Abstract
Presentists deny that past or future things exist. Some presentists also deny that there are any underlying truths about the past or future. While this seems to conflict with our everyday tensed discourse, presentists might avoid conflict by adopting a theory of hermeneutic fictionalism about the non-present. Under such a theory, everyday utterances of non-present-tensed sentences are taken to engage with a fiction, rather than expressing truths about the past or future. In this paper I defend a specific version of this view: meta-fictionalism about the non-present. Under this view there is a socially-understood non-present fiction, a story of history, derived from apparent records existing in the present. Meta-fictionalists take our everyday tensed discourse to involve assertions about the content of that fiction. I argue that this view is plausible, and that it fares better than pretence fictionalism, a competing view that has already seen discussion in the literature.
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Notes
A similar argument can be made for supervenience theories of truth, e.g. in Baron (2013b).
I do not expand on the term ‘about’, but for more on this point see Baron (2013a).
How does one interpret the claim ‘the past and future are unreal’? This might be about what is real, and its lack of temporal extension, rather than being about the past or future per se.
I am not aware of any presentists that defend it, but Miller (2021) notes that one could be a semantic non-factualist about non-present sentences (taking them not to express propositions).
Under some views, propositions that are ‘true in a fiction’ are just true. So it is true that Holmes is a detective. This could allow for some fictionalists about the non-present to accept (Non-present truths). But I will assume otherwise, and distinguish felicity from truth in this paper.
The relationship between apparent records and fiction would likely be two-way. Our beliefs about the non-present fiction influence the sorts of extrapolations we take to be derivable from apparent records. In turn, those extrapolations alter our beliefs about the non-present fiction.
Obviously more would need to be said here about the meaning of ‘ideal’.
For more on pretence fictionalism in the context of truth-talk see Woodbridge (2005).
This requires an account of how there can be sentences about dinosaurs, if dinosaurs are unreal.
This is acknowledged by Miller (2021) as a possible advantage of object fictionalism.
See Yablo (2001) for a discussion of the many fictionalisms on offer, and of how our meanings could be mixed, even in the context a single sentence like ‘the number of numbers is 0’.
Miller (2021, p. 12) does not examine how pretence should be understood in this context, but she acknowledges that an account would be needed, which could be a drawback of the view.
Of course, fictionalists are not the only ones who would adopt this view. As I noted in §1, other presentists often attempt to uphold past truths, while denying the reality of past things.
I noted in §1 that presentists might not think so differently of the future, taking it to be open.
I note some potential consequences for interpretations of quantum theory in Dawson (2021).
Some might take folk notions of the past to be reflected in academic theories of history. There is a (non-mainstream) view that interprets history as an incomplete story, built from present records for present motivations. Armitage (2020) calls this ‘historical presentism’, though this term can also mean Whig history, making the topic murky. Still, fictionalists might defend such a theory, and lean on its justifications to argue that their view aligns with everyday talk, too.
Many disputes may not involve genuine disagreement. Even for those that do, the philosophy of disagreement is described by Frances and Matheson (2019) as under-developed (‘a mere infant’). I skip over the complexities here, and just assume that there is a subset of disputes involving non-present sentences that at least seem to involve conflicting beliefs.
The Wallabies and the All Blacks are the Australian and New Zealand national rugby teams.
For shared non-present fictions, as per Miller (2021), the basis for felicity might be a group condition: e.g. a past sentence is felicitous if the majority pretend it is true. A similar complication arises: utterances of past sentences are both acts of pretence, and expressions of belief about what the majority are pretending.
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I would like to thank Daniel Deasy, Kristie Miller, and my anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on this paper.
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The author has no conflicts of interest to declare in relation to this work, and is the sole author of the work. This research was funded by an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship.
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Dawson, P. Meta-fictionalism about the non-present. Synthese 202, 166 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04390-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04390-1