Abstract
Presentism is typically characterised as the thesis that everything (unrestrictedly) is present, and therefore there are (quantifying unrestrictedly) no dinosaurs or Martian presidential inaugurations. Putting aside the vexed question of exactly what it is to be present in this context (see Williamson in Modal logic as metaphysics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013; Cameron in Anal Philos 57:110–140, 2016; Deasy in Noûs 51:378–397, 2017), this thesis seems quite straightforward. However, a number of authors—such as Merricks (Mind 104:521–531, 1995), Lombard (Philosophia 27:253–260, 1999), Meyer (New papers on the present, Philosophia Verlag, Munich, pp 67–90, 2012), Tallant (Erkenntnis 79:479–501, 2014) and Sakon (Philosophia 43:1089–1109, 2015)—have argued that Presentism so characterised is either trivially true or false even by Presentist lights. This is the so-called Triviality Argument against Presentism. In this paper I show that three of the four premises of the Triviality Argument are plausibly false. I conclude that Presentists have nothing to fear from the Triviality Argument.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Crisp (2003) defends this reading.
Crisp (2004) defends this reading.
See Zimmerman (1996). Note that ‘x exists now’ in this context should not be read as equivalent to ‘x is located at this instant’, but to ‘now, x is something’.
See Crisp (2003).
See Cameron (2016).
See Zimmerman (1996).
See Deasy (2017).
Some theorists argue that while Presentism is often presented as the simple universal claim that everything is present, in fact it should be read in some other, quite different way. For example, Stoneham (2009) argues that Presentism should be understood as a claim about ‘truthmakers’; Tallant (2014) argues that Presentism should be understood as a statement of property identity; and Sakon (2015) argues that Presentism should be treated as a claim about propositions. Finally, Deasy (2017) argues that Presentism should be understood as a claim concerning the temporariness of existence, to the effect that sometimes, something was nothing and sometimes, something will be nothing. (In fact, most Presentists defend the stronger thesis that many things—such as molecules, mountains, and stars—both begin and cease to exist over time.) However, note that with the exception of Deasy (2017), these theorists are motivated to redefine Presentism by the Triviality Argument.
Something like this argument is endorsed by Merricks (1995), Lombard (1999), Stoneham (2009), Meyer (2012), Tallant (2014) and Sakon (2015). I have also seen the argument endorsed by philosophers in other contexts. Responses to the argument can be found in Ludlow (2004, pp. 33–36), Sider (2006) and Szabó (2006, pp. 399–400). Sider (2006) describes a closely related argument to the effect that the dispute between Presentists and Eternalists is ‘merely verbal’. I do not explicitly consider that argument here, but some of the discussion in what follows is relevant.
There is a further response to the argument that I do not consider here, due to Cameron (2016). Cameron (2016, pp. 137–138) argues that Presentists can accept the conclusion of the Triviality Argument on the grounds that even if it is trivial that everything is present given the Presentist interpretation of ‘is present’, it is not trivial that the Presentist interpretation of ‘is present’ is the correct one.
It also follows from Tensed Verbs that the verb ‘to be present’ in the sentence ‘Everything that exists is present’ must be either past, present, or future tensed. This generates further readings of the target sentence—see in particular Mozersky (2011)—but does not by itself undermine the Triviality Argument. In what follows, unless stated otherwise I assume that the predicate ‘is present’ is present tensed.
As far as I am aware, Tensed Verbs receives no explicit support from the relevant linguistics literature. However, there are some arguments that may provide evidence against the thesis. For example, Sauerland (2002) argues that the present tense is vacuous, on the grounds that if the present tense in a sentence s refers to (or refers to an interval which overlaps) the instant of utterance of s, one cannot account for the felicity conditions of sentences such as ‘Every Monday this month, I fast’. I am grateful to Paul Elbourne for drawing my attention to this point.
Thank you to Paul Elbourne for suggesting this example to me.
From now on, where it is useful to do so I adopt Szabó’s practice of underlining allegedly tenseless verbs.
Imagine this sentence being uttered in the context of discussing one’s travel plans.
Imagine this sentence being uttered as part of a speech concerning the lives of religious figures.
Such arguments can be thought of as providing a ‘path to knowledge’ for those who are open to accepting their premises. Thank you John Hawthorne for this idea.
A third option is to reject Tensed Verbs and Tenseless Properties and argue that the standard definition is a sentence of English*.
Note that Presentists can still accept that the verb ‘to be present’ in the standard definition is present-tensed—the sentence ‘Everything that existsis now present’ is neither trivial nor false by Presentist lights.
