Abstract
Permanentists have no trouble explaining how truths about the past or future can be grounded in reality. If n time-units ago, there was something that made α true, then, whatever it was, according to permanentism, it still exists so as to make ‘n time-units ago, α’ presently true. Presentists, by contrast, cannot infer, from the fact that n time-units ago, there was something that made α true, that, whatever it was, it still exists. Their ontology doesn’t include merely past entities. For this reason, presentists face the challenge to explain how contingent truths about the past – whose existence it is hard to deny – can be grounded in reality. This paper expounds and defends a relatively recent line of response to this grounding challenge that likewise extends to contingent truths about the future. As such, it is also open to those Ockhamists who posit true future contingents but deny that the future is already fully determined by what presently exists and how it presently is.
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Notes
- 1.
See Rosenkranz (2012). Historically more faithful interpretations focus on divine foreknowledge, and its compatibility with our freedom, rather than the truth of future contingents and its compatibility with an open future; some of these interpretations are moreover primarily concerned with past divinations and our freedom to presently act as we do, rather than present divinations and our freedom to act in the future as we will (see, e.g., the papers in Part II of Fischer & Todd, 2015). Clearly, however, these issues are intimately related. See Prior (2003: 44) for an argument why divine foreknowledge, past or present, presupposes the truth, past or present, of future contingents.
- 2.
The behaviour of ‘the present time’ can be elucidated by appeal to the distinction between the time of utterance and the time of index familiar from contemporary philosophy of language: ‘the present time’ – like ‘the referent of ‘now”, but unlike the indexical ‘now’ – is a temporally non-rigid designator for the time of index, where temporal operators like ‘Always’ or ‘2068 years ago’ may shift the time of index away from the time of utterance.
- 3.
Without implying that any type of thing is reducible, or irreducible, to any other, it seems extensionally correct to say the following. Events are located at the times contained in their temporal extension. Continuants are located at the times included in the temporal extension of the events that are their histories. States of things are located at the times at which those things are in those states. Tropes are particularised property-instantiations that are located at the times at which the relevant property is instantiated. Tensed facts are located at the times at which they obtain. Tenseless facts are located at the time that is their topic (for the latter notion, see Fine, 2005: 296). For convenience, we may also stipulate that, on the relevant notion of temporal location at work in the suggested characterisation of presentism, individual time instants are located at themselves and only at themselves.
- 4.
Another worry one might have is that even if the actual world is deterministic, other possible worlds are not: determinism, if true, is only contingently true. For all that has here been said, presentism itself may at best be only contingently true; and friends of the nuclear option might insist that it is. Even if this was so, however, there is no reason to expect that no indeterministic world is presentist. Friends of the nuclear option might then still insist that no presentist world both is indeterministic and allows for truths about the past. But with every step, this line of defence becomes less convincing, casting doubt on the idea that the nuclear option can deliver more than a contingently true explanation.
- 5.
It is natural to understand grounding as being many-one rather than one-one, i.e. to hold that the general form of grounding statements should be taken to be ‘p, q, … < r’ where ‘p, q, …’ is a list of one or more sentences, but for the sake of simplicity we will ignore this.
- 6.
One reason why one might hold that nefarious views have insufficient explanatory power is implicit endorsement of the view that pointing to a ground whose topic is the present is somehow more explanatory than pointing to a ground whose topic is the past or future (for the notion of topic, see again Fine, 2005: 296). It is, however, unclear what might warrant this view. In any case, all the other proposals under discussion – including our own – cohere with it.
- 7.
The nuclear option is discussed in Sider (2001: 37–39).
- 8.
It could also be argued that some if not all of these upstanding views fail to heed the demand that the grounds for a given truth be wholly relevant to that truth. But as we stressed in the previous section, we do not want to make too much of that demand.
- 9.
A further shortcoming of Baia’s proposal is that it ultimately does not furnish us with explanations of why presently true sentences about the past are presently true, but merely with explanations of why the corresponding sentences about the present were true in the past.
- 10.
See footnote 1.
- 11.
See footnote 1.
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Acknowledgements
The research that resulted in this publication was funded by the European Commission’s H2020 programme under grant agreement H2020-MSCA-ITN-2015-675415 and by the Swiss National Science Foundation through project BSCGI0-157792. We are grateful to the participants of a research seminar, led by Giovanni Merlo at the University of Geneva, for helpful comments on a previous version of this paper.
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Correia, F., Rosenkranz, S. (2022). Presentism, Ockhamism, and Truth-Grounding. In: Santelli, A. (eds) Ockhamism and Philosophy of Time. Synthese Library, vol 452. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90359-6_7
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