Perspectives on Ontology - registration deadline

The deadline to register for Perspectives on Ontology (July 1st) is fast approaching; so if you want to come to this fantastic conference, you'd better send your registration in asap!

Details here:

www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~phlrpc/Perspectives on Ontology.htm

Truthmakers, presentism and indeterminacy

In my ‘Truthmaking for Presentists’ paper, I end up defending the following 2 theses:

1) Truths concerning what was or will be the case are grounded by the presently existing world instantiating a distributional property – I’ll call it a world history – that says how it is across time.
2) The asymmetry of fixity – that the past is fixed and the future is open – is to be explained as follows: there is a non-empty non-singleton set, S, of candidate world histories, such that it’s determinate that exactly one of them is instantiated by the present world but not determinate of any member of S that it is instantiated by the present world. The candidate properties ‘agree’ on how the past was and ‘disagree’ on how the future will be, which is why propositions concerning the past are fixed whilst those concerning the future are unsettled.

This raises a bunch of questions: What makes it the case that the present candidates for being our world’s world history are the present candidates for being our world’s world history? What change in being has there been between yesterday and now that accounts for the fact that there are fewer candidate world histories? What is the difference in being between our world and a world whose past is like ours but which has a less open future? What makes it true that it’s determinate that a member of S is the world history of our world? What makes it true that it’s indeterminate of any particular member of S that it is the world history of our world?

These questions raise issues concerning how the truthmaker theorist should deal with propositions of the form ‘(In)determinately, p’, which I’ve been thinking about recently.

There are two broad approaches to answering these questions. On the first approach, propositions of the form ‘Determinately, p’ or ‘It’s indeterminate whether p’ get treated just like any other. On this view, there will be some truthmaker for ‘Determinately, p’, some thing which can’t exist and p not be determinately true, and some truthmaker for ‘It’s indeterminate whether p’, some thing which can’t exist and p have a determinate truth-value.

This approach will, perhaps, be favoured by those who hold that there is no gap between truth and determinate truth. On this view, it’s safe to simply identify the truthmaker for ‘determinately, p’ with the truthmaker for p: all God has to do to make p a determinate truth is to make p true, so any thing that makes p true will make it true that p is determinately true. On this view, indeterminacy leads to a truth-value gap, and so a truthmaker for ‘It’s indeterminate whether p’ can be thought of simply as something whose existence necessarily excludes the existence both of any truthmaker for p and any truthmaker for not-p.

I, however, hold that there is a gap between truth and determinate truth. More has to happen for the world to be such that p is determinately true than that p is true. If truth doesn’t entail determinate truth, what more is needed of ontology to make p determinately true than is needed to make it merely true? I reject the answer that says there must be an additional truthmaker for ‘Determinately, p’: rather, I say that the truthmaker for p must simply be a determinate existent rather than a mere existent.

If God wants to make sure that p is not only true but determinately true, He doesn’t need to add another entity to the world, in addition to the truthmaker for p, that will make it true that p is determinately true. Rather, all He needs to do to ensure that p is not merely true but determinately true is ensure that the truthmaker for p not only exists but determinately exists, (or at least that it’s determinate that a truthmaker for p exists – He needn’t make it determinate of a particular truthmaker for p that it exists). If God wants to make a world where p is indeterminate, He should create a world where it’s indeterminate whether a truthmaker for p or a truthmaker for not-p exists. And if He wants to create a world where p is true but indeterminate, He should create a world where there is a truthmaker for p but where it doesn’t determinately exist (and nor is it determinate that there is any truthmaker for p).

The idea is that propositions expressed by sentences involving the determinacy or indeterminacy operators don’t themselves get matched up to possible truthmakers. Rather, the ‘(in)determinacy free’ propositions that are their constituents get matched up to possible truthmakers, and the ‘(in)determinacy involving’ propositions get their truth-value bases on whether those truthmakers determinately exist, determinately don’t exist, exist but don’t determinately exist, or don’t exist but don’t determinately not exist.

Traditionally, the truthmaker theorist thinks that in order to fix exactly what is true, God simply has to decide what to create. On the view under offer, this isn’t quite right. Deciding what to create fixes the truth-value of the ‘(in)determinacy free’ propositions; but to further fix the truth-values of the ‘(in)determinacy involving’ propositions, God has to do one more thing: decide which of the things He’s decided to create are to exist determinately and which are to exist but not determinately exist., and decide which of the things He’s decided not to create are to determinately not exist and which are to not exist but not determinately not exist. Once He’s done that, he’ll have settled everything there is to settle.

Let’s return to the questions we asked earlier regarding the candidate world histories. Presumably, what would make it true that H is the world history of our world would be the state of affairs of our world instantiating H. In the normal run of things – when we’re not dealing with indeterminacy – explanation can stop here; we don’t have to admit an additional entity to make it true that the state of affairs of our world instantiating H exists: the state of affairs itself makes that true. Everything makes true the fact that it itself exists, so once we’ve reached the facts concerning what truthmakers exist, we’ve reached the level of facts where explanation comes to a halt.

But in the above context, where it is indeterminate which member of S is the world history of our world, it must be indeterminate what state of affairs exists. Suppose S just has two members: H1 and H2. Then here are three truths:

1) It is indeterminate whether H1 is the world history of our world
2) It is indeterminate whether H2 is the world history of our world
3) It is determinate that exactly one of H1 and H2 is the world history of our world

The truth of (1) – (3) entail the truth of (4) – (6) below:

4) It is indeterminate whether the state of affairs of our world instantiating H1 exists
5) It is indeterminate whether the state of affairs of our world instantiating H2 exists
6) It is determinate that exactly one of the state of affairs of our world instantiating H1 or the state of affairs of our world instantiating H2 exists.

On the approach I rejected, we now need truthmakers for (4) – (6). I suggest abandoning this approach. Intuitively, the difference in being between a world in which (4) is true and a world in which it is false is simply the difference in the status this state of affairs has in both worlds: in one it has determinate existence, in the other it lacks determinate existence (without going so far as to have determinate non-existence). Doesn’t that sound like difference in being enough? Why should we feel the need to postulate something outside of this state of affairs that exists at one world and accounts for the state of affairs’ determinate existence and which doesn’t exist at the world where the state of affairs does not determinately exist?

On the view I advocate, there are no truthmakers for (4) – (6). (4) – (6) are brute truths; explanation comes to a halt here. If p is indeterminately true then what grounds this is that it is indeterminate whether a truthmaker for p exists; but that it is indeterminate that such a truthmaker exists is not itself something that demands a truthmaker.

