Abstract
Presentism says that only present objects exist (timelessly). But the view has trouble grounding past-tensed truths like “dinosaurs existed”. Standard Eternalism grounds those truths by positing the (timeless) existence of past objects—like dinosaurs. But Standard Eternalism conflicts with the intuition that there is genuine change—the intuition that there once were dinosaurs and no longer are any. I offer a novel theory of time—‘The Imprint’—that does a better job preserving both the grounding and genuine change intuitions. The Imprint says that the past and present exist (in the timeless sense), but where the present exhibits mass-energy, the past only consists of curved empty regions of spacetime. We therefore avoid saying that there are dinosaurs, since there is no mass-energy in the past; but the curvature of the past gives us a way to ground the truth that “dinosaurs existed”.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
A third option is to take grounding as a sui generis relation (e.g. Schaffer 2009a).
Crisp (2007) defends Presentism like this: he posits the existence of abstract times and the temporal relations of ‘earlier than’ and ‘later than’ that hold between them. ‘There were dinosaurs’ is therefore grounded in the fact that a time that entails the existence of dinosaurs is earlier than the present time. My main difficulty with the view is that the view requires that there are times t 1 and t 2 such that: (A) t 1 is earlier than t 2, yet (B) t 1 and t 2 are both present (since it’s a Presentist view). Yet (A) and (B) seem inconsistent; how could they both be present if the one is earlier than the other? In response, Crisp (2007: 103) distinguishes two construals of (B): (B’) t 1 and t 2 are at no temporal distance from the present, (B’’) t 1 and t 2 are both true. He accepts (B’) but rejects (B’’). But I don’t see how this distinction helps. (A) and (B’) still seem inconsistent. (If we instead analyzed ‘t 1 is earlier than t 2’ as ‘t 1 was true relative to t 2’ then the inconsistency fades. For then (A) would be talking about the truth of the times in question and (B) would be talking about the existence of the times in question. But of course this analysis itself would be invoking past-tensed truths to ground past-tensed truths.)
Or, as Chisholm (1976: 100) says, they are “rooted outside the times at which they are had”.
Cameron doesn’t see a need for revision since he doesn’t think it’s a cheating property. But I find it hard to agree.
For an analysis of the notion of ‘intrinsic properties’ see Lewis (1986: 61–63).
If Sober (1980) is right that species have their origins essentially, then being a dog might entail that some dog—the first of the species—existed at some point in the past. If so, then I should think that including being a dog in the supervenience base is a cheat. Nonetheless, a more purely qualitative description such as ‘being dog-shaped’ would not be.
Deasy (2015: 2078–2079) argues that The Moving Spotlight does accommodate the sort of genuine change we’re after. He claims that the intuition expressed by ‘dinosaurs don’t exist’ employs a quantifier that is restricted to only the present. Hence, as the spotlight moves, the sentence goes from true to false. I find this to be a hard line for The Spotlight view to take. Surely its proponents wouldn’t want to say that the intuition ‘this is the privileged present’ employs a quantifier restricted to the present. But if the privileged present intuition works with this unrestricted tenseless quantifier, why doesn’t the intuition concerning dinosaurs also?
Cameron (2015) tries to satisfy the grounding intuition by appealing to temporal distributional properties (TDPs)—such as the property of having once contained dinosaurs, but no longer. The important feature of TDPs is that even though they are temporally non-homogenous (they imply different features at different times), they aren’t reducible to homogenous properties. This is suppose to give us a non-cheaty ground of ‘there were dinosaurs’ since that truth supervenes on the TDP without also supervening on the purely past-directed property having once contained dinosaurs. My concern with this account is that even if the TDP isn’t purely past-directed, it’s past-directedness still seems like a cheat.
Sullivan’s (2012) minimal A-theory also resembles The Spotlight, since they both hold that there exist objects that were once spatially located, but no longer are. The difference is that on Sullivan’s view, such objects permanently exist—that is, they exist at all times, even at those times at which they aren’t located anywhere.
Though Zimmerman proposes the empty box view in order to ground cross-temporal truths (such as whether an object has moved inertially or non-inertially) rather than truths like “there were dinosaurs”.
Though Hawthorne and Uzquiano (2011) think non-material angels can be primitively located at a region—not in virtue of there being effects in the region caused by the angel.
If we just think of holes as empty regions of spacetime, then we can avoid saying this. But this doesn’t ultimately help the proposal. Holes will just be located somewhere in the sense that a region of spacetime is located at itself. But this is true for any region. A unicorn-shaped slice of past spacetime, for example, will likewise have something located at it—itself! But that shouldn’t mean that there was once a unicorn.
