Abstract
I outline the debate in metaphysics between those who believe time is tensed and those who believe it is tenseless. I describe the terms in which this debate has been carried out, and the significance to it of ordinary tensed language and widespread common sense beliefs that time is tensed. I then outline a case for thinking that our intuitive beliefs about tense constitute an Adaptive Imaginary Representation (Wilson, in Biol Philos 5:37–62, 1990; Wilson, in Biol Philos 10:77–97, 1995). I also outline a case for thinking that our ordinary tensed beliefs and tensed language owe their tensed nature to its being adaptive to adopt a temporally self-locating perspective on reality. If these conclusions are right, then common sense intuitions and temporal language will be utterly misleading guides to the nature of temporal reality.
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Notes
This is not the place for an examination of McTaggart’s paradox. For discussion I refer the reader to some of the following citations. There is some disagreement, even among B-theorists, as to whether this argument ultimately succeeds. B-theorists who think it does include Le Poidevin (1991), Mellor (1981), Oaklander (1984) and Dyke (2002a). B-theorists who are skeptical about the success of McTaggart’s paradox include Sider (2001) and Savitt (2000).
Although there are some exceptions. See, for example, Fiocco (2007).
I develop this argument in more depth in Dyke (2012, forthcoming).
Linguists use the term ‘deictic’ to describe context-dependent expressions.
I am grateful to two anonymous referees for this journal for drawing these objections to my attention.
However, not all linguists treat the perfect as a tense, treating it instead as an aspect (Comrie 1976, 6).
As should be clear from the preceding discussion, ‘tensed sentence’ here is not restricted to grammatically tensed sentences, but refers to any sentence that, by whatever means, locates some event in either the past, present or future. Conversely, ‘tenseless sentence’ refers to any sentence that carries no implications for the A-series location of any event. Examples of tenseless sentences include “2 + 2 = 4”, and “E1 occurs (tenseless, not present tense) before E2”.
The existence of tenseless natural languages does not support the early B-theorists’ claim that language could be detensed, as those languages have other means of locating events in the past, present and future so they are not tenseless in the requisite sense. Neither, for the same reason, does the existence of such languages undermine the widely accepted view that tense cannot be eliminated from language without loss of meaning.
I develop this position in much greater detail in Dyke (2008).
I am grateful to Hugh Mellor for suggesting this example to me.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to audiences at the Future of the Philosophy of Time conference, Wake Forest University, April 2010, and the Australasian Association of Philosophy conference, University of New South Wales, July 2010, for helpful comments. I’m also grateful to James Maclaurin and two anonymous referees for this journal for suggesting many improvements.
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Dyke, H. The evolutionary origins of tensed language and belief. Biol Philos 26, 401–418 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-011-9263-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-011-9263-5