Abstract
Temporal ontology is concerned with the ontological status of the past, the present and the future, with presentism and eternalism as main contenders since the second half of the last century. In recent years several philosophers have argued that the presentism/eternalism dispute is not substantial. They have embraced, one may say, deflationism (about temporal ontology). Denying or downplaying the meaningfulness of tenseless language and wielding the so-called triviality objection have been their main argumentative tools. Other philosophers have opposed this trend, thereby holding fast to what could be named substantialism (about temporal ontology). Their leading defensive strategy has consisted in bringing to the fore tenselessness or unrestricted quantification in an attempt to resist the triviality objection. Despite this reaction, the past few years have hosted a new wave of deflationism, wherein the triviality objection and qualms about the legitimacy of tenselessness and unrestricted quantification still loom large. This paper counters this trend, by providing a new clarification of tenseless predication, unrestricted quantifiers and their role in rescuing substantialism from the triviality objection. A crucial ingredient is this: the appeal to unrestricted quantifiers and to tenseless predication are not alternative strategies, but rather two sides of the same coin, since substantialism requires quantifiers that are both tenseless and unrestricted.
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Notes
As is well known, there are different kinds of eternalism and in particular one should at least distinguish between its A-theoretical and B-theoretical versions (see, e.g., Orilia 2014; see also Oaklander 2012 for a dissenting view on this distinction and the defense of a version of eternalism called R-theory). As we shall see, it will become important at some point to draw distinctions within the eternalist camp, but until then we may avoid such complications.
Cf. Callender (2000), Dolev (2007), Dorato (2006), Lombard (1999), Meyer (2005), Savitt (2002, 2006), Williams (1996) (see Oaklander 2014, n. 2; Ingram and Tallant 2018, §3 for other references). It should be noted that many a time in the deflationist trend the official target is not temporal ontology in general but simply presentism, as accused of lacking a formulation that makes it a non-trivial thesis (see, e.g., Meyer 2005). However, attacks to presentism of this sort may be seen as deflationists, since, as we shall see below in discussing the so-called triviality challenge, an analogous accusation can be levelled in the same way against eternalism (and indeed against other positions in temporal ontology, such as the growing-block theory, which we shall not discuss for simplicity’s sake, since nothing crucial will depend on these details).
This reading has often been called tenseless, especially by some of those who argue against the substantiality of the debate. As we shall see in a moment, this term has also been used, more appropriately, in another way, and we shall follow this line.
Perhaps the earliest formulations in print of this problem, but only qua problem for presentism, are in Zimmerman (1998) and Lombard (1999). Later on, Meyer (2005) still sees it as affecting only presentism. Zimmerman, far from taking it as a pro-deflationist argument, quickly sets it aside, and Lombard is interested in that paper in other issues and does not quite press it in the deflationist’s direction. Meyer does, but since he insists only on presentism, he is, we may say, a semi-deflationist. Sider (2001, p. 15) hints at the triviality challenge as affecting both presentism and eternalism and as constituting, according to some (no reference offered), a pro-deflationist argument. He then tries to counter it. Sider (2006, n. 3) presents the triviality challenge and tells us that it is often discussed, although rarely in print. And then again tries to counter it. As far as we know, Dorato (2006) and Savitt (2006) are the two earliest printed presentations of the triviality challenge that view it as affecting both presentism and eternalism and as conclusively pro-deflationist.
Emphasis on unrestricted quantification in defining presentism is often found even in authors who do not consider the triviality challenge; see, e.g., Markosian (2004).
In talking about unrestricted quantifiers, we shall usually skip from now on the parenthetical “temporally,” taking it as contextually implicit.
Meyer in these new publications again presents the triviality challenge as a problem for presentism only.