We could understand it in the same way a composite object might be said to have mass derivatively, whereas its fundamental parts have mass non-derivatively. But if past dinosaurs ‘have mass’ in that sense, then don’t past dinosaurs have mass in just the same sense that present dinosaurs do?
The equations are, however, extremely complex, and only very few exact solutions to them have been discovered.
David Lewis has objected to standard branching views in this way: “if two futures are equally mine, one with a sea fight tomorrow and one without, it is nonsense to wonder which way it will be—it will be both ways—and yet I do wonder” (1986: 207). Belnap et al. (2001: 206–207, 225) have responded that this objection mistakenly relativizes truth to a moment in time. Rather it must be relativized to a moment and history (a maximal line through a tree). The sentence “there will be a sea fight tomorrow and there will be no sea fight tomorrow” therefore fails to come out true—on no moment-history pair is it true.
Many such views are surveyed in Markosian (2003).
I previously objected to the ‘bare objects’ view of trackers by saying that such objects are too bare to be located—doesn’t an object need matter, or at least need to stand in causal relations to some region, to properly be said to have a location? The supersubstantival view I propose here can be thought of as a version of this bare objects view (empty regions are quite bare). But it gives an appealing answer to the objection: since regions just are locations, there’s a clear sense in which they are located.
Zimmerman (2011: 200) also gives this sort of reply in defense of his suggestion that there are past regions of spacetime, all of which are empty.
See also Cameron’s (2015: ch. 4) for a response.
This is why a kugelblitz (a black hole created solely out of photons) can be formed.
See Will (2014: Sect. 3.4.1).
This response, however, might not always work. When an electron and positron meet, the two are annihilated, leaving radiation behind. The resulting radiation—together with the past curvature—could indicate, first, that the radiation was the result of electron–positron annihilation and, second, that one of the particles came from the west and the other from the east. But the manner of the radiation’s dispersal might not be enough to indicate which particle came from the east.
Alternatively, we might take it as a mark against The Imprint that it counts the graviton theory as necessarily false (though The Imprint theorist will treat the graviton theory as akin to other a posteriori necessary falsehoods).
References
Armstrong, D. M. (1997). A world of states of affairs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Belnap, N. D., Perloff, M., & Xu, M. (2001). Facing the future: agents and choices in our indeterminist world. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bigelow, J. (1996). Presentism and properties. Philosophical Perspectives, 10, 35.
Bilson-Thompson, S., Markopoulou, F., & Smolin, L. (2007). Quantum gravity and the standard model. Classical and Quantum Gravity, 24(16), 3975–3993.
Bourne, C. (2006). A future for presentism. Oxford: Clarendon.
Butterfield, J. (2005). On the emergence of time in quantum gravity. In J. Butterfield (Ed.), The arguments of time (pp. 111–167). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cameron, R. P. (2015). The moving spotlight: an essay on time and ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chisholm, R. M. (1976). Person and object: a metaphysical study. La Salle: Open Court Pub. Co.
Craig, W. L. (2001). Time and the metaphysics of relativity. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.
Crisp, T. (2004a). On presentism and triviality. In D. Zimmerman (Ed.), Oxford studies in metaphysics (Vol. 1, pp. 15–20). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Crisp, T. (2004b). Reply to Ludlow. In D. Zimmerman (Ed.), Oxford studies in metaphysics (pp. 37–46). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Crisp, T. M. (2007). Presentism and the grounding objection. Nous, 41(1), 90–109.
Deasy, D. (2015). The moving spotlight theory. Philosophical Studies, 172(8), 2073–2089.
Einstein, A. (1916). The foundation of the general theory of relativity. Annalen der Physik, 49, 769–822.
Fales, E. (1990). Causation and universals. London, New York: Routledge.
Forrest, P. (2006). Uniform grounding of truth and the growing block theory: a reply to Heathwood. Analysis, 66(290), 161–163.
Forrest, P. (2008). Relativity, the passage of time and the cosmic clock. In D. Dieks (Ed.), The ontology of spacetime II (pp. 245–253). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Hawthorne, J., & Uzquiano, G. (2011). How many angels can dance on the point of a needle? Transcendental theology meets modal metaphysics. Mind, 120(477), 53–81.
Heathwood, C. (2007). On what will be: Reply to Westphal. Erkenntnis, 67(1), 137–142.
Heller, M. (1984). Temporal parts of four dimensional objects. Philosophical Studies, 46(3), 323–334.
Heller, M. (1998). Property counterparts in ersatz worlds. The Journal of Philosophy, 95(6), 293–316.
Kierland, B., & Monton, B. (2007). Presentism and the objection from being- supervenience. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 85(3), 485–497.
Kripke, S. (1980). Naming and necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.
Lehmkuhl, D. (forthcoming). The metaphysics of super-substantivalism. Noûs.
