糖心TV

It has been suggested that all predication in natural languages is tensed and that, as a result, the appearance of a dispute between eternalists and presentists is an illusion—the alleged issue cannot be so much as stated so as to be substantive and philosophically interesting. In this paper it is argued that there must be tenseless predication in English, if we are to maintain a plausible view of the truth values of specific instances of certain kinds of claim—attributions of arithmetical properties to numbers being one forceful example. If the predication in claims like ‘Necessarily, 3 is odd’ is tensed, then unacceptable results follow concerning the truth values of such claims, in view of the possibility of timeless worlds (unless we accept non-standard, ‘Priorean’, views concerning the contents of claims such as ‘3 is odd’, and the relations between possibility and necessity). An argument is given for the claim that there are timeless worlds—that timelessness is a genuine possibility. It is shown how presentism can be stated, using tenseless predication, in such a way that it is a substantive thesis open to real philosophical debate.