There are also recent responses to Lombard and Meyer, but they focus on the triviality objection as a problem for presentism only (Tallant 2014; Deasy 2017b). In contrast, we think that a more general reply that considers both presentism and eternalism is appropriate. Apart from this, the approach we follow is different. This is especially true with respect to Tallant (2014), who argues for his own way of defining presentism. The line taken by Deasy (2017b) is more similar to ours. In particular, Deasy, like us (though in different ways), defends the intelligibility of tenselessness and admits that quantifiers may be used tenselessly. Contrary to Deasy, however, we emphasize, as we shall see, the fact that quantifiers are predicated, which raises the issue of whether their predication is tensed or tenseless. Moreover, we support with different arguments the claim that the presentist theses (P2) and (P3) (see below) are not trivially false.
As we shall see, even in the substantialist camp, the role of tenselessness in the appeal to unrestricted quantifiers failed (Crisp 2004a, b) and still fails (Deasy 2017a) to be acknowledged. Mozersky (2011, §1; 2015, §3.2) acknowledges that unrestricted quantification and tenselessness must go together, but fails to explicitly clarify (contra Lombard and Meyer) how the triviality challenge is blocked once these resources are employed.
It may be worth noting that Lombard (2010) presents the triviality challenge pretty much as in Savitt (2006), but adds an additional twist to it by implicitly bringing into the picture Williamson’s ex-concrete objects, as we shall see in Sect. 5. Presumably, Lombard formulated the challenge independently from Savitt, since the former’s paper originates from a talk delivered in 2005 (see Campbell et al. 2010, p. vii). In any case, Lombard’s paper is a fit target for us since it was published after the above mentioned replies to the triviality challenge. Let us also note that we shall neglect Meyer (2013a), since nothing relevant for present purposes is contained there without also being contained in Meyer (2013b).
It is typically assumed that presentism is, if true, always true and accordingly presentism is more precisely the thesis that always, everything that exists exists now. A referee pointed out that this may be taken to imply “by standard tense-logical reasoning” that, e.g., Aristotle exists now. Presumably, the idea here is that prefixing “always” to a universally quantified sentence allows one to instantiate from the universal quantifier to any individual, whether past, present or future and thus in particular to a past individual such as Aristotle. There is however no reason to assume this. We may grant that always, S implies S, where S is any sentence, possibly a universally quantified sentence such as “everything that exists exists now.” But then whether the universal quantifier can be instantiated in that way is far from obvious; we shall discuss this in detail in Sects. 4 and 5. Nothing crucial however hinges on this: the definition cum “always” may be taken to imply (P), which is where the action lies.
Actually Lombard forgets an occurrence of “now” and simply writes “[e]verything that existed, exists or will exist exists now,” but (P2) is clearly what he means. He also considers a most implausible “conjunctively omnitemporal” reading, which we can neglect for present purposes (in the terminology of Sect. 5 we would call it “conjunctively tensed”).
It is not explicitly stated that it is (A) that should convince us that (E2) is not only true but also obviously true. However, it seems clear from the context.
Crisp does not consider (E2) and (E3), since he is only concerned with how to formulate presentism.
In Crisp’s formulation we find “for every x” instead of “everything.”
We stick to Lombard’s example. Crisp considers the Roman Empire.
More precisely she says “this statement stands in need of elucidation,” meaning by “this statement” standard presentism. But it is clear from the context that the culprit in her opinion is tenseless existence.
In Deng’s reconstruction, Wüthrich attributes to the presentists the view that only some of the existing events physically exist (Deng 2018, §3) and then argues that presentism is at odds with modern physics, in particular relativity theory. But here tenseless existence seems to be taken for granted rather than elucidated and the presentist’s talk of present existence is traded for physical existence so as to pave the road for the appeal to modern physics in order to chastise presentism. Deng is indeed right in being disappointed. Stoneham, on the other hand, also belongs to the group of those who find tenseless predication unintelligible. In order to save the substantiality of temporal ontology, he thus appeals to truthmaking and claims that presentism and eternalism make different substantial claims about truthmaking. However, Deng (2018, §4) notes that Stoneham’s strategy works only if tenseless predication is appealed to in such claims, and Stoneham himself, like Deng, does not take this notion to be intelligible and thus available. Again then Deng is right in being disappointed.
