Abstract
In this article, we consider two independently appealing theories—the Growing-Block view and Humean Supervenience—and argue that at least one is false. The Growing-Block view is a theory about the nature of time. It says that (a) past and present things exist, while future things do not, and (b) the passage of time consists in new things coming into existence. Humean Supervenience is a theory about the nature of entities like laws, nomological possibility, counterfactuals, dispositions, causation, and chance. It says that none of these entities are fundamental, since if they were, this would entail the existence of irreducible necessary connections between matters of fact. Instead, these entities supervene on a fundamental, non-nomological ‘Humean mosaic’ of property instances at spacetime points. We will further explain and motivate the Growing-Block view and Humean Supervenience in Sects. 2 and 3, but first, we turn to our master argument.
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Notes
David Lewis (1986a) attempts to reduce all modality to nonmodal concepts. Our Humean needn’t adopt Lewis’s views on metaphysical modality; here, we are particularly interested in the reduction of nomological modality.
Briggs and Forbes thank Jon Williamson for this point.
We also consider two other semantic proposals, one three-valued and one intuitionist, which give slightly different treatments of logically complex sentences. The difference between these proposals is orthogonal to our main point, so we will set it aside.
Some Presentists deny the asymmetry by claiming that no truthmakers are needed for past claims or future claims (cf. Tallant 2009), but the Growing-Blocker can’t accept this without undermining their motivation for thinking that the past exists.
This is Ulrich Meyer’s view (2013, 55). On one possible reading, this is also the view held by Tooley (1997), who claims that, “one can give an account of the idea of a whole, dynamic world only if one employs both the concept of being actual as of a time and the concept of the totality of existence—both temporal and non-temporal” [41]. Tooley also holds that truth simpliciter is bivalent [153, 311]. Thus, truth simpliciter, for Tooley, would seem to supervene on being and future being.
We do not believe that our condition fully characterizes Humeanism, because a view may be anti-Humean without satisfying our condition. An anonymous referee gives an interesting example: it seems anti-Humean to claim that heterogenous extended simples, and their current temporal distributional properties, serve as truthmakers for future tensed claims. But it’s not clear that this anti-Humean view posits necessary connections between distinct existents. Giving a necessary and sufficient characterization of Humeanism is an interesting question for future research.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Alan Hájek, Daniel Nolan, Rosanna Keefe, Jonathan Payne, Jon Williamson, and anonymous referees at Philosophical Studies and the Australasian Journal of Philosophy for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Briggs, R., Forbes, G.A. The Growing-Block: just one thing after another?. Philos Stud 174, 927–943 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0714-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0714-3