Is this revisionary? It’s not clear to me that it is, and I certainly think that it’s in the spirit of truthmaker theory. Truthmaker theory just is a theory about what truths are brute. The only brute truths, says the truthmaker theorist, are truths about what there is: explanation only comes to an end when we reach the ontological inventory. Now, if there’s no indeterminacy in the world, then it’s natural to characterise such truths as all being of the form ‘X (the Xs) exist(s)’. But if it can be indeterminate what exists, then it’s not clear why ‘It is indeterminate whether Y exists’ should be grounded in some truth of the form ‘X exists’: there is a perfectly good sense in which ‘It is indeterminate whether Y exists’ is about what there is, and hence is exactly the kind of truth that truthmaker theory allows us to take as brute. ‘It is indeterminate whether Y exists’ is not about how Y is, it’s about whether Y is: it belongs with ‘Y exists’ and not with ‘Y is F’, in that it is a truth simply about what should go on the ontological inventory and not a truth about how the things that are on the ontological inventory are. To put this another way: being indeterminately existent is no more a property than being existent, and so attributing indeterminate existence to an entity is no more to say something about how that entity is than attributing existence to it: both attributions are to do with whether the entity is, not how it is, and so if one can acceptably be taken as brute, so can the other.

The truthmaker theorist is fond of theological metaphors: all God has to do to fix what is true is to fix what exists. I agree. And if He wants to make a proposition p determinately true he will make sure to make the corresponding portion of ontology that makes p true determinately existent (or at least make it determinate that there is a corresponding bit of ontology), whereas if He wants to make it indeterminate whether p is true, He will make it indeterminate whether that portion (or indeed, any such portion) of ontology exists. He does not need to thereby add more ontology to the world to make it true that this portion of ontology determinately or indeterminately exists: His fixing that it determinately or indeterminately exists is part of His fixing what there is.

Consider two presentist worlds, wc and wo. Since they are presentist worlds, they consist of one time only: call it t. But both worlds are such that they will last for exactly one more instant after t and haven’t existed before t. Both worlds will be such that they have lasted for two instants, then. They both contain one entity, a, which exists throughout the duration of the world; which is just to say that a exists at t and that it will persist into the next instant. At t, the first instant of each world (the present instant), a is F. In wc (the closed world), it is settled at t that a will remain F in the second instant. In wo (the open world), it is unsettled at t whether a will remain F in the second instant or whether a will cease to be F.

What does God have to do to make wc? He has to take a and the distributional property of being F and then (in the next instant) F and put them together in the state of affairs of a having this distributional property: call it SC. He then has to make this state of affairs a determinate existent. Were wc actual, it would be true that a will be F, and this would be made true by SC; furthermore, in this closed world, a’s future is settled: it is determinately true that a will be F, and the truth of this is secured by the fact that SC doesn’t just exist but rather exists determinately.

Making wo is a little more complicated for God. As a first step, He’ll need the distributional property of being F and then (in the next instant) not-F, and the state of affairs (call it SO) of a having this property. He then needs to decree that it is determinate that exactly one of SC or SO exists, but that it is indeterminate that SC exists and indeterminate that SO exists. This suffices to ensure that, were wo actual, it would be open what will happen to a: it will be determinate that a is F (since it’s determinate that a truthmaker for ‘a is F’ exists, since it’s determinate that one or other of SC and SO exist, and the existence of either will make it true that a is F), but it will be determinate whether or not a will be F in the future (since it’s indeterminate whether there’s a truthmaker for ‘a will be F’, since one of the candidate world histories would make that true and the other won’t).

But God’s job isn’t done yet. For suppose wo is actual. Once we wait an instant, we’ll be able to see whether a is F in the second instant of wo’s history, and this will reveal whether the proposition ‘a will be F’ was true at t. Suppose a does in fact remain F. In that case, a’s history in the two worlds is just the same: it’s just that in one world its history was open and in the other it was closed. At t in both worlds, what lies ahead in the future for a is the same: it’s just that in one world it is settled that this is what lies ahead for a, and in the other world it’s not settled that this is a’s future, because there are genuine alternatives that are not ruled out. So God needs to do one last thing to make wo: He needs to make SC exist. He just needs to be careful that in doing so He doesn’t make it determinately exist!

wo and wc, then, are exactly alike with respect to what ‘(in)determinacy free’ propositions are true, and differ solely with respect to the truth-value of propositions of the form ‘Determinately, p’ or ‘It is indeterminate whether p’. And this leads to exactly what you’d expect on the view under offer: they are exactly alike with respect to what exists, and differ only as to whether some of the things that exists determinately exist and whether some of the things that don’t exist determinately don’t exist. SC exists at both worlds and SO doesn’t exist at either world; but in wc SC is a determinate existent and SO a determinate non-existent, whereas in wo it’s neither determinately the case that SC exists or determinately the case that it doesn’t exist, and likewise for SO. On the other hand, a is a determinate existent at both worlds, and SX, the state of affairs of a having the distributional property being not-F and then (in the next instant) F, determinately doesn’t exist at both worlds.

So, I’d love any feedback on the above approach. I’d also really appreciate any thoughts on my response to the following potential objection.

Objection: “What you’re doing, basically, is allowing more truths as brute than simply those of the form ‘such-and-such exists’. You’re also allowing as brute truths of the form ‘Determinately, p’ or ‘Indeterminately, p’ provided that p is itself a truth of the form ‘such-and-such exists’. But if we’re allowed to do that with the determinacy operators, what’s the bar on doing that with temporal operators? That is, why can’t we allow as brute truths of the form ‘WAS, p’ or ‘WILL BE, p’, provided that p is itself a truth of the form ‘such-and-such exists’? If, when characterising what God has to do to fix what is the case, we’re allowed to say that He makes A a determinate existent and B an indeterminate existent, why are we not allowed to also say that He simply makes C a past existent, D a future existent, etc. There’s no privileged difference that will allow you to take truths of the form ‘Determinately, A exists’ as brute and not truths of the form ‘It will be the case in a year’s time that B exists’; but if we can take the latter as brute, there’s simply no truthmaker objection to presentism, and so all of the above is unnecessary.”

Reply: I think there is a privileged difference. ‘Determinately, such-and-such exists’ is about what there is in a way that ‘WAS, such-and-such exists’ is not – it’s just about what there was.

The temporal (and modal, for that matter) operators ‘point beyond’ themselves in a way that the determinacy operators don’t. When I modify ‘A exists’ with a temporal or modal operator, I’m attributing to A the same kind of existence as if I simply said ‘A exists’, but I’m attributing this kind of existence to A not in the circumstances of utterance but at some point removed from the circumstances of utterance: I’m saying that A has the bog-standard mode of existence – but it doesn’t have it here, it has it some distance along the temporal or modal dimension. By contrast, when I modify ‘A exists’ with a determinacy operator (by saying ‘Determinately, A exists’ or ‘It’s indeterminate whether A exists’) I’m making a claim about A’s existence in the circumstances of the utterance and instead modifying the mode of A’s existence.

