4 Time and Persistence
3. Some Differences Between Tensed Theories
It will be noticed that although I spoke just now of presentness being predicated of an event e in the past tense, the way I construe this is in terms of saying that it was true to say ‘e is happening now’. There is one very good reason why I use this sort of metalinguistic construction, and this is that I don't want to suggest that ‘presentness’ is some sort of property of events. Some advocates of the tensed view of time would indeed want to suggest precisely this,135 but I cannot agree with them. The problem is that if presentness (and likewise pastness and futurity) is conceived of as being a property of events, then it is difficult to see how it can either be a property which an event has always had and always will have, or be a property which an event now has, has had, or will have only temporarily—and no other option seems available. The first option appears to be quite untenable: it is surely absurd to say that the Battle of Hastings, say, always was and always will be present. According to the second option, however, presentness is a property which the Battle of Hastings once had, but which it has no longer. But how has it come to lose this property? We shouldn't be tempted to liken the case to that of a blue object losing its colour with the passage of time: objects can lose or gain properties because they persist through time while undergoing qualitative change—but events do not do this. The Battle of Hastings no longer exists now that it has ‘lost’ its ‘presentness’, unlike the blue object which has faded. It is true that persisting objects undergo not only qualitative change, but also substantial change,
134 See Broad, Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy, 273.
135 See e.g. Smith, Language and Time, ch. 5.
when they cease to exist by losing an essential property (as, for example, when a coin is destroyed by being squashed out of shape). But loss of ‘presentness’ by an event cannot be likened to substantial change, since the latter is the ceasing to exist of something that has persisted for a certain period—and events, once more, do not do this. It won't help, apparently, to think of an event's supposed loss of presentness as being a ‘mere Cambridge change’—the sort of change which is undergone by a dead person who ceases to be famous—for this would imply that presentness is not an intrinsic property of events and hence its loss not a real change in the event possessing it. Nor, I think, should we say with Broad that we are talking here of a special sense in which properties can be gained or lost by events, a sense in which such ‘changes’ precisely constitute the ‘passage of time’—for this is to indulge in a kind of talk about time which, though common enough, strikes me as being hopelessly obscure.136
However, now the charge may be raised against me by other adherents of the tensed view of time that in denying that presentness (and likewise pastness and futurity) is a property, I deny myself any means of explaining the distinctive semantic contribution of tenses to our talk about time.137What does an expression like ‘the present moment’ mean, i f i t does not involve ascribing the property of presentness to a moment of time? My response is twofold. First, not every adjective in the surface structure of everyday grammar should be construed as having the logical role of expressing a property of items of some sort. Sometimes such an adjective may effectively be playing the logical role of a sentential operator or predicate modifier. For example, possible-worlds semanticists typically claim that ‘Possibly P’ means ‘In some possible world, P i s true’—but one might be (in fact, I am) inclined to reverse the direction of explanation here, and say that this use of the adjective ‘possible’, if it is to be understood at all, is to be construed not as expressing some property of items of a queer sort (‘worlds’), but rather in terms of the sentential operator ‘Possibly’. (So, although I myself indulged in possible-worlds talk in Chapter 1, I did not intend this to commit me to a robust realism concerning such worlds.) Likewise, then, ‘There is rain in Durham at the present moment’ is, in my view, just a roundabout way of saying ‘Presently, it is raining in
136 C. D. Broad and Storrs McCall both maintain that we can legitimately use the language of change to characterize temporality provided we distinguish between change in time and change of time: see Broad, Scientific Thought, 64 ff., and McCall, A Model of the Universe, 30–1. As I remarked earlier (see section 1), I think that this suggestion is unhelpful, because there can be literally nothing in common between the two sorts of ‘change': so why use the same word for both?
137 See e.g. Smith, Language and Time, 166 ff.
Durham'—or, even more succinctly, ‘It is now raining in Durham’. My second point is to repeat what I said before about certain notions being so fundamental that they are semantically irreducible—I take this view of the tenses. And why not? Don't we have to take the same view of an operator such as negation? ‘It is not the case that’ cannot be given a noncircular semantic explanation, yet of course we grasp its meaning as clearly as we grasp the meaning of anything.
At this point it may seem that my position with regard to the tenses is pretty much the same as A. N. Prior's, and yet in fact that is not so. This is connected with the fact that I use the metalinguistic constructions deployed earlier. Prior believed that the so-called tense operators could be iterated, allowing us to say things such as ‘It was the case that it will be the case that such-and-such’.138But because I believe that tensed sentences have token-reflexive truth-conditions, I cannot accept this sort of locution as legitimate—any more than I can accept as legitimate a sentence like ‘Over there it is raining here’.139The best we can do to make sense of the latter is to construe it as meaning ‘Over there it is true to say “It is raining here’“. Likewise, then, instead of saying ‘It was the case that it will be the case that it is now raining’, I must insist on saying ‘It was true to say “It will be true to say ‘It is now raining”“. In sum, then, I adopt the metalinguistic constructions exemplified above in order to avoid the difficulties of two versions of the tensed theory of time which I wish to reject: the view which treats presentness, pastness, and futurity as properties of events or moments, and the view which treats the so-called tense operators as iterable. (But I should stress that my recourse to such metalinguistic constructions is not at all indicative of a lack of metaphysical seriousness in my account of the nature of time.)
I should perhaps remark that in fact I differ from Prior also in not regarding the tenses as sentential operators, but rather as predicate modifiers : they can't, in my view, be sentential operators because any sentence on which they operated would have to have a tensed verb, so that at least some tensed sentences couldn't result from the application of a tense operator to a sentence—and if not these, then why any? Prior himself thought that the basic sentences from which all other tensed sentences were generated by the application of tense operators were present-tense sentences140—which is, in my view, to show a quite unjustified favouritism towards the present. No wonder, then, that Prior is often accused of
‘presentism’, an
138 See A. N. Prior, Papers on Time and Tense (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 8.
139 Cf. my ‘The Indexical Fallacy in McTaggart's Proof of the Unreality of Time’, Mind, 96 (1987), 62–70.
140 See Prior, Papers on Time and Tense, 8.
implicit denial of the ‘reality’ of past and future.141 No such charge can be levelled at me, precisely because I treat all three tenses as being on an equal footing.
This is not, however, to say that I think (as tenseless theorists of time typically do) that no ontological distinction whatever can be drawn between past, present, and future—an idea that has often been associated (rightly or wrongly) with some sort of fatalism or determinism. I am happy to allow, thus, that the law of excluded middle may not apply to all future tensed statements—that maybe, for example, it is now neither true nor false to say ‘It will rain in Durham on 12 March 2099’ or ‘There will be a sea battle tomorrow’. (Incidentally, if this is correct, then I should at least qualify my earlier remark that if it was once true to say ‘e is happening now’, then it was also true to say, earlier, ‘e will happen’: for i n many cases it could be that it was earlier neither true nor false to say ‘e will happen’, even though it was later true to say ‘e is happening now’.) On this matter of ‘future contingents’, then, I side with what I take to be Aristotle's position.142But be that as it may, returning to the question of the status of the tenses in logical grammar, I repeat my view that they are predicate modifiers. To say that Durham will be rainy is to predicate raininess of Durham in the future-tense mode. And it is because Durham is a concrete, time-bound object that, in my view, properties like raininess can only be predicated of it in some tensed mode, either past, present or future.