This argument is anticipated by Crisp (2004, p. 17). My presentation of the argument differs substantially from Meyer’s, but I take it to be essentially the same.
See e.g. Dorr and Goodman (Forthcoming) for a defence of this thesis.
Stoneham (2009, p. 210) writes: ‘The problem is that first-order formal languages give us the means for syntactically tenseless predication [and quantification], but it does not follow that we have semantic tenselessness’.
See, for example, Liu (2015). I am very grateful to an anonymous referee for drawing my attention to the significance of tenseless languages to the debate concerning premise (2).
See e.g. Zimmerman (1996).
See especially Sider (2001). It is natural for B-theorists to identify instants of time with maximal simultaneity-slices of the manifold. Of course, given STR it follows that there are no instants simpliciter, only instants relative to a frame. However, for ease of exposition I will omit reference to frames in what follows.
Taking ‘P’ and ‘F’ as primitive, we can define the further tense operators ‘H’ (‘it always has been the case that’), ‘G’ (‘it always will be the case that’), ‘A’ (‘it is always the case that’) and ‘S’ (‘it is sometimes the case that’) as follows: \(\mathrm{H} \varphi =({ def}) \lnot \mathrm{P} \lnot \varphi ; \mathrm{G} \varphi =({ def}) \lnot \mathrm{F} \lnot \varphi ; \mathrm{A} \varphi =({ def}) \mathrm{H} \varphi \wedge \varphi \wedge \mathrm{G} \varphi ; \mathrm{S} \varphi =({ def}) \mathrm{P}\varphi \vee \varphi \vee \mathrm{F} \varphi \).
It is well known that the modal analogue of Locator—the principle that the standard modal operators ‘\(\square \)’ (‘it is necessarily the case that’) and ‘\(\lozenge \)’ (‘it could be the case that’) are implicit quantifiers over possible worlds which restrict the explicit individual quantifiers within their scope to things located at the relevant worlds—causes trouble for Modal Realists when combined with other natural Modal Realist commitments, such as the modal-logical axiom T (\(\varphi \supset \lozenge \varphi \)) and the claim that there are many possible worlds. See for example Divers (2002, 2014), Parsons (2012), Williamson (2013, pp. 16–17), and Noonan (2014).
In particular, it would be natural for B-theorists to consider defending a temporal analogue of Bricker’s (2001) ‘island-universe friendly’ analysis of the modal operators, on which ‘S\(\varphi \)’ means something like ‘restricting attention to things located at some interval of time \(i, \varphi \)’.
Unfortunately, space does not permit an assessment of the different strategies here. See Marshall (2016) for relevant discussion.
Marshall (2016) raises something like this objection against the modal analogue of Redundancy.
Most Presentists accept TBC. For example, Crisp (2005)—a Presentist—describes alleged counterexamples to TBC as ‘bizarre’. Indeed, some authors have argued that Presentism implies TBC—see e.g. Bergman (1999). However, others have disputed this, and drawn attention to the advantages for Presentism of rejecting TBC—see e.g. Inman (2012).
Permanentism is the temporal analogue of Necessitism, the thesis that necessarily, everything is necessarily something \((\hbox {formally: } \square \forall x\square \exists y y=x)\). The names ‘Permanentism’ and ‘Necessitism’ are due to Williamson (2013), who defends the conjunction of Necessitism and Propositional Contingentism (the view that there are propositions that are true [false] but could be false [true]).
For the purposes of this discussion I ignore the problem for Transientist Presentists of accounting for the truth of sentences featuring expressions such as ‘Xanthippe’ which apparently refer directly to non-present entities. See Markosian (2004) for discussion.
Tallant (2014, p. 481) writes: “\( \exists _{t}\) x (x)’ is true iff x either has existed, does exist or will exist’.
See Deasy (2015) for a number of A-theoretic responses to McTaggart’s argument.
I am grateful to Ross Cameron, Paul Elbourne, and Jeremy Goodman for helpful comments. I am also grateful to two anonymous referees for reports which helped to improve the paper considerably. Finally, thank you to Grace E. Deasy for her friendship, love, and kindness.
References
Barcan Marcus, R. (1962). Interpreting quantification. Inquiry, 5, 252–259.
Bergman, M. (1999). (Serious) actualism and (serious) presentism. Noûs, 33, 118–132.
