As far as our experience goes, we live in a dynamic present. Those two phenomenal features of experience—presentness and dynamism—are obviously connected. However, how they are connected is not obvious at all. In this paper, I criticise the view according to which the former can explain the latter, which I call sophisticated representationalism. My criticism will be based on an ambiguity in the notion of tense found in the philosophical literature, that between the perspectival understanding and the dynamic understanding (...) of tenses. The distinction is not just of independent interest, but it has a role in providing indirect evidence for the claim that the feeling of passage of time should be understood in non-representationalist terms. (shrink)

There is a common form of problem, to be found in many areas of philosophy, concerning the relationship between our perspective on reality and reality itself. We make statements (or form judgements) about how things are from a given standpoint or perspective. We make the statement ‘it is raining’ from the standpoint of the present time, for example, or the statement‘it is here’ from the standpoint of where we are, or the statement ‘I am glad’ from the standpoint of a (...) subject. In each of these cases, the statement has a certain ‘aspect’ or perspectival character in virtue of which its truth is capable of varying from one standpoint to another. Thus the statement ‘it is raining’ is tensed, the statement ‘it is here’ is ‘spatiocentric’ and the statement ‘I am glad’ is first-personal. The problem we then face is to determine whether this aspect is a feature of the reality which is described or merely a feature of the statement by which it is described. Is reality itself somehow tensed or spatiocentric or firstpersonal or is it merely that we describe a tenseless or spatially uncentered or impersonal reality from a tensed or spatiocentric or first-personal point of view? (shrink)

I attempt to set the stage for a constructive analysis of the nature and function of tensed belief as a distinct psychological type. After introducing tensed beliefs, I describe the philosophical issues that implicate them, including Prior’s “ thank goodness it’s over ” argument against the B-theory of time. I proceed to flesh out, and then argue against, two traditional treatments of tensed belief from the philosophy of time: the A-theoretic view, which starts from present facts or properties, and Hugh (...) Mellor's B-theoretic reply, which starts from the tenseless properties of tensed belief tokens. The explanatory failure of the former shows that, pace Prior, the existence of tensed attitudes does not favor the A-theory, while the failure of both shows that there are still explanatory gaps that we need to fill. I conclude by offering a working definition of tensed belief and the ideal methodology for filling out these explanatory gaps in future study. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Tensism is the view that tense is not merely a property of language and the mind, but of the world itself. Perspectivalism extends this idea to all perspectival properties be they person or locational. One challenge that perspectivalism faces is the problem of expressing the contents of the beliefs and utterances of persons that are in other perspectival positions. One proposed solution to this problem is to allow for semantic theories that "realign" the expression of contents so that (...) the contents expressed by persons in other perspectival positions can be re-expressed from one's own perspectival position. In this paper I argue that a similar semantic realignment strategy could be deployed in helping perspectivalists generally come to grips with a puzzle raised by the Special Theory of Relativity. In short, the strategy is to realign the expression of contents in another inertial frame so that they are expressed from within your inertial frame. As we will see, the strategy is not puzzle free. (shrink)

Michael Tooley presents a major new philosophical theory of the nature of time, offering a powerful alternative to the traditional "tensed" and recent "tenseless" accounts of time. He argues for a dynamic conception of the universe, in which past, present, and future are not merely subjective features of experience. He claims that the past and the present are real, while the future is not. Tooley's approach accounts for time in terms of causation. He therefore claims that the key to understanding (...) the dynamic nature of the universe is to understand the nature of causation. Time, Tense, and Causation is a landmark treatment of one of the oldest and most perplexing intellectual problems, and will be fascinating reading for anyone interested in the character of time. (shrink)

Those inclined to positions in the philosophy of time that take tense seriously have typically assumed that not all regions of space-time are equal: one special region of space-time corresponds to what is presently happening. When combined with assumptions from modern physics this has the unsettling consequence that the shape of this favored region distinguishes people in certain places or people traveling at certain velocities. In this paper I shall attempt to avoid this result by developing a tensed picture (...) of reality that is nonetheless consistent with ‘hypersurface egalitarianism’—the view that all hypersurfaces are equal. (shrink)

