Abstract
The most important argument against the B-theory of time is the paraphrase argument. The major defense against that argument is the “new” tenseless theory of time, which is built on what I will call the “indexical reply” to the paraphrase argument. The move from the “old” tenseless theory of time to the new is most centrally a change of viewpoint about the nature and determiners of ontological commitment. Ironically, though, the new tenseless theorists have generally not paid enough sustained, direct attention to that notion. I will defend a general criterion of ontological commitment and apply it to generate a version of the new tenseless theory of time. I will argue that many of the extant versions of the new tenseless theory of time (specifically, all those which seek to identify tenseless truth-conditions of tensed sentences as a way out of apparent ontological commitment to tensed features of reality) are unsatisfactory because their general criterion of ontological commitment is inadequate. Those versions of the new tenseless theory which are adequate (specifically, those which identify tenseless truthmakers for tensed sentences) actually entail the criterion of ontological commitment that I defend, despite appearances to the contrary.
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Notes
An exception is Dyke (2008), especially Chaps. 2 and 3.
All this assumes that eliminativism about tensed sentences is not an option for the B-theorist. Oaklander (2003) apparently tries elimination, but as far as I can tell, denying that there are any truths about the past or the future seems to me to result in McTaggart’s denial of the reality of time. Suppose that it is false (or nonsense) that I will die, false that I was born, false that I am now writing this or that I have written this or that I will write this. It is false that the origin of the earth is past, false even that anything is in the past, and false that I have any future at all (much less a future in professional philosophy). Surely it would follow that nothing changes, that time itself and change are unreal.
Smith (1994).
For a more detailed development and defense of this claim, see Johnson (unpublished a).
I am assuming for the sake of argument that Aristotle’s account of human beings is correct.
The relevant sense of “state of affairs” here is David Armstrong’s, according to which a state of affairs exists only if it obtains and so is suited to be a truthmaker for a proposition. It seems to me that there is no reason to believe in “states of affairs” in the sense meant in Plantinga (1974), according to which there is one state of affairs corresponding to each proposition (true or false), unless states of affairs just are propositions. The term “fact” is used in a variety of ways; sometimes it means a state of affairs in Armstrong’s sense, while other times it seems to mean a true proposition. Ontological explanation relations can hold even between false propositions.
I do not know what that “closeness” amounts to; presumably, a good theory of truth would illuminate this question.
For an argument against the possibility of ungrounded infinite regresses of ontological explanation, see Johnson (unpublished b). If such ungrounded infinite regresses are possible, though, my criterion has the result than none of the propositions in the series have any ontological commitment. And that seems like just the right result—ontological explanation is reductive, and an ungrounded infinite regress of ontological explanations reduces without end, never getting any closer to a fundamental description of reality. It stands to reason that such an infinite series wouldn’t carry an ontological commitment of any sort.
See Jackson (1980).
It is of course a further epistemological question how ontological explanations might reliably be identified.
(Mellor (1998), Chap. 5).
Perry (1979).
Kripke (1979).
Indeed, Beer uses the argument to motivate a different version of the new tenseless theory of time. I will argue in Sect. 4 that her view ends up entailing the one I have advanced.
See Chalmers (2006).
We’ll put aside the question of whether Jesus was God and was over six feet tall. The example could be modified rather easily.
Richard (1981).
D.H. Mellor may not have been perfectly clear in his original proposal along these lines, but Oaklander clears this up nicely. See (Oaklander (1994), p. 59). Truth-conditions for a sentence-type will most likely end up just being a paraphrase of that sentence—what Torre (2009) calls “meaning truth-conditions”—since the two sentences will have the same truth-values when uttered in the same contexts. Paul’s (1997) “sentence-type” version of the new tenseless theory of time, which I will discuss in a moment, actually attempts to give truth-conditions for sentence-types relative to a context of evaluation, not sentence-types by themselves.
Smith’s original critique is found in his (1987), though the discussion has continued in numerous publications since.
This argument can be found in (Smith (1999), pp. 236–237).
See (Smith (1987), p. 379).
(Dyke (2002), p. 348).
(Dyke (2002), p. 342) .
For the seminal paper on the topic, see Shope (1978). The conditional fallacy shows up in the familiar “masking” and “finking” issues in counterfactual analyses of causation and in many other places.
See (Torre (2009), p. 333), for a different sort of example that also exploits the conditional fallacy in Dyke’s analysis.
(Mozersky (2001), p. 409).
(Torre (2009), p. 330).
Interestingly, this is the approach that Torre suggests at the end of his paper—(Torre (2009), p. 343).
The previous problem, about direction, also amounts to a claim that finding truth-conditions is too easy. This argument points out another reason that this is true, however.
Interestingly, this is one advantage that paraphrase has over truth-conditions as a criterion of ontological commitment. Paraphrase is narrower than truth-conditions.
It is important to note that the notion of “what is minimally necessary to make a proposition true” is significantly different than David Armstrong’s notion of a minimal truthmaker. A minimal truthmaker for a proposition, according to Armstrong, is an entity which makes the proposition true and which is the sort of thing that if you subtract from it will no longer make the proposition true. So a group of four electrons is not a minimal truthmaker for the proposition that there are electrons, but an individual electron is. That individual electron is not minimally necessary to make the proposition true in my sense, however, because a different electron could make the proposition true. This allows my view to escape from one of Jonathan Schaffer’s objections to the truthmaker view of ontological commitment, what he calls the “uniqueness problem.” See (Schaffer (2008), p. 14), and Johnson (unpublished a).
All of this assumes, of course, the conception of propositions that I have advanced, which allows indexicals to be eliminable from propositions and allows for an element in addition to propositions that individuates beliefs. On Beer’s picture of propositions, which doesn’t allow for the eliminability of indexicals, ontological explanation should not be thought of as a relation between propositions at all, and so my definition of a “base proposition” would have to be rethought along with the whole line of argument that employs it.
(Schaffer (2008), pp. 11–13).
For a full reply to the rest of his objections, see Johnson (unpublished a).
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Johnson, D.M. B-theory old and new: on ontological commitment. Synthese 190, 3953–3970 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-012-0239-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-012-0239-z