The Gist of Brightly's Presentism

An excerpt from a comment by David Brightly  to this entry:

My mind is populated with ideas of things. I acquire these ideas (a) directly through acquaintance with external objects and (b) indirectly by description in language and image. These ideas of things guide my interaction with the outside world. Having seen a bear go into the cave or having been told 'There's a bear in the cave', I approach the cave with caution. Through my contact with the external world I come to accept that all external things come into existence, exist for a while, and then pass out of existence. The ceasing to exist of things that I am familiar with and am attached to is an everyday experience. When I have such an experience, or have a thing's passing described to me, my idea of that thing becomes modified. None of the idea itself passes away, at least not initially. Instead the idea (not the thing it's an idea of) acquires a new attribute, analogous to the label 'Account Closed' on the front of a business ledger, signifying that, to a first approximation, the content of the idea can be safely ignored for purposes of guiding my life. I might express this label by saying 'The thing is past' or 'The thing is in the past' or 'The thing has ceased to exist'. The important point here is that, despite appearances, these assertions are not predicating something of the thing itself but rather of my idea of it, namely that the idea is redundant.

Suppose that a monument M, of which I had direct sensory acquaintance, has been demolished.  M no longer exists, but my memorial ideas, my memories, of M still exist. Consider the most vivid of these, idea R.  R is obviously distinct from M because R is a mental representation of M. R exists now 'in' my mind; M does not exist now, and, being a physical chunk of the external world, never existed 'in' any (finite) mind either spatially or merely intentionally. When I learn that M no longer exists, R undergoes a modification; it "acquires a new attribute" as David puts it.  This new attribute is not an attribute of M, which no longer exists, but solely an attribute of R.  We could describe this attribute as the property of not being of or about anything real or existent. It comes to the same if we call this attribute the property of being non-veridical. This simply means that R is not true of anything.  R has thus undergone a modification: it was veridical when M existed, but is now non-veridical when R no longer exists.  (In my example, R is a memory, but it might be a past-directed description, say, 'the only statue at the corner of Third and Howard.' 

You can see where David is going with this. He is proposing that we analyze 'M is (wholly) past, ' M is in the past,'  and 'M has ceased to exist'  in terms of 'R has ceased to be veridical.'  

One virtue of this analysis is that R is available, and available at present, which satisfies the demands of presentism according to which only what exists (present tense) exists.   But I don't think the analysis is workable even as a specification of truth conditions. The cup out of which Socrates drank the hemlock existed but no one now has any ideas about it, that very cup. And there are innumerable things that existed but no longer exist about which no one now or ever had any ideas whether singular or general.  What existed cannot depend for its having existed on the present contents of any finite mind.  But there is worse to come when we ask about truthmakers. 

If you are wondering what the difference is between a truth condition and a truthmaker, our old friend Alan Rhoda in an old blog post does a good job of explaining the distinction:

. . .truthmakers are parcels of reality . . . .

Not so with truth conditions. Truth conditions are semantic explications of the meaning of statements. They tell us in very precise terms what has to be true for a particular statement to be true. For example, a B-theorist like Nathan Oaklander will say that the truth conditions of the sentence "The 2006 Winter Olympics are over" is given by the sentence "The 2006 Winter Olympics end earlier than the date of this utterance". Thus truth conditions are meaning entities like statements that are used to spell out or analyze the meaning of other statements.

'M existed' is true, true now, and contingently true now (it might not have been true now and would not have been true now if the Antifa thugs hadn't dynamited the monument).  We have here a truthbearer that clearly needs a truthmaker.  So I ask a simple question of the presentist: What makes it true that M has ceased to exist? (In general: what makes any presently true, past-tensed, contingent truth true?)  The truthmaker cannot be or involve M because M, on presentism, does not exist.

Note that the truthmaker of 'M has ceased to exist' cannot be the fact that the memorial representation or idea R has ceased to be  veridical. This answer avails nothing since it merely postpones the question, which becomes: what makes it true that R has ceased to be veridical?  'R is no longer veridical' is true, presently true, and contingently true. It needs a truthmaker.    

If the presentist says instead that 'M has ceased to exist' had a truthmaker in the past, what makes true this tensed claim, namely, the claim that the truthbearer in question had a truthmaker in the past? 

Could past-tensed contingent truths be brute truths?  (A brute truth, by definition, has no need of a truthmaker.)   I may come back to this topic in a separate entry.  But if you grant me that the true, present-tensed, contingent 'BV is  seated' (assertively uttered at t) needs a truthmaker, then how could the mere passage of time do away with the need for a truthmaker of the presently true, contingent, past-tensed 'BV was seated' (assertively uttered at t* > t)?

Finally, the presentist might reject the need for any truthmakers at all.  I would respond by hitting him over the head with Aristotle's Categories, figuratively speaking of course.

Comments

[David Brightly]

Evening Bill,

You can see where David is going with this. He is proposing that we analyze 'M is (wholly) past', ' M is in the past,' and 'M has ceased to exist' in terms of 'R has ceased to be veridical.'

That's not where I'm hoping to get! I see no need to explain the phenomenon of the cessation of existence in terms of ideas or memories. I take it as an external given. The question is, How do we speak about it? I'm suggesting that if R exemplifies the property you are calling 'non-veridical' and I'm calling 'non-encounterable' then we express this by saying 'M is in the past', etc. I entirely agree that 'What existed cannot depend for its having existed on the present contents of any finite mind'. So I think your critique from there on misses the mark.

I see now that 'unencounterable' is badly-chosen. Going back to your piece on Yourgrau for inspiration, I imagine an unencounterable representation as akin to a crossed-out picture. The representation is 'stamped' with some symbol that has no meaning in the represented world. Instead, it nullifies the representation itself. Pay no attention to the encodings within!

[BV]

Good Morning, David.

Your response suggests that you and I are not addressing the same question. To put it crudely, I am concerned with the world, you with talk about the world. My orientation is realist, yours anti-realist, like Buckner's.

Here is my question. Is temporal reality as it is in itself apart from our systems of representation such that every temporally real item is temporally present? Or is it rather the case that there are temporally real items that are temporally non-present?

[Dmitri]

ELIOT, Burnt Norton

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

[David Brightly]

I'm sorry, Bill, but for me your question is ambiguous. For concreteness let's suppose that 'temporally real item' means the same as 'former US president'. Joe Biden is excluded. How many items are there? Taking 'are' to be strictly present-tensed the answer is five: JC, BC, GWB, BO, DT, none of which is temporally non-present. Interpreting 'are there' more generously the answer is forty-four, of which thirty-nine could be said to be temporarily non-present. So there is a language issue at the heart of this question, even at the level of discussing its Moorean truths. My hope is that if we can sort out the language to our mutual satisfaction then the metaphysical question evaporates.

[BV]

Dmitri,

I will say only that T. S. Eliot is a great poet, playwright, and cat fancier.

David,

Will respond later. Thanks for your comments.