Abstract
One premise in David Lewis’s well-known argument from temporary intrinsic properties in favor of temporal parts is the (putative) intuition that material objects exemplify such properties simpliciter, that is, without qualification. The argument has spawned a large critical literature, with commentators questioning the simpliciter premise’s motivation, content, dialectical force, and status as an intuition. The present essay has two chief goals: to provide a novel framework for clarifying Lewis’s simpliciter premise and to explain how the resulting clarification upends a wide range of attempts in the literature to evade his conclusion. Central to both goals is the observation that exemplification simpliciter best comports with our most fundamental notion of property exemplification, a notion that applies equally well to material and atemporal abstract objects.
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Notes
For convenience, I will hereafter use ‘eternalism’ as synonymous with ‘anti-presentism’, but it should be noted that one could be an anti-presentist non-eternalist by allowing that only present and past objects exist.
While presentists are not required by conceptual consistency to be “serious tensors,” I will speak hereafter as though the two views go hand in hand.
Indeed, for lack of space, some interesting eternalist options will not be discussed, either (e.g. MacBride 2001).
Whether there is a substantive difference between the relational theory and the adverbial property theory is a question that may be left open for present purposes. As Ehring points out, one way to encounter a substantive difference is to be sensitive to whether properties and relations are universals or classes of tropes.
While it seems plausible to me that the clarification to be proposed faithfully regiments what Lewis has in mind in the passages quoted above, it will not detract from the point of the present essay if some of the details of the proposal are less than conclusively concordant with all of Lewis’s writings. The point is to offer an updated defense of the argument Lewis gave, not to engage in Lewis exegesis. That said, I will proceed as though the proposed update is one Lewis would have found acceptable.
Notice that strong dependence on a given parameter entails weak dependence.
For an interesting discussion of scope ambiguities in temporal predication, see (Lombard 2006). While the discussion of scope in that paper is indeed interesting, I doubt that it furthers the debate substantially. After disambiguating the various scope readings, Lombard continues to assume that exemplification simpliciter does not follow from temporally indexed property attributions (ibid. 446–447). That assumption is false if exemplification simpliciter is the more metaphysically perspicuous concept.
One important consequence of this fact is that it shows the momentary trope version of the adverbial property theory defended in (Ehring 1997) to violate the simpliciter intuition as clarified here. Yogi can only have one of Ehring’s momentary bent-at-t tropes in his bundle (and thus exemplify the property bent-at-t) if it is in his bundle at t. That Ehring’s view violates the simpliciter intuition weakens the analogy he draws between his view’s treatment of temporary intrinsics and Lewis’s.
This analysis of the neo-Aristotelian view’s violation of Monadicity is compatible with the claim, which follows from a more general claim endorsed in (Brower 2010), that Yogi and bent-Yogi are numerically the same material object. Brower’s more general claim is that entities sharing the same prime matter are the same material object. The compatibility stems from the fact that distinct relata may share the same prime matter. (This is why Yogi and bent-Yogi are merely the same material object, not the same entity simpliciter.)
Lombard (2006) credits Michael McKinsey and Ted Sider for pointing out to him that some possible entities have some properties that they do not have at times. He then argues that numbers do in fact have properties at times, for example, one of them has the property of being his favorite number. I doubt that his example shows anything about numbers having properties at times. At most it shows that numbers can be externally related (non-spatiotemporally) to objects that do have their properties at times. But no matter. The point of concern for motivating the simpliciter intuition is whether abstracta have at least some properties without necessarily having them at times, which is quite consistent with their having other properties at times.
It is less clear that the neo-Aristotelian theory unduly tampers with the nature of bentness, for the view presented in (Brower 2010) has the virtue of attributing bentness simpliciter to (a certain type of) material objects. But there is some reason to suspect that tampering occurs at the base level of the Aristotelian distinction between substantial and accidental forms. The worry is that the distinction underplays the characterizing role that certain accidental properties like shapes play for substances like animals. Consider the substantial form of Horse. How could any prime matter instantiate the form Horse in a way that is ontologically independent from its instantiating a shape? Yet if the aforementioned ontological independence is relaxed then the neo-Aristotelian account of temporary intrinsics loses its parallel with perdurantism and consequently loses its force. To be clear, this is no knockdown objection to the neo-Aristotelian view, but it is a non-trivial worry that perdurantism does not face.
Why does an instantaneous temporal proper part of Yogi at t not strongly depend on the parameter ‘time’ via t? Because we have agreed to assume eternalism. If a is F at t and eternalism is true, then a is F even when t is not present and some distinct t′ is the value of the parameter ‘time’. This is so even if a is an instantaneous temporal part exactly located at t.
Thank you to an anonymous referee for encouraging me to emphasize this point.
For a different critique of the relational theory, see (Stone 2003). The Stone critique, mapped onto the Yogi example, involves the premise that there is some one property (namely, bentness simpliciter) that Yogi has throughout the extended interval that he is bent (t1–t5, say), and which Yogi possesses throughout that interval precisely because he was bent at each time in the interval. The problem for the relational theory, according to Stone, is that it cannot furnish any such property. The desired property cannot be the bent-at-t1-at relation, for Yogi would have that property throughout the relevant interval even if he were not bent at, say, the latter half of the interval. So his being bent throughout the interval cannot (let us suppose) be the cause of his bearing bent-at-t1-at throughout the interval. The desired property cannot be the bent-at-some-time-or-other-at relation for the same reason. It cannot be the bent-at-t1-through-t5-at relation either, for possession of the desired property by Yogi at t6 would entail that Yogi is bent at t6, but standing in the bent-at-t1-through-t5-at relation to t6 would not entail that Yogi is bent at t6. Stone concludes that the relational theory fails a condition of adequacy on theories of properties, namely, that they furnish “enough properties to ascribe one wherever a feature plainly persists” (289). I have reservations about Stone’s critique. In particular, it seems to me that the basic relation being-bent-at does the trick just fine (modulo independent worries for the relational theory). Surprisingly, Stone does not consider this relation (notice that being-bent-at is not the same relation as being-bent-at-some-time-or-other-at; I tentatively conjecture that Stone did not appreciate this fact in his 2003). Yogi bears being-bent-at throughout t1–t5, and he does so because he is bent at (i.e. bears being-bent-at to) each time in that interval. It is no problem for this suggestion that Yogi might have borne being-bent-at to more, fewer, or different times, and he would not bear it throughout the relevant interval if, say, he had stopped bearing it back at t3.
There are many ways to spell out compresence, but the variety does not matter for present purposes. For an exception to the claim that trope theorists are bundle theorists, see (Martin 1980). As I read Martin, he rejects the possibility of substrata tropes that bear no properties. If that is correct then he, like Armstrong (see main text below), cannot allow that character-conferring properties are external relations.
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Acknowledgements
Thank you to Anna-Sofia Maurin and several anonymous referees for helpful feedback on ancestors of this essay. Funding for the completion of this essay was provided by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Grant No. RIK15-1252:1).
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Giberman, D. Bent, Not Broken: Why Exemplification Simpliciter Remains a Problem for Eternalist Endurantism. Erkenn 82, 947–966 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-016-9852-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-016-9852-4