Presentism’s persisting problem

ABSTRACT

David Lewis [1986. On the Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publishers] famously declares that presentism is unable to allow for objects to persist and therefore should be rejected. The underlying idea is that presentism, in which only present entities exist, conflicts with persistence, which requires an object exist at multiple times. Both presentists and eternalists alike take this objection to be easily dismissed because the presentist can offer a tensed account of persistence in which an object persists iff it exists and it will or did exist. Although it is the standard presentist response to Lewis, this strategy is inherently problematic. I show that if persistence is formulated in a tensed way, the presentist cannot distinguish a temporal series of unrelated instantaneous objects from a persisting object. Because there is no persistence in a temporal series of unrelated instantaneous objects, if the presentist cannot establish a difference between the two kinds of objects, the presentist’s account does not qualify as an adequate account of persistence.

KEYWORDS:

• Time
• presentism
• persistence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See, for example, Hinchliff (1996) or Ingram (2019).

2 Note that a third theory is that of exdurance, in which there are temporal stages of an object. See Hawley (2001) and Sider (2001).

3 Markosian (1994, 246), Hawley (2001, 11), and Tallant (2018; Tallant and Ingram 2020) echo this point about endurance being a matter of an object being ‘wholly present’. Parsons (2000, 400–401) formulates the concept slightly differently in terms of being wholly located at multiple times. I speak in terms of an object being wholly located, but if there is a distinction between the two conceptions of endurance, I hold that does not affect my argument.

4 See Hinchliff (1996) for a detailed defense of the presentist account of change.

5 What the ‘having of temporal parts’ amounts to is outside the scope of the paper. I assume that however the perdurantist plausibly fills in the details does not affect my main argument.

6 This formulation is from Sider (2001, 58).

7 This then avoids Tallant’s (2018) objection that discussion of facts makes persistence about truth, and persistence is not about truth – it is about the properties of objects.

8 Other defenders include Markosian (2004) and Crisp (2003, 2007).

9 This idea is originally proposed and set out by Tallant and Ingram (2015) and more fully explicated by Ingram (2019) as a strategy to ‘connect’ tensed properties with the past (or future) without entailing the existence of the past (or future).

10 Ingram (2016) points to Diekemper (2015) as originally offering this idea of non-rigid ontological dependence.

11 This same problem is also faced by McKinnon and Bigelow’s (2012) revised version of Lucretian presentism in which Lucretian properties are not primitive and unanalyzable, but instead are standard properties that are instantiated in a tensed way. More specifically, McKinnon and Bigelow claim that in addition to the normal present-tensed ‘instantiation-tie’, there is past-tensed instantiation-tie and a future-tensed instantiation-tie. Furthermore, these instantiation-ties are primitive and unanalyzable. Thus, for example, Desk presently-instantiates being wholly located and pastly-instantiates being wholly located. And this is in virtue of which Desk is a persisting object – it instantiates being wholly located in two different ways.

12 Ingram’s (2016, 2019) thisness presentism can distinguish Desk and Short Desk because they have different thisnesses. However, Ingram’s endorsement of primitive tensed properties means that any account of persistence in thisness presentism fails in the same way as Bigelow’s (1996) original formulation of Lucretian presentism.

13 The presentist might want to respond that Desk is numerically identical to Past Desk, but this cannot hold in virtue of a cross-temporal relation. Thus, it must hold in virtue of a property that Desk has. This merely pushes the problem back one step; there is nothing that can have, or be related to, the property that Desk needs to persist – the property of being located at t.

14 And perhaps this is the underlying reason why (GI’) in general is objectionable. It seems to imply that true statements establish the actual nature of the world, rather than the other way around.