Tensed timeChristian Wüthrichhttp://philosophy.ucsd.edu/faculty/wuthrich/146 Philosophy of PhysicsClass 5, 11 October 2007Christian Wüthrich Class 5Tense vs. dynamismTwo distinct issues:1static vs. dynamic dispute: concerns reality or unreality oftemporal passage2tenseless vs. tensed dispute: concerns concepts required todescribe world in metaphysically adequate waye.g. B-theory combines two distinct claims:1world is static, all times/events equally real (block universe)2world can be fully described in tenseless termsstatic dynamictenseless B-theory ×tensed × A-theoryChristian Wüthrich Class 5E Jonathan Lowe (∗1950): support for the tensed view“the tensed view takes McTaggart’s ‘A-series’ terminologicallindispensable for the metaphysics—not just the epistemologyand the semantics—of time, whereas the tenseless view takesthe ‘B-series’ terminology alone to be indispensable for themetaphysics of time.” (Lowe (1998), 43)Lowe maintains thatonly abstract objects which do not exist in space and timecan tenselessly have propertiesanything that does exist in space and time can possessproperties only in a tensed way⇒ “There is rain in San Diego on 25 September 2071.” istensed i.e. it’s an abbreviation for saying “There was, isnow, or will be rain in San Diego on 25 September 2071.”disjunctive tensed predicationChristian Wüthrich Class 5Reminder: Mellor’s challengeConsider Mellor’s dilemma for the A-theorist: “they must acceptthat either (i) tensed sentences are made true by tensed factsthat are non-token-reflexive, or (ii) tensed sentences are madetrue by token-reflexive facts that are tenseless.” (Dainton, 64)but (ii) amounts to rejecting tensed facts (and thus themetaphysical significance of tense)but (i) is incoherent: “World War One is now over” is true iftokened after 1918, and false if tokened before, but thiscannot be the case if the truthmaker is a tensed fact that isindependent of when the sentence is tokenedChristian Wüthrich Class 5Lowe grabs the second horn of the dilemma but rejects that thetruthmakers must be tenseless facts.According to him, the truth-conditions of tensed facts must bestated e.g. as follows:A token of the proposition “It is now raining in SanDiego” [is] true iff it [is] uttered at a time t s.t. it [is]raining in San Diego at t.where the square bracket indicates the disjunctive tensedpredication.This is necessary bc we are talking about truth-conditionsfor a token sentence, not an abstract type, and these areconcrete entities in time and space and are so subject totensed predication.Christian Wüthrich Class 5McTaggart’s indexical fallacyLowe charges McTaggart with what he calls an “indexicalfallacy”:It’s incoherent to say things like “Caesar’s death wasfuture”, just as it’s incoherent to say things like “It’s raininghere over there”.Rather, what is meant by the latter sentence is sth like this:an utterance over there of the sentence “It’s raining here” istrue.Likewise, an A-theorist is at most committed to sth like this:“For any event e, (i) it either was, is now, or will be true to saythat ‘e has happended’, and (ii) it either was, is now, or will betrue to say that ‘e is happening now’, and (iii) it either was, isnow, or will be true to say that ‘e will happen’.” (Lowe (1998),46)Christian Wüthrich Class 5Not propertiesMore generally, “presentness” etc—whatever they are—cannotbe properties bcIf presentness is a(n intrinsic) property predicated ofevents, then either it’s tenselessly always so predicated orit is now, has been, or will be predicated only temporarily.That a property such as presentness is eternallypredicated of an event is absurd.If events possess properties such as presentness onlytemporarily leads to overdetermination problems asencountered in §2.6 of Dainton.⇒ Presentness, pastness, futurity are not (intrinsic)properties of events.Christian Wüthrich Class 5Deflationary dynamismBut if they are not properties, what are they?Lowe doesn’t really help here, beyond saying that they arefundamental concepts which are “semantically irreducible”Does this mean that the difference bw past, present andfuture is merely verbal?!?Let’s look at metaphysically more substantive proposals...Christian Wüthrich Class