{"id":3147,"date":"2020-05-10T05:13:29","date_gmt":"2020-05-10T05:13:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2020\/05\/10\/statements-about-the-past\/"},"modified":"2020-05-10T05:13:29","modified_gmt":"2020-05-10T05:13:29","slug":"statements-about-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2020\/05\/10\/statements-about-the-past\/","title":{"rendered":"Statements about the Past: Troubling for Presentism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ruby<\/a>1) 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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

4) That Ruby killed Oswald is not about anything that exists at present. This is because Ruby and Oswald are wholly past individuals.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/em>.  Aristotle makes this point in the Categories<\/em> at 14b15-22.
<\/span><\/p>\n

The notion that Socrates is<\/em> seated cannot be a brute truth, but that Socrates was<\/em> seated can be a brute truth, cannot be credited. But I won't argue this out for it is not my present topic.<\/span><\/p>\n

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. <\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/em> more to the past than is recorded in the present.  But I won't pursue this line of critique at the moment.
<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.  <\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, the photograph shows what the man looked<\/em> like, not what he looks<\/em> 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1) 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 … Continue reading “Statements about the Past: Troubling for Presentism”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-time-and-change"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3147\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}