We classify Dolev here as a deflationist, since he shares the general deflationist theme of demoting the significance of the contrapositions in temporal ontology. It should be noted however that Dolev, contrary to what is typically done by the deflationists, does not appeal to the triviality challenge, and has a peculiar post-ontological or phenomenological perspective on the nature of time, which is meant to be neither eternalist nor presentist (Dolev 2007).
According to Dolev, “[o]ne could resort to the ‘ontological inventory’ and say that containment in it is the paradigm of tenseless existence. But then reference to the items of the ‘ontological inventory’ already makes use of a tenseless language. So tenseless language presupposes the inventory, which in turn can only be described by means of a tenseless language.”
At this juncture, Dolev makes two points in order to back up his argument. One, that there is no “sense of ‘existing simpliciter’, as it is sometimes phrased, say some disjunctive notion that comprises all senses of ‘exist’ and with respect to which it can always be asked of any X whether it exists or not.” Second, that “[t]he eternalist/presentist debate is conducted on the assumption that no context is required for asking about some X whether it exists,…” (the quotation continues with a repetition of the previous complaint that the notion of ontological inventory cannot be taken for granted.) These two points appear to us rather different, even though, in introducing the second one, Dolev presents it as “another way of putting it [the first point].”
When Dolev speaks of different meanings of “exist,” it is not clear to us whether they are taken to be irreducible modes of existence, i.e., whether Dolev is endorsing some form of ontological pluralism (see Spencer 2012). Note also that Dolev speaks of an “irreducible plurality of things,” rather than of a distinction of domains, but we take it that this is in essence what he means, since he seems to talk about an irreducible plurality of things in order to motivate Scanlon’s distinction of domains. This irreducible plurality of things is brought to the fore first by citing Putnam (1987, p. 16) telling us that there are tables, chairs, ice cubes, electrons, space–time regions, prime numbers, people who are a menace to world peace, moments of beauty and of transcendence, etc., and then by informing us that “much has been written on how impossible it is to accommodate this irreducible plurality of things under a Quinean univocal notion of existence.” (Putnam 2013 is also cited.).
We may want to distinguish here, as in Oaklander (2014), the pre-theoretical level of common sense and the theoretical level of ontology.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing this out.
This option is considered and rejected by Lombard (2010).
Once we grant that there is tenseless predication, we typically resort to the grammatical present tense to convey it. If so, the grammatical present tense is ambiguous, since it can be used tensedly or tenselessly. To avoid this ambiguity when the context requires precision, we can resort to the adverbs “presently” or “now” on the one hand, and “tenselessly,” on the other hand. This is what we have done throughout this paper. Thus, “Mary’s car is presently red” tells us that the instantiation of red by the car is present, whereas “Mary’s car is tenselessly red” provides no information as to whether this instantiation is past, present or future.
It should be clear that we are not saying here that the existential and universal quantifiers can be defined in terms of more primitive notions such as exemplification and universality; we are simply using “exemplified” and “universal” to express what the two quantifiers respectively express, with the following advantage: since these two locutions require the copula “is” to be deployed, they make it evident that in quantifying we predicate. Alternatively, we could have used locutions such as “possessed by something” and “possessed by everything.”
