Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Ostrich Presentism

The following remark in Wittgenstein's Zettel seems to fit my sparring partner, Bad Ostrich, to a T.

456. Some philosophers (or whatever you like to call them) suffer from what may be called "loss of problems." (Problemverlust) Then everything seems quite simple to them, no deep problems seem to exist any more, the world become broad and flat and loses all depth, and what they write becomes immeasurably shallow and trivial. Russell and H. G. Wells suffer from this.

Here is a problem, or rather a question, that seems genuine and 'deep.'  Do only present items exist, or do wholly past and wholly future items also exist?  For this question to make sense, 'exist' in both occurrences cannot be in the present tense. If it were, 'Only present items exist' would be logically true and 'Past and present and future items all exist' would be logically false. The presentist claim would then be non-substantive (trivial), and the 'eternalist' claim would be substantive, but necessarily false.

Well, maybe the question just doesn't make sense.  This seems to be the Ostrich's view. He seems to think that logical as opposed to metaphysical presentism is the only game in town: 'Only the present exists' is susceptible of only one reading, the logical reading, whereas I think it is susceptible of two readings, the logical one and a metaphysical one.  In one of his earlier comments, the Ostrich writes:

He [the logical presentist] is putting forward not a substantive metaphysical thesis, but rather a substantive thesis about language, a thesis about the meaning of ‘exists’ and ‘at present’.

The thesis, I take it, is that 'exists' can only be used correctly in the present-tensed way.  If so, 'Boethius exists' is nonsense, if it is a stand-alone, as opposed to an embedded, sentence. ('It was the case that Boethius exists' is not nonsense.) In other words, 'exists' has no correct tenseless use.

Now if there are timeless entities, then 'exists' can be used both tenselessly and correctly. But I expect the Ostrich will have no truck with the timeless.  His claim will then presumably be that 'exists' has no correct tenseless use in respect of any temporal item, and that temporal items are the only ones on offer.

What about the disjunctively omnitemporal use that I have already explained? Surely it is true to say that Boethius exists in that he either existed or exists or will exist, where each disjunct is tensed.  This is true because the first disjunct is true.  The Ostrich could say that the disjunctively omnitemporal use is not genuinely tenseless since it is parasitic upon tensed expresssions.

The Ostrich bids us consider

. . . the question of whether a thing could exist without existing in the present. The logical presentist might then question what is meant by ‘no longer exists’. The natural interpretation is ‘existed, but does not exist’. But then the thing doesn’t exist, period. 

Using tensed language we can say, truly, that Boethius existed, but does not exist.  Why not be satisfied with this?  

The past-tensed 'Boethius existed' is true. It is true now.  What makes it true? The Ostrich will presumably say that nothing makes it true, and there is no need for anything to make it true; it is just true!  I expect the Ostrich to adopt A. N. Prior's redundancy theory of the present according to which everything that is presently true is simply true. (Cf. C. Bourne, 2006, 42 f.)  Just as 'It is true that ____' is redundant. 'It is now the case that ___' is redundant.

For Prior, all tensed sentences are present-tensed.  Thus the past-tensed 'Boethius existed' MEANS that it is now the case that Boethius existed.  Given the redundancy of 'It is now the case that ____,' we are left with 'Boethius existed.'  And that is all!  There is no need or room for a metaphysics of time.  There is nothing more to say about the nature of time than what is said in a perspicuous tense logic.

Thus the Ostrich. I am not satisfied. Past-tensed contingent truths need truth-makers.   'BV exists' is true. It can't just be true. It needs a truth-maker.  A plausible candidate is the 200 lb animal who wears my clothes. It will be the case that BV no longer exists. When that time comes, 'BV existed' will be true. If 'BV exists' needs a truth-maker, then so will 'BV existed.'

As with BV, so with Boethius.

If 'Boethius existed' needs a truth-maker, and nothing at present can serve as truth-maker, then the pressure is on to resist the Ostrich thesis that 'exists' can only be correctly used in the present-tensed way.