Lewis, D. (1986). On the plurality of worlds. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Lewis, D. (2001). Truthmaking and difference-making. Nous, 35(4), 602–615.
Lewis, D. (2009). Ramseyan humility. In D. Braddon-Mitchell & R. Nola (Eds.), Conceptual analysis and philosophical naturalism (pp. 203–222). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lombard, L. B. (2010). Time for a change: a polemic against the Presentism-Eternalism debate. In J. K. Campbell, M. O'Rourke, & H. Silverstein (Eds.), Time and identity (pp. 49–77). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Lowe, E. J. (1987). The indexical fallacy in McTaggart’s proof of the unreality of time. Mind, 96(381), 62–70.
Lucas, J. R. (2008). The special theory and absolute simultaneity. In W. L. Craig & Q. Smith (Eds.), Einstein, relativity and absolute simultaneity (pp. 279–290). London: Routledge.
Markosian, N. (1993). How fast does time pass? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 53(4), 829–844.
Markosian, N. (2003). A defense of presentism. In D. Zimmerman (Ed.), Oxford studies in metaphysics (Vol. 1, pp. 47–82). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McDaniel, K. (2013). Degrees of being. Philosopher’s Imprint, 13(19), 1–18.
McDaniel, K. (Online Manuscript). The Fragmentation of Being.
Mctaggart, J. M. E. (1908). The unreality of time. Mind, 17, 457.
Merricks, T. (2007). Truth and ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Meyer, U. (2005). The Presentist’s dilemma. Philosophical Studies, 122(3), 213–225.
Mozersky, M. J. (2011). Presentism. In C. Callendar (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy of time (pp. 122–143). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Paul, L. A. (2006). Coincidence as overlap. Noûs, 40(4), 623–659.
Popper, K. (1959). The logic of scientific discovery. New York: Basic Books.
Prior, A. N. (1967). Past, present and future. Oxford: Clarendon.
Prior, A. N. (1996). Some free thinking about time. In B. J. Copeland (Ed.), Logic and reality: essays on the legacy of arthur prior (pp. 47–51). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Psillos, S. (2006). What do powers do when they are not manifested? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 72(1), 137–156.
Putnam, H. (1967). Time and physical geometry. The Journal of Philosophy, 64(8), 240–247.
Schaffer, J. (2009a). On what grounds what. In D. J. Chalmers, D. Manley, & R. Wasserman (Eds.), Metametaphysics new essays on the foundations of ontology (pp. 347–383). Oxford, New York: Clarendon Press.
Schaffer, J. (2009b). Spacetime the one substance. Philosophical Studies, 145(1), 131–148.
Shoemaker, S. (1980). Causality and properties. In P. van Inwagen (Ed.), Time and cause: Essays presented to Richard Taylor (pp. 109–135). Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company.
Sider, T. (2001). Four-dimensionalism: an ontology of persistence and time. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sider, T. (2006). Quantifiers and temporal ontology. Mind, 115(457), 75–97.
Sider, T. (2011). Writing the book of the world. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Skow, B. (2015). Objective becoming. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smart, J. J. C. (1956). The river of time. In A. Flew (Ed.), Essays in conceptual analysis (pp. 213–227). New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Sober, E. (1980). Evolution, population thinking, and essentialism. Philosophy of Science, 47(3), 350.
Sullivan, M. (2012). The minimal A-theory. Philosophical Studies, 158(2), 149–174.
Swoyer, C. (1982). The nature of natural laws. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 60(3), 203–223.
Szabo, Z. G. (2006). Counting across times. Philosophical Perspectives, 20(1), 399–426.
Wesson, P. S. (1999). Space-time-matter modern Kaluza-Klein theory. Singapore: World Scientific.
Wheeler, J. A. (1962). Geometrodynamics. New York: Academic Press.
Will, C. (2014). The confrontation between general relativity and experiment. Living Reviews in Relativity, 17(1), 1–117.
Williams, N. E. (2009). The ungrounded argument is unfounded: a response to Mumford. Synthese, 170(1), 7–19.
Williams, N. E. (2011). Dispositions and the argument from science. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 89(1), 71–90.
Williamson, T. (2002). Necessary existents. In A. O’Hear (Ed.), Logic, thought and language (pp. 233–251). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Zimmerman, D. (2005). The A-Theory of Time, The B-Theory of Time, and ‘Taking Tense Seriously’. Dialectica, 59(4), 401–457.
Zimmerman, D. (2011). Presentism and the space-time manifold. In C. Callender (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy of time (pp. 163–239). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Longenecker, M.TS. Imprints in time: towards a moderately robust past. Philos Stud 175, 2429–2446 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0967-5
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0967-5