Month: May 2020

Presentism and Eternalism: A Substantive Difference?

A reader is convinced by my arguments against presentism and eternalism but is not convinced that there is a genuine issue in dispute. He further suspects that the parties to the dispute are using 'exist(s)' in different ways. The reader issues a serious challenge. Can I meet it?

Presentists and eternalists give competing answers to Quine's question, "What is there?" Roughly, presentists maintain that only  present items exist, whereas eternalists maintain that past, present, and future items exist.  The dispute concerns the ontological inventory. It is essential to observe that the disagreement presupposes a prior agreement as to how 'exist(s)' is to be used.  It obviously cannot be used in the present tense. If it is, then both presentism and eternalism turn out to be trivial theses, presentism trivially true, and eternalism trivially false. (We have gone over this many times.)

So let me introduce the sign 'exist(s)*' to denote existence simpliciter. The dispute is then whether what exists* is restricted to what is present or is not so restricted.  This strikes me as a substantive difference.  The views are in genuine conflict. It is as genuine a conflict as that between those who say that only particulars exist* and those who say that both particulars and universals exist*.  The dispute is about what exists simpliciter, i.e., what exists*. 

Another example. Suppose on Monday morning you take delivery of 300 paving stones. By  Friday evening, you have made a walkway out of them. Do you now have 300 + 1 new things on your property or only 300?  Does the walkway count as something in addition to the paving stones? Some say yes. Other say no: you have 300 stones arranged walkway-wise. This is an ontological inventory dispute, a dispute about what exists.  It is arguably genuine — but only if  there is agreement as to the sense of 'exist(s).'

Quine famously told us that "Existence is what existential quantification expresses." ("Existence and Quantification" in Ontol. Rel., 97) To put that with all due scrupulosity, we must rewrite it as "Existence* is what existential quantification expresses."   Equivalently, existence simpliciter is what existential quantification expresses. Uncle Willard takes his quantifiers 'wide open,' or unrestricted. They range over whatever there is, whether abstract or concrete , universal or particular, past, present, or future. On he same page, Quine offers his definition of singular existence: a exists =df (∃x)(x = a). 

Suppose my reader agrees with the above.  He might still feel that there is no real difference between presentism and eternalism, that the metaphysical difference is not a difference that makes a (practical) difference.  The reader may be reasoning as follows: since the presentist and the eternalist accept all the same Moorean facts, there is no substantive difference between the positions.

Consider first the past. Among the gross facts not in dispute is the truth of

1) Scollay Square no longer exists.

What this says using tensed language is that

1T) Scollay Square existed but Scollay Square does not exist.

In tenseless language it goes like this:

1U) Every time at which Scollay Square exists* is a time earlier than the present time.

The reader may claim victory at this point. "You see? Two different ways of saying the same thing, a presentist way and an eternalist way. Hence there is no substantive difference between the two views."

But now consider the future. Here a substantive difference emerges. Suppose Dave is a father whose kids are slackers who may or may not procreate, but haven't done so yet.  If they do, then Dave will have one or more grandchildren.  If they do not, then Dave will have no grandchildren.   On presentism, future temporal items do not exist* which implies that neither of the following is now true:

2) Dave will have a grandchild

and

~2) Dave will not have a grandchild.

On eternalism, however, future temporal items exist* so that one of the above propositions is now true.  On eternalism, the future is as fixed as the past, whereas on presentism, the past alone is fixed.  This is a substantive difference and not a difference in two ways of saying the same thing.

RELATED:  Peter Unger on the Emptiness of the Presentist-Eternalist Debate

Want Politics?

For political linkage and 'rantage' see my Facebook page. The Kavanaugh hearings galvanized me. I no longer see any reason to hold back or be polite. It is time for all good men and women to come to aid of the Republic. No 'liberals' need apply.

A Reader Poses a Question about the Extent of My Solubility Skepticism

M.M. writes,
I understand that your method is aporetic – you argue that the great problems of philosophy are genuine problems but also insoluble, at least by us here below. 
 
[. . .]
 
