Three plausible views—Presentism, Truthmaking, and Independence—form an inconsistent triad. By Presentism, all being is present being. By Truthmaking, all truth supervenes on, and is explained in terms of, being. By Independence, some past truths do not supervene on, or are not explained in terms of, present being. We survey and assess some responses to this.

Presentists hold that only present things exist. But we all, presentists included, utter sentences that appear to involve quantification over non-present objects, and so we all, presentists included, seem to commit ourselves to such objects. Equally, we all, presentists included, take utterances of many past-tensed (and some future-tensed) sentences to be true. But if no past or future things exist, it’s hard to see how there can be anything that those utterances are about, which makes them true. This paper presents (...) a hitherto unexplored response to both problems: pretence fictionalism about the non-present. This view combines semantic factualism with psychological non-cognitivism. Sentences that appear to quantify over the non-present have propositional content and (almost all of) those propositions are false because the thing they are about – the non-present – does not exist. Nevertheless, when we utter such sentences we don’t thereby utter something false. Our utterances do not report the belief that the propositional content of the sentence uttered is true; rather, they express a non-cognitive attitude towards that content: namely an attitude of pretence. Hence by thinking various thoughts, and uttering various sentences we are, collectively, pretending as though things were (or will be) thus and so. (shrink)

Strong non-maximalism holds that some truths require no ontological ground of any sort. Strong non-maximalism allows one to accept that some propositions are true without being forced to endorse any corresponding ontological commitments. We show that there is a version of truthmaker theory available—anti-aboutness truthmaking—that enjoys the dialectical benefits of the strong non-maximalist’s position. According to anti-aboutness truthmaking, all truths require grounds, but a proposition need not be grounded in the very thing(s) that the proposition is about. We argue that (...) if strong non-maximalism can be defended, then so can anti-aboutness truthmaking on the very same basis; one can enjoy the benefits of strong non-maximalism without giving up on the idea that truth is always grounded in being. (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)

1. IntroductionA popular view in metaphysics is that which propositions are true depends upon how the world is . In more evocative language, truth requires ground. This thought then gets used to do some serious work. As Sider has it, ‘[t]he point of … the principle that truth supervenes on being is to rule out dubious ontologies’. Here, I argue that ‘dubious’ ontologies are theoretically virtuous.

Let us call non-presentist dynamism any view according to which (a) a single moment of time is objectively present and (b) which time is objectively present changes and (c) objectively non-present times exist, and at least some of these are occupied by objects, events, or properties. Non-presentist dynamism has an advantage over presentist dynamism—the view that only present objects, properties, and events exist, and that which objects, properties and events there are, changes—in the truthmaking arena. Presentists have trouble finding plausible (...) truthmakers for past (and future) tensed propositions, since no past, (or future) objects, properties, or events exist, which could make true said propositions. Hence presentists have to resort to one of two strategies. According to the first, nothing makes past (or future) tensed propositions true, though some are true nonetheless. For some class of propositions, the truth of said propositions does not in any way depend on ontology. This strategy rejects even the fairly weak requirement that for any proposition P, and worlds w and v, if P is true in w but not in v, then either something exists in v but not in w or else some n-tuple of things stands in some fundamental relation in v but not in w . Call this account No Truthmaker: -/- No Truthmaker: There are no truthmakers for past-tensed truths. -/- Embracing No Truthmaker is typically taken to be a cost of presentism. According to the second strategy, some presently existing thing makes true past-tensed truths. Advocates of this strategy embrace anti-aboutness truthmaking, the view that while all truths are grounded in being, the truth of a proposition need not grounded in the thing(s) the proposition is about. Since past things do not exist, past-tensed propositions are made true by something other than what they are about. Such presentists endorse some version of Present Record Truthmaking. (shrink)

What do “existing” and “having existed” mean? The answer to this question depends radically on the metaphysical assumption that we are making about the nature of time. If we take the present to be privileged over other times, then “having existed” is bound to express a notion close to non-existence. If we think that the present has no ontological supremacy over what was and what will be, then the difference between “having existed” and “existing” is bound to be no deeper (...) than the difference between “existing here” and “existing there”. In this article I show that the view to the effect that the present is privileged, i.e. “presentism”, suffers from a fatal problem concerning the present truth of many past-tensed existential statements. Therefore, we had better abandon it in favour of “eternalism” – the rival view to the effect that between “existing” and “having existed” there is no ontological difference. (shrink)

Presentism says that only present objects exist. But the view has trouble grounding past-tensed truths like “dinosaurs existed”. Standard Eternalism grounds those truths by positing the existence of past objects—like dinosaurs. But Standard Eternalism conflicts with the intuition that there is genuine change—the intuition that there once were dinosaurs and no longer are any. I offer a novel theory of time—‘The Imprint’—that does a better job preserving both the grounding and genuine change intuitions. The Imprint says that the past and (...) present exist, but where the present exhibits mass-energy, the past only consists of curved empty regions of spacetime. We therefore avoid saying that there are dinosaurs, since there is no mass-energy in the past; but the curvature of the past gives us a way to ground the truth that “dinosaurs existed”. (shrink)

This book discusses fundamental topics on contemporary Ockhamism. The collected essays show how contemporary Ockhamism can impact areas of research such as semantics, metaphysics and also the philosophy of science. In addition, the volume hosts one historian of Medieval philosophy who investigates the way in which William of Ockham “in flesh and bone” construed time and, more generally, future contingency. The essays explore the different meanings of this theory. They cover three main topics, in particular. The first examines the thesis (...) that sentences and propositions about the future have a definite truth value, without any ensuing commitment to determinism or fatalism. The second topic looks at the problem whether the branching-time model needs to countenance a privileged branch (the so-called Thin Red Line). Finally, the third topic considers the idea that there are so-called soft facts. These would be the subject matter of sentences and propositions verbally about the present or the past, but metaphysically about a later time, and which might change in the future. Overall, the book provides an updated and rigorous idea of the debate about Ockhamism. It gives readers a deeper understanding into this philosophical approach influenced by William of Ockham, characterized by the rejection of the Aristotelian idea that, in order to preserve the contingency of the future, future contingents must be deemed neither true nor false. (shrink)

We defend two claims: (1) if one is attracted to a strong non-maximalist view about truthmaking, then it is natural to construe this as the view that there exist fundamental truths; (2) despite considerable aversion to fundamental truths, there is as yet no viable independent argument against them. That is, there is no argument against the existence of fundamental truths that is independent of any more specific arguments against the ontology accepted by the strong non-maximalist. Thus there is no argument (...) that the strong non-maximalist herself will find dialectically motivating. (shrink)