Presentism faces a serious challenge from truthmaker theory. Standard solutions to the truthmaker objection against presentism proceed in one of two ways. Easy road presentists invoke new entities to satisfy the requirements of truthmaker theory. Hard road presentists, by contrast, flatly refuse to give in to truthmaker demands. Recently, a third way has been proposed. This response seeks to address the truthmaking problem by tensing our truthmaker principles. These views, though intuitive, are under-developed. In this paper, I get serious about (...) a fundamentally tensed approach to truthmaking by sketching out the underlying ontological picture needed to make sense of tensed truthmaker theory. (shrink)

Many languages allow for “fake” uses of their past tense marker: the marker: can occur in certain contexts without conveying temporal pastness. Instead it appears to bear a modal meaning. Iatridou :231–270, 2000) has dubbed this phenomenon Fake Tense. Fake Tense is particularly common to conditional constructions. This paper analyzes Fake Tense in English conditional sentences as a certain kind of ambiguity: the past tense morphology can mark the presence of a temporal operator, but it (...) can also signal a specific modal operator. The ambiguity is proposed to be the result of recategorization: the Simple Past develops a second, modal meaning because of structural similarities between the temporal and the modal/epistemic domain. The proposal is spelled out in the generative semantics framework, using the restrictor approach to conditionals Semantics from different points of view, 1979; in: A. von Stechow and D. Wunderlich Semantics: an international handbook of contemporary research, 1991), and building on von Stechows et al.’s recent work on the English tense system The expression of time in language, 2010; Romero and von Stechow, Tense: introduction, 2008). (shrink)

In this book and the companion volume The Tenseless Theory of Time: A Critical Examination, Craig undertakes the first thorough appraisal of the arguments for and against the tensed and tenseless theories of time.

At the centre of Arthur Prior’s ‘Thank goodness’ argument for the A-theory of time is a particular form of relief. Time must objectively pass, Prior argues, or else the relief felt when a painful experience has ended is not intelligible. In this paper, I offer a detailed analysis of the type of relief at issue in this argument, which I call temporal relief, and distinguish it from another form of relief, which I refer to as counterfactual relief. I also argue (...) that existing discussions of the ‘Thank goodness’ argument—including Prior’s own—fail to give a satisfactory account of temporal relief, and that it needs to be seen as an emotion linked to the ability to engage in fairly sophisticated forms of planning. I also suggest that this has an impact on Prior’s claim that the idea of points in time plays no fundamental role in the semantic analysis of tenses. (shrink)

We direct different attitudes towards states of affairs depending on where in time those states of affairs are located. Call this the type asymmetry. The type asymmetry appears fitting. For instance, it seems fitting to feel guilt or regret only about states of affairs that are past, and anticipation only of states of affairs that are future. It has been argued that the type asymmetry could only be fitting if there are tensed facts, and hence that since it is fitting, (...) there are tensed facts. In this paper I argue that tensed facts are not necessary to ground the fittingness of the type asymmetry, and thus we have no reason, arising from the fittingness of the asymmetry, to posit such facts. I also argue for a stronger conclusion: even if these facts obtain they are no part of what grounds the fittingness of the type asymmetry. These facts are explanatorily redundant. (shrink)

In recent years the idea that perceptual content is tensed in the sense that we can perceive objects as present or as past has come under attack. In this paper the notion of tensed content is to the contrary defended. The paper argues that assuming that something like an intentionalistic theory of perception is correct, it is very reasonable to suppose that perceptual content is tensed, and that a denial of this notion requires a denial of some intuitively very plausible (...) principles. The paper discusses some common objections against the notion of tensed content and concludes that none of them succeeds in showing that perceptual content cannot be tensed. (shrink)

We shall describe the set of strongly meet irreducible logics in the lattice ϵLin.t of normal tense logics of weak orderings. Based on this description it is shown that all logics in ϵLin.t are independently axiomatizable. Then the description is used in order to investigate tense logics with respect to decidability, finite axiomatizability, axiomatization problems and completeness with respect to Kripke semantics. The main tool for the investigation is a translation of bimodal formulas into a language talking about (...) partitions of general frames into intervals so that relative to both Kripke frames and descriptive frames the expressive power of both languages coincides. (shrink)

