Abstract

An account of temporal supervenience requires an account of temporal predication: a semantic account of the language in which facts about ordinary time are stated. For the detenser, the problem of temporal predication is essentially the task of giving an account of the semantic function of the modifier ‘at t’ in ‘a is F at t’. In the project of explaining temporal supervenience, an account of temporal predication functions as an analysis of ordinary temporal facts, which is required to build an explanatory bridge from these temporal facts to their spatiotemporal supervenience base. This chapter discusses various accounts of temporal predication that share the common feature that temporal supervenience cannot be explained on the basis of them, because these accounts allow no plausible explanatory link between the facts of persistence and change and any facts about spacetime.