Fleeting Things and Permanent Stuff: A Priorean Project in Real Time

Abstract

The notion of an individual object was central to Prior’s conception of the philosophical project inspired by McTaggart’s conception of the problem of change which tense logic was to solve. McTaggart’s famous proof of the unreality of time proceeds in two stages. First, B-expressions and the so-called static view which treats time analogously to space are opposed and subordinated to the so-called dynamic view according to which A-expressions of pastness, presentness and futurity are essential for an adequate description of phenomena in time. Second, it claims to show that descriptions of the latter kind contradict one another. Prior was sympathetic to the general conclusion of the first stage, understanding it to require that acceptable B-expressions be reducible in context to tensed sentences expressing pastness, presentness and futurity. But he thought that contradiction of A-expressions was not necessary for the thesis of the unreality of time, and that McTaggart was in fact mistaken in the second stage of his argument. The crucial point for Prior was the correct logical form of tensed sentences which, in the spirit of Russell’s famous notion of contextual definition, confines the use of referring terms to what he is prepared to countenance as existing. McTaggart developed his argument in terms of sentences like

(1)Queen Anne’s death is past,

which he contrasted with sentences like

• Queen Anne’s death is present

• Queen Anne’s death is future.