A foundation for presentism

Authors: Robert E Pezet

Publish Date: 2016/02/03

Volume: 194, Issue: 5, Pages: 1809-1837

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Abstract

Presentism states that everything is present Crucial to our understanding of this thesis is how we interpret the ‘is’ Recently several philosophers have claimed that on any interpretation presentism comes out as either trivially true or manifestly false Yet presentism is meant to be a substantive and interesting thesis I outline in detail the nature of the problem and the standard interpretative options After unfavourably assessing several popular responses in the literature I offer an alternative interpretation that provides the desired result This interpretation is then used to clarify the distinction between ‘real change’ from mere variation and temporal relativisation Reflecting on my solution I try to diagnose the source of confusion over these issues Then building upon Fine’s Modality and tense 2005 distinction between ontic and factive presentism I elucidate what the presentist thesis specifically concerns and how best to formalise it In the process I distinguish a weak and strong extended version of the presentist thesis Finally I end by drawing out some limitations of the paperPresentism is the metaphysical thesis that ‘all and only present things exist’ Let us call this the ‘presentist thesis’ What this amounts to depends on the way we interpret the concepts employed in the statement of that thesis For our purposes a ‘theory’ shall be a way of understanding a ‘thesis’ That is a thesis provides the skeletal structure to a theory a broad declarative claim on a subject matter A theory then “fleshes out” out that claim by providing an elaborative interpretation of that skeletal structure which serves to precisify the thesis and specify what it amounts to Of central importance to our understanding the presentist thesis is how we interpret ‘present’ and ‘exist’ In this paper we shall explore the notion of existence and its relation to presentness and by so doing gain a better grasp of what an interesting presentist theory might look likeSome have thought that the relationship between the concepts of existence and presentness is too intimate for presentism to be the substantive and interesting thesis it ought to be Despite initial appearances I think that this triviality charge against the presentist thesis is mistaken My primary focus will be on elaborating and refuting this charge Sects 1 and 2 respectively This will require the deliverance of an account of existence that does not analytically settle the presentness of existents We will need to be cautious that this account does not prejudge or bias our assessment of presentism and we ought ultimately to offer a diagnosis and treatment of the source confusion that ultimately inspired the chargeMy solution to the triviality charge will then be employed to distinguish between dynamic and static ways of construing change Sect 3 This distinction is crucial to our being able to capture what is meant by temporal passage which perhaps provides the most compelling common sense inclination towards the nonphilosopher’s presentist skew That is many have complained that the static conception of time—the view that treats time like space without metaphysically privileged positions—does not account for any ‘real change’ And of course our complainant will often take such real change as manifestly evident in their experience However perhaps paradoxically they have often struggled to distinguish ‘real change’ from less controversial kinds of change that even static accounts of time can accept In particular I will distinguish metaphysical change dynamic change from mere temporal variation and temporal relativisation static forms of change These distinctions between dynamic and static ways of construing change will allow us to express what is at stake in this debateI will then attempt to diagnose the underlying source from which the triviality objection draws its strength Sect 4 It is claimed that the objection presupposes a biased conception of the priority between time and existence And that given this biased conception it is no wonder that presentism turns out as a trivial thesis However this begs the question against Eternalism the thesis that all past present and future things are equally real Eternalists take an alternative stance on the priority between time and existence and it is because this stance is eliminated from consideration from the start that presentists are not able to make their substantive claimFinally I will clarify the presentist thesis by emphasising what it is and is not about Sect 5 In particular I draw on Fine’s 2005b distinction between ontic and factive presentism to stress that the presentist thesis concerns ontology rather than the nature of facts This is then related to the distinction between de re and de dicto claims and to draw out a limitation and potentially desired extension to the presentist thesis In what follows I will follow Arthur Prior in using tense operators to representing claims about the Adeterminations pastness presentness and futurity By employing tense operators to express the Adeterminations I mean that we will represent pastness presentness and futurity by the operators ‘It was the case that’ ‘It is now the case that’ and ‘It will be the case that’ respectively Symbolically we may express the past tense operator by ‘P’ the present tense operator by ‘N’ and the future tense operator by ‘F’ These operators may take any proposition as an argument and form a new one It is also permissible that the operators appear within the scope of quantifier and take ascriptions concerning bounded entities as their argument to form new ascriptions concerning those bounded entities Ultimately this paper will set the foundations necessary for a sensible dialectic over the presentist thesis made possible by permitting us crucial distinctions that we otherwise could not makeUnsurprisingly there has been a recent surge in the literature claiming that presentism is either trivially true or obviously false cf Dorato 2006 Lombard 1999 2010 Meyer 2005 2013 Savitt 2006 The controversy is best described as concerning the status of the ‘is’ in standard characterisations of presentism such as

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