If, as the new B-theory of time maintains, tensed sentences have tenseless truth conditions, it follows that it is possible for two sentence-tokens to have the sametruth conditions but different meanings. This conclusion forces a rethink of the traditional identification of truth conditions with meaning. There is an aspect of the meanings of tensed sentences that is not captured by their truth conditions, and that has so far eluded explanation. In this paper I intend to locate, examine, and explain this (...) feature of tensed meaning. (shrink)

Classical mereology (CM) is usually taken to be formulated in a tenseless language, and is therefore associated with a four-dimensionalist metaphysics. This paper presents three ways one might integrate the core idea of flat plenitude, i.e., that every suitable condition or property has exactly one mereological fusion, with a tensed logical setting. All require a revised notion of mereological fusion. The candidates differ over how they conceive parthood to interact with existence in time, which connects to the distinction between endurance (...) and perdurance. Similar issues arise for the integration of mereology with modality, and much of our discussion applies to this project as well. (shrink)

Special relativity has been understood by many as vindicating a tenseless conception of time, denying the existence of tensed facts and a fortiori objective temporal passage. The reason for this is straightforward: both passage and the obtaining of tensed facts require a universal knife-edge present moment—yet this structure is not easily reconcilable with the relativity of simultaneity. The above being said, the prospects for tense and passage are sometimes claimed to be improved on moving to cosmological solutions of general (...) relativity. In this paper, we evaluate in detail these arguments, finding that there remain several open questions to be addressed if the introduction of tensed facts into the relativistic context is to be compelling. Moreover, we argue that, even setting aside these issues, objective tense stands and falls in relativity for exactly the same reasons that it does in classical philosophical discussions on the matter. (shrink)

This paper first develops a theoretically motivated view of narrative as a special form of inferential, cooperative human communication, of the role that the past tense plays in the intersubjective coordination of narrators and readers, viz. that of ‘curtailing’ the immediate argumentative applicability of the represented situation, and of its relation to viewpoint management. In three case studies, it is subsequently shown how this helps to elucidate certain effects of present and past tense alternations in stories. While these (...) effects are multi-faceted and highly text-specific, there is a common denominator of the use of the past tense in the dimension of narrator-reader communication in the narratives. The analysis supports an independently motivated conception of intersubjectivity that assigns a special status to ‘coordination with other minds’, apart from senders and addressees. (shrink)

I might summarize this section by saying that the English tenses, according to this analysis, form quite a motley group. PAST, PRES and FUT serve to relate reference time to speech time, while WOULD and USED-TO behave like Priorian operators, shifting the point of evaluation away from the reference time. HAVE also shifts the point of evaluation away from the reference time, but in a more complicated way. And FUT, in contrast to PRES and PAST, is a substitution operator, putting (...) the reference time of its clause in the plate of the speech time of subordinate clauses. (shrink)

It is demonstrated that Hamblin's 15 tense theorem does not only hold for temporal logic with linear time but also for branching time. Furthermore three other theorems with finitely many tenses are shown.

Original essays by philosophers of language and philosophers of time exploring the semantics and metaphysics of tense.

Nihel Jhou (2021) takes issue with our argument to the conclusion that realism about tense implies realism about temporal passage (Correia and Rosenkranz 2020). Here we review his criticism and defend our conclusion by improving the original argument so as to do justice to the more demanding notion of temporal passage Jhou invokes.

