Abstract
We have seen in the foregoing chapters that tensed thought and language seem to necessitate the reality of tense. But all this still leaves us with the B-theorist’s tu quoque argument, one of the most powerful in his arsenal: If the A-theorist’s arguments for the reality of tense are correct, then there must be spatially “tensed” facts as well, which no one will admit. Accordingly, in this chapter we shall examine this final line of defense of the B-theorist.
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References
D. H. Mellor, Real Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 58–66.
Ibid., p. 63.
Ibid., p. 64.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Robin Le Poidevin and Murray MacBeath, “Introduction,” in The Philosophy of Time, ed. R. Le Poidevin and M. MacBeath, Oxford Readings in Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 3.
For facility of expression I shall call a proposition “indexical” just in case the correct linguistic expression of it involves indexical terms; if not I call it “non-indexical.” Similarly, I call a proposition “tensed” just in case its correct linguistic expression involves tense; otherwise I call it “tenseless.”
See Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1948), pp. 77, 84–93; for discussion, see Janet Farrell Smith, “Russell on Indexicals and Scientific Knowledge,” in Rereading Russell, ed. C. Wade Savage and C. Anthony Andersen, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 12 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 122–125.
Gottlob Frege, “Thoughts,” in Logical Investigations, trans. P. T. Geach and R. H. Stoothoff, ed. with a Preface by P. T. Geach, Library of Philosophy and Logic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), p. 12.
Ibid., pp. 12–13.
John Perry, “Frege on Demonstratives,” Philosophical Review 86 (1977): 474.
P. T. Geach and R. H. Stoothoff, “Preface,” to Logical Investigations, p. vii.
David Kaplan, “The Logic of Demonstratives,” in Contemporary Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language, ed. Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), pp. 403–407; idem, “Demonstratives: an Essay on the Semantics, Metaphysics and Epistemology of Demonstratives and Other Indexicals,” in Themes from Kaplan, ed. Joseph Almog, John Perry, Howard Wettstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 505–521.
Kaplan, “Demonstratives and Other Indexicals,” pp. 523–524.
Ibid., p. 530.
Ibid., pp. 533–534.
E. Mach, Die Analyse der Empfindungen, 5th rev. ed. (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1906), p. 3. Mach relates, “I once boarded an omnibus after a very strenuous overnight train trip, just as another man entered from the other side. `What a run-down old schoolmaster!’ I thought. It was I myself, for across from me was a large mirror.”
Kaplan, “Demonstratives and Other Indexicals,” p. 532.
Kaplan, “Logic of Demonstratives,” p. 401.
Kaplan, “Demonstratives and Other Indexicals,” p. 503.
Kaplan, “Afterthoughts,” in Themes from Kaplan, p. 607.
Nathan Salmon, “Tense and Singular Propositions,” in Themes from Kaplan, p. 342.
Richard Cartwright, “Propositions,” in Analytical Philosophy, ed. R. Butter (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), pp. 92–94.
G. E. Moore, “Facts and Propositions,” in idem, Philosophical Papers (New York: Collier Books, 1962), p. 71.
So also William and Martha Kneale, “Propositions and Time,” in G. E. Moore: Essays in Retrospect, ed. Alice Ambrose and Morris Lazerowitz, Muirhead Library of Philosophy 9 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1970), p. 232.
Salmon, “Tense and Singular Propositions,” p. 344.
Mark Richard, “Temporalism and Etemalism,” Philosophical Studies 39 (1981): 3–4. Oddly enough, Richard thinks that the temporalist will agree that “Nixon is now President” expresses an eternal proposition. But the A-theorist would never make such a concession, since both “is” and “now” are tensed expressions. For a critique of Richard’s argument, see Mark Aronszajn, “A Defense of Temporalism,” Philosophical Studies 81 (1996): 71–95, who maintains that the inference from “Mary believed p” and “Mary still believes everything she has ever believed” to “Mary still believes p” is valid; it is etemalism which fails to warrant the correct inferences.
Though it would not be insulting if Mary is a child. My own daughter Charity believed in 1983 that “Reagan is President,” but she never believed “Reagan is President in 1983.” If I told someone that in 1983 Charity believed Reagan was President and that in 1990 she still believed that, the person would undoubtedly think that my daughter had not kept up on her current events.