To say that p is determinate or indeterminate is to say something about p’s status in our current circumstances, it’s not to ‘point beyond’ our current circumstances and say something about its status at circumstances removed from ours along some dimension in the way that we do when we say that p was or will be true, or that it could or must have been true. Determinate existence and not-determinate existence are types of existence a thing can have in the current circumstances; necessary or contingent existence, or temporary or eternal existence (e.g.), are not modes of existence – a necessary/eternal existent exists in the same way as a contingent/temporary existent, it just does so at every point across the modal/temporal dimension. Whereas when I say that something is a determinate existent, this is not to say (contra Akiba) that that thing exists at every point across some ‘precisificational’ dimension , but to say something about how it exists in our circumstances.

That’s why I think it’s acceptable for the truthmaker theorist to take as brute truths concerning what determinately exists or exists but not determinately, etc, but not truths concerning what will or did exist, or what could or must exist. Only the former are truths concerning what there is; the latter concern not what there is, but only what there was or will be, or what there could or must be, and hence must be grounded in facts concerning what there is.

Jobs at Leeds

Leeds is advertising for two one-year lecturerships; one with a preferance for phil science, the other with a preferance for value/history. Details here.

These are quite nice gigs, because (unlike a lot of temporary jobs) your workload and teaching/admin duties will be just like that of any other member of staff, temporary or permanent - so the successful applicants will have the same amount of time dedicated for research as any other member of staff.

Neo-Carnapianism and triviality

So here's something that's been puzzling me, and I've made very little progress on. The neo-Carnapian holds that ontological debates are shallow. When two ontologists argue as to whether there are Fs, the neo-Carnapian says that this isn't a genuine ontological debate: that at worst these two theorists are simply talking past one another; at best their disagreement is merely linguisitc, over the correct usage of the English terms involved.

Now, it's obviously trivial that we could use the term 'exists' differently, so that 'there exists an F' would have had the opposite truth value from what it in fact has. We could have meant by 'there exists' what we in fact mean by 'there doesn't exist', for example. That's not interesting. So what is the neo-Carnapian thesis? Sider characterises it, correctly, as the doctrine that there are multiple meanings for the quantifier and that none of them is more natural than any of the others. (Either because there's no such thing as naturalness, or because there is and they're all equally natural.) Okay, but we just used a quantifier to state that: there are multiple meanings for the quantifier that are equally natural. So if neo-Carnapianism is true, wouldn't their own theory tell them that their theory is not a substantial theory: that is, one whose truth is sensitive not to the metaphysics but simply to what we mean by our words? If neo-Carnapianism is false, it's substantially false, but if it's true it's trivial (in one good sense of trivial).

Is that right? And if so, is it a problem for neo-Carnapianism? It's a strange dialectical position to be in, to hold a view that is trivial if true and substantially false if false, but it's not obviously incoherent.

(I've been considering a neo-Carnapian who thinks that all ontologiacal disputes are shallow; of course, many don't - Hirsch, for example, thinks disputes about the existence of complex objects etc are shallow, but not disuputes about the existence of, e.g., numbers and sets. So let the question be: does the above give us reason to reject global neo-Carnapianism: to hold that at least the question as to whether there is a most natural meaning for the quantifier is a substantive ontological question?)

Perspectives on Ontology - Register Now!

UPDATE: Registration details are now available for Perspectives on Ontology. Please see the website here.

Attendance at the conference is limited, so I urge early registration.

Details are also available for the graduate bursaries.

Perspectives on Ontology

A major international conference on metaphysics to be held at the University of Leeds, Sep 5th-7th 2008.

Speakers:
Karen Bennett (Cornell)
John Hawthorne (Oxford
Jill North (Yale)
Helen Steward (Leeds)
Gabriel Uzquiano (Oxford)
Jessica Wilson (Toronto)

Commentators:
Benj Hellie (Toronto)
Kris McDaniel (Syracuse)
Juha Saatsi (Leeds)
Ted Sider (NYU)
Jason Turner (Leeds)
Robbie Williams (Leeds)

There's also going to be a graduate conference directly prior to this. Details, including a call for papers, are available here.

Counterpart theory and the incarnation. Cos why not?

While I generally try and avoid the philosophy of religion unless I'm bored of an afternoon, this year I have been teaching 'metaphysical issues in religion', and so have been forced to get to grips with some of the issues.

One issue that's not been uninteresting is a familiar problem regarding God’s incarnation as the man Jesus Christ. Christ is both human and divine. This is to say that he has a human nature and a divine nature. As the Council of Chalcedon put it in 451AD, "the same Christ . . . [is] to be acknowledged in two natures . . . the characteristic property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one person."

The threat is that this leads quickly to outright contradiction. Associated with the divine nature are properties of perfection, such as omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence; but associated with the human nature is the absence of such perfections. Humans are neither omnipotent, omniscient nor omnibenevolent. And so we seem driven to saying that Christ both is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent (in virtue of being divine) and not omnipotent, omniscient or omnibenevolent (in virtue of being human): a contradiction three times over!

How to respond? One option is to deny that it follows from having a human nature that one doesn’t have any of the qualities of divine perfection. Certainly, it is no part of the human nature that a human have these qualities: but it hardly follows that in virtue of being human a thing must lack those qualities – being human might simply be silent as to the presence or absence of the divine perfections. In that case Christ’s humanity simply doesn’t speak to his having or lacking omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence. As far as his human nature is concerned, it is simply an open question whether he has those properties or not. The door is closed, however, because of his divinity, which ensures that he does indeed have them. And so Christ simply has the divine perfections, and there is no threat of contradiction.

Such a view is taken by Thomas Morris. Morris distinguished between being wholly human and merely human. Christ is wholly human because he belongs to the kind human. And if it makes any sense to speak of things as partially belonging to a kind, Christ does not only partly belong to it, he wholly belongs to it. But he is not merely human. To be merely human is to have no more essential properties that what are guaranteed by being a member of the kind human; and Christ does have more, because he also has the properties that are guaranteed by his divinity.

This view avoids the paradox, but at a cost. There is a strong temptation to hold not only that being human doesn’t entail the possession of the divine perfections but that it entails their absence. To say otherwise, after all, is to invite the theologically immodest claim that even we mere humans might have been omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. We are not in fact as God is; but we could have been.

But also, there is some desire to be able to say that Christ the man lacked them. Think of Christ in Gethsemane: it appears for all the world to be the story of a man who is worried about the future. But why would such concerns arise unless Christ lacked knowledge about how things would turn out? Think now of Christ being tempted by Satan: it appears for all the world to be a story about a man overcoming temptation. But unless there was the possibility of his succumbing, there was nothing to overcome. And so the threat of contradiction is pressing. Christ, we want to say, is both limited and unlimited, both perfect and flawed. How can this be?

