Month: April 2019

This is the third in a series. Part I here; Part II here.

On the principle of bivalence, every proposition is either true, or if not true, then false. Given that bivalence holds for what presently exists, it is difficult to see how it could fail to hold for what did exist. Why should the present, which is wholly determinate, become less than wholly determinate when it becomes past? However things stand with the future, one reasonably views the past as a realm of reality and thus as wholly determinate. Our knowledge of the past is spotty, but not the past itself. It WAS, and I would add: it ACTUALLY was.  When a thing passes away it does not pass from actuality to mere possibility; it remains actual, though no longer temporally present. Or so it would seem if we are realists about the past. The historian studies past actualities, not past possibilities. Compare Kierkegaard's engagement to Regine Olsen to his marriage to her.  There is a sense in which both events belong to the past. The crucial difference is that the first event actually occurred while the second was a mere possibility.  This is a difference that an adequate philosophy of time must be able to accommodate.  

One point to keep in mind is that if  the past is wholly determinate, as determinate as the present, this is the case whether or not determinism is true. The determinate is not to be confused with the determined. Consider the proposition that my grandfather Alfonso drank a glass of 'dago red' on New Year's Day, 1940. Bivalence ensures that the proposition is either true or false but not both. If the proposition is true and the event occurred, it doesn't matter whether the event was caused by prior events under the aegis of the laws of nature, or not. To say that the past is determinate is not to say that past events are determined; it is to say that, e.g., the past individual Alfonso V. cannot be such that he neither drank nor did not drink red wine on the date in question. It had to be one or the other if bivalence holds for the past.

Of course, no one now remembers whether or not this event occurred, and there is no written record or other evidence of the event's having occurred. If the event occurred, nothing in the present points back to it as to its cause.  Some past events, states, individuals, and property-instantiations leave causal traces in the present, but not all do.  My grandfather's gravestone and the dessicated bones lying beneath it are causal traces in the present of  a long-dead and wholly past individual. But there is nothing in the present that bears upon the truth of the proposition that Alfonso drank a glass of  red wine on New Year's Day, 1940,  assuming it is true. If true, it is true now but lacks a present truth-maker. 

Now if one were to hold both that there are truth-makers for all past-tensed truths, and that presentism is true, then one would have to hold that the past is not wholly determinate. For if presentism is true, all existing truth-makers must exist at present. (I assume, and I think Feser does as well, that there are no nonexistent or 'Meinongian' truth-makers.) But then there wouldn't be enough truth-makers for all the past-tensed truths. The following quartet of propositions is collectively inconsistent:

a) The past is wholly determinate: bivalence holds for every proposition about the past.
b) Presentism is true: only present items exist.
c) Contingent truths have (existing) truth-makers.
d) Not every contingent truth about the past has a presently existing truth-maker.

The members of the quartet are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent.  The first three propositions, taken together, entail that every contingent truth about the past has a presently existing truth-maker.  But this contradicts the fourth member, (d).  (d) is well-nigh self-evident as I have already established with the example of Alfonso and his wine. There is nothing that exists in the present that could make true the proposition in question, if it is true.  With how many men did Caesar cross the Rubicon? Were any of them barefoot? And when he met his end on the Ides of March, what was the exact size and shape and length and composition of the blade that entered his body?

So how do we solve this bad boy?  I suspect that it is insoluble, but to argue this out goes well beyond the scope of a mere blog post.  Some will solve it by abandoning  presentism.  This is precisely what Ed Feser will not do. But before discussing his suggestion, let me say just a little in support of (a).

Bivalence, as a principle of logic, strikes me as pretty solid.  But now consider: could the applicability of a principle of logic depend on when it is applied?  Could the passage of time restrict its application? Take identity: for any x, x = x.  Everything is self-identical. If this is true for temporally present values of 'x,' I should think it would be true also for past values of 'x.'  I am self-identical, but so is Alfonso, who is wholly past. When he ceased to exist, he didn't cease to be self-identical. When I refer to him now, I refer to the same man I referred to when I referred to him when he was alive. And when I cease to exist,  I won't cease to be self-identical.  I won't become self-diverse, or neither self-identical nor self-diverse.  The mere passage of time cannot bring it about that a principle of logic that applies to a thing in the present ceases to apply to that thing when it become past.

Likewise, when I cease to exist, I won't go from being a completely determinate individual to an incomplete object.  

Define a completely determinate, or complete, individual x as one  such that, for any pair of predicates, one the complement of the other, one member of the pair must be true of x, but not both, and not neither.  For example, 'non-smoker' is the complement of the predicate 'smoker.' If neither of these predicates is true of Peter, then Peter is an incomplete object.  Since Peter exists at present, he is one or the other. As it happens, he is a smoker.  When he dies, it will become true that he was a smoker, not that he was neither a smoker nor a non-smoker.

A Question for Feser

Feser is clearly a presentist: ". . . what actually exists in the strict sense is what exists now." (Aristotle's Revenge, 239) What then of the past and the future? It is trivially true, and mere fallout from ordinary language, that the (wholly) past is no longer. But it does not follow that the past is nothing or does not exist at all or has no reality. Feser appreciates the reality of the past. The question is whether he can adequately account for it.

The past and future exist now only in the loose sense that they are, as it were, causally contained in what exists now . . . . Future entities, states, and events are contained within the present as potentials which might be actualized. Past entities, states, and events are contained within the present insofar as their effects on the present remain. The present points forward to a range of things which might yet be caused to exist. The present also points backward toward formerly existing things qua causes proportionate to the effects that now exist. But again, what actually exists in the strict sense is what exists now. (Aristotle's Revenge, 239, italics in original.)

We are being told that wholly past items exist in that their effects in the present exist.  Here is an example, mine, not Feser's. Tom stood outside of Sally's window a few days ago.  That event on presentism does not exist. It is not just that it does not exist now — which is trivially true — it does not exist period. For on presentism, only what exists now exists period or simpliciter.  And yet  Tom's standing outside of Sally's window is not nothing: it actually occurred. The evidence that it occurred are Tom's distinctive footprints. On the causal trace theory, a version of which Feser is promoting, the reality of the past event is adequately accounted for by the footprints Tom left.  The theory is ontological, not epistemological. The footprints are not merely evidence of what occurred in the recent past; the footprints are the reality of what occurred in the recent past.

Now one objection to this scheme is that there are not enough present items to represent all past items.  There are not enough truth-makers in the present for all past-tensed truths. Big Al drank a glass of dago red on New Year's Day, 1940.  That event left no trace in the present. And yet it occurred. 

So if the past is wholly determinate and if past-tensed truths need truth-makers, then presentism is in trouble.  There are other objections to the causal trace theory.  I may consider them later.