My question is: do you think that  — even if all positions in some metaphysical disputes have their problems — we can weight reasons for one position against other and make reasoned choice which is partially voluntaristic but also theoretically superior against other options? 
Yes.  Not all problems are insoluble; not all questions are unaswerable.   Let the question be: Are there beliefs?  Along comes an eliminativist who give the following argument:
 
(1) If beliefs are anything, then they are brain states; (2) beliefs exhibit original intentionality; (3) no physical state, and thus no brain state, exhibits original intentionality; therefore (4) there are no beliefs. 
But any reasonable person should be able to see that this argument does not establish (4) but is instead more reasonably taken to be a reductio ad absurdum of premise (1) according to which beliefs are nothing if not brain states.  For if anything is obvious, it is that there are beliefs.  This is a pre-theoretical datum, a given.  What they are is up for grabs, but that they are is a starting point that cannot be denied except by those in the grip of  a scientistic  ideology.  Since the argument is valid in point of logical form, and the conclusion is manifestly false, what the argument shows is that beliefs cannot be brain states. (I am assuming that we accept both (2) and (3).)
 
I conclude that not all problems are such that the arguments pro et contra cancel out so as to leave an intellectually honest person in a state of doxastic equipoise.  I hold that this is the case only for a set of core problems, the great problems as my reader calls them, the problems that have humbled the greatest minds.
 
Contrast the question of the existence of beliefs with the question of the existence of God. Deny beliefs and I show you the door. Deny God, and I listen attentively to your arguments.

CREDO: Agency and Spectatorship

Whether or not God and the soul are real, and whether or not this life has any final meaning, we are free to live as if they are and as if it does.  And this is how we ought to live. We can go around and around on the Big Questions, and to do so is a way of honoring the seriousness of life and of living at the highest pitch possible; but we will achieve no satisfactory result on the theoretical plane. Reason is weak and its conclusions are inconclusive.  God and the soul can neither be proven nor disproven. The same goes for the objectivity of morality and every other question on the far side of the quotidian, including the question of the freedom of the will.

The freedom of the will is proven, in the only way it can be proven, by an act of will, by descending from the theoretical to the practical plane. And then the theoretical question becomes moot: to act is to demonstrate practically the freedom to act. To act is to act freely.  The freedom of the will in the pregnant sense as liberum arbitrium indifferentiae is a presupposition of action. So act, and verify, in the sense of make true, the presupposition.

By acts of will we de-cide what to believe and what to do. By de-ciding, we cut off reflection which, left to itself, is interminable. After due consideration, I WILL accept this and I WILL reject that; I WILL live according to my best lights, dim and flickering as they may be, for as long as I can and as best  I can, all the while continuing the search for truth on the theoretical plane.  I WILL NOT allow doubts to undermine decisions arrived at in moments of of high existential clarity.

"But can't one still ask whether the will is really free?" You can, but then you are abandoning the point of view of the agent for the point of view of the  spectator. Mirabile dictu: we are both actors and spectators. We both march in, and observe, life's parade.  How is that possible? How integrate our subjective freedom and our objective determination? A nut that cannot be cracked at the level of theory can only solved at the level of praxis.

RELATED:

Could it be Reasonable to Affirm the Infirmity of Reason?

Reductive Presentism and the Truth-Value Links

What renders a statement about the past true? On one version of presentism, nothing does: statements about the past are brute truths. A rather more plausible version holds that "whatever renders a statement about the past true must lie in the present." (Michael Dummett, Truth and the Past, Columbia UP 2004, 75)  Craig Bourne labels this view "reductive presentism." (A Future for Presentism, Oxford UP 2006, 47 ff.)  But it too is untenable for various reasons, one of which is that it "conflicts with the truth-value links which assuredly govern our use of tensed statements." (ibid.) Dummett continues:

Such a truth-value link requires that if a statement in the present tense, uttered now, of the form "An event of type K is occurring," is true, then the corresponding statement in the past tense, "An event of type K occurred a year ago," uttered a year hence, must perforce also be true. (ibid.)

Suppose I now scratch my right ear and intone 'I am now scratching my right ear.'   If precisely a year later I were to say, 'I scratched my right ear exactly a year ago,' I would say something true. "But it might well be that in a year's time you would have forgotten that trivial action, and that every trace of its occurrence would have dissipated." (ibid.)  But then on reductive presentism, my statement, 'I scratched my right ear exactly  a year ago' would not be true.

It would not be true because there would be nothing presently in existence to render it true. No  memory, no video-taped recording, no causal trace whatsoever.

Presentism: Safe Passage between Tautology and Absurdity?

Scylla CharybdisCan presentism navigate between the Scylla of tautology and the Charybdis of absurdity? Let's see.  We begin with a datum, a given, a Moorean deliverance that I think most would be loath to deny:

DATUM: if it is true that a was F, or that a F'ed, then it was true that a is F, or that a Fs.

For example, if it is true that John F. Kennedy was in Dallas on 22 November 1963, then it was true on that date that he is in Dallas on that date.  For a second example, if it is true that Socrates drank hemlock, then it was true that Socrates drinks hemlock.

