Abstract
John Perry has argued that language, thought and experience often contain unarticulated constituents. I argue that this idea holds the key to explaining away the intuitive appeal of the A-theory of time and the endurance theory of persistence. The A-theory has seemed intuitively appealing because the nature of temporal experience makes it natural for us to use one-place predicates like past to deal with what are really two-place relations, one of whose constituents is unarticulated. The endurance view can be treated in a similar way; the temporal boundaries of temporal parts of objects are unarticulated in experience and this makes it seem that the very same entity exists at different times.
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Prosser, S. Temporal Metaphysics in Z-Land. Synthese 149, 77–96 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-004-6249-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-004-6249-8