Here a referee pointed out the following: “it’s not unusual for B-theorists to interpret tense operators as redundant when the sentences in their scope are ‘temporally saturated,’ in the sense that all relevant time-variables have been filled in. On this view, ‘presently, something is such that at t, it crosses the Rubicon’ is equivalent to ‘something is such that at t, it crosses the Rubicon,’ and therefore the second sentence implies the first.” Following the way we are phrasing things in an effort to minimize ambiguities, the idea is that a B-eternalist may take the following to be equivalent: (a) there is, tenselessly, a thing such that at t this thing crosses, tenselessly, the Rubicon, and (b) presently, there is, tenselessly, a thing such that at t this thing crosses, tenselessly, the Rubicon. Perhaps, a B-eternalist may take this line, but what is worth emphasizing here is that (b) is quite different from the claim that there is, presently, a thing such that at t this thing crosses, tenselessly, the Rubicon. For, as explained above, from an eternalist point of view, the latter may be inferred from “at t, Caesar crosses, tenselessly, the Rubicon” only if “Caesar” refers to a presently existing item; whereas (b), if taken to be equivalent to (a), may be inferred from “at t, Caesar crosses, tenselessly, the Rubicon,” simply because “Caesar” refers to something, whether present or not.
Hence, according to Dolev, there cannot be the notion of an all-encompassing ontological inventory.
See Van Inwagen (2009) for further support on these points.
Here and in the following for readability we use italics in making up property names, when these are particularly complex.
We saw that Ludlow distinguishes serious tensism and very serious tensism, but for present purposes we need not go into these details.
Even this is moot, for the fact that a property was universal need not imply that it was universal when Aristotle existed, but let us pass this.
Thus, in the end, if we understand the “tenselessly” of (P3) and (E3) in terms of Lombard’s “now real,” (P3) and (E3) reduce once more to (P2) and (E2).
If we take to be essential to eternalism that there are temporal items, such as objects and events, that tenselessly exist at non-present times, this view is not strictly speaking eternalist. Moreover, this view could even be incorporated into a “moderate” form of presentism; see Orilia (2016).
Meyer (2013b, p. 76) considers the idea of associating Williamson’s position to a tensed reading of the quantifiers, but rather than noting that this amounts to endorsing a very specific temporal ontology, which would be impossible if the deflationists were correct, he takes this option as another way of showing that presentism is trivial.
The serious tenser may perhaps say that a disjunctively or conjunctively tensed interpretation of “is instantiated” should also be taken into account. However, the present-tensed interpretation that we have considered is the obvious one to pick, if (E2i) is to be seen as derivable from (A).
Meyer (2013b, §5) considers this option, although, for reasons that we saw, he fails to take into account the analogous option for eternalism. Lombard (2010) comes close to an implicit recognition of this reading, although it is not clear that he really does, because his exposition is not entirely transparent in this respect.
Meyer (2013b), in carrying out the triviality objection (as addressing presentism only), makes the analogous inference consisting of an existential generalization on the proposition that it was the case that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, which yields that there is tenselessly something such that it was the case this something crossed the Rubicon. He considers the objection that this move is illicit given that “Julius Caesar” lacks a present referent, but in the end puts the objection aside on the ground that the quantified tense logic with untensed quantifiers that he is assuming grants this inference. But clearly this tense logic is presupposing eternalism. It may be enough to have recourse to a free tense logic (see Cocchiarella 1991) to avoid this automatic commitment to eternalism, but we must reserve a more thorough discussion of these formal issues for another occasion.
Alternatively, the presentist may assume that proper names may be denotationless and assume a free logic.
However, this will not support the claim that there is, tenselessly, a thing that existed and does not exist now.
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The authors are equally responsible for the content of this paper and are grateful to the anonymous Synthese referees for their valuable comments. Useful suggestions were also provided by Gregory Landini, Nathan L. Oaklander and William F. Vallicella.
