Abstract
In this paper I claim that as bitter as the eternalist/presentist rivalry is, as far as both camps are concerned, a third position—which I defend—is more disturbing. The reason is that what eternalists and presentists agree on is more fundamental than what they disagree about. They agree that time carves, to use Orilia’s term, “ontological inventories.” This in a way answers the “fundamental question”—what is time? They disagree about the contents of the inventories, but that, I suggest, is a secondary issue. Thus, an argument against what they agree about would be more detrimental to their joint project—analyzing tense in ontological terms—than the internal disagreement they are engaged in. I develop this thesis by responding to Orilia’s paper “Two Metaphysical Perspectives on the Duration of the Present” (Orilia in Debates in the metaphysics of time. Bloomsbury, London/New York, pp 51–70, 2014). I criticize the specialized use Orilia makes of the notion of an “ontological inventory” in the context of the metaphysics of time, but also Quine’s approach to ontology, on which Orilia’s account relies. The gist of my criticism is that it is question begging to rely on the notion of an “ontological inventory” for giving content to the presentism/eternalism debate, and for arguing that there can’t be an alternative.
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Notes
Orilia (2014, pp. 51–70).
Orilia (2014, p. 55).
Ibid., p. 51.
Ibid., p. 56.
Ibid., p. 58. There are several other places in which Orilia states that my position consists of an ontology.
Ibid., p. 56.
Ibid., p. 58.
I should add that my analysis rejects the presentist notion that present events “exist” in some way events that are not present do not. I reject all reality claims in this context. Given this, Orilia certainly cannot infer that according to me parts of present events “exist”.
One can wonder: does this mean Orilia is committed to Meinongism? Orilia seems to think it does not (Orilia 2016, pp. 592, 593) but fails to provide sufficient argumentation to back this claim.
Orilia (2014, p. 52).
Orilia adds in a footnote here: “I basically side with Meyer (2009, p. 97), when he urges that in looking at the A vs. B dispute we should not worry about how ‘real’ is used and should rather concentrate on what exists, according to the parties”.
Orilia (2014, pp. 55–56). Note that similar statements are absent from his more recent paper of 2016.
Thus, Orilia is presupposing from the outset that the task for the metaphysics of time is ontological, which explains his remark at the opening of his paper that “we not need not distinguish between ontology and metaphysics” (Ibid., p. 51).
Appeals to events as ‘existing’ also appear in Orilia (2016), see e.g. on p. 596.
Ibid., p. 60.
Which must not be conflated with the general ‘exist’ as in “Higgs bosons exist”. This use of “exist” is not tenseless, rather, it states the existence in tensed time of a certain kind of entity.
Putnam (1987, p. 16).
See on this point Putnam (2013).
In addition to the charge that my theory fails to break out from the eternalism/presentism framework, Orilia also complains that my “selection of theories from the debate is too incomplete and idiosyncratic to license any conclusion about a need to dismiss all sorts of A- and B-theories (Meyer 2009; Tallant 2009). In particular, as I see it, Dolev’s criticism of B-eternalism focuses on the new B-theory”. This is true. At the time it was not relevant to discuss it. In light of the revival it is currently seeing in the work of Oaklander and Orilia, I devote a great part of my (2014) to a critical examination of the old theory. The old theory is, admittedly, more attractive than its successor, but, as I argue in this paper, it too is grounded in, and argues for, an “inventory” of the eternalist brand. As for my “idiosyncratic selection”, it consisted of formulations of ontological theories that I thought were the most robust and illuminating, and in which the demarcation of the “ontological inventory” was the clearest. Thus, I still think that though he never meant it as a theory of time (though it became that more and more—his last book was Truth and the Past), Dummett’s antirealism gives the best defense of presentist ontology, and Mellor’s work continues to be a classical elaboration of eternalism. Discussing other works would have just resulted in unneeded repetitions.
Scanlon (2014, p. 25).
Scanlon (2014).
In this vein let me remark that just as deriving eternalism from a tenseless language is circular, so deriving presentism from language’s inevitable tensedness would also be question begging.
References
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Dolev, Y. Is ontology the key to understanding tense?. Synthese 195, 1741–1749 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1303-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1303-x