Abstract
The question of what exists is often seen as one of the metaphysician’s primary concerns—an ontological stance is a central and basic component of a great many positions in metaphysics. Consider, in particular, the debate surrounding the metaphysics of time: the question of whether non-present entities exist is typically thought of as one of the fundamental issues at stake in the debate, with each position on the nature of time consisting in part of an answer to this question of ontology. My purpose in this paper will be to raise some worries about this focus on ontology, and to sketch an alternative approach to conceptualizing the debate—one that I think can help us get a clearer and deeper understanding of the fundamental issues at stake. I’ll focus in particular on the case of time and the ontology of non-present objects, but the framework I present is ultimately meant to apply more broadly to a range of debates involving ontology. On the framework I propose, the basic question at stake in this and other analogous debates is the following: Of the various perspectives we might adopt on reality, which perspective is fundamental? I’ll explain what this means and how it can help us reconceptualize the relevant metaphysical issues.
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Notes
Some theorists understand the second question in terms of change rather than tense. E.g., Miller (2013) characterizes the debates in terms of a dynamical thesis about there being a change in what time is present. As my focus here will be on the role of the question of ontology in the debates, the precise formulation of the second question will not concern us for the time being. As I’ll argue later on, there is a general difficulty with understanding the debates in terms of two independent questions along these lines.
It is important to distinguish such a view from what Zimmerman (2005) calls ‘taking tense seriously.’ As Zimmerman argues, one can be an eternalist who takes tensed language and propositions seriously without being committed to tense as a fundamental feature of reality.
This is one common way of understanding the moving spotlight view; one might also imagine a presentist version of the moving spotlight view such as Timothy Williamson’s (2002) view, on which everything that exists is present, but this includes objects of the past and future in non-concrete form—i.e., anything that exists at any time exists now, but changes its properties as time passes. Also see Sullivan (2012) for a non-standard version of the moving-spotlight view along these lines.
As we’ll see later on, there are various ways in which one could adopt tense as primitive, and in principle, this could come apart from the commitment to there being fundamental tensed facts. The question of how exactly tense could be a fundamental feature of reality, rather than just an irreducible aspect of our description of reality, is one of the questions I’ll be concerned with in the development of the alternative approach to these issues that I’ll go on to present.
In saying that non-present objects exist in reality I don’t presuppose any particular view as to how the ‘ontological weightiness’ of this claim should be understood—this issue will be the focus of the discussion to follow.
It’s important to note that there are other versions of ontological realism that do not depend on such a structural conception of fundamentality—e.g., on Fine’s (2001, 2009) view, the question of what exists* is not understood in terms of a special, joint-carving sense of ‘existence,’ but rather as concerning what exists in reality, where the latter is understood in terms of a metaphysically weighty primitive notion of reality and a corresponding distinction between something’s being merely the case, and its being the case in reality. The issues I raise below do not apply directly to this kind of view, and as we’ll see, the alternative approach I go on to present is in some ways similar to Fine’s approach to these issues.
See Quine (1948).
See Fine (2009), for some reasons to reject the quantificational approach.
It’s important to note that the bin talk should not be taken too literally as involving any ontological commitment; its purpose is just to bring out a distinction that can ultimately be made sense of in other terms.
It’s more natural to talk about the tenseless sense of ‘existence’ in quantificational terms, i.e., in terms of what there is rather than what exists, but I don’t think this should be taken to have any implications for whether these issues should ultimately be thought of as concerning fundamental quantifiers or predicates.
Importantly, existence\({_{e}}\) is not understood to be defined up in terms of existence-at-a-time or any tensed notion of existence; rather, it is taken to be a basic tenseless notion.
See, e.g., Chalmers (2009).
Importantly, both theorists might still present their positions in terms of substantive ontological commitments rather than meta-ontological commitments about existence*, but the two-bin approach takes it that the issue between them ultimately comes down to the question of meta-ontology.
It’s important to note that this move does not result in the original one-bin approach presented above. On that approach, existence* was taken to be a primitive ontological notion, while on this ‘collapsed’ one-bin picture it is seen as defined, by way of the higher-order concept of a fundamental sense of ‘existence’. So while this is a way of collapsing the two-bin picture into a one-bin approach—in that it’s a move back to asking a substantive question of ontology rather than a question about candidate senses of existence—it does not result in the original one-bin picture we started out with.
See Quine (1948).
See Tallant (2014) for a presentist view that explicitly presents itself in this way—i.e., on which only present objects exist by virtue of the nature of presence and existence.