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Bill Vallicella

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5 responses to “Ostrich Presentism”

  1. The Bad Ostrich Avatar
    The Bad Ostrich

    You misrepresent the Ostrich, who recognises there is a deep problem, but who insists that it is a problem of explaining in precisely what sense the problem can be set out clearly. ‘The riddle does not exist. If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it’.
    We saw the problem earlier in the case of *exist, meaning ‘exists, has existed, or will exist’. Then ‘X *exists, but does not presently exist’ is the trivial claim that rules out one of the three possibilities. The metaphysical anti-presentist wants to say more than something merely trivial. I think he wants a sense of *exist that is closer to or identical with the normal sense of ‘exists’, i.e. exists in the present, which is of course impossible, for ‘X *exists, but does not presently exist’ would state that X presently exists, but does not presently exist.
    The anti-presentist claim is a bit like the claim that the existence of no longer existing things is being in some shadowy parallel ‘now’. They really do exist in some way, rather than in some sense. But then they really do exist, although they have passed from present existence in this physical world to present existence in the shadow realm. Which would defeat anti-presentism, for presentism then would be true in the sense that nothing really ceases to exist, but merely changes state. Quoting Wittgenstein back at you again: ‘Is not this eternal life as much of a riddle as our present life?’ (Tractatus, 6.4312)
    Once again, the problem is to provide a sense of ‘*exists’ that renders ‘X *exists, but does not presently exist’ both substantive and intelligible.

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  2. David Gudeman Avatar
    David Gudeman

    This may seem off-topic, but please bear with me for a few paragraphs.
    There is a common account of Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise and the tortoise that goes something like this: “In Zeno’s day they didn’t know that an infinite series could have a finite result. When mathematicians discovered this, they were able to resolve Zeno’s paradox”.
    But that account can’t be right, at least not if the paradox under consideration was a paradox of nature, because no infinite number of natural objects can sum up to a finite size, and in fact it is doubtful that there are an infinite number of natural objects at all.
    I propose that what really happened is that Zeno’s paradox was never about the natural world; it was a paradoxe of a particular set of concepts used to think about the natural world. When mathematical limit theory was invented, this was not a discovery of a new fact about nature; it was a discovery of a new formalism for talking about nature–and this new formalism did not have the same paradoxical problems as the intuitive concepts used in Zeno’s paradox. Limit theory is not a solution to Zeno’s paradox; it is a new formalism in which Zeno’s scenario is not a paradox. Zeno’s paradox was an artifact of a particular way of thinking about the world.
    I think that something similar applies to other problems in metaphysics, including the one being discussed here. I’m not trying to say that metaphysics is just a language game or that our language about metaphysics is meaningless, but I am suggesting that we have limits to what we can conceive of.
    There may be areas such as time, where we simply do not have access to a conceptual system that’s fits all of reality, so we have to make do with a collection of conceptual systems for particular purposes. For some purposes an eternalist conceptual system works, for other purposes a presentist conceptual system works, these two conceptual systems might be fine individually, withing their restricted sphere while not being compatible with each other, and while neither is fully competent to discuss all aspects of time.

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  3. The Bad Ostrich Avatar
    The Bad Ostrich

    Re Dave’s comment, there is another narrative that runs something like this:
    “philosophy began in Ancient Greek times with a set of problems that people tried to solve using reason without appeal to authority or superstition. Gradually these problems (such as the problem of limits, or the problem of how the universe began to exist) were solved by Science. What we call ‘philosophy’ is simply the residue of the problems that Science has not yet addressed. The field of philosophy is continually contracting. One day Science will solve all problems, and philosophy will cease to exist”.
    I think that’s a terrible story, but that’s how it goes.

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  4. BV Avatar
    BV

    Ostrich,
    I agree with you that the above is a “terrible story.”
    There is a core set of problems that are not amenable to solution by any positive science.
    But we disagree about this: ” ‘The riddle does not exist. If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it.”
    I say that there are problems that are genuine but are insoluble by us.
    I should write a separate post on this.

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  5. The Bad Ostrich Avatar
    The Bad Ostrich

    >>I should write a separate post on this.
    You should. Mary Midgley’s headmistress on whether you can think X clearly if you cannot say X clearly.

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