Advanced Temporalizing

Abstract

There is a widespread assumption that B-theorists—according to whom there is no fundamental distinction between present and non-present times—should interpret tense operators such as ‘It was the case that’ and ‘It will be the case five minutes hence that’ as implicit quantifier-restrictors, so that (for example) an utterance at the present time n of the sentence ‘It was the case that there are dinosaurs’ is true just in case there are dinosaurs located at some time t earlier than n. However, it is easy to show that this interpretation of the tense operators causes problems for B-theorists when combined with certain other natural B-theoretic commitments. In this paper, I argue that a good way for B-theorists to avoid these problems is to treat the tense operators as redundant when the sentences in their scope are qualitative—that is, not about any particular individual(s).

A Temporal Comparison Argument for Presentism

“…3232The question of how a non‐presentist four‐dimensionalist should analyse (TC2b) (when its quantification is not tacitly restricted) is effectively the temporal analogue of the problem raised for modal realists by what Divers calls advanced modalising. See Divers (2002), Marshall (2016), Parsons (2012), Dorr (MS), Noonan (2014), Jago (2016) and Deasy (2021). …”