Wolfgang Schwarz

Is there a problem with the following naive idea: read (tenseless) "Socrates is wise" as "Socrates is, or was, or will be wise". And whatever story you tell about the truth of the past-tense "Socrates was wise" now secures the truth of the tenseless statement, through securing the truth of one disjunct.

I'd like to hear a bit more about those past tense statements involving things that no longer exist, though. I thought that "N was F" was analyzed through the F-ness or otherwise of a past counterpart of the *present* N. (Just as in the modal version truth conditions depend on counterparts of *actual* individuals). But that won't fit a case where there is *no* present N.

(By the way, the (copy of the) Sider paper to which you link doesn't have a p.27!)

Oops, thanks, link corrected. More later.

I guess the "is, was