Abstract
Recently, Orilia and Oaklander have attempted to revive the so-called old tenseless theory of time, which most tenseless theorists themselves had given up as untenable, heralding the appearance of the so-called new tenseless theory. I argue that Orilia and Oaklander have not successfully shown that the old tenseless theory of time is still viable.
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Notes
While the debate over the tensed and tenseless theories appears in the early twentieth century, some historical philosophers defended accounts of time which we now recognize as tensed or tenseless. For instance, in Plato’s Timaeus (37d) we find “Now the nature of the ideal being was everlasting, but to bestow this attribute in its fullness upon a creature was impossible. Wherefore he resolved to have a moving image of eternity, and when he set in order the heaven, he made this image eternal but moving according to number, while eternity itself rests in unity, and this image we call time” (Plato and Jowett 1961, p. 1167). This passage is clearly suggestive of the tensed theory.
Of course, advocates of the old tenseless theory just called themselves tenseless theorists. It is now called the old tenseless theory in contrast to the new tenseless theory.
‘A-sentences’ are prima facie tensed sentences.
Orilia and Oaklander clarify that when they say ‘sentence’ they really mean ‘sentence token’:
For brevity’s sake, in the following we shall often say that a certain sentence is uttered or that a certain proposition is expressed by a given sentence, even though we should more accurately say that a token of a certain sentence type is uttered or that the proposition in question is expressed by a token of the sentence type. (Orilia and Oaklander 2015, p. 159)
Eric Hiddleston points out that this way of characterizing sentence tokens as tensed seems to have counter-examples, like “I am here now,” and “Either now it is sunny or now it is now sunny.” I am inclined to think this is correct, but I am not here offering an account of what makes a sentence tensed or tenseless, but reporting one.
Orilia and Oaklander may also worry that if any of the content of a true sentence token is irreducibly tensed, then the proposition which that sentence expresses must have irreducibly tensed content as well, which would seem to create a problem for the new tenseless theory of time. My thanks to Eric Hiddleston for pointing this out to be, and more generally for helping me get clear on what Orilia and Oaklander are trying to do.
Prior’s original example is “Thank goodness that’s over!” I use “I’m glad that’s over” because the former is, strictly speaking, an exclamation rather than a declarative sentence, and hence one may think that it lacks truth value and does not express a proposition. Alternatively, one might think that this example shows that propositions can be expressed by some exclamations.
For an attempt to account for the significance of a tensed utterance which escapes capture by tenseless utterances consistently with the tenseless theory of time, see Maclaurin and Dyke (Maclaurin and Dyke 2002).
The new tenseless theorist ought not hope that literally every tensed sentence token can be given tenseless truth-conditions. The tensed and the tenseless theorist offer different truth-conditions for tensed sentence tokens. If the sentence tokens used to express the truth-conditions for a given tensed token offered by the tensed theorist could themselves be stated tenselessly, then the disagreement between the tensed and tenseless theorist would be superficial. In other words, there must be some statement which the tensed theorist would endorse and the tenseless theorist reject, in order for there to be a genuine metaphysical disagreement at all. Rather, the new tenseless theorist ought to think that sentence tokens other than those used to express the tensed theory of time can be given tenseless truth-conditions.
References
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Maclaurin, J., & Dyke, H. (2002). Thank goodness That's Over': The evolutionary story. Ratio, 267–292.
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Plato, & Jowett, B. (1961). Plato, "Theaetetus," F. M. Cornford (Trans.). In E. Hamilton, & H. Cairns (eds), The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters (p. 845-919). Princeton University Press.
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Acknowlegements
My thanks to an anonymous reviewer, whose comments on an earlier draft led to substantive improvements to this paper. Thanks also goes to Eric Hiddleston, for helpful comments.
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Figg, T. The Old Tenseless Theory: Back from the Dead?. Philosophia 45, 1167–1178 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9861-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9861-9