Abstract
Some philosophers argue that non-presentist A-theories (i.e. the views that the tenses—past, present, and future—are objective features and that not only present things exist) problematically imply that we cannot know that this moment is present. The problem is usually presented as arising from the combination of the A-theoretic ideology of a privileged presentness and a non-presentist ontology. The goal of this essay is to show that the epistemic problem can be rephrased as a pessimistic induction. By doing so, I will show that the epistemic problem, in fact, stems from the A-theoretic ideology alone. Hence, once it is properly presented, the epistemic problem presents a serious threat to all A-theories.
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Notes
Theoretically, to be a non-presentist A-theorist, one just has to be an A-theorist who accepts the reality of the tenses and also think that some moments other than the present one exists. So, a non-presentist A-theorist can defend the view that only the future and the present moments exist and not the past. I define non-presentist A-theory in the way I do here because the growing block view and the moving spotlight view are the only two non-presentist A-theories being taken seriously in the literature. I want to focus on them and set aside other theoretical possibilities.
Here I’m using Quine’s (1951) distinction between a theory’s ontological and ideological commitment. The ontological commitments of a theory are the objects it posits; the ideological commitments are the basic unanalyzable notions the theory introduces. The A-theories are committed to a primitive notion “present” that represents an objective presentness.
See Miller (2018) for an in-depth discussion of how to understand the epistemic problem without any radically skeptical principle about justification. In the end, her version of the problem targets non-presentist A-theories alone. I’ll show that there is a way to present the problem to target all A-theories.
I’m certainly simplifying matter for the sake of getting my point across more efficiently. Here, I write as if only actual disagreements can lead to reasonable doubt. But, strictly speaking, that isn’t true. As Kelly puts it:
[I]t is extremely implausible that actual disagreement is always more epistemically significant than certain kinds of merely possible disagreement. After all, whether there is any actual disagreement with respect to some question as opposed to merely possible disagreement might, in a particular case, be an extremely contingent and fragile matter. (2005: p. 181)
In other words, if the fact that a disagreement is merely possible instead of actual is due to some fragile accident, i.e., that the disagreement could have very easily been actual, then the merely possible disagreement may have (almost) as much epistemic force as an actual disagreement. In the dinner case, I set aside the issue of nearby possible disagreements and worked with the simple dichotomy between actual and merely possible disagreements. I consider such simplification to be harmless in this context because, first of all, the epistemic problem for the non-presentist A-theories is indeed primarily presented to be about actual people having actual beliefs about the present being elsewhere. Furthermore, the kind of epistemic possibilities Cameron targets are meant to be remote: the epistemic possibility that we are currently in the past or future while there is another moment that is the present instead. That plays a key part in his claim that the epistemic problem is a dialectically weak one because it assumes that one needs to have evidence to rule out even the most remote possibilities. Thus, even though it’s strictly speaking right that some merely possible disagreement is epistemic significant, it isn’t significant in this particular dialectical context.
“B1”, “B2”, “B3”… refer to beliefs before us. I say that “B1 is false” is true. There has been a standing problem for presentism with respect to apparently true claims that refer to past objects. Presentists deal with the problem in various ways. I don’t want to go into the details; but the bottom line is, however the presentists choose to handle the issue, I believe their solution should not end up saying that there are no present tense truths about past objects. It has to be true, for example, that Napoleon is no longer alive. So, I’m setting aside Markosian’s (2004) suggestion that claims about past objects are all false.
The pessimistic induction I’ve just introduced sounds similar to the reasoning based on a principle Cameron calls Statistical Knowledge: “If you believe p on basis E then, if most of the people who believe p on basis E believe falsely, you do not know p on basis E”. (2015: p. 43) The crucial difference, however, lies in this. For Cameron, the principle Statistical Knowledge is just another way to capture the safety requirement for knowledge: “I think [Statistical Knowledge] only sounds appealing because [the safety requirement] is appealing”. (ibid: 43) On the contrary, the rational pull of my pessimistic induction doesn’t rely on the modal character of knowledge, e.g., the safety requirement. All I need for the pessimistic induction about the objective presentness to work is the innocent idea of the legitimacy of induction about the objective features of things. The rational appeal of induction doesn’t stem from the safety principle; even a modal skeptic can find induction reasonable.
See Miller (2018) for an argument against those who reject this claim.
See also Charkravartty (1998).
The distinction between the structural and non-structural aspect of scientific theories isn’t easy to flesh out rigorously. In fact, as Psillos (1999) argues, doing so without compromising the view’s claim of being a realist position is a difficult task for the structural realists. I don’t know whether that can be done.
See also Lange (2002).
Lewis labels it the false positives paradox instead (2001: p. 376).
Presumably, the same can be said about the optimistic induction.
This principle about higher-order evidence has been under much discussion. For defenders of the principle, see Feldman (2007), and Christensen (2010, 2013). For those who are against it, see Kelly (2005) and Fitelson (2012). Fitelson (2012) offered an alleged counter-example that challenges various interpretations of the principle. For the debate about Fitelson’s counter-example and the subsequent attempts to formulate the principle in a more rigorous manner, see Feldman (2014), Roche (2014), and Tal and Comesaña (2015). My impression is that the consensus is now leaning towards accepting the evidential value of higher-order evidence.
This paper has benefited substantively from the feedback and advice from many people. All I had was a vague hunch that something isn’t right about how the epistemic problem has been handled. Discussion with so many patient and incredibly smart people over the past 4 years helped me put the idea on paper in its current shape. I’d like to thank Ross Cameron for introducing me to the philosophy of time in his incredible metaphysics of time graduate seminar in 2015. He taught me everything I know about philosophy of time. Correspondence with Jim Darcy has helped me better understand the intuitive basis and hidden commitments of the A-theories. I owe Nick Rimell my deepest gratitude both for the numerous thought-provoking discussions on the topic while we were on the road together and for his generous help in going through my writing line by line to clean up my English. Besides Nick, Stacie Thyrion also helped me with the language. I’m grateful to the audience of the OZWS Conference 2015 in Amsterdam, the Joint Meeting of North & South Carolina Philosophical Society 2016 in Boone, the Society of Exact Philosophy Annual Meeting 2016 in Miami, and the Philosophy of Time Society conference 2016 in Winston-Salem. I also want to thank Louis Doulas, who emailed me for a copy of the paper. I was uncertain about the value of the project and had given up the paper for a while at that point. Louis’s email prompted me to go back to work on it again. Finally, this paper is improved by the thoughtful comments and objections from the anonymous reviewers of this journal, and the reviewers of the other journals where earlier versions of this paper were submitted.
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Lam, D. Being pessimistic about the objective present. Synthese 198, 11311–11326 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02789-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02789-8