Bricker, P. (2001). Island universes and the analysis of modality. In G. Preyer & F. Siebelt (Eds.), Reality and humean supervenience: Essays on the philosophy of David Lewis (pp. 27–56). Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
Cameron, R. (2015). The moving spotlight: An essay on time and ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cameron, R. (2016). On characterizing the presentism/eternalism and actualism/possibilism debates. Analytic Philosophy, 57, 110–140.
Crisp, T. (2003). Presentism. In M. J. Loux & D. Zimmerman (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of metaphysics (pp. 211–245). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Crisp, T. (2004). On presentism and triviality. In D. Zimmerman (Ed.), Oxford studies in metaphysics (Vol. 1, pp. 15–20). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Crisp, T. (2005). Presentism and cross-time relations. American Philosophical Quarterly, 42, 5–17.
Deasy, D. (2015). The moving spotlight theory. Philosophical Studies, 172, 2073–89.
Deasy, D. (2017). What is presentism? Noûs, 51, 378–97.
Deasy, D. (2016). Philosophical arguments against the A-theory. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1111/papq.12151.
Divers, J. (2002). Possible worlds. London: Routledge.
Divers, J. (2014). The modal status of the Lewisian analysis of modality. Mind, 123, 861–72.
Dorr, C., & Goodman, J. (Forthcoming). Diamonds are forever. Noûs.
Inman, R. (2012). Why so serious? Non-serious presentism and the problem of cross-temporal relations. Metaphysica, 13, 55–63.
Liu, M. (2015). Tense and aspect in Mandarin Chinese. In W. S-Y. Wang, & C. Sun (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of Chinese linguistics (pp. 274–289). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lombard, L. (1999). On the alleged incompatibility of presentism and temporal parts. Philosophia, 27, 253–60.
Ludlow, P. (2004). Presentism, triviality, and the varieties of tensism. In D. Zimmerman (Ed.), Oxford studies in metaphysics (Vol. 1, pp. 21–36). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Markosian, N. (2004). A defence of Presentism. In D. Zimmerman (Ed.), Oxford studies in metaphysics. Oxford University Press.
Marshall, D. (2016). A puzzle for modal realism. Philosopher’s Imprint, 16, 1–24.
McTaggart, J. M. E. (1908). The unreality of time. Mind, 17, 457–74.
Merricks, T. (1995). On the incompatibility of enduring and perduring entities. Mind, 104, 521–31.
Meyer, U. (2005). The presentist’s dilemma. Philosophical Studies, 122, 213–25.
Meyer, U. (2012). The triviality of presentism. In R. Ciuni, K. Miller, & G. Torrengo (Eds.), New papers on the present (pp. 67–90). Munich: Philosophia Verlag.
Mozersky, M. (2011). Presentism. In C. Callender (Ed.), The oxford handbook of the philosophy of time. Oxford University Press.
Noonan, H. (2014). The adequacy of genuine modal realism. Mind, 123, 851–60.
Parsons, J. (2012). Against advanced modalising. In J. Maclaurin (Ed.), Rationis defensor: Essays in honour of Colin Cheyne. Netherlands: Springer.
Plantinga, A. (1983). On existentialism. Philosophical Studies, 44, 1–20.
Rini, A. A., & Cresswell, M. J. (2012). The world-time parallel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sakon, T. (2015). Presentism and the triviality objection. Philosophia, 43, 1089–1109.
Salmon, N. (1998). Nonexistence. Noûs, 32, 277–319.
Sauerland, U. (2002). The present tense is vacuous. Snippets, 6, 12–13.
Sider, T. (2001). Four-dimensionalism: An ontology of persistence and time. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sider, T. (2006). Quantifiers and temporal ontology. Mind, 115, 75–97.
Skow, B. (2015). Objective becoming. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stoneham, T. (2009). Time and truth: The presentism–eternalism debate. Philosophy, 84, 201–18.
Szabó, Z. G. (2006). Counting across times. In J. Hawthorne (Ed.), Philosophical perspectives 20: Metaphysics (pp. 399–426). London: Blackwell.
Tallant, J. (2014). Defining existence presentism. Erkenntnis, 79, 479–501.
Williamson, T. (2002). Necessary existents. In A. O’Hear (Ed.), Logic, thought and language (pp. 233–251). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Williamson, T. (2013). Modal logic as metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zimmerman, D. (1996). Persistence and presentism. Philosophical Papers, 25, 115–26.
Zimmerman, D. (2005). The A-theory of time, the B-theory of time, and ‘Taking Tense Seriously’. Dialectica, 59, 401–57.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Deasy, D. The triviality argument against presentism. Synthese 196, 3369–3388 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1601-y
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1601-y