One thing we might be tempted to say is that Christ has the divine perfections qua God but not qua man. But what do such locutions mean? Well, there’s a familiar story about how that can be the case; and surprisingly it has received no discussion, to my knowledge, in this context. I want to put this option on the table: the option is counterpart theory.

Compare the case of Christ and omnipotence with a familiar case which is structurally analogous: the case of the statue and the clay. The clay can be squashed but the statue cannot. And yet many of us feel the pressure to say that there is only one entity here: the lump of clay simply is the statue. How, then, are we to avoid the absurdity that one and the same thing both has and doesn’t have the property of squashability?

As above, there is a temptation to say that this one thing is squashable qua lump of clay but not qua statue. But what does this mean? Counterpart theory gives us an answer. The properties of this one thing remain constant, but whether any of its properties deserve to be called the property of squashability depends on contextually variant factors, which means that whether or not the entity satisfies the predicate ‘. . . could be squashed’ can itself vary from context to context. When we speak of the one thing as the clay, this is enough to make salient the clay-ness of the entity, and in such a context one of the properties had by this entity deserves to be called the property of squashability, which is why we speak truly when we say that the clay could be squashed. When we speak of the one thing as the statue, on the other hand, this is enough to make salient the statue-ness of the entity, and in such a context none of the properties had by this entity deserves to be called the property of squashability – including the one previously correctly so described! This is why we speak truly when we say that the statue could not be squashed. And this is what we mean when we say that the entity can be squashed qua lump of clay but not qua statue.

That is enough to show that there need be no inconsistency in saying in one context that an entity satisfies some predicate and in another that it lacks it (despite not having undergone change): to generate an inconsistency one needs the further assumption that the property being picked out by that predicate is the same in both contexts. Since the predicate ‘. . . could be squashed’ is picking out a different property depending on whether the subject is referred to as the statue or as the clay, there is no inconsistency in saying that the statue couldn’t be squashed but that the clay could, even though they are one and the same thing. Likewise, if ‘. . . is omnipotent’, ‘. . . is omniscient’ etc pick out a different property depending on whether the subject is referred to as God or as man then there is no inconsistency in saying that Christ the man lacks omnipotence and omniscience etc and that Christ the God possesses them, even though the God is the man.

Omnipotence is a modal property like squashability: it is the property of being able to do anything possible. One needn’t actually do every possible action to be omnipotent, it simply has to be within one’s powers, which is to say that for any possible action one could do it. In that case, the counterpart theoretic solution can simply be carried over to the case of Christ and omnipotence. It is true to say that Christ the God is omnipotent and false to say that Christ the man is omnipotent. Why? Not because there are two entities, but because different standards of similarity are invoked depending on whether it is the divine or the human characteristics of one and the same entity that are made salient. If Christ’s divinity is salient then no possible being would count as dissimilar to Christ in virtue of doing some possible action – and so, for any possible action, there is a counterpart of Christ that performs that action, which is why Christ satisfies ‘. . . is omnipotent’. But if Christ’s humanity is salient then beings that perform miraculous feats like creating the universe ex nihilo don’t get to count as Christ’s counterparts, since humans just can’t do such things. And so, in this context, it will be true to say that there are things that Christ (the man) just couldn’t do, and thus true to say that he is not omnipotent.

Does the counterpart theoretic story carry over to the other divine perfections, such as omniscience and omnibenevolence? I think the prospects aren't terrible. It is easy to construe such predicates as being implicitly modal. It is no stretch of the imagination to suggest that to be omnibenevolent it is not enough simply to have managed not to actually do anything wrong: rather, one must have had the disposition to act rightly no matter what the circumstances. (You don’t get to be omnibenevolent by moral luck!) And so whether an object satisfies ‘. . . is omnibenevolent’ depends on whether or not that object has counterparts that do wrong things, and so the above story applies. Likewise with omniscience: it’s not enough simply to know all truths – the omniscient being would know even the propositions that are actually false, had those propositions been true. And in general, when we’re dealing with the divine perfections, they will concern not just how the bearer actually is but how it could have been. Perfection implies a counterfactual robustness – you don’t get to be perfect y accident. God’s perfection with respect to knowledge or power or etc concerns how he is and how he could and must have been: a being does not get to share in these properties by virtue of chance or luck. And as soon as one insists on counterfactual robustness one makes these predicates modal, which invites the counterpart theoretic solution to the threatening paradox.

What about God’s actual knowledge of all actual truths? Don’t we want to deny this to Christ the man as well? (Consider his apparent lack of knowledge, in Gethsemane, as to how the future would turn out.) If so, then to run the above story we must accept a modal account of what it is for an agent to know something. But this is not implausible. It’s what Ryle held, for example. x knows that p iff, roughly, x is disposed to act in a p-believing way in suitable circumstances. Now, of course, Ryle combined this with a behaviourism about the mental and an account of dispositions as brute truths; but we needn’t join him in either of those theses to find plausible the linking of knowledge ascriptions with ascriptions of some complex dispositional. It needn’t be an analysis of what it is for x to know that p for x to be disposed in a certain manner in order for the truth of the knowledge ascription to go hand in hand with the truth of the dispositional ascription. And if the truth of the knowledge ascription is sensitive to the truth of the dispositional ascription then context sensitivity in the latter will result in context sensitivity in the former. Christ the God can be correctly ascribed knowledge that p because all his relevant Godly counterparts act in a p-believing way when in the appropriate circumstances, but Christ the man cannot correctly be ascribed knowledge that p because he has manly counterparts that fail to exhibit p-believing behaviour even when prompted appropriately.

Here's an interesting consequence of the counterpart theoretic view: it commits us to saying that while the second person of the Trinity, God the Son, in fact incarnated as the man Jesus Christ, he might not have done. Counterpart theory, familiarly, commits us to the contingency of identity. The statue is in fact identical to the lump of clay, but it might not have been: had the lump of clay been squashed, it wouldn’t have been identical to the statue. Likewise, Christ the God, the second person of the Trinity, is in fact identical to Christ the man (who is also therefore, given Leibniz’s law, the second person of the Trinity). But Christ the God might not have been identical to Christ the man: had the man been flawed he wouldn’t have been identical to the God. And so whilst Christ the God is essentially the second person of the Trinity, Christ the man is only accidentally the second person of the Trinity.

Regimentation

Here's something you frequently hear said about ontological commitment. First, that to determine the ontological commitments of some sentence S, one must look not at S, but at a regimentation or paraphrase of S, S*. Second (very roughly), you determine the ontological commitments of S by looking at what existential claims follow from S*.

