Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Continuing the Discussion of Time, Tense, and Existence

This just in from London.  I've intercalated my responses.

Here is another take. We agree on our disagreement about the following consequence

(A)  X is no longer temporally present, therefore X has ceased to exist.

You think it is not valid, i.e. you think the antecedent could be true with the consequent false. I think it is valid.

BV: Yes. So far, so good. 

However regarding

          (B) X is no longer temporally present, therefore X does not still exist

we seem to agree. We both think the antecedent cannot be true with the consequent false.

BV:  Right.  For example, we agree BOTH that the Berlin Wall is no longer temporally present (and is therefore temporally past) AND that the Berlin Wall does not still exist.  I should think that we also, as competent speakers of English, agree that locutions of the form 'X still exists' are intersubstitutable both salva veritate and salva significatione with locutions of the form 'X existed and X exists' where all of the verbs are tensed and none are tense-neutral or tenseless. Agree?  My second comment has no philosophical implications.  It is merely a comment on the meaning/use of a stock English locution.

My puzzle is that my reading, and I think a natural reading, is that (A) and (B) mean the same, because “X has ceased to exist” and “X does not still exist” mean the same. You clearly disagree.

BV:  If we stick to tensed language, then 'X has ceased to exist' and 'X does not still exist' mean the same.  So I don't disagree if we adhere to tensed language. But note that 'X has ceased to exist' is ambiguous as between

a) X has ceased to presently-exist (or present-tensedly exist)

and

b) X has ceased to be anything at all (and thus has become nothing at all).

For example, the Berlin Wall has ceased to presently-exist.  But it doesn't follow that said wall has become nothing, that it is no longer a member of the totality of entities, that it has been annihilated by the mere passage of time.  If you think that it is no longer a member of said totality, then you are assuming presentism and begging the question against me.  You have restricted the totality of what exists to what presently exists. Note that I do not deny that one can move validly from the premise of (A) to its conclusion if one invokes presentism as an auxiliary premise. My claim is that the inference fails as a direct or immediate inference.

I think you want to argue that there is a covert tensing in “X does not still exist” which is absent in “X has ceased to exist”, which (according to you) is tenseless. But how? Doesn’t the verb ‘cease’ always imply a time at which X ceased to exist? Would it make sense to say that 2+2 has ceased to equal 4? How?

BV: In 'X does not still exist,' 'exist' is present-tensed.  But 'X has ceased to exist' is ambiguous as explained above . It can be read your tensed way, but it can also be read in my tenseless way.  Surely you don't want to say that 'exists' has exactly the same meaning /sense as 'exists-now' or 'exists' (present tense).  We could call that semantic presentism. I don't think anyone is a semantic presentist.  And for good reason. You, as a nominalist, will not countenance abstracta such as numbers and sets and the other denizens of the Platonic menagerie. But you understand what you are opposing when you oppose their admission into our ontology in the Quinean sense (our catalog by category of what there is).  And so you understand the notion of tenseless existence and tenseless property possession as when a 'Platonist' says that 7 is prime. The copula is tenseless, not present-tensed.

So, in summary, my problem (and I am always seeing problems) is how you think (A) and (B) differ.

Over to you.

BV: The Boston Blizzard of '78 was one hell of a storm. When it ended, did it cease to exist? Yes of course, if we are using 'exist' in the ordinary present-tensed way. The storm because wholly past, and in becoming wholly past it stopped being presently existent. Obviously, nothing can exist at present if it is wholly past.  And it is quite clear that what no longer is present is not still present, and that what no longer presently exists is not still presently existent.

So far, nothing but platitudes of ordinary usage.  Nothing metaphysical. 

We venture into metaphysics when we ask: Does it follow straightaway from the storm's having become wholly temporally past, that it is nothing at all?  I say No. If you say Yes, then you are endorsing presentism, a controversial metaphysical theory. 

You can avoid controversy if you stick to ordinary language.  If you have trouble doing this, Wittgensteinian therapy may be helpful.

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7 responses to “Continuing the Discussion of Time, Tense, and Existence”

  1. Ostrich Avatar
    Ostrich

    >> note that ‘X has ceased to exist’ is ambiguous as between a) X has ceased to presently-exist (or present-tensedly exist) and b) X has ceased to be anything at all (and thus has become nothing at all).<< But then I don’t understand why 'X does not still exist' cannot be similarly ambiguous between ‘X is not still [or ‘is no longer’] presently-existing’ and ‘X is not still [or ‘any longer’ something at all’. It would have been easier for you to have rejected, from the very beginning, the consequence ‘X is no longer temporally present, therefore X does not exist [or ‘X is not something’]’, while pointing out to the unwary that the ‘exist’ in the consequent must be read tenselessly. Relying on the verb ‘cease’ to force a tenseless reading is confusing. Does that represent your position better? The argument is then about whether such a tenseless sense of ‘exist’ is semantically valid.

