Abstract
Our ordinary conception of time has it that there are temporal particulars: not only do people do things, but there are particular doings by people; not only are we born, but the birth of each one of us was a particular event, and each of us will have our own particular death. Temporal particulars in this sense are individuated, fundamentally, by their temporal locations or relations, rather than by their intrinsic or qualitative characteristics. In this respect they are unrepeatable, not just de facto, but as a matter of their very nature. However, there is a tradition in philosophy that seriously downplays this aspect of our thinking about time. According to this tradition, the fundamental unit of temporal representation is tensed truth; the notion of an unrepeatable particular, individuated by its temporal location, is at best an abstraction from a complex of tensed truths. The aims of this paper are, first, to argue that the representation of temporal particulars is deeply implicated in our ordinary conception of the past as fixed and unalterable; and, secondly, to argue that the theorist of tensed truth is able to provide only a pale imitation of this aspect of our thinking. I will then reflect on the consequences of this for debates about the metaphysics of tense.
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Notes
The neatness of this contrast would be disputed by defenders of the possibility of backwards causation, as well as those who hold that the proper objects of deliberation are just those events whose (subjective) probability is linked to our actions, even if they are causally prior to those actions—as in the case of Newcomb-like problems and retrospective petitionary prayer. A classic discussion of such cases is Dummett (1964). I cannot get into these delicate matters here; I will just note that both of these possibilities are to some extent revisionary of the common thought that the past cannot be altered.
A reviewer at this point wondered how the phase thinker can really distinguish past and future at all if, from its point of view, every event is always both past and future—in which case it is hard to see how the thoughts ‘X is past’ and ‘X is future’ could have distinct psychological functional roles. One solution would be to associate distinct functional roles not with the bare labels ‘past’ and ‘future’, but with quasi-metrical representations of the degree of pastness or futurity of an event, perhaps as an analogue magnitude, so that (the analogue equivalent of) the thought ‘breakfast was one hour ago’ has a distinct functional profile from the thought ‘breakfast is in an hour’. While this would solve the immediate problem of distinguishing the functional roles of past and future, the fact that the same event can be represented as to some degree both past and future shows that the creature in a deeper sense systematically conflates the past and the future, and to this extent cannot be credited with a grip on the idea that past events are fixed and unalterable.
Thanks to a reviewer for encouraging me to consider our future-directed attitudes at this point.
Which are more fundamental, locations or relations? As will emerge from the discussion of the Russell below, really it is the individuating role of relations that is my focus here. However, this is not necessarily to commit to the claim that all facts about temporal and spatial locations, or about the identities of particular located items, can be reduced or translated to facts about relations between them. For discussion of the difficulties for this claim, see Hawthorne and Sider (2002). The point I take from Russell in what follows, that detecting relations plays a key role in the cognitive project of individuating particulars, can be separated from this reductionist claim. Thanks to a referee for pressing me to clarify this.
There is an unclarity in Russell’s presentation. The idea that particulars are individuated by their standing in mutual ordering relations is different from, and not obviously connected to, the idea canvassed in the previous quotation that particulars might be distinguished by their having incompatible relational properties, like ‘being wholly and immediately surrounded by red’ and ‘...by black’. From Russell’s surrounding discussion it is clear that he takes the former idea, of a system of transitive, irreflexive and asymmetric relations, to be the more fundamental.
See, for instance, Reichenbach (1958)’s vivid descriptions of adventures in non-Euclidean space.
A reviewer suggested that individuating spatial particulars also requires a grasp of the relevant logical properties, such as asymmetry, transitivity, etc. While I am sympathetic to this suggestion, some might regard it as too demanding. Arguably, the visual system creates distinct object files partly on the basis of information about objects’ (relative) spatial locations, thereby exploiting the logical properties of spatial relations to individuate objects, but without having to represent those logical properties Kahneman et al. (1992). It might perhaps be suggested that conceptual (as opposed to perceptual) individuation of particulars requires a grasp of these logical properties. However, again, I think it is arguable that a thinker could simply use concepts such as ‘to the left of’ to individuate objects that stand in those relations, without grasping in full generality the higher-order concepts of asymmetry, transitivity, and so on. But this is a delicate matter that warrants further discussion.