Leave aside the second step of this. What I'm perplexed about is how people are thinking about the first step. Here's one way to express the confusion. We're asked about the sentence S, but to determine the ontological commitments we look at features of some quite different sentence S*. But what makes us think that looking at S* is a good way of finding out about what's required of the world for S to be true?

Reaction (1). The regimentation may be constrained so as to make the relevance of S* transparent. Silly example: regimentation could be required to be null, i.e. every sentence has to be "regimented" as itself. No mystery there. Less silly example: the regimentation might be required to preserve meaning, or truth-conditions, or something similar. If that's the case then one could plausibly argue that the OC's of S and S* coincide, and looking at the OC's of S* is a good way of figuring out what the OC's of S is.

(The famous "symmetry" objections are likely to kick in here; i.e. if certain existential statements follow from S but not from S*, and what we know is that S and S* have the same OC's, why take it that S* reveals those OC's better than S?---so for example if S is "prime numbers exist" and S* is a nominalistic paraphrase, we have to say something about whether S* shows that S is innocent of OC to prime numbers, or whether S shows that S* is in a hidden way committed to prime numbers).

Obviously this isn't plausibly taken as Quine view---the appeal to synonymy is totally unQuinean (moreover in Word and Object, he's pretty explicit that the regimentation relationship is constrained by whether S* can play the same theoretical role as we initially thought S played---and that'll allow for lots of paraphrases where the sentences don't even have the appearance of being truth-conditionally equivalent).

Reaction (2). Adopt a certain general account of the nature of language. In particular, adopt a deflationism about truth and reference. Roughly: T- and R-schemes are in effect introduced into the object language as defining a disquotational truth-predicate. Then note that a truth-predicate so introduced will struggle to explain the predications of truth for sentences not in one's home language. So appeal to translation, and let the word "true" apply to a sentence in a non-home language iff that sentence translates to some sentence of the home language that is true in the disquotational sense. Truth for non-home languages is then the product of translation and disquotational truth. (We can take the "home language" for present purposes to be each person's idiolect).

I think from this perspective the regimentation steps in the Quinean characterization of ontological commitment have an obvious place. Suppose I'm a nominalist, and refuse to speak of numbers. But the mathematicians go around saying things like "prime numbers exist". Do I have to say that what they say is untrue (am I going to go up to them and tell them this?) Well, they're not speaking my idiolect; so according to the deflationary conception under consideration, what I need to do is figure out whether there sentences translate to something that's deflationarily true in my idiolect. And if I translate them according to a paraphrase on which their sentences pair with something that is "nominalistically acceptable", then it'll turn out that I can call what they say true.

This way of construing the regimentation step of ontological commitment identifies it with the translation step of the translation-disquotation treatment of truth sketched above. So obviously what sorts of constraints we have on translation will transfer directly to constraints on regimentation. One *could* appeal to a notion of truth-conditional equivalence to ground the notion of translatability---and so get back to a conception whereby synonymy (or something close to it) was central to our analysis of language.

It's in the Quinean spirit to take translatability to stand free of such notions (to make an intuitive case for separation here, one might, for example, that synonymy should be an equivalence relation, whereas translatability is plausibly non-transitive). There are several options. Quine I guess focuses on preservation of patterns of assent and dissent to translated pairs; Field appeals to his projectivist treatment of norms and takes "good translation" as something to be explained in projective terms. No doubt there are other ways to go.

This way of defending the regimentation step in treatments of ontological commitment turns essentially on deflationism about truth; and more than that, on a non-universal part of the deflationary project: the appeal to translation as a way to extend usage of the truth-predicate to non-home languages. If one has some non-translation story about how this should go (and there are some reasons for wanting one, to do with applying "true" to languages whose expressive power outstrips that of one's own) then the grounding for the regimentation step falls away.

So the Quinean regimentation-involving treatment of ontological commitment makes perfect sense within a Quinean translation-involving treatment of language in general. But I can't imagine that people who buy into to the received view of ontological commitment really mean to be taking a stance on deflationism vs. its rivals; or about the exact implementation of deflationism.

Of course, regimentation or translatability (in a more Quinean, preservation-of-theoretical-role sense, rather than a synonymy-sense) can still be significant for debates about ontological commitments. One might think that arithmetic was ontologically committing, but the existence of some nominalistic paraphrase that was suited to play the same theoretical role gave one some reassurance that one doesn't *have* to use the committing language, and maybe overall these kind of relationships will undermine the case for believing in dubious entities---not because ordinary talk isn't committed to them, but because for theoretical purposes talk needn't be committed to them. But unlike the earlier role for regimentation, this isn't a "hermeneutic" result. E.g. on the Quinean way of doing things, some non-home sentence "there are prime numbers" can be true, despite there being no numbers---just because the best translation of the quoted sentence translates it to something other than the home sentence "there are prime numbers". This kind of flexibility is apparently lost if you ditch the Quinean use of regimentation.

Updates

There are two new papers posted on my homepage. One is my contribution to a symposium in Philosphical Books on Trenton Merricks' 'Truth and Ontology'. Basically, this paper just gives the bite-sized versions of what I think are the best motivations for truthmaker theory and the best accounts of truthmakers for negative existentials, modal truths, and temporal truths in a presentist setting.

The other is the first draft of a paper that Elizabeth and I have written on the open future. Our goal here is to argue that theses that often get run together with the thesis that the future is open are not consequences of it. In particular, we argue that the future can be open and bivalence hold unrestrictedly, determinism about laws be true, and the future exist.

I've also updated my 'Truthmaking for Presentists' paper, to stop it making false claims (or at least to stop it making as many false claims) about here-now-ism (thanks Nolan!).

You should also check out Elizabeth and Robbie's new paper on metaphysical indeterminacy, which is awesome.

Phlox

I just found about about Phlox, a (relatively) new weblog in philosophy of logic, language and metaphysics. It's attached to a project at Humboldt University in Berlin. As well as following the tradition of philosophy centres with Greek names (this one means "flame", apparently) "Phlox" is a cunning acronym for the group's research interests.

There's several really interesting posts to check out already. Worth heading over!

Relative identity at a time

Working at the ancestral home of relative identity, I feel the need to say something about it. The relative identity theorist says that we can’t speak of x and y being identical simpliciter but only identical relative to a sortal, and that while x and y might be the same F they might not be the same G. So, for example, while the foetus in 1979 might be the same biological organism as that typing this blog post, it is not, perhaps, the same person.

Something I was reading recently suggested the following argument against relative identity. The cases that are remotely plausible as being cases of relative identity are (like the one above) cases of identity across time. There are no plausible cases of relative identity at a time. But if that’s the case, we should think that identity at a time is absolute. In which case we shouldn’t think that the relation that is holding across time and is sortal relative is identity at all. And so we don’t really have relative identity: we’ve just got no cases of identity across time, but with a surrogate relation that holds between entities across time and is like identity in some respects but which is sortal relative.