It follows that the present present cannot be the only present: there had to have been past presents, past times that were once present. For example there was the present when JFK was assassinated. That is a past present. Only what was once present could now be past. Suppose you deny this. Then are you saying that there are past items that were never present.  But that cannot be right. For the past is the present that has passed away.  It cannot be the case that the event of Kennedy's assassination was always past and never present.  There was a time when it was present and a time before that when it was future. When Kennedy was inaugurated, his assassination was future; when Johnson was sworn in, his asassination was past.

Bear in mind that presentism is an A-theory.  This implies that among times there is a  privileged time that is absolutely or non-relationally present.  So while every time is present at itself, only one time is present absolutely. This time instantiates the monadic (non-relational) property of absolute temporal presentness.  This absolute property is temporary, not permanent. 

So what is the presentist maintaining? He cannot be maintaining that

P-Taut: Only present items presently exist

for this is not a substantive metaphysical claim contradicted by the eternalist's  substantive denial, but a mere tautology. Nor can he be telling us that

P-Solip: Only presently present items exist simpliciter.

For this is solipsism of the present moment, a bizarre if not lunatic thesis. It amounts to the claim that all that ever existed, all that exists, and all that will ever exist exists now, where 'now' is a rigid designator of the present moment, the moment at which I am writing and you are reading.  If our presentist pals are not solipsists of the present moment, then they cannot be saying that only what exists at the present present exists simpliciter, and so they they must be telling us that only what exists at a given present (whether past, present, or future) exists.  Thus

P-Always: At every time t, only what is present at t, exists simpliciter.

This seems to do the trick.  What is says is that, at every time t, only what is temporally present at  t belongs in the ontological inventory, the catalog of what there is.

Thinking a little deeper, however, (P-Always) seems contradictory: it implies that at each time there are no non-present times and that at each time there are non-present times. For if one quantifies over all times, then one quantifies over present and non-present times in which case there are all these times including non-present times. But the bit following the quantifier in (P-Always) takes this back by stating that only what is present at a given time exists simpliciter.

It is obvious that (P-Taut)  and (P-Solip) are nonstarters.  So we are driven to (P-Always).  But it is contradictory. The presentist wants to limit the ontological inventory, the catalog of what exists, to temporally present items.  To avoid both tautology and the solipsism of the present moment, however, he is forced to admit that what exists cannot be limited to the present. For he is forced to quantify over times that are not present in order to achieve a formulation that avoids both (P-Taut) and (P-Solip).

The presentist needs the 'always' to avoid Scylla and Charybdis, but it doesn't keep him from drowning. He is forced to jump out of his privileged temporal perspective from within time and view matters sub specie aeternitatis. He is forced into an illict combination of a privileged perspective within time with a view from No When, a view from outside of time.  The perspectives cannot be integrated, and therein lies the root of the problem.

My interim conclusion is that presentism makes no clear sense.  This does not support eternalism, however, for it has its own problems. 

Being and Time: Another Presentist Puzzle

One type of presentism makes a double-barreled claim about the Being of all beings:  All beings are (i) in time (ii) at the present time. There is nothing 'outside' of time, and the there is nothing 'outside' of the present time.  To be just is to be temporally present.  Being = Presentness.  Since identity is symmetrical, the property identity proposition expressed by the immediately preceding sentence  does not fully convey what I want to convey.  What I want to convey is that Being reduces to Temporal Presentness on the type of presentism now being considered.   (If A reduces to B, it does not follow that B reduces to A.)

The presentism under discussion is involved in a double restriction:  Items in general are restricted to temporal items, and then temporal items are restricted to present items. And all of this as a matter of metaphysical necessity.

What then do we say about the Berlin Wall? It is wholly past. Being past, it is in time. For, by definition, an item is in time just in case it is the subject of a temporal predicate, whether a monadic A-determination, or a relational B-property.  The Wall is the subject of the predicate 'past', which is true of it; ergo, the Wall is in time.  To put the point B-theoretically, the Wall is such that, every time at which it existed is a time earlier than the present time. Ergo, the Wall is in time.

On the other hand, being past, the Wall is nothing. Presentism implies that the passage of time has consigned the Wall to the abyss of nonbeing. For if Being reduces to Presentness, and an item is wholly past, then said item is nothing. But if the Wall is nothing, then it has no properties, including the monadic property of being past, and the relational property of being earlier that the present, whence it follows that the Wall is not in time.