Importantly, the existence\(_{e}\) bin may also fit objects that are not wholly past, present, or future (due to being temporally extended), as well as objects that are not determinately past, present, or future (as in, e.g., a relativistic setting)—existencee is not understood in terms of a disjunction of past, present, and future, but rather as a basic tenseless notion of existence.
Williamson (2013) and Deasy (2017) have recently proposed alternative approaches to these debates as well, which will be useful to contrast with the present proposal. In particular, both Williamson and Deasy suggest an emphasis on the question of whether objects exist temporarily rather than on the traditional question of ontology. This proposed change goes some way towards addressing the worries I’ve raised, but the present proposal goes further, particularly in clarifying the relationship between the traditional question of ontology and the issue of tense. The question of whether objects exist temporarily can be seen as fitting in to the proposed reconceptualization as well: the question of temporariness, like the original question of ontology, can be seen as downstream from the more basic question about perspectives I’ll go on to present
Some presentists might be unwilling to accept this characterization—e.g., someone who maintained that there were no non-present objects, but that some facts were nevertheless atemporal. (See, e.g., Fine 2005b.) I’ll return to discuss this sort of view later on.
See Sider (2011).
See Fine (2005a).
That is, assuming we’re not considering them from a particular spatial perspective already, but rather seeking to evaluate them from a fundamental non-spatial perspective.
As I’ll discuss later on, however, there is also the possibility that there might be more than one fundamental perspective. The potential for a ‘pluralist’ view of this sort is part of what I think is useful and intuitive about the perspectives framework.
One might worry that if there’s really no neutral perspective to be adopted, we can’t make sense of this claim after all—perhaps in stating that some perspective is in fact fundamental, we haven’t really managed to ‘step out’ of the perspective at issue and thus haven’t made a substantive claim. This is a big issue that I won’t be able to address fully in this paper, and will be a central point of focus in the further development of the perspectives framework. But I do think we can make sense of the notion of a genuinely fundamental perspective on reality, and that this will allow us to make sense of the claim that some particular perspective really is fundamental as well.
One might want to say that there is a sense in which these facts then wouldn’t be present-tensed after all, but they would still be present-shaped, in that the term ‘now’ would still be seen as metaphysically redundant and reflective of the shape of reality.
One might wonder why it can’t be the case now that some non-present entities exist-tenselessly—after all, the claims that an eternalist makes about the reality of other times and non-present objects are all supposed to be true now. But in adopting the present-tensed perspective as fundamental, one is committed to more than saying that everything that is the case in reality is also the case now. To adopt the present-tensed perspective as fundamental is to accept that for anything that is the case, what it is for it to be the case and what it is for it to be the case now are one and the same. This rules out the existence of non-present entities, as the fact that they exist would need to obtain independently of how things are now, and thus can’t be present-tensed in shape in the way that the fundamentality of the present-tensed perspective requires. To allow for the existence of any non-present objects, one must accept that some facts can obtain independently of how things are now, which requires the adoption of the atemporal perspective on reality.
One might think that the growing block theorist could adopt her own distinctive perspective, in identifying the past and present with the whole of reality. But I think adopting such a perspective depends on the adoption of both the present-tensed and atemporal perspectives I’ve described. The growing block theorist must accept that some facts are present-tensed in shape in accommodating the growth of the growing block, and that some facts are atemporal in shape in maintaining that past objects and states of affairs exist and obtain in a reality that extends beyond the present moment. The perspective of ‘how things were/are up until now’ thus doesn’t seem to be a basic perspective that one can adopt in place of the present-tensed and the atemporal.
This might be one way of interpreting Dummett’s (1960) defense of McTaggart’s (1908) argument against the reality of time, where he concludes that “McTaggart’s argument shows that we must abandon our prejudice that there must be a complete description of reality.” (p.504) A pluralist about reality similarly maintains that reality cannot be fully grasped and described from a single fundamental perspective. See also Lowe (1987) who explicitly makes use of the notion of multiple temporal perspectives in his argument against McTaggart, though he focuses only on temporal perspectives (rather than a temporal and atemporal perspective), and does not take them to be fundamental in my sense.
See Solomyak (2013).
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Ted Sider and Kit Fine for much discussion and extensive comments on earlier versions of this paper. Many thanks also to Riccardo Baratella, Claire Benn, Sharon Berry, David Chalmers, Martin Glazier, Silvia Jonas, Erica Shumener, and Jared Warren, as well as to audiences at NYU, the Vermont Women in Metaphysics Workshop, the Gargnano Conference in Philosophy of Time, and the Cambridge Metaontology Workshop for much helpful discussion and feedback throughout the development of this paper.
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Solomyak, O. Temporal Ontology and the Metaphysics of Perspectives. Erkenn 85, 431–453 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0034-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0034-4