A consideration of some of the most common questions about animal minds.Do birds have feelings? Can fish feel pain? Could a honeybee be anxious? For centuries, the question of whether or not animals are conscious like humans has prompted debates among philosophers and scientists. While most people gladly accept that complex mammals - such as dogs - share emotions and experiences with us, the matter of simpler creatures is much less clear. Meanwhile, the advent of the digital age and artificial (...) intelligence has created an added dimension to questions about non-human consciousness. In Tense Bees and Shell-Shocked Crabs, Michael Tye offers answers to some of today's most pressing questions about nonhuman consciousness. Blending the latest research about animal sensation with theories about the nature of consciousness, Tye develops a methodology for addressing the mysteries of the animal mind. Without endorsing any specific theory on the nature of consciousness, Tye tackles issues such as the animal experience of pain and fear, and the role of brain anatomy in determining consciousness. He then turns his attention to the artificial realm, considering whether complex robots could ever be considered conscious. Tye concludes with a discussion of how, if we consider animals conscious, this might impact our ethical obligations to them. From insects to crabs, fish to birds, Tense Bees and Shell-Shocked Crabs offers an insightful exploration of the ways in which animals relate to the world. Tense Bees and Shell-Shocked Crabs will appeal to students and scholars of philosophy and neuroscience, as well as general readers with an interest in animal and environmental ethics. (shrink)

This monograph is designed to provide an introduction to the principal areas of tense logic. Many of the developments in this ever-growing field have been intentionally excluded to fulfill this aim. Length also dictated a choice between the alternative notations of A. N. Prior and Nicholas Rescher - two pioneers of the subject. I choose Prior's because of the syntactical parallels with the language it symbolizes and its close ties with other branches of logi cal theory, especially modal logic. (...) The first chapter presents a wider view of the material than later chapters. Several lines of development are consequently not followed through the remainder of the book, most notably metric systems. Although it is import ant to recognize that the unadorned Prior-symbolism can be enriched in vari ous ways it is an advanced subject as to how to actually carry off these enrichments. Readers desiring more information are referred to the appropri ate literature. Specialists will notice that only the first of several quantifi cational versions of tense logic is proven complete in the final chapter. Again constraints of space are partly to blame. The proof for the 'star' systems is wildly complex and at the time of this writing is not yet ready for publi cation. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the distribution and the interpretation of the temporal suffix -kue in Mbyá, a Guaraní language that is closely related to Paraguayan Guaraní. This suffix is attested both inside noun phrases and inside clauses. Interestingly, its nominal uses give rise to inferences that are unattested in its clausal uses. These inferences were first identified in Paraguayan Guaraní by Tonhauser, who called them the existence property and the change of state property. Tonhauser further argued that these properties (...) are built into the lexical entry of the nominal temporal marker -kue. By contrast, I argue that -kue denotes a relative past tense both in its nominal and clausal uses, and that the existence and change of state properties are pragmatic inferences that arise from the interaction of the literal meaning of -kue with general constraints on the interpretation of noun phrases, notably constraints on the topicality of the time of evaluation of noun phrases. This allows me to maintain a uniform analysis of -kue across its nominal uses and its clausal uses. The analysis of -kue in Mbyá is relevant to a number of current debates on the expression of tense crosslinguistically. Firstly, the existence of relative tenses has sometimes been called into question. Klein notably argues that relative tenses are actually combinations of tense with the perfect aspect. Others have argued that there exist true relative tenses in certain languages. I argue that facts of Mbyá support the latter view. Secondly, Klein famously defined tenses as relations between topic times and the time of utterance. I argue, on the other hand, that relative tenses only denote relations between times, and that the topicality or non-topicality of their temporal arguments depends on their context of use, including their syntactic environment. Thirdly, this paper contributes to debates on the nature and reality of nominal tenses The Oxford handbook of tense and aspect, 2012), by arguing that tense in Mbyá is a genuinely nominal category, in the sense that temporal functional projections are part of the extended projection of the noun phrase. (shrink)

The main goal of Michael Tooley’s groundbreaking book is to establish a position intermediate between the tenseless theory of time and the standard tensed theory of time. Tooley argues for a novel version of the tensed theory of time, namely, that the future is unreal and the present and past real, and yet that reality consists only of tenseless facts. The question that naturally arises for the reader concerns an apparent paradox: how could the tensed theory of time be true (...) if reality consists only of tenseless facts? (shrink)

In this book Ludlow uses the metaphysics of time as a case study and focuses on the dispute between A-theorists and B-theorists about the nature of time.