So the Wall is both in time and not in time. It is in time, because 'wholly past' is true of it.  It is not in time for the reason given in the immediately preceding paragraph.

Presentism, as a thesis about the very Being of all beings, restricts everything to the present time, including the temporal modes, past and future. In so doing, presentism negates itself by eliminating time. For there is no time if there are no distinctions among past, present, and future.

A Note on Feminism and My Conservatism

Although I am a conservative, I am not a 'throne and altar' conservative. Nor am I the sort of conservative who thinks that everything traditional trumps everything newfangled.  (The conservative's presumption in favor of the traditional is defeasible.) And of course it is silly to think that conservatives oppose change; it is just that we don't confuse change with change for the better.

Traditionally, women were wives and mothers whose place was said to be the home.  (Either that, or they lived with their parents or entered a nunnery.)  Now the traditional wife and mother role is a noble one, and difficult to fill properly, and I have nothing but contempt for the feminazis who denigrate it and denigrate those who instantiate it.  May a crapload of obloquy be dumped upon their shrill and febrile pates.   But surely women have a right  to actualize and employ their talents to the full in whichever fields they are suited to enter, however male-dominated those fields  have been hitherto.  They must, however, be suited to enter those fields: no differential standards, no gender-norming,  no reverse discrimination.

Simone Weil, Edith Stein, and Elizabeth Anscombe are wonderfully good philosophers, and much better than most male philosophers.  I know their works well and consider them to be my superiors both intellectually and morally.  (And I don't think anyone would accuse me of a lack of self-esteem.)  It would have been a loss to all of us had these admirable lights been prevented from developing their talents and publishing their thoughts.

This makes me something of a liberal in an old and defensible sense.  But I don't use 'liberal' to describe my views. 'Liberal' has suffered linguistic hijacking and now is, for all practical purposes, indistinguishable in sense from 'leftist.'  Anyone who reads this site soon learns that one of my self-appointed tasks is to debunk the pernicious buncombe of the Left.  As someone who maintains a balanced and reasonable position — does that sound a tad self-serving? — I am open to attack from the PC-whipped leftists and from the reactionary, ueber-traditionalist, 'throne and altar' conservatives.  To my amusement, I have been attacked from the latter side as a 'raving liberal.'  (I respond in the  appropriately appellated Am I a Raving Liberal?)

So much for a brief indication of where I stand with respect to feminism.

Addendum

Having stuck up for the distaff contingent I must now express a certain distaste for their tendency toward tribalism, group-think, and identity-fetishization.  Herewith, a congressional depiction thereof.  I cannot recall whether this was SOTU 2020 or 2019:

Tribalism Female

 

Statements about the Past: Troubling for Presentism

Ruby shoots oswald1) There are statements about the past, and some of them are true. 'Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald' is a true statement about the past. In particular, it is a true statement about the wholly past individuals, Ruby and Oswald.

2) It is true now that Ruby killed Oswald and it was true at every time later than the time at which Ruby killed Oswald. That Ruby killed Oswald is a past-tensed truth true at present.

3) On presentism, the (temporally) present alone exists and "the past, as the past, retains no existence whatever . . . ." (Michael Dummett, Truth and the Past, Columbia UP, 2004, p. 52) 

4) That Ruby killed Oswald is not about anything that exists at present. This is because Ruby and Oswald are wholly past individuals.

5) That Ruby killed Oswald is not about anything at all. This follows from (3) and (4).  So much the worse for presentism unless it can find a way to uphold and do justice to the reality of the past.

6) At this point, one might insist that past-tensed truths are brute truths, where a brute truth is a contingent truth that requires nothing external to it for its being true.  A brute truth is just true, and that's all she wrote.  The truth expressed by the present-tensed 'Tom is smoking' presumably cannot be brute since it requires, for its being true, Tom himself at a bare minimum.  For if Tom does not exist, then 'Tom is smoking' cannot be true.  But it is true, and it is true of Tom, so Tom exists.  Here is a clear case in which truth supervenes on being, or veritas sequitur esse.  Aristotle makes this point in the Categories at 14b15-22.

The notion that Socrates is seated cannot be a brute truth, but that Socrates was seated can be a brute truth, cannot be credited. But I won't argue this out for it is not my present topic.

7) The present topic is a different way out of the difficulty, call it the Way of Surrogacy.  What the presentist tries to do is to find something in the present that can deputize for the wholly past item, a temporally present surrogate item that can ground the being-true of the past-tensed truth. 

