The puzzle of the changing past

Analysis 75 (1):59-67 (2015)
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Abstract

If you utter sentence (1) ‘Obama was born in 1961’ now, you say something true about the past. Since the past will always be such that the year 1961 has the property of being a time in which Obama was born, it seems impossible that could ever be false in a future context of utterance. We shall consider the case of a sentence about the past exactly like (1), but which was true when uttered a few years ago and is no longer true now. On this basis, we shall conclude that the past has changed.

Author Profiles

Luca Barlassina
University of Sheffield
Fabio Del Prete
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

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