Abstract
Typical presentism asserts that whatever exists is present. Moderate presentism more modestly claims that all events are present and thus acknowledges past and future times understood in a substantivalist sense, and past objects understood, following Williamson, as “ex-concrete.” It is argued that moderate presentism retains the most valuable features of typical presentism, while having considerable advantages in dealing with its most prominent difficulties.
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Notes
I use “event” and “state of affairs” interchangeably. At least for present purposes, we do not need to distinguish between them. I use “object” to refer to ordinary or theoretically posited particulars such as cats and chairs or quarks and leptons, and not as an extremely generic umbrella term (like “entity”) that ranges inter alia over events and times.
Alternatively, as proposed by McKinnon and Bigelow (2012, p. 257), the presentist who does not want to be committed to times could acknowledge primitive metrical past-tensed exemplification ties, such as having been exemplified 66,929 s ago, by means of which objects exemplify with a certain degree of pastness untensed attributes like tiredness and kissing. McKinnon and Bigelow argue for the superiority of this approach to metricality and more generally for the superiority of tensed exemplification ties to tensed attributes. For present purposes nothing crucial hinges on this and thus I shall set McKinnon's and Bigelow's proposal aside.
Despite the many objections traditionally raised against it (see, e.g., Meyer 2013, Ch. 3). These will have to be answered somehow, but this issue goes beyond the scope of this paper.
Hinchcliff makes non-Ersatzist past and future times compatible with TP, by acknowledging them in his ontological inventory, while declaring them, in a Meinongian fashion, non-existent. He plays a similar gambit with past (and future?) objects (see also Paolini Paoletti 2015). In contrast, I do not deny that such entities exist, at least as regards past objects (more on this in the next section), and I thus shift from (P) to the more modest (MP).
Although I call ex-concrete objects past, there is a sense in which they can still be considered present entities: it is always at the present time that they enjoy whatever attributes they manage to exemplify, in spite of their peculiar ontological status.
Zimmerman plausibly attributes to Williamson the spotlight view of time rather than presentism (Zimmerman, 2008, p. 215). The option of combining ex-concrete objects with presentism has been considered without approval by De Clercq (2006, § 6) and by Caplan and Sanson (2011, § 4) (very briefly) and by Sider (2011, § 11.9) (a bit more extensively). In this paper, inter alia, I am exploring this suggestion and arguing that it deserves approval.
Thisnesses or the like may not be the only options in the search for surrogates. McKinnon and Bigelow, following the lead of Keller 2004, list still existing concrete physical objects, places, the whole world, bits of matter, particles, words. We may add, as suggested by an anonymous referee, the space–time points of Zimmerman (2011).
There is a sense in which past and future times can also be considered present entities: as I see it, it is always at the present time that they precede or follow, as the case may be, the present time. I realize this is a controversial point that need be further articulated, but I shall leave this task for another occasion, since nothing crucial hinges on it for the main purposes of this paper.
For reasons I discuss elsewhere (Orilia 2012a), the moments that host events had better be pointlike durationless instants (this does not mean that moments understood as extended intervals cannot be acknowledged).
Although Mellor (1998, p. xii and ch. 8) has disputed this point, most eternalists acknowledge it and indeed Merricks' arguments seem to me decisive.
Bigelow draws on Lucretius, who however, as noted by Bigelow himself, takes properties of this sort to be exemplified by sections of matter or portions of space.
An advantage of admitting ex-concrete objects is this: by recourse to them we can easily provide truthmakers for past-tensed “counting” propositions such as that there were two Charles of England kings, which Lewis (2004) finds embarrassing for presentism. For instance, MP can take the latter proposition to have a truthmaker jointly constituted by the two states of affairs of Charles I's having been King of England and Charles II's having been King of England (since a similar advantage could be gained otherwise, e.g., by recourse to haecceities, I do not present this there as a reason for preferring MP to TP). One might suspect however that there are also counting propositions regarding past events, which should similarly suggest a recourse to past events; for example, the proposition that there were two deaths of Charles of England kings. Following the suggestion made at the end of Sect. 3, however, talk of past events should be appropriately reformulated in presentist-friendly terms. Thus, we should say that it was the case twice that a Charles of England king died. And for this proposition the moderate presentist can put forward a truthmaker jointly constituted by the events of Charles I's having ceased to be alive and Charles II's having ceased to be alive. An anonymous referee has asked why, once we renounce past and future events, we could not renounce events altogether. As I see it, once we admit that things have properties and stand in relations, which can hardly be denied, we ipso facto admit that there are states of affairs or events, so that the world, as Armstrong (1993) puts it, is basically a world of states of affairs. And, as Armstrong has insisted, to find a truthmaker for, e.g., the proposition that this sheet is rectangular, it is not enough to have the sheet and rectangularity, we also need the sheet's being rectangular.
Analogous criticisms of Bigelow's Lucretianism can be found in Oaklander (2002).
Davidson makes this point in criticizing a Lucretianism that claims that a truth such as (2) is made true by the state of affairs of Garibaldi's and Vittorio Emanuele II's meeting in Teano as long as Garibaldi and Vittorio Emanuele II exist, but then is made true by the world's being such that Garibaldi and Vittorio Emanuele met in Teano as soon as Garibaldi or Vittorio Emanuele II cease to exist. Clearly, MP does not have this problem, but I shall not press this point, since Lucretianism, as Davidson recognizes, can simply claim that all past-tensed truths are made true by the world's instantiating past-tensed properties, even if these truths involve present objects such as Obama or the Eiffel tower. (Davidson thinks this is not sufficient to solve the problem at issue for Lucretianism. I do not think he is right, but this point need not concern us here).
Merricks (2007) thus rejects the truthmaker principle rather than presentism.
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Acknowledgments
A version of this paper has been presented at the University of Padua on June 2013 and at the Gargnano Philosophy of time conference in May 2014. I wish to thank the audiences for the helpful feedback provided, in particular by Emiliano Boccardi, Riccardo Baratella, Roberto Ciuni, Pierdaniele Giaretta, Ernesto Graziani, L. Nathan Oaklander, Federico Perelda, Rosanna Raviola, Giuliano Torrengo. Michele Paolini Paoletti, Gregory Landini and two anonymous referees have also offered useful comments. This work has been supported by the PRN 2012 project Models and inferences in science, funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research.