8) There is more than one way to proceed.  One way is to appeal to causal traces in the present of the past events or individuals. For example, we have video footage of Ruby shooting Oswald, and this evidence is corroborated by eye witness accounts recorded in documents presently available. So the causal traces in the present include video footage, still photographs, copies of same, as above, memories, documents, the gun, etc. That the shooting issued in a killing, is shown by other evidence available at present.

So  one could say, with some plausibility, that the reality of the past is preserved in the present by the effects (causal traces) in the present of the past events/individuals.  But of course there is much more to the past than is recorded in the present.  But I won't pursue this line of critique at the moment.

9) I will mention a different problem with this view.  When I assert that Ruby killed Oswald, I am making an assertion about those individuals themselves.  I am not talking about anyone's memories of them, or photographs of them, or video footage of them, or anything else.  I am not referring to things present, but to things past. The very sense of 'Ruby killed Oswald'  rules out anything present being what the sentence is about. It is about wholly past individuals.

Suppose I show you a photograph. I say, "This is my long-dead father." You reply, "So you were sired by a photograph? What you want to say is that this is a photograph of your father."  You learn something about the appearance of a wholly past man by studying a present photograph. 

Of course, the photograph shows what the man looked like, not what he looks like. But repeating this platitude does not to blunt the point that the dead man must in some sense exist if he is to be an object of ongoing study via photographs and other documentary evidence, not to mention exhuming the poor guy and studying his teeth and bones.

Scollay Square is wholly past. But there are plenty of pictures of it. By studying these pictures one can learn a lot about Scollay Square itself.  The ultimate object of study is SS itself, not the evidence by means of which we infer truths about SS. Now if an historian learns more and more about Scollay Square by studying evidence in the present, how can it be maintained that such wholly past items as Scollay Square are now nothing at all?

Political Correctness in the Philosophy Journals

I found the following in a technical article on the philosophy of time by a male author:

The defender of the spotlight theory also embraces past and future objects, but she accepts a "fuller" conception of these objects than the Williamsonian.  According to her . . . .

Suddenly I am distracted from the abstruse content by the injection of politics where it does not belong. "Another lefty," I think to myself, "signalling his virtue and flaunting his political correctness." The use of 'she' and 'her' is not only jarring but also slightly comical. Women are famously 'under-represented' in philosophy, to use a lefty expression that conflates the factual and the normative, but few who work in the philosophy of time are women. This is not to deny that there are women who have made outstanding contributions to this, the most difficult branch of philosophy.

My complaint will of course leave the lefty cold. 'She' feels that standard English with its gender-neutral uses of 'he' and 'him' is sexist, presumably because it excludes women. It does no such thing, of course, but the lefty will remain unfazed. But I know how they feel, so I have an irenic suggestion.

Let's honor the classically liberal principle of free speech. You write your way and we'll write our way.  We will tolerate you, your beliefs, and your modes of expression, but we expect the same in return.  Will it work?

I doubt it. There is nothing classically liberal about the contemporary Left. In fact, we conservatives are the new (classical) liberals, and leftists are the new authoritarians.  Peace with such dogmatists seems not to be in the cards.  Free speech and open inquiry are not among their values. So unless we can achieve the political equivalent of divorce, we should expect tensions to run high.

Existence is Tenseless

The Ostrich inquires,

You hold that [instances of] both (1) and (2) below are true.

               (1) X is no longer temporally present and (2) X exists tenselessly.

Fair enough. But what does ‘exist tenselessly’ mean?

To exist tenselessly is just to exist. To exist is to be something. More precisely, it is to be identical to something or other:

Q. Necessarily, for any x, x exists iff for some y, y = x.

For example,

a. Quine exists iff Quine = Quine.

Now is (a) true at all times, or only at some times? At all times. For at no time is Quine self-diverse.  This commits me to the affirmation of permanentism and the denial of transientism:

P. It is always the case that everything in time exists at every time.

T. Sometimes something begins to exist, and sometimes something ceases to exist.

Now if nothing begins to exist and nothing ceases to exist, then the A-determinations (pastness, presentness, and futurity) are purely temporal and not at all existential. This is why, from

b. The Berlin Wall is no longer present

one cannot validly infer

c. The Berlin Wall does not exist.

Although nothing begins to exist and nothing ceases to exist, some items begin to be temporally present and some items cease to be temporally present.

Now presentism includes transientism.  Having rejected transientism, I must also reject presentism, the view that it is always the case that whatever exists exists at present.

Is it a substantive metaphysical question whether permanentism or presentism is true?  I should think that it is. It is a question about the nature of existence: Is existence time-independent or not?