More on the Reality of the Past: Reply to Brightly

 In an earlier thread, David Brightly offers the following penetrating comment:

My birth certificate purports to record the event of my birth which occurred on such and such a day to such and such parents, etc. For an event or process to exist is for it to be ongoing or occurring. So my birth, being wholly past, no longer exists. This does not mean it never occurred or never existed, just that the passage [of] time brought that event or process to an end. Bill would argue that if the passage of time annihilated my birth then my birth certificate would record nothing (no real event). This could only be true under a strict and literal interpretation of 'annihilation' as making a thing (and the world) as if [it] never existed. Elsewhere Bill calls this 'absolute annihilation'. It seems to me, however, that [E. J.] Lowe is operating with a weaker notion of annihilation as a bringing to an end---a mere ceasing to be rather than a ceasing to having been.

I too believe that the past is (was?) real, but I suspect my understanding of this claim differs from Bill's. Bill appears to contrast 'reality' with 'nothingness'. I contrast 'real' with 'imaginary'. We need to look into this difference of view. Arguably a blank birth certificate records no event. A falsified birth certificate records an event, but an imaginary or unreal one.

I will first summarize our points of agreement and then try to locate the bone of contention.

David and I agree about birth certificates. Some are blank, some are forged/falsified, and some record actual births, and in most cases wholly past actual birth events.  We agree that for an event or process to exist (present tense) is for it to be ongoing or occurring. We agree that there are events. We agree that some events no longer exist in the sense that they are not now occurring, but did occur.  We agree that there is an important distinction between what did exist and what never existed. (For example, Kierkegaard's engagement to Regine Olsen did exist whereas his marriage to her never existed.) And we both believe that the past is real. That is, we both assertively utter tokens of 'The past is real.' But I am pretty sure that the contents of our assertions, i.e., the propositions (thoughts) we assert when we make those assertions, are different. To anticipate, I believe that past items are real in that they exist simpliciter.  I suspect that David will balk at this and say that past items are real in that they existed, and leave it at that. I will explain existence simpliciter in a moment.

Note that when David informs us of his belief about the reality of the past, he  tellingly waffles in his formulation: "I too believe that the past is (was?) real . . . " David is trying to get by with ordinary tensed English. He senses, however, that to say that the past is (present tense) real is false, indeed, absurd (self-contradictory). Bear in mind that this discussion is about the reality of what is wholly past. Surely it would be absurd to say that what is wholly past is present. But if he says that the wholly past was real, then he says something tautological.  Of course the past was real.  If we stick with tensed English we won't be able to formulate the problem.

To locate the bone of contention in the philosophy of time over which presentists and 'eternalists' fight, we must navigate, if we can, between the Scylla of self-contradiction and Charybdis of tautology.   Mixed metaphors aside, the issue is whether the past exists simpliciter. When I say that the past is real, I mean that past items exist simpliciter. I do not mean that past items exist now -- which would be self-contradictory -- or that they existed -- which  would be trivial. What I mean, and what the dispute is about, cannot be understood without this notion of existence simpliciter. And the issue is meaningful only if this notion is meaningful. So what is existence simpliciter?

E. J. Lowe's (correct) answer is that to exist simpliciter is to be a part of reality as a whole. (Monist article, 284) To deploy a Jamesian trope, to exist simpliciter is to be part of the "furniture of the world." Or you could say that to exist simpliciter is to be listed in the final ontological inventory.  Equivalently, to exist simpliciter is to be in the range of our logical quantifiers when they are taken 'wide open.'  To exist simpliciter is simply to exist.  Existence simpliciter abstracts from when an item exists if it exists in time, and indeed whether an item is in time at all. 

So the issue cannot be whether the wholly past is real or was real.  The issue is whether the wholly past exists simpliciter.  Presentists deny this. They maintain that, with respect to temporal items, everything that exists simpliciter exists at present, and thus that nothing non-present exists simpliciter.  (The present in question is what William James calls  the "specious" or short-term present.) The presentist thesis is not trivially true. It is not the thesis that  whatever exists (present tense) exists (present tense). That is of course true, but of no philosophical interest. Presentism is the metaphysically substantive claim that whatever exists simpliciter exists (present tense).  And of course the converse holds as well for the presentist: whatever exists (present tense) exists simpliciter. Presentism is a biconditional thesis. 

David needs to tell me whether he accepts the notion of existence simpliciter.  It is of course not my invention but is  standard in the literature.  David also needs to tell me whether he agrees with me that the thesis of presentism cannot even be formulated without the notion of existence simpliciter.  By  'presentism' I of course intend a metaphysically  substantive thesis about the 'relation' of time and existence, not the mere tautology that whatever exists (present tense) exists (present tense) and such related trivialities as 'What no longer exists did exist but does not exist' and 'What still exists, did exist and exists (present tense).'    