A solution to the problem of intrinsic change for enduring things should meet three conditions. It should not replace monadic intrinsic properties by relations. It should not replace the having simpliciter of properties by standing in some relation to them. It should not rely on an unexplained notion of having an intrinsic property at a time. Johnston's solution satisfies the first condition at the expense of the second. Haslanger's solution satisfies the first and second at the expense of the third.

This work aims to make tense logic a more robust tool for ontologists, philosophers, knowledge engineers and programmers by outlining a fusion of tense logic and ontology of time. In order to make tense logic better understandable, the central formal primitives of standard tense logic are derived as theorems from an informal and intuitive ontology of time. In order to make formulation of temporal propositions easier, temporal operators that were introduced by Georg Henrik von Wright are (...) developed, and mapped to the ontology of time. (shrink)

The primary goal of Peter Ludlow's Semantics, Tense, and Time is to illustrate how one can study metaphysical issues from a linguistic/semantic perspective by addressing the debate between tenseless theorists and tensed theorists. Ludlow's book is noteworthy in part because of the novelty of its approach to this debate and in part because it addresses and endeavors to solve the metaphysical problems of temporal solipsism that other temporal solipsists have not addressed.

This book is collection of the the author’s previously published papers on the philosophy of modality and tense and it also includes three unpublished papers. The author provides an exposition and defence of certain positions for which he is well-known: the intelligibility of modality de re; the primitiveness of the modal; and the primacy of the actual over the possible. He also argues for some less familiar positions: the existence of distinctive forms of natural and normative necessity, not reducible (...) to any form of metaphysical necessity; the need to make a distinction between the worldly and unworldly, analogous to the distinction between the tensed and the tenseless; and the viability of a nonstandard form of realism about tense, which recognizes the tensed character of reality without conceding there is any privileged standpoint from which it is to be viewed. (shrink)

The paper proposes a formal account of Aristotle's trichotomy of verbs, in terms of properties of their continuous tensings, into S(state)-verbs, K(kinesis)-verbs, and E-(energeia)-verbs. Within a Fregean tense framework in which predicates are relativized to times, an account of the continuous tenses is presented and a preliminary account of the trichotomy devised, which permits an illuminating analogy to be drawn between the temporal properties of E- and K-verbs and the spatial properties of stuffs and substances. This analogy is drawn (...) upon in constructing a sophisticated version of the preliminary theory accommodating more of the linguistic data. (shrink)

On the basis of an experimental investigation of the construals of present under past in child French, we argue that French children, just like Japanese adult speakers, but unlike French adult speakers, allow pure simultaneous construals of present under past, where the present denotes an interval that lies completely in the past, be it in relative or complement clauses. We conclude that French children have two presents: an indexical present and a zero present (just like Japanese adults, cf. Ogihara 1999, (...) 2008), suggesting that French children have both the Japanese and the French setting for the Sequence of Tense parameter since they allow simultaneous construals of both present and past under past. This multiple grammar approach to tense interpretation in child French extends to child Japanese in so far as Japanese children have been argued to allow simultaneous readings of past under past, although this reading is unavailable in the target grammar (Matsuo & Hollebrandse 1999). (shrink)

Recent attempts to resolve the truthmaker objection to presentism employ a fundamentally tensed account of the relationship between truth and being. On this view, the truth of a proposition concerning the past supervenes on how things are, in the present, along with how things were, in the past. This tensed approach to truthmaking arises in response to pressure placed on presentists to abandon the standard response to the truthmaker objection, whereby one invokes presently existing entities as the supervenience base for (...) the truth of past-directed propositions. In this paper, I argue that a fundamentally tensed approach to truthmaking is implausible because it requires the existence of cross-temporal supervenience relations, which are anathema to presentism. (shrink)

In this paper it is shown how the DRT (Discourse Representation Theory) treatment of temporal anaphora can be formalized within a version of Montague Semantics that is based on classical type logic.