I guess I think that’s a good argument against relative identity if the premise is correct, but I’m not convinced that there aren’t cases of relative identity at a time that are just as plausible as the cases of relative identity across time.

Before I give my case, consider the following situation. Suppose there is a sculptor, Bob. Bob takes a lump of clay at t1 – call it CLAY - and makes it into a statue of a man at t2 – call it STATUE. We have the familiar question as to the relationship between CLAY and STATUE. Some will say that STATUE is a proper temporal part of the CLAY, some that it is distinct but constituted by CLAY. The relative identity theorist, as I understand her, thinks she has a simpler story: STATUE is the same lump of clay as CLAY, but not the same statue (since CLAY is not a statue, and x and y are only the same F if they are both Fs). But that is relative identity across time, of course, not at a time. We don’t get relative identity at a time on this story: STATUE is both the same statue and the same lump as STATUE, and CLAY is the same lump as CLAY, and it doesn’t make sense to either say or deny that CLAY is the same statue as CLAY, since it isn’t a statue.

Now suppose another sculptor, Sara, made a different statue from a different lump. Sara’s sculpture is an intrinsic duplicate of Bob’s sculpture (STATUE), but while Bob’s sculpture is of a man, Sara’s sculpture is of a lump of clay shaped like a man. Sara’s sculpture has aesthetic properties that Bob’s sculpture lacks: her work is a comment on the very nature of art and representation. You can imagine her sipping Merlot out of a teacup and proclaiming the impossibility of separating the signifier from the signified, or something.

Now suppose there is a third sculptor, Jacob, who decided to kill two birds with the one stone and sculpt two statues from the one lump of clay: a statue of a man and a statue of a lump of clay shaped like a man. We know they are two, because they differ in their aesthetic properties. At a single time t after the sculpting is complete, then, there is the lump of clay, LUMP, the statue of a man, MAN, and the statue of the lump of clay shaped like a man, LUMP-MAN. MAN is the same lump of clay as LUMP, and LUMP-MAN is the same lump of clay as LUMP. It seems to follow that MAN is the same lump of clay as LUMP-MAN. Now, the logic of relative identity is somewhat up for grabs, but x is the same F as y and y is the same F as z seem to entail that x is the same F as z. Counterexamples to transitivity should only arise when there’s a change in sortal. And in any case, it’s independently plausible that MAN is the same lump of clay as LUMP-MAN, since there’s only one lump of clay in the vicinity. But MAN is not the same statue as LUMP-MAN – they are distinct statues, for they have different aesthetic properties. So MAN and LUMP-MAN are, at one time t, the same lump of clay but different statues. So we have relative identity at a time.

Now of course there are loads of things we could say without invoking relative identity, such as that the one lump constitutes two statues at this time, or (my preference) that you can’t conclude that there are two statues from a difference in aesthetic properties. But that’s not the point. There’s always an absolutist story one can tell when the relativist would tell a relativist story; my claim is only that this case of relative identity at a time is just as plausible as the alleged cases of relative identity across time, in which case the above argument against relative identity is unsound, and doesn’t give us reason to accept absolutism. (Common sense on the other hand . . . )

Four new appointments at Leeds

I'm delighted to have four new permanent colleagues joining us at Leeds in the near future.

Firstly, there are the appointments of Jason Turner and Pekka Vayrynen to the philosophy section at Leeds.

Jason works on metaphysics, philosophy of action and free will, and the philosophy of logic and language. He is currently finishing his PhD at Rutgers and already has an impressive list of publications in these areas, including publications in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophical Studies, and Mind and Language. (Have a peek at them here!)

Pekka is joining us from UC Davis. His main interests are in meta-ethics and value theory, and the overlap between these areas and metaphysics and the philosophy of language. He's published a boatload of really interesting stuff, and will make a fantastic addition to Leeds' new Centre for Ethics and Metaethics.

The division of history and philosophy of science within the department has also recently made two appointments: Juha Saatsi and Sophie Weeks.

Juha works on the philosophy of science. He has published on various aspects of scientific realism, and has recently been working on metaphysical issues arising from the philosohpy of science. Juha has been at Leeds this year on a temporary contract and has been a wonderful colleague, so we're delighted that he'll be staying around.

Sophie is a historian of early modern science, and specialises in Francis Bacon. She's currently working on a monograph on Bacon which, in her words, "focuses upon the close relation between Bacon's matter theory, his inductive method of inquiry, and his moral and political philosophy, whilst drawing attention to his synthesis of Stoic, Epicurean and various Renaissance borrowings."

All will be starting Aug/Sep '08, except Sophie who will be starting in '09, so she can finish her current research fellowship at Cambridge.

UEA wants fuzzy philosophers

The University of East Anglia is advertising for an 'indefinite' lecturer in philosophy. I don't know whether this means lecturers with fuzzy boundaries or vague parts, or whetherit just means lecturers who haven't made their minds up on what they believe yet.

Seriously, what does this mean? Is it obvious to everyone else? Is it for a position such that they don't know how long it's going to last? Is it permanent, and they're saying 'indefinite' because you're not allowed to say 'permanent'? (But then, why not use the standard 'continuing'?) What does it mean?? Oh well, never trust a Wittgensteinian, that's what I say.

Sorry MV has been so quiet of late; normal service will resume shortly.

Structured propositions over at T&T

I'm not going to x-post them all on this blog, but I just wrote up three notes on structured propositions over at Theories and Things that metaphysical folk might have opinions on... here here and here. Any thoughts much appreciated!

Truthmakers and Ontological Commitment (update)

This paper is now forthcoming in Philosophical Studies (special issue devoted to selected papers from the 2007 BSPC).

Truthmaker theorists should be priority monists.

I’ve written a paper arguing that the truthmaker theorist has to be a priority monist, on pain of being committed to mysterious necessary connections. That is, if you think that for every true proposition there is an entity which couldn’t exist and that proposition be false then you should also think that there is only one fundamental existent, with every other entity being ontologically dependent on The One, otherwise you violate my suggested version of the Humean ban on necessary connections.

The full paper is here, and any comments will be much appreciated. But here’s the argument in outline. The first step is to identify when necessary connections are acceptable. A completely die-hard Humean would say: never. I’m interested in how to be less die-hard and still have a principled position (one that can be justified independently of considerations concerning truthmaker theory). One popular option is: necessary connections are bad when they’re between wholly distinct existents, but acceptable when they’re between distinct but not wholly distinct entities – i.e. entities that overlap. I don’t like that. In general, things have the parts they do, and belong to the complexes they do, as a matter of contingency; and if that’s the case then necessary connections between overlapping entities are as mysterious as necessary connections between wholly distinct entities. I suggest instead that necessary connections are acceptable iff there is an appropriate relationship of ontological dependence between the entities. I want to analyse ontological dependence in terms of truthmaking: B is ontologically dependent on A iff B exists in virtue of A’s existence, which is to say just that A is the truthmaker for the fact that B exists. In that case, it’s no surprise if the existence of A necessitates the existence of B – that just follows from truthmaker maximalism. With a caveat that I won’t go into here (but I do in the paper), I suggest we limit the necessary connections in our ontology to those where the necessitated entity is ontologically dependent on the necessitating entity. Those necessary connections are explainable just by what ‘ontological dependence’ means, so if all the necessary connections are of that kind, we’re okay.