Let us now consider a concrete example, Winston Churchill.  The gross facts or Moorean data are not in dispute. WC existed, but does not now exist.  So far, no metaphysics. Just ordinary tensed English, and a bit of uncontroversial historical knowledge.  Reflecting on the data, we note that some of what is said now about WC is true, and some false.  WC is now the logical subject of both true and false predications (predicative statements).  And this despite the fact that WC does not now exist. At this point a philosophical problem arises for the presentist. On presentism, only that which presently exists exists simpliciter. What did exist and what will exist does not exist simpliciter. How can something that does not exist simpliciter be the logical subject of such presently true past-tensed  contingent affirmative statements  as 'WC smoked cigars'? This is the question to which presentism has no good answer.  It would be a very bad answer to say that the past-tensed sentence is true now because WC existed.  For on presentism, WC is nothing; he is not just nothing now -- which is trivially true -- but simply nothing, i.e., nothing simpliciter. And if WC is simply nothing, then he is not 'there' (read existentially, not locatively) to be the logical subject of predications.  I am assuming the following principle. 

Veritas sequitur esse. (VSE) Truth follows being in the sense that, necessarily, if a statement about a thing is true, then that thing exists simpliciter. There are no truths about nonexistent 'things.'  I take the principle just enunciated to be very secure, epistemically speaking, though not self-evident. (Meinong did not find it self-evident; indeed he rejected it.)  Accepting the VSE principle as I do, I say that WC exists simpliciter and that therefore presentism is false.

What then are David and I disagreeing about? We agree that WC is actual, not merely possible, and real as opposed to fictional/imaginary.  So there is a clear sense in which we both accept the reality of the past. The difference between us may be that David hasn't thought through what it means to say of a past item that it is real.  He contents himself with platitudes.  No doubt WC is real as opposed to imaginary or fictional. But what is it to be real given that (a) WC is wholly past and that (b) presentism is true?

Comments

[David Brightly]

Thanks, Bill. That has clarified things a great deal, I think. You ask two questions of me:

Q1. Do I accept the notion of existence simpliciter? Yes and No. In so far as 'X exists simpliciter' appears to be a shorthand (a computer scientist's macro) for the disjunction of tensed claims 'X existed or X exists or X will exist' then I can guardedly accept it. This does seem to capture what is meant by 'listed in the final ontological inventory', does it not? But I worry that if we aren't very careful it can lead to logical mistakes. 'Simpliciter' here is a strange beast. It isn't an adverb qualifying 'to exist' for that would make 'to exist simpliciter' into a tenseless verb, and there are no such things. Nor, I think, does 'exists simpliciter' attribute a property to an item, so I cannot see 'existence simpliciter' as a concept. There is a whiff of 'grue' about it.

Q2. Do I agree that the thesis of presentism cannot even be formulated without the notion of existence simpliciter? No. I take the core intuition of presentism to be that there is nothing 'outside' the ever-changing present and that the 'spatialisation' of time is a misleading metaphor. But I think of presentism as more of an attitude than a thesis. That attitude is one of adhering to tensed language and avoiding gerrymandered terms. You say that if we stick with tensed English we won't be able to formulate the problem. I say that if we try to go beyond tensed English we will be in danger of formulating a pseudo-problem. For example, you say,

When I say that the past is real, I mean that past items exist simpliciter. I do not mean that past items exist now -- which would be self-contradictory -- or that they existed -- which would be trivial.

We differ here. Let x be an element of the past. You want to explicate 'x is real' as 'x exists simpliciter', which, you say, means something non-trivially beyond 'x existed or x exists or x will exist'. But how do we get beyond the disjunction? That remains unclear.

Our question is, How do we reconcile the reality of the past with the presentist intuition that reality is exhausted by the present, that there is nothing outside the present? By equivocating between things and ideas of things. Here is a sketch. Let IWC, IBJ, and ISH denote my idea (singular concept) of Winston Churchill, Boris Johnson, and Sherlock Holmes, respectively. I categorise ideas of things in two dimensions: REAL/IMAGINARY and PAST/NOW/FUTURE:

IWC---REAL---PAST
IBJ----REAL---NOW
ISH---IMAG---PAST

Only those things the ideas of which I characterise as both REAL and NOW can I expect to encounter and to be able know by acquaintance. There are as it were two species of unreality, the IMAGINARY and the PAST/FUTURE. When I talk about the objects of these ideas a degree of ambiguity arises. I might say,

Winston is real but in the past / Winston was real
Boris is real
Sherlock is/was a fictional detective

All these are acceptable ways of expressing the categorisation of the corresponding ideas.

[BV]

David,

Thank you for your direct and very clear answers to my questions. You have made the right objections. Pursuing these matters will be fruitful (for me at least) and my plan is to devote stand-alone entries to (Q1) and (Q2), respectively. So stay tuned.

To provide context, I should point out that my view is that the problems that divide presentists and 'eternalists' are genuine, but insoluble. So anything I say in criticism of presentism is not to be taken as a (veiled) argument for eternalism which, I think, has its own problems.

[David Brightly]

Morning Bill. I have been trying to fit this topic into the larger one of language and reference that we have also touched on over the years (!). I look forward to your next posts.