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Appendix: Tenselessness and natural language
Appendix: Tenselessness and natural language
Tenseless predication is clearly appealed to by the early B-theorists. Three main kinds of tenseless sentence (involving only tenseless predication) have been traditionally recognized: abstracta sentences, which are about abstract entities, e.g., “two is a prime number;” B-relational sentences such as “the birth of Plato is earlier than the birth of Aristotle,” and neutrally dated sentences such as “Caesar crosses the Rubicon at 5 a.m. on January 10, 49 B.C.” This last sentence tells us when a certain attribute, crossing, is instantiated, but it does this without qualifying this as past, present or future. If we simply consider its subpart, “Caesar crosses the Rubicon,” we get a tenseless sentence such that, for it to be true, it must be true at some time or other, and is thus different from abstracta and B-relational sentences. In other words, that Caesar, tenselessly, crosses the Rubicon is true if and only if there is a time at which Caesar crosses the Rubicon. In contrast, it is not the case that two is a prime number at a certain time, or that the birth of Plato is earlier than the birth of Aristotle at a certain time (or at least this is what a typical B-theorist would say). Some B-theorists, such as Russell and Quine, might have thought that resorting to a tenseless language is a linguistic reform that takes us beyond the strictures and inconveniences of natural language. But others, perhaps the majority, thought that tensed sentences were tenseless sentences “in disguise,” as Loux (2006, p. 216) puts it. In other words, according to them, in order to perspicuously convey the meaning of tensed sentences, one should provide a tenseless paraphrase. Thus, for example, the meaning of the tensed sentences “Mary is tired” and “Mary was tired” are provided, respectively, by the neutrally dated tenseless sentences “Mary is tired at t” and “there is a time tʹ earlier than t such that Mary is tired at tʹ” (where t is the time of utterance). Or, alternatively, the meanings are provided, respectively, by the tenseless B-relational sentences “Mary’s being tired is simultaneous with the utterance of this token” and “Mary’s being tired is earlier than the utterance of this token.” If so, tenseless predication, far from being absent from natural language, would be implicitly presupposed in the common tensed way of speaking. As is well-known, the legitimacy of these tenseless paraphrases has been questioned and nowadays even B-theorists do not view them as capable of conveying the meanings of the corresponding tensed sentences; they are taken to express only their truth conditions (see, e.g., Oaklander and Smith 1994). Perhaps the jury is still out, though. It has recently been claimed that the arguments against taking these paraphrases as “meaning-providers” are not conclusive after all (Orilia and Oaklander 2015). Be this as it may, the very fact that we can argue about the legitimacy of these paraphrases testifies that we understand them perfectly well, which in turn may be taken to suggest that the tenseless predication involved in such paraphrases is already at home in natural language. It is the very same tenseless predication, one may continue, that is also found in sentences such as “John is sometimes tired,” or in abstracta sentences.
This is of course no conclusive evidence that tenseless predication is part of pre-philosophical natural language, and indeed one could argue to the contrary by turning to the attempts of some earlier A-theorists to show that a tenseless sentence is just, as Loux again puts it (2006, p. 218), a “disguised way” of making a tensed claim. For example, to say that Plato’s birth is earlier than Aristotle’s birth would be to make a disjunctive tensed claim such as the following one. It was the case that: Aristotle is being born and Plato is not being born and Plato was born; or Aristotle is being born and Plato is not being born and Plato was born; or it will be the case that Aristotle is being born and Plato is not being born and Plato was born. Similarly, “John is sometimes tired” would be read as disjunctively tensed: John was tired or John is presently tired or John will be tired. And a logico-mathematical sentence such as “2 is a prime number” would mean: 2 has always been, is presently, and will always be a prime number. We should agree that it is an empirical issue whether or not natural language contains tenseless predication, and in the light of these paraphrases one could think that the allegedly tenseless natural language sentences that we have provided are not really tenseless after all. This would be so if paraphrases such as those we have seen indeed provided the true hidden meaning of the allegedly tenseless sentences, as the earlier A-theorists seem to have thought. We may leave this issue open here, for what really matters for present purposes is that tenseless predication is intelligible, whether or not it is part of natural language.
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Graziani, E., Orilia, F. Temporal ontology: tenselessness and quantification. Synthese 198, 2821–2847 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02248-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02248-z