If that’s right the argument to priority monism is pretty quick. The truthmaker theorist needs not only truthmakers for atomic truths but also a totality truthmaker that says that all the first-order truthmakers are all the first-order truthmakers. The existence of the higher-order truthmaker necessitates the existence of each of the first-order truthmakers: if it didn’t, it wouldn’t be doing the job it was introduced to do. If that necessary connection is to be explainable, then, the first-order truthmakers must be ontologically dependent on the higher-order truthmaker. The fact that the first-order truthmakers exist must be true in virtue of the existence of the higher-order truthmaker. And so we’re driven to the view that the only fundamental being is the higher-order truthmaker – the totality fact that says how the world as a whole is; other things exist – such as the states of affairs of proper parts of the world being some way – but these will all be ontologically derivative entities, dependent on the totality fact.

I don’t particularly care as to whether one should modus ponens and be a priority monist or modus tollens and reject truthmaker theory. I care about the conditional; any thoughts on it will be welcome.

Nihilism, maximality, problem of the many (x-post)

Does nihilism about ordinary things help us out with puzzles surrounding maximal properties and the problem of the many? It's hard to see how.

First, maximal properties. Suppose that I have a rock. Surprisingly, there seem to be microphysical duplicates of the rock that are not themselves rocks. For suppose we have a microphysical duplicate of the rock (call it Rocky) that is surrounded by extra rocky stuff. Then, plausibly, the fusion of Rocky and the extra rocky stuff is the rock, and Rocky himself isn't, being out-competed for rock-status by his more extensive rival. Not being shared among duplicates, being a rock isn't intrinsic. And cases meeting this recipe can be plausibly constructed for chairs, tables, rivers, nations, human bodies, human animals and (perhaps) even human persons. Most kind-terms, in fact, look maximal and (hence) extrinsic. Sider has argued that non-sortal properties such as consciousness are likewise maximal and extrinsic.

Second, the problem of the many. In its strongest version, suppose that we have a plentitude of candidates (sums of atoms, say) more or less equally qualified to be a table, cloud, human body or whatever. Suppose further that both the sum and intersection of all these candidates isn't itself a candidate for being the object. (This is often left out of the description of the case, but (1) there seems no reason to think that the set of candidates will always be closed under summing or intersection (2) life is more difficult--and more interesting--if these candidates aren't around.) Which of these candidates is the table, cloud, human body or whatnot?

What puzzles me is why nihilism---rejecting the existence of tables, clouds, human bodies or whatever---should be thought to avoid any puzzles around here. It's true that the nihilist rejects a premise in terms of which these puzzles would normally be stated. So you might imagine that the puzzles give you reason to modus tollens and reject that premise, ending up with nihilism (that's how Unger's original presentation of the POM went, if I recall). But that's no good if we can state equally compelling puzzles in the nihilist's preferred vocabulary.

Take our maximality scenario. Nihilists allow that we have, not a rock, but some things arranged rockwise. And we now conceive of a situation where those things, arranged just as they actually are, still exist (let "Rocky" be a plural term that picks them out). But in this situation, they are surrounded by more things of a qualitatively similar arrangement. Now are the things in Rocky arranged rockwise? Don't consult intuitions at this point---"rockwise" is a term of art. The theoretical role of "rockwise" is to explain how ordinary talk is ok. If some things are in fact arranged rockwise, then ordinary talk should count them as forming a rock. So, for example, van Inwagen's paraphrase of "that's is a rock" would be "those things are arranged rockwise". If we point to Rocky and say "that's a rock", intuitively we speak falsely (that underpins the original puzzle). But if the things that are Rocky are in fact arranged rockwise, then this would be paraphrased to something true. What we get is that "are arranged rockwise" expresses a maximal, extrinsic plural property. For a contrast case, consider "is a circle". What replaces this by nihilist lights are plural predicates like "being arranged circularly". But this seems to express a non-maximal, intrinsic plural property. I can't see any very philosophically significant difference between the puzzle as transcribed into the nihilists favoured setting and the original.

Similarly, consider a bunch of (what we hitherto thought were) cloud-candidates. The nihilist says that none of these exist. Still, there are things which are arranged candidate-cloudwise. Call them the As. And there are other things---differing from the first lot---which are also arranged candidate-cloudwise. Call them the Bs. Are the A's or the B's arranged cloudwise? Are there some other objects, including many but not all of the As and the B's that *are* arranged cloudwise? Again, the puzzle translates straight through: originally we had to talk about the relation between the many cloud-candidates and the single cloud; now we talk about the many pluralities which are arranged candidate-cloudwise, and how they relate to the plurality that is cloudwise arranged. The puzzle is harder to write down. But so far as I can see, it's still there.

Pursuing the idea for a bit, suppose we decided to say that there were many distinct pluralities that are arranged cloudwise. Then "there at least two distinct clouds" would be paraphrased to a truth (that there are some xx and some yy, such that not all the xx are among the yy and vice versa, such that the xx are arranged cloudwise and the yy are arranged cloudwise). But of course it's the unassertibility of this sort of sentence (staring at what looks to be a single fluffy body in the sky) that leads many to reject Lewis's "many but almost one" response to the problem of the many.

I don't think that nihilism leaves everything dialectically unchanged. It's not so clear how many of the solutions people propose to the problem of the many can be translated into the nihilist's setting. And more positively, some options may seem more attractive once one is a nihilist than they did taken cold. Example: once you're going in for a mismatch between common sense ontology and what there really is, then maybe you're more prepared for the sort of linguistic-trick reconstructions of common sense that Lewis suggests in support of his "many but almost one". Going back to the case we considered above, let's suppose you think that there are many extensionally distinct pluralities that are all arranged cloudwise. Then perhaps "there are two distinct clouds" should be paraphrased, not as suggested above, but as:

there are some xx and some yy, such that almost all the xx are among the yy and vice versa, such that the xx are arranged cloudwise and the yy are arranged cloudwise.

The thought here is that, given one is already buying into unobvious paraphrase to capture the real content of what's said, maybe the costs of putting in a few extra tweaks into that paraphrase are minimal.