This claim might of course be disputed: after all, there is a perceptible difference between a sequence consisting of red flash followed by a green flash, and a sequence consisting of a green flash followed by a red flash, which on the face of it is a difference in temporal relation. The tense theorist will have to construe this difference as one of tensed contents, rather than temporal relations. Adjudicating this disagreement on phenomenological grounds is a tricky matter—for some discussions see, for instance, contributions to Phillips (2017). In what follows I will focus on the cognitive role of temporal relations for individuating particulars, setting aside questions of their presence in experience.
In what follows, I consider just the propositional language of tense logic, and completely ignore any of the complications arising from combining tense logic with the logic of quantification.
A reviewer invited me to consider here David Lewis’s argument against linguistic ersatzism about possible worlds on the grounds that linguistic or propositional specifications of possible worlds are unable to allow for distinct but indiscernible possible individuals (Lewis, 1986, pp. 157–158) I do not know exactly what to make of this argument of Lewis’s, but I have a couple of points to make about its relation to the present dialectic: (i) Lewis is principally concerned with the problem of distinguishing between indiscernible individuals within a single possible world; by contrast, he considers the problem of indiscernible worlds to be ‘harmless’, precisely because there is no particular reason why a theory of modality should rule for or against the possibility of indiscernible worlds. And (ii) Lewis is of course arguing that our ordinary modal judgments commit us to a certain conception of the modal domain, namely as a framework of particular ‘big concrete objects’, in contrast to a traditional conception of modality as a primitive modification or mode of a state of affairs. But the tense primitivist holds that tense is fundamentally analogous to modality as traditionally conceived, rather than as conceived by Lewis. So to say that modal thought according to Lewis has a certain feature is not to say that temporal thought according to the tense primitivist has a a corresponding feature. And indeed, as I emphasise below, it remains a signal limitation of the tense primitivist’s conception of time that times—maximal constellations of tensed truths—conform to a version of the Identity of Indiscernibles.
By an external relation I mean one that does not supervene on the intrinsic properties of the relata. For discussion see MacBride (2016).
Strictly speaking what this means is that the modal system which is sound and complete for the class of irreflexive models is just the basic system K, which is also sound and complete for the class of all models. For explanation see Cresswell and Hughes (1984, Chap. 2).
This raises the tricky question whether the future-directed analogue \(F\phi \rightarrow HF\), that what will be the case was always going to be the case, should be thought of as expressing a form of fatalism about the future. Assuming it does generates a trilemma for the primitive tense theorist here: Either we accept both PS5 and its mirror image FS5, thus embracing fatalism; or we reject both, thus denying the fixity of the past as a logical principle; or we accept PS5 and reject FS5, thus complicating the logic of time. Many discussions of future contingents in the setting of tense logic are essentially explorations of the third horn of this trilemma. By contrast, in what follows I suggest we reject the trilemma by denying that PS5 is an adequate expression of our intuitions about the past.
What follows is a sketch of the kind of supervaluational branching-time semantics developed by Thomason (1970), Belnap and Green (1994), Dummett (1981) and others. There are other alternative implementations of a branching-time semantics, for instance the many-valued approach of Łukasiewicz (1968). I am focusing on the supervaluational approach because it has the important feature of preserving the logic of a standard interpretation of the operators.
For discussions of this approach to the open future, see the contributions to Correia and Iacona (2013).
As we have seen, this is not a characterisation that Prior would have been entirely happy with, because he resists the idea that the present is one among many temporal perspectives. Nevertheless, it is still correct to say, even by Prior’s lights, that tense logic does not model the interaction of tensed truths from multiple different temporal perspectives.
This conclusion mirrors the ‘thin red line’ problem from branching models of the open future, that there is no single actual course of events common to each point in the model, and so it is no longer to coherent to talk of the ‘actual future’.
This is not to suggest that singling out a particular event requires having some other way of picking out its location, like a date and time. It is rather that singling out an event makes it possible to frame questions about its temporal location in relation to one’s own, and to other events—even if these cannot be given an informative answer.
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Bacharach, J. Tensed truth, temporal particularity, and the fixity of the past. Synthese 203, 21 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04470-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04470-2