If, as the new B-theory of time maintains, tensed sentences have tenseless truth conditions, it follows that it is possible for two sentence-tokens to have the sametruth conditions but different meanings. This conclusion forces a rethink of the traditional identification of truth conditions with meaning. There is an aspect of the meanings of tensed sentences that is not captured by their truth conditions, and that has so far eluded explanation. In this paper I intend to locate, examine, and explain this (...) feature of tensed meaning. (shrink)

According to a number of authors it is possible to give tenseless (B-series) truth conditions for tensed sentences by utilizing token indexicals in something like the following fashion. (1a) An utterance u of 'Past S' is true iff at some time earlier than u, S is true (1b) An utterance u of 'Pres S' is true iff at some time overlapping u, S is true This strategy has been challenged on the grounds that it will break down in cases like (...) (2). (2) There was no spoken language A number of strategies have been attempted to circumvent this difficult, including the introduction of possible utterances, etc. In this paper I argue that such moves are unnecessary — that the problem turns on scope interactions with hidden modals in the theorems of the T-theory. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine Takashi Yagisawa’s response to van Inwagen’s ontic objection against David Lewis. Van Inwagen criticizes Lewis’s commitment to the absolutely unrestricted sense of ‘there is,’ and Yagisawa claims that by adopting modal tenses he avoids commitment to absolutely unrestricted quantification. I argue that Yagisawa faces a problem parallel to the one Lewis faces. Although Yagisawa officially rejects the absolutely unrestricted sense of a quantifying expression, he is still committed to the absolutely unrestricted sense of ‘is a (...) real.’. (shrink)

The semantics of tense has received a great deal of attention in the contemporary linguistics, philosophy and logic literatures. This is probably due partly to a renewed appreciation for the fact that issues involving tense touch on certain issues of philosophical importance (viz., determinism, causality, and the nature of events, of time and of change). It may also be due partly to neglect. Tense was noticeably omitted from the theories of meaning advanced in previous generations. In the (...) writings of both Russell and Frege there is the suggestion that tense would be absent altogether from an ideal or scientifically adequate language. (Tense was not the only blemish of natural language to be removed, of course, but tense is a more serious omission than, say, pronouns because it is present in every sentence of the language.) Finally, in recent years there has been a greater recognition of the important role that all of the so-called “indexical” expressions must play in an explanation of mental states and human behavior. Tense is no exception. Knowing that our friend died is cause for mourning, knowing that he dies is just another confirmation of a familiar syllogism. (shrink)

Is tense real and objective? Can the fact that something is past, say, be wholly objective, consistent with special relativity? The answer is yes, but only so long as the distinction has no ontological ground. There is a closely related question. Is the contrast between the determinate and the indeterminate real and objective, consistent with relativity and quantum mechanics? The answer is again yes, but only if the contrast has no ontological ground. Various accounts of it are explored, according (...) to different approaches to quantum mechanics. The Everett interpretation is much the most successful in accounting for it. (shrink)

Natural languages exhibit a great variety of grammatical paradigms. For instance, in English verbs are grammatically marked for tense, whereas in the tenseless Eskimo-Aleut language Kalaallisut they are marked for illocutionary mood. Although time is a universal dimension of the human experience and speaking is part of that experience, some languages encode reference to time without any grammatical tense morphology, or reference to speech acts without any illocutionary mood morphology. Nevertheless, different grammatical systems are semantically parallel in certain (...) respects. Specifically, I propose that English tenses form a temporal centering system, which monitors and updates topic times, whereas Kalaallisut moods form a modal centering system, which monitors and updates modal discourse referents. To formalize these centering parallels I define a dynamic logic that represents not only changing information but also changing focus of attention in discourse (Update with Centering, formalizing Grosz et al 1995). Different languages can be translated into this typed logic by directly compositional universal rules of Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) The resulting centering theory of tense and illocutionary mood draws semantic parallels across different grammatical systems. The centering generalizations span the extremes of the typological spectrum, so they are likely to be universal. In addition, the theory accounts for the translation equivalence of tense and illocutionary mood in a given utterance context. Following Stalnaker (1978) I assume that the very act of speaking up has a ‘commonplace effect’ on the context. It focuses attention on the speech act and thereby introduces default modal and temporal topics. These universal defaults complement language-specific grammars, e.g. English tenses and Kalaallisut moods. In a given utterance context the universal discourse-initial defaults plus language-specific grammatical marking may add up to the same truth conditions.. (shrink)