Caveats: notice that this isn't to say that nihilism solves your problems, it's to say that nihilism may make it easier to accept a response that was already on the table (Lewis's "many but almost one" idea). And even this is sensitive to the details of how nihilism want to relate ordinary thought and talk to metaphysics: van Inwagen's paraphrase strategy is one such proposal, and meshes quite neatly with the Lewis idea, but it's not clear that alternatives (such as Dorr's counterfactual version) have the same benefits. So it's not the metaphysical component of nihilism that's doing the work in helping accommodate the problem of the many: it's whatever machinery the nihilist uses to justify ordinary thought and talk.

There's one style of nihilist who might stand their ground. Call nihilists friendly if they attempt to say what's good about ordinary thought and talk (making use of things like "rockwise", or counterfactual paraphrases, or whatever). I'm suggesting that friendly nihilists face transcribed versions of the puzzles that everyone faces. Nihilists might though be unfriendly: prepared to say that ordinary thought and talk is largely false, but not to reconstruct some subsidiary norm which ordinary thought and talk meets. Friendly nihilism is an interesting position, I think. Unfriendly nihilism is pushing the nuclear button on all attempts to sort out paradoxes statable in ordinary language. But they have at least this virtue: the puzzles they react against don't come back to bite them.

Jobs at Leeds

The philosophy department at Leeds is advertising for four jobs.

Two of the jobs will be in one or more of philosophy of value, epistemology, philosophy of mind, logic and language, and history of philosophy; one will be in the philosophy of science, with preference for phil physics; and one will be in the history of early modern/enlightenment science.

The appointments will either be at the lecturer or senior lecturer level (see the advert for details). Those unfamiliar with the UK system should check out Robbie's post here to see how this roughly translates into the US system.

London Logic and Metaphysics Forum

If you're in London on a Tuesday evening, what better to do than to take in a talk by a young philosopher on logic or metaphysics?

Spotting this gap in the tourist offerings, the clever folks in the capital have set up the London Logic and Metaphysics forum. Looks an exciting programme, though I have my doubts about the joker on the 11th Dec...

Tues 30 Oct: David Liggins (Manchester)
Quantities

Tues 13 Nov: Oystein Linnebo (Bristol & IP)
Compositionality and Frege's Context Principle

Tues 27 Nov: Ofra Magidor (Oxford)
Epistemicism about vagueness and meta-linguistic safety

Tues 11 Dec: Robbie Williams (Leeds)
Is survival intrinsic?

8 Jan: Stephan Leuenberger (Leeds)

22 Jan: Antony Eagle (Oxford)

5 Feb: Owen Greenhall (Oslo & IP)

4 Mar: Guy Longworth (Warwick)


Full details can be found here.

Big Ideas at MV

Metaphysical Values is the featured blog this month at Big Ideas. We are truffle oil (apparently) . . .

Truthmaking for presentists

At this week’s CMM I’ll be presenting a paper I’ve been working on recently, ‘Truthmaking for Presentists’. Here’s the general gist. Many see a tension between presentism and truthmaker theory. Some (Sider, Armstrong etc) see this as counting against presentism, some (e.g. Merricks) see this as counting against truthmaker theory. Fewer of us want to reconcile the two. While I am no presentist, my paper aims at reconciliation.

I say that people see a ‘tension’ between the two doctrines. The tension is not incompatibility. It’s hard for a doctrine to be incompatible with truthmaker theory because, without further constraints, it’s just too easy to be a truthmaker theorist. The tension arises because, allegedly, the only way to be a truthmaker theorist and a presentist is to accept the existence of things that violate some other norm governing what we should postulate in our ontology. Consider, for example, the Lucretian reconciliation of truthmaker theory and presentism, defended by Bigelow. Bigelow thinks there are properties like being such as to have been a child, and the state of affairs of me instantiating this property is the truthmaker for the fact that I was a child. Sider and Merricks agree that this is not an attractive reconciliation: they both charge these Lucretian properties with peculiarity and both claim that it is a cheat to appeal to them. I want to offer the presentist a truthmaker that isn’t peculiar in the way that the Lucretian’s truthmaker is peculiar.

So in what sense are the Lucretian properties peculiar. In the paper I settle on the following: those properties are peculiar because they make no contribution to the intrinsic nature of their bearer at the time of instantiation.

An assumption in the paper (that I think the presentist should definitely grant) is that it makes sense to talk of the intrinsic nature of an object at a time as opposed to the intrinsic nature of an object atemporally speaking. An object’s currently instantiating being such as to have been a child does indeed tell us something about the intrinsic nature of that object if by its intrinsic nature we mean its atemporal intrinsic nature; but, I want to say, its instantiating that property now doesn’t tell us about how it intrinsically is now. That is what’s peculiar about properties like that, I claim: properties should make a difference to their bearers; since, for the presentist, the bearers are not temporally extended objects, a property can only be making a difference (in the relevant sense) if they’re making a difference to its present intrinsic nature. Lucretian properties don’t, so we shouldn’t believe in them.

If I’m right about what makes Lucretian properties peculiar, then the challenge for the presentist truthmaker theorist is to find properties the present instantiation of which makes a difference to the present intrinsic nature of the bearer but which are also such that the bearer couldn’t instantiate them without some truths of the form ‘the bearer was F’ being true. That is, the presentist needs properties which make a difference both to the present intrinsic nature of their bearers and which fix the truths concerning how the bearer was in the past.

I think Josh Parsons’ distributional properties fit the bill. Consider an extended simple that is polka-dotted with red spots on white. What explains the polka-dotted-ness of this object? Not that the object has some parts which are red simpliciter and some parts that are white simpliciter, because it doesn’t have parts. Not that the object is red at some places and white at others, because being white is not a relation between a thing and a region. Parsons’ answer is that the object simply has a distributional property of being polka-dotted in a certain fashion. This is a property that says how the object is across space, but Parsons also believes in distributional properties that says how an object is across time. What explains why I am a bent at t and straight at t*? Not that I have a part that is a bent simpliciter and a part that is straight simpliciter because (let us suppose) I don’t have temporal parts. Not that I am bent at some times and straight at others, because (as Lewis taught us) being bent isn’t a relation between a thing and a time. Parsons’ answer is that I simply have a distributional property that says how I am across time. Now, crucially, I couldn’t currently instantiate that very distributional property and it not be the case that I was bent. So my instantiating that distributional property is a truthmaker for the fact that I was bent. But it’s not peculiar in the way the Lucretian property is: instantiating it now is making a difference to my present intrinsic nature, because it is in virtue of having this property that I am straight. And so I think we’ve got a non-peculiar way of being presentist truthmaker theorists. Distributional properties ground facts about how things were, solving the truthmaker problem, while at the same time grounding facts about how things now are, avoiding the charge of peculiarity.

So that’s the basic idea. The draft paper is here; comments are, of course, welcome.