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  2. BV Avatar
    BV

    That’s a good comment. My formulation was not the best. This would have been clearer:
    ‘X is no longer temporally present’ does not entail ‘X does not tenselessly exist’
    similarly as
    ‘X is not longer spatially present’ does not entail ‘X is does not now exist.
    >>The argument is then about whether such a tenseless sense of ‘exist’ is semantically valid.<< Do you mean: whether there is such a sense in ordinary, pre-philosophical English? I would say that there is. Back in the day we learned that 2 + 2 is 4. Was the teacher's use of 'is' present- tensed? No. Suppose she said, 'The number of blonde girls in this class is two.' Such a use of 'is' is present-tensed. Suppose I say to my class, 'Hume is an empiricist.' Is that bad English? Should I have said that Hume WAS an empiricist? If it is good or acceptable English, is my use of 'is' tenseless?

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  3. Ostrich Avatar
    Ostrich

    >>Suppose I say to my class, ‘Hume is an empiricist.’
    Interesting example. You have inspired me to read Scotus 1.39 again – the famous discussion of God’s certain foreknowledge of future events, and of the whole of eternity.
    Scotus says that eternity is not like a stick fixed in a river, through which the whole river flows past. “If eternity were a sort of static thing (like the stick), alongside which time flowed, so that there were nothing present to it except a single instant of time (just as there is nothing present to the stick at any one time except a single part of the river), eternity would not be immense in respect of time.”
    My translation.
    But he goes on to say that eternity is immense with respect to time. I.e. Just as all of space is to a single point in space, so eternity is to a single point in time.
    So perhaps the idea of space-time did not begin with Einstein.
    But more later.

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  4. BV Avatar
    BV

    Well, there is nothing new under the sun, and according to Richard Sorabji (Time, Creation, and the Continuum, p. 32 et seq.) Iamblichus anticipates McTaggart’s distinction between the A-series and the B-series.
    Your claim about Einstein would seem to be rather an understatement. For Einstein, time is exhausted by the B-series. His perspective is eternalist, not presentist. In reality, time does not pass or flow, and past and future are just as real as the present. What you’ve got is just one big 4-D space-time block. Believe it or not, Einstein comforts the relatives of a physicist friend on the latter’s demise by saying that the man is immortal in that he tenselessly exists, and always will, at a temporal location earlier than the present.
    Death, where is thy sting?
    I have the sense that it is this sort of conception that you can’t wrap your head around. But I am not endorsing it! Can you dig it?
    Do you understand McT’s A-B distinction?

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  5. Ostrich Avatar
    Ostrich

    >>Believe it or not, Einstein comforts the relatives of a physicist friend on the latter’s demise by saying that the man is immortal in that he tenselessly exists, and always will, at a temporal location earlier than the present.
    Yet another example of physicists, who are certainly competent physicists, interfering in a subject (philosophy) they don’t understand. I thought this was a peeve of yours?

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  6. BV Avatar
    BV

    We are talking about EINSTEIN. He was philosophically well-versed, E. Mach, et al. John Leslie, a philosopher, defends Einstein’s type of view in Immortality Defended (Blackwell 2007).
    Can you answer my questions above?
    >>Back in the day we learned that 2 + 2 is 4. Was the teacher’s use of ‘is’ present- tensed? No. Suppose she said, ‘The number of blonde girls in this class is two.’ Such a use of ‘is’ is present-tensed.
    Suppose I say to my class, ‘Hume is an empiricist.’ Is that bad English? Should I have said that Hume WAS an empiricist? If it is good or acceptable English, is my use of ‘is’ tenseless?<<

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  7. David Brightly Avatar
    David Brightly

    Why is it thought that Einsteinian space-time supports eternalism?
    What Einstein seems to exclude is a universal clock and, for each event, a universal simultaneity, with ‘universal’ meaning equally applicable to all inertial frames, aka, ‘absolute’. Observers can disagree as to the rate of their clocks—they can assign different time coordinates to the one event—and they can disagree as to which events occur simultaneously with that one event. Nevertheless, two observers coinciding at an event will agree which events are in the past of that event and which events are in its future. They identify their pasts and futures regardless of their relative velocity.
    Compare this with Newtonian space-time. The latter has a universal clock and a universal simultaneity. Its geometry differs somewhat from Einsteinian space-time. If presentism makes sense for Newton then why not for Einstein? Neither system has anything labelled ‘the present’ in it. Galileo could have drawn a space-time picture to illustrate the motion of balls running down his inclined plane. Again, it would not have had ‘the present moment’ in it. Why? Perhaps because the laws of physics in each of these systems are time-invariant.

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