In an earlier post (How Long Is The Present?) we had a little warm-up exercise. I assumed that presentism must hold that the only time that exists is a durationless present moment. I also tried to motivate it with two arguments. Let’s just take that assumption for granted in this post. Presentism must hold that the present is a durationless instantaneous moment and no other moments exist.
Puzzle One: Referring to the Present Moment with “Now”
Consider the utterance of the word “now”. If eternalism is true, then “now” refers to the time of utterance, and eternalism seems to have enough in the toolkit to be the referent of “now”. One candidate for the referent is the the entire range of time it takes to utter “now”.
It’s a little difficult for me to see what the referent of ‘now’ could be if presentism is true and present moments are durationless. I doubt it is what the presentist could plausibly countenance as the present moment. It can’t be the entire range of time that it takes to utter the word “now” –
ranges of time are not present moments for the presentist (if the assumption in the previous paragraph is correct).
I suppose the presentist could hold that it’s the first moment at which the speaker begins the event of uttering the word “now” – But I’m not sure that’s true. At least, in some cases where I utter “now” I’m not trying to pick out that moment. I’m trying my best to pick out some range of
moments that occur during the utterance.
Furthermore, suppose I utter “Now, I am speaking” – If ‘now’ denotes the first moment at which I start to utter ‘now’, then what I utter is false – because ‘I am speaking’ is present tense and by the time I utter those words the first moment of the utterance of ‘now’ is past.
Some presentists maintain that you can refer to things that do not exist and say true things about them. Call this non-serious presentism. The non-serious presentist might hold that ‘now’ does refer to the entire range of time at which ‘now’ is uttered (just like the eternalist might) because non-serious presentism allows for reference to non-existing times.
A problem for this view is that ‘now’ doesn’t really pick out the present. Eternalism still comes out OK because ‘now’ functions indexically. Which brings me to a related concern.
Puzzle Two: “Now” has never been uttered in the present.
If presentism is true, then no one in the history of the world has ever uttered the word “now” in any present moment. Assuming that it takes some amount of time to utter the word ‘now’ – then no one has ever completely uttered the word ‘now’ in the present. That’s a little odd considering that we typically take it for granted that the present moment is precisely when the word ‘now’ gets uttered.
Puzzle Three: Gunky Time
Here’s a third puzzle. This one has less to do with the referent of ‘now’ and more to do with the presentist commitment to durationless moments of time.
One might think that it is metaphysically possible for time to be gunky in a way that is analogous to the way that metaphysicians appeal to the possibility of gunky matter and gunky space. That is, it seems metaphysically possible that there no smallest unit of time (for any unit of time, you can always split that unit into two other units).
Now let’s go a step further. If you’re on board with the possibility that time can always be split, then you might also be on board with another possibility – namely that time does not have durationless moments. At a minimum, this is epistemically possible. For all I know there are no durationless moments.
If it’s metaphysically possible for time to lack durationless moments, then it is metaphysically possible that presentism is false in worlds where time passes. If presentism is supposed to be a necessary truth about the nature of existing things in worlds where time passes, then presentism is false.
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So those are my half-baked puzzles. Nothing devastating as far as I can tell, but they seem like they’re worth thinking about to me.
Andrew…interesting stuff. I tend to think of “now” in ordinary usage contexts as an indexical, roughly picking out a time, the way “here” roughly picks out a place. Note that, since the Earth is hurtling through space at quite a velocity, no one has ever uttered “here” in precisely the location intended. But we get aong well enough by allowing for relative location, and bracketing the Earth’s movement. Perhaps something similar with the temporal indexical now? We simply interpret the utterance charitably, as though we understood the exact moment to which it refers in any given context of utterance.
This is an interesting example with the Earth.
Notice, however, that with the Earth there is a candidate for the referent of “here” that can be cashed out in terms of relations to other objects – which don’t change even as the Earth moves. (If someone were a relationalist about regions of space).
If one were not a relationalist about space one might also hold that “here” is vague in that indeterminately picks out a range of locations and we simply get by with that vagueness. However, all of those locations exist in order to be the candidate referents. (Note this is not an option for the presentist).
Or we might try and get by with your relative location strategy which looks like a way for the substantivalist to borrow the relationalist response but keep their substantivalism – however – relative locations make sense because there are other objects located at other regions – it’s difficult to see how to transport this into the time debate to the service of presentism. On the serious presentist view there are no other objects at other times to be related to.