Abstract
Fine’s discussion of McTaggart’s paradox and tense realism may be the most significant progress in the philosophy of time in recent years. Fine reformulates McTaggart’s paradox and develops a novel realist theory called fragmentalism. According to Fine, one major advantage of fragmentalism is its ability to account for the connection between reality and tensed truths. I will argue that fragmentalism cannot give an adequate account of this connection. The reason is that while external relations between fragments are required by this kind of account, these relations are not allowed in fragmentalism.
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Notes
For McTaggart’s original version of the paradox, see McTaggart (1908).
Fine (2005, 281) explicitly says “Any fact is plausibly taken to belong to a fragment or maximally coherent collection of facts…these fragments will correspond to the external standpoints of the relativist (which are times)”. Notice that the coherence relation in Fine’s definition cannot be the same as the one that is normally used nor the one that is talked about when Fine claims that reality is not “coherent” and each fragment is “coherent” in itself. As Correia and Rosenkranz (2012, 312) notice, if “coherence” is used in the above sense, then the fact that Socrates is furious and that Plato is anxious belong to the same fragment since they are not incompatible. But if fragments are just times, then there is no fragment that contains both because they are not obtained at the same time. For detailed discussions on this topic, see Lipman (2015).
In other words, I suggest that two entities belong to the same fragment if they exist simultaneously. Correia and Rosenkranz (2012, 311–312) have made an objection to this idea. They claim that given absolutism, tensed facts constitute reality simpliciter. This means that they constitute reality at any time, which in turn means that all tensed facts are simultaneous. It leads to the conclusion that there is only one fragment. I think, their mistake lies in the misunderstanding of absolutism and constitution simpliciter. They understand absolutism as claiming that the constitution is not a temporary matter or that the constitution does not vary through time. They take this to mean that what constitutes reality should exist at every time (ibid, 309). Here, they ignore an ambiguity about “times”. In one sense, “times” refers to different parts of a single reality. In another sense, it refers to the external standpoints that the constitution is relative to. Whether constitution is a temporary matter has nothing to do with the former sense. After all, why does constitution of reality being temporary or not has something to do with how parts of reality are constituted? Absolutism only requires reality not to be relative to any time, i.e., not to vary through times in the latter sense. It is completely adequate to say that a fact that exists only at a certain time constitutes reality simpliciter, and this does not violate absolutism.
Fine (2012, 43–46) prefers “verifying” rather than “truthmaking”. This is perhaps because of his suspicion of the so-called metaphysical truthmaking theory. However, as Asay (2017) notices, his suspicion is based on a specific version of truthmaking theory, which is not held by many truthmaking theorists.
This is also the motivation of the new B-theory. It denies that B-theory should translate every A-sentence to B-sentences to avoid commitments to A-facts and A-properties. Instead, they claim that it is enough to give pure B-theoretic truth-conditions of A-sentences. The term “truth-conditions” is not quite adequate here, because sometimes, to give the meaning of a sentence is just to give its truth conditions. Later, many new B-theorists turn to use “truthmakers” instead of “truth-conditions”. Fine himself seems also to be suspicious of this supposed close connection between semantics and metaphysics. This is why he proposes grounding theory as a new way of doing metaphysics and ontology.
Fine regards verifying or truthmaking as a relation between entities and the content of utterances. For simplicity, I will regard it as a relation between entities and utterances themselves.
Notice that this only means that an utterance U uttered at t is true if it is made true by the facts at t, not that U uttered at t is true at t if it is made true by the facts at t. The latter implies that the truth value of an utterance may change through time, which violates the stable conception of truth. For the philosophers who understand Relevant Link as the latter, see Correia and Rosenkranz (2012, 312).
Strictly speaking, in Prior’s tense logic, past-tensed propositions such as “It was the case that Socrates is a philosopher” can always be reformulated as present-tensed ones such as “it is the case that it was the case that Socrates is a philosopher”. Here, I take present-tensed truths to mean unembedded propositions or u-propositions in Bourne’s (2006, 53) sense, i.e., propositions that include no tense operators such as “it was the case that…” or “it will be the case that…”. In turn, present-tensed facts are the facts that can be expressed by present-tensed propositions.
See Caplan and Sanson (2011, 197). They call it the Independence principle.
Torrengo and Iaquinto (2019, 191) claim that they have another theoretical role. Tensed facts of this sort constitute genuine flow because they constitute reality in such a way that there is a past or future-tensed fact in a fragment because there is a relative present-tensed fact in an earlier or later fragment. Then, there are strong metaphysical reasons to accept these facts anyway, at least for those who are willing to embrace passage. I think, even if they exist, they do not imply passage. Imagine a possible world in which all times exist, and time does not flow. It is not obvious why there cannot be duplications of the past and the future in the present in this world. Later, Torrengo and Iaquinto (2022, 36–60) acknowledge this problem but still insist that the correlation above is needed to explain the passage. The new picture is that while the primitive tensed notions capture the temporal passage, the correlation is nevertheless needed to provide an explanation for the notions by showing how they behave. The suspicion is that explanations are supposed to point out how the explicandum behaves differently from the others. For example, if someone adds a new primitive “#” in propositional logic. He explains it only by showing that it behaves in the same way as “\(\to\)”, then it is not clear whether this counts as an explanation about what “#” is. In the temporal case, the dynamic and the static fragmentalism can both utilize tensed notions, and the possibility above shows that the notions in these two theories behave in the same way as regards to the correlation. Then, it is suspicious whether the correlation counts as an explanation for the tensed notion in dynamic fragmentalism.
See Caplan and Sanson (2011, 202).
Torrengo and Iaquinto (2019, 197; 2022, 53–55; 84–89; 97–115) have discussed the problem of the earler than relation and other cross-temporal relations, especially the causal relation. Divers (2014, 577–575) notice a similar problem in the modal case. He notices that in modal realism, if different worlds are genuinely separate, then there cannot be genuine external relations between things in different worlds, which prevents modal realism from accounting for intuitive cross-world truths.
This argument can be reformulated without assuming an ontology of facts. Following Fine, we can propose sentential operators “in reality, it is the case that…” and “in fragment t, it is the case that…”. Suppose in reality, it is the case that Rab, and for two different fragments t1 and t2, in fragment t1 it is the case that a exists but b does not exist, in fragment t2, b exists but a does not exist. Let fragment t be such that for all x, in fragment t it is the case that Fx, if in fragment t1 it is the case that Fx, or in fragment t2 it is the case that Fx. Then either in t1 it is the case that Rab, or in t2 it is the case that Rab, or in t it is the case that Rab. Given that the obtaining of a relation implies the existence of its terms, it cannot be that in t1 Rab, because it implies that in t1, b exists, and it cannot be that in t2, Rab because it implies that in t2, a exists. The only possibility is that in t Rab. But given reality is sufficiently variegated, it is possible that (in t1, Fc) and (in t2,\(\neg\) Fc). This implies that in t, Fc and \(\neg\) Fc.
This response is transformed from Michels’ response to Divers’ similar objection to Modal realism; see Michels (2018).
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Qi, X. Fragmentalism and Tensed Truths. Acta Anal (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-024-00592-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-024-00592-5