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Time Will Tell: Against Antirealism About the Past

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Abstract

Past entities, events, and circumstances are neither observable nor manipulatable. Several philosophers argued that this inaccessibility precludes a realistic conception of the past.

I survey versions of antirealism and agnosticism about the past formulated by Michael Dummett, Leon Goldstein, and Derek Turner. These accounts differ in their motivations and reasoning, but they share the opinion that the reality of at least large swathes of the past is unknowable. Consequently, they consider statements about them as referring, at most, to present constructs.

These antirealists about the past are not, however, antirealists or skeptics about time or chronology. They accept, among other things, that present traces can be dated and statements about their temporal provenances are referring and truth-apt.

I posit that an antirealist who accepts that at least some of the present traces can be truth-aptly dated while holding that these traces do not support knowledge about past events and circumstances commits herself to a radically skeptic stance. Otherwise, she would be diluting her position so that it will be hardly distinguishable from realism.

This problem could be avoided if antirealists about the past would extend their antirealism to estimates of the age of present traces. Such a position, however, would imply a very drastic form of scientific antirealism.

I conclude that the past’s inaccessibility is insufficient to support antirealism about the past, either as a part of moderate scientific antirealism or as a stand-alone position.

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Notes

  1. A different motivation for antirealism about the past relates to the ontology of time (McTaggart 1908; Ingram and Tallant 2018; Emery et al. 2020) as reflected, for example, in the eternalism/presentism debate. The versions of antirealism discussed here are motivated by epistemic and semantic considerations and cannot be subsumed under the ontological debate.

  2. I shall claim below (Sect. 4.1) that some of the standard arguments against scientific realism do not fare well when applied to sciences of the past.

  3. “Nobody shall ever know what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, because we weren’t there to watch it happen.” (Gee 2001, 2).

  4. Note that this definition differs from the use of the term chronology in the narrativist literature (e.g., White 1965). In particular, I shall have no use for Danto’s (1985) all-knowing “ideal chronicler.”

  5. Formerly, Dummett sought to answer the “truth-value link problem” by maintaining that similar statements asserted in different times have different notions of truth since “the world changes.” (Cf. Dolev 2007, 52–57; Botros 2017, 29–32). For our purpose, what is significant is that even under Dummett’s earlier, stronger conception attributes like “X years ago” are considered meaningful, even when statements about what happened then may be unjustifiable and meaningless.

  6. Goldstein brushes aside differences between naïve realism and more sophisticated realistic schemes as immaterial to his argument: “historical realism undercuts all those distinctions among realisms, simply because the objects of historical knowing are not given in the way in which natural objects present to perception are.” (1976, xxv; cf. also his response to McGullah in Goldstein 1980, 427)

  7. An interesting question, which Goldstein avoids, is whether the “history of history” itself can be construed realistically. I think Goldstein is committed to answering negatively, but by this he would be undermining his own argument.

  8. Goldstein’s philosophy of historiography, particularly his insistence that historians construct, rather than observe, past circumstances, had a notable influence on Aviezer Tucker, as evident by numerous citations and references (Tucker 2004). Tucker, like Goldstein, stresses the significance of consensus on historiography: He suggests that whenever such consensus (subject to certain conditions) exists, the most plausible explanation is that historiographers possess knowledge on the past and “in this respect historiography is open to realist interpretation as any established science that points to unobservable entities” (Tucker 2004, 257). This position is different from Goldstein’s, who does not discuss the plausibility of beliefs. (Cf. also Tucker 2001).

  9. In his latest writing, Goldstein was less confident about the ability of historiographic practices to weed out relativism, for example, about holocaust denial. (Goldstein 1996. See also O’Sullivan 2006, 214)

  10. Though I do not address here issues related to the ontology of time, it is worth noting that the interpretation of Dummett’s position on this matter is disputed: While Dolev (2007; 2010) and Putnam (2010) characterized Dummett’s early philosophy as akin to a tensed view of time or presentism, he never accepted this categorization. Botros (2017, 80–81) argues that Dummettian semantic antirealism, while eschewing the eternalist’s pretension “to stand out of time,” is different from (and more radical than) presentism. For Goldstein and Turner, a similar question evidently does not arise.

  11. Alluding to the creation of Adam and Eve complete with their navel (Greek: omphalos).

  12. Botros (2017, 143): “The disparity between Dummett’s antirealism and presentism is shown in their response to Russell’s skeptical paradox. Dummett… would dismiss it as incoherent.”

  13. The idea that realism can be compatible with skepticism, while antirealism can dispel skepticism, is not confined to the historical sciences. Indeed, “If you are not a realist about a whole subject matter in the first place, then there is in a sense nothing to be skeptical about” (Bigelow 1994).

  14. Even if we understand Dummett as allowing that a preset trace (for example, a fossil) is verificatory of the existence of some past object (e.g., a dinosaur), this, for Dummett, cannot be gerrymandered to include the causal context of that object (say, how it came to be or to perish). But see Sect. 4.1 below.

  15. I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.

  16. “Colligatory” concepts like “The Paleozoic era” or “The Middle Stone Age” are human constructs that reflect both theoretical and practical considerations, and their referential scope is more labile than straight chronological terms.

  17. Turner (2007, 99) notes that relying on historical records as evidence for PMI-like argument against realism about the past would be self-defeating because such records themselves involve statements about past unobservables. His solution is to apply the PMI only to the prehistorical past, for which there are no written records. However, Turner’s two asymmetries, if cogent, apply to text-based historiography no less than to the research of prehistory.

  18. Contra Botros (2017, 209).

  19. The possibility of backward causation was explored in the context of quantum processes such as the Bell phenomena (e.g., Price 1996), but it is never seriously considered for the macroscopic realm. In the Humean framework the direction of causation is the direction of time. Alternative schemes, which identify the direction of causation with an increased fixity (Mackie 1966; 1974), or with conditionship (Sanford 1984), effectively make the two coincide. Dummett (1954; 1964; 2004, 82) famously insisted that backward causation is logically possible, but only in a very restricted context. “Apart from prayer, we know of no way of making it more probable that some event should have previously occurred. The direction of causality is a pervasive fact about reality.“ Even the power of prayer is limited: “If I know what happened in the past, it would indeed be senseless for me to try to prevent it from having happened, and even more to act so as to bring it about that it happened.“ Goldstein specifically rejected the idea of backward causation as one which would “clash with all manners of aspects of our conceptual apparatus” (1976, 20; see also Goldstein 1996, 226). Turner does not discuss the matter, but if backward causation were possible, both the asymmetry of manipulability and the asymmetry in the role of background theories, which play a major part in his argument, would be vacuous.

  20. Note that some of these methodologies (e.g., dendrochronology) can be extended to the very recent past and therefore may support absolute dating.

  21. It is not sufficient since it preserves the law of bivalence for unverifiable statements, while for the verificationist there is no truth of the matter unless “conditions which establish the truth or falsity of statements” are met. And it is not necessary, because only realization of said condition is needed. Green (2013, 11) concludes that “one should not, therefore, assume that the verificationism that he [Dummett] explores is the outdated, discredited philosophy of the logical positivists.”

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Yemima Ben-Menahem, Arnon Levi, and two anonymous referees for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 9190501, Jerusalem, Israel

    Efraim Wallach

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Correspondence to Efraim Wallach.

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Wallach, E. Time Will Tell: Against Antirealism About the Past. J Gen Philos Sci 53, 539–554 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-021-09592-0

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