For further ineffectual arguments against tensed propositions, see Milton Fisk, “A Pragmatic Account of Tenses,” American Philosophical Quarterly 8 (1971): 93–96. Fisk conflates non-indexical, tensed sentences with indexical ones. It is true that it is in virtue of the indexical that indexical, tensed sentences refer to a specific time. But Fisk errs in thinking that a non-indexical, tensed sentence only incompletely expresses a proposition; the A-theorist can hold that the tensed proposition is non-indexical, refers to no temporal position, and is variable in truth value due to its ascription of an A-determination. Fisk is therefore wrong when he argues that to determine the proposition expressed by a tensed sentence one must specify the time of the token, which leads to an infinite regress. There is only an infinite regress of entailments, but not of propositional content or meaning.
Howard Wettstein, “Has Semantics Rested on a Mistake?” Journal of Philosophy 8 (1986): 195. See also David Braun, “Demonstratives and their Linguistic Meanings,” Nods 30 (1996): 147–148.
Pace Eros Corazza and J. Crime Dokic, “On the Cognitive Significance of Indexicals,” Philosophical Studies 66 (1992): 183–196, who only consider the temporal indexical “now” and fail to consider the full range of such indexicals. Similarly, they only consider the first-person singular “I” to the neglect of the first-person plural.
Cf. a similar illustration by Steven E. Boer and William G. Lycan, “Who, Me?” Philosophical Review 89 (1980): 448–450. What the authors fail to see is that such a situation undermines the explanation of cognitive significance in terms of linguistic meaning, not the distinction between belief de re and belief de se.
François Recanati, “Direct Reference, Meaning, and Thought,” Noels 24 (1990): 708. See further idem, Direct Reference: From Language to Thought (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993), p. 71.
Recanati, “Reference, Meaning, and Thought,” p. 709.
Ibid. Recanati considers the interesting proposal of simply reducing the linguistic mode of presentation to the psychological. “Thus, instead of taking the linguistic convention governing the use of `I’ to be the rule that `I’ refers to the speaker, one would take it to be the rule that `I’ is used to express the sui-generis concept Ego” (Recanati, Direct Reference, p. 85). But he questions how such a reductive analysis would be worked out. For example, to account for the mode of presentation of “you” must there be a communication-independent concept of Alter-ego that the word “you” conventionally expresses? Recanati is reluctant to abandon the classical view of the meaning of indexical expressions, according to
which the meaning of an indexical is constituted by a reference rule governing the use of that indexical (e.g., the rule that `I’ refers to the speaker) in favor of a yet to be worked out alternative. It seems to me that Recanati’s example of “you” would not be difficult to handle on the psychological account: “you” is used to express the concept the one addressed by Ego. The problem with the reduction of linguistic meaning to the psychological mode of presentation comes not with the personal indexicals, but with spatial and temporal indexicals. For example, the meaning of a historical marker “Here is where Custer fell” would become something like “Custer fell where Ego-Nunc is.” But then the sentence on the marker literally has no meaning (or truth value) unless someone reads it, which seems clearly wrong. Indexical sentence tokens have meaning apart from one’s psychological apprehension of them. But it does seem to me that it is dubious whether Recanati is justified in continuing to speak of a linguistic mode of presentation, for apart from a cognizing mind how is linguistic meaning or rules a presentation at all? 36 Wettstein, “Mistake,” p. 201.
Frege, “Thoughts,” p. 28.
Ibid., pp. 28–29. See our exposition in chap. 2, p. 33.
Kaplan, “Demonstratives and Other Indexicals,” p. 534.
Ernest Sosa, “Consciousness of the Self and of the Present,” in Agent, Language, and the Structure of the World, ed. James E. Tomberlin (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1983), pp. 138–140; Palle Yourgrau, “Frege, Perry, and Demonstratives,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 12 (1982): 744–745, who writes, “A-type facts about time…represent the way we grasp times, not eternal, Fregean concepts, or senses, which denote times. Perry’s analysis of `now’ in terms of its role seems only to account for B-type facts…. If, however, the mode of access to a time, t, we express with `now’ represents an A-type fact, it can be a mode of access analogous to seeing: to see x is to have access to it, but it is not the same kind of access as being able to denote it. If I can denote x, I am always in a position to do so: not so for seeing x. The same applies to the mode of access to t we express with `now’: I do not always have access to a time t, via the way it is now presented as `now’ (indeed, only now do 1 have such access).” See also Palle Yourgrau, “The Path Back to Frege,” in Demonstratives (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 131–132; idem, The Disappearance of Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 125.
John Perry, “Cognitive Significance and New Theories of Reference,” No fis 22 (1988): 5.
Ibid., p. 6. See also remarks of Lawrence D. Roberts, “Perry on Indexical Semantics and Belief States,” Communication & Cognition 26 (1993): 77–96, who emphasizes the need for spatio-temporal contexts in order to explain the cognitive significance of indexicals. What Roberts fails to mention is that the times must be A-series times.
Jon Barwise and John Perry, Situations and Attitudes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, Bradford Books, 1983), p. 19.
Perry, “Cognitive Significance,” p. 7.
A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, ed. Robert Hale and Crispin Wright, s.v., “Indexicals and Demonstratives,” by John Perry (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), pp. 586–612. Perry himself enthusiastically endorses Mellor’s Indexed B-Theory of Language and presses the tu quoque argument from spatial tenses in “Time, Consciousness, and the Knowledge Argument,” in Essays on Time and Related Topics, pp. 60–69, apparently oblivious to the tense involved in his own account and unaware of the shortcomings of Mellor’s theory and the availability of reductive analyses of spatial tenses.
Recanati, Direct Reference, p. 86.
Ibid., p. 87.
Ibid., p. 88.
Ibid., p. 123.
Ibid.
Hector-Neri Castaneda, “Indexicality: The Transparent Subjective Mechanism for Encountering a World,” Noûs 24 (1990): 723–734.
Ibid., pp. 737–738.
Ibid., pp. 745–746.
Ibid., p. 746.
Ibid., pp. 747–748.
I was fascinated to discover during public discussion at a Philosophy of Time conference held at City College in Santa Barbara in 1990 that both Kaplan and Salmon were utter innocents with respect to the whole dispute between A- and B-Theories of time and seemed bewildered that anyone could deny the objectivity of A-determinations like pastness,presentness, and futurity. They certainly did not think of their theories as in any way supportive of the tenselessness of time.
Bertrand Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1940), pp. 108–110. Cf. the remark of C. D. Broad, Scientific Thought (1923; rep. ed.: New York: Humanities Press, 1969), p. 59: “Here is not going to help us understand Now,since it contains an essential reference to Now.” Advocating a similar analysis of spatial indexicals is Richard Swinburne, “Tensed Facts,” American Philosophical Quarterly 27 (1990): 127. Cf. the remark of John Campbell, Past,Space, and Self (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), p. 103: “The relation among tokens of `here’… does not seem to be immediately given to the subject in the way in which the simultaneity of two tokens or their having both been produced by the subject is immediately given.” Compare B-theorist Eddy Zemach’s attempt to reduce “It’s two o’clock now” to “I am located at two o’clock” (Eddy M. Zemach, “Time and Self,” Analysis 39 119791: 145), an analysis which fails because Zemach overlooks the fact that “am” must be present-tense, so that the attribution of a property of presentness to a point of time has not been eliminated. Our reductive analysis of spatial indexicals undermines the to quoque argument of Ned Markosian, “On Language and the Passage of Time,” Philosophical Studies 66 (1992): 17–18. A parallel reductive analysis of the “now” in terms of the “here” with a view toward establishing objective spatial tenses is wholly implausible, since, as B-theorists admit, no one (except a very few philosophers) takes spatial indexicals to ascribe objective spatial tenses to things or events.
Thus, the A-theorist could agree with Williams that the sentences “Linda is reading here” and “Linda is reading at her home” describe the same state of affairs, though they differ in meaning (Clifford Williams, “The Date-Analysis of Tensed Sentences,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 70 [1992]: 201), but insist that the cognitive significance of the former, unlike the latter, implies as well the existence of a self and a present. Thus, the utterance “During the Cretaceous Period the trachodon laid her eggs on the beach” has a wholly different cognitive significance than the utterance “During the Cretacious Period the trachodon laid her eggs here on the beach.” The latter’s use of “here” involves an ego-centric particular that implies a self’s being presently located on the beach where the trachodon once lived. Similarly, the cognitive significance of Williams’s “Here’s Chicago” differs from that of “Chicago is at Chicago,” though these sentences describe the same state of affairs, in that it alone implies the present existence of a self at Chicago. If “Here’s Chicago” is a thing token like a road sign, then it has no cognitive significance until it is read, but may be held to express the same propositional content as “Chicago is at Chicago.” The A-theorist can accept Williams’s assertion that “the meaning of `here’ requires `here’ to be used to refer to the place at which it is used, whereas the meaning of `Chicago’ does not require it to be used in the city it is used to refer to” (Ibid., p. 202) without inferring that the cognitive significance of “here” implies either the non-objectivity of the I-now or the equal objectivity of the here. Similarly, the linguistic meaning of “now” requires that it refer (normally) to the time it is tokened; but the cognitive significance of “Now’s the time to go,” as opposed to that of “Three o’clock’s the time to go,” is not adequately accounted for by linguistic meaning in the absence of tense, as we have seen.
On New Testament teaching, see Robert H. Gundry, Soma in Biblical Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), esp. pp. 83–93; Paul Hoffmann, Die Toten in Christus, 3d rev. ed., NTA 2 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1978), pp. 26–174. Historically, Christian theological tradition has affirmed anthropological dualism, as is demonstrated by Howard M. Ducharme, “Personal Identity in Samuel Clarke,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 24 (1986): 359–383.
J. M. E. McTaggart, The Nature of Existence, 2 vols., ed. C. D. Broad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927; rep. ed: 1968), 2: 62. Cf Jerrold J. Katz, “Descartes’s Cogito,” in Demonstratives, pp. 154–181.
McTaggart, Nature of Existence, 2: 63.
Ibid., 2: 76.
Ibid., 2: 64.
Mellor, “I and Now,” pp. 81–82. See further idem, “Analytic Philosophy and the Self,” in idem, Matters of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991): pp. 1–16.
Roderick Chisholm, The First Person (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), p. 1; see also John Perry, “Castaiïeda on He and I,” in Agent, Language,and the World, p. 35; Esa Saarinen, “Castafieda’s Philosophy of Language,” in Hector-Neri Castafieda, ed. James E. Tomberlin, Profiles 6 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1986), pp. 190–210; William Seager, “The Logic of Lost Lingens,” Journal of Philosophical Logic 19 (1990): 407–428.
E. J. Lowe, Subjects of Experience, Cambridge Studies in Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 185. Lowe defines a self as a possible object of first person reference and subject of first person thoughts.
Geoffrey Madell, Mind and Materialism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988), pp. 104, 108.
Geoffrey Madell, The Identity of the Self (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), pp. 39–40. 69 Ibid., p. 40.
Madell, Mind and Materialism, p. 103. Cf. Bor and Lycan, “Who, Me?” pp. 445–446, who agree with Madell’s inference and therefore reject the thesis that “I” is irreducible.
Ibid., p. 120.
Ibid., p. 114; so also Patrick Grim, “Against Omniscience: The Case from Essential Indexicals,” Noüs 19 (1985): 170; Swinburne, “Tensed Facts,” p. 126. Contra, see Mellor, “Analytic Philosophy and the Self,” who does not, however, discuss any of the alternatives dealt with in the text.
Castaneda tries to elude this consequence by maintaining that first-person propositions come into and go out of existence with the person himself (Hector-Neri Castaneda, “On the Phenomeno-Logic of the I,” Akten des XIV. Internationalen Kongresses für Philosophie 3 (Vienna: University of Vienna, 1969), pp. 260–269.
See Boer and Lycan, “Who, Me?” p. 442 for an entertaining statement of this point.
For an interesting exchange on this point, see Robert M. Adams and Hector-Neri Castaneda, “Knowledge and Self: A Correspondence between Robert M. Adams and Hector-Neri Castaneda,” in Agent, Language, and the World, pp. 304–305, 308. Adams worries about admitting indexical propositions which are not identical with any which can be expressed quasi-or non-indexically, for then God cannot know all true propositions. He comforts himself with the thought that “We can still say that God knows all the quasi-indexical propositions. In an important sense he still knows all the facts.” Castaneda shows himself quite sympathetic with Adams’s concern and proposed solution: “Given the intimacy of the equivalence between indexical and their corresponding quasi-indexical propositional guises, there is a strong sense in which God’s knowledge of all the true quasi-indexical guises of a true indexical proposition puts him in knowledge of the fact corresponding to them all. Indeed, that fact is nothing more than the true proposition of which all of them are intimately equivalent guises. God certainly knows all the FACTS….” But this solution is unavailing, as Grim, “Against Omniscience,” shows. For a discussion, see William Lane Craig, Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom: The Coherence of Theism: Omniscience, Studies in Intellectual History 19 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991), pp. 7–9. 76 Jonathan L. Kvanvig, The Possibility of an All-Knowing God (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), pp. 47–70, 151–162.
Ibid., p. 48.
Ibid., pp. 155–156.
See Alvin Plantinga, “The Boethian Compromise,” American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1978): 129–138; cf. idem, “Self-Profile,” in Alvin Plantinga, ed. James E. Tomberlin and Peter Van Inwagen, Profiles 5 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), pp. 76–87. Plantinga presents an incisive critique of the Theory of Direct Reference with respect to proper names. For discussion, see Nathan U. Salmon, Reference and Essence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 3–32; Diana F. Ackerman, “Plantinga’s Theory of Proper Names,” in Alvin Plantinga, pp. 187–198; Alvin Plantinga, “Reply to Diana Ackerman,” in Alvin Plantinga, pp. 349–365.
Smith, Language and Time, secs. 4. 3, 5.
Smith’s argument against the relational view is the same fallacious argument discussed in chapter 2, note 92.
See chapter 1, note 20.
I follow Smith’s formulation here; he has neglected Reichenbach’s shifting point of reference. When a past-tense operator is prefixed, the point of reference shifts back to the past, thus affecting verbal tense. Correct English grammar would be “It was true yesterday that today would be Thursday.” Tichy’s formulation of the propositional content of this sentence would be “For some day u, u is actually present, and it was the case at u-1 that it will be the case at u-1+1 that u is Thursday.”
Smith, Language and Time, p. 129. that he apprehends M as actually including E. “Nowness,” unlike presentness, 85 David Lewis, “Attitudes De Dicto and De Se,” Philosophical Review 88 (1979): 513–543; Roderick Chisholm, The First Person (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981); Roderick Chisholm, “Why Singular Propositions?” in Themes from Kaplan, pp. 145–150.
Lewis, “De Dicto and De Se,” p. 519.
Ibid., p. 520.
Ibid., p. 521.
Ibid., p. 525.
Ibid., p. 526.
Ibid., p. 521.
Sosa, “The Self and the Present,” p. 134. Cf. idem, “Properties and Indexical Attitudes,” in On Believing: Epistemological and Semiotic Attitudes, ed. Herman Parret, Foundations of Communication (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1983), p. 326, where Sosa’s exposition underlines the fact that tense is involved in all the competing models of indexical reference. See further Ernest Sosa, “De Re Belief, Action Explanations, and the Essential Indexical,” in Modality, Morality, and Belief, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 235–249, where Sosa opts for perspectivism for propositions.
In his reply to Sosa, Castafleda agrees that neither the propositional view nor the self-ascription of properties view manages to eliminate the self and the present (H. N. Castarieda, “Reply to Ernest Sosa: Self-Reference and Propositions,” in Agent, Language, and the World, pp. 385–392). But he sees this, not as a vindication of the reality of the self and the present, but as a defect of the theories! But it seems to me that Castafieda’s own view also fails to eliminate real tense, as I have argued.
Chisholm, First Person, p. 45.
Ibid., pp. 50–51, 125.
Ibid., p. 17.
Lewis, “De Dicto and De Se,” p. 514.
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Craig, W.L. (2000). The B-Theory and Theories of Direct Reference. In: The Tensed Theory of Time. Synthese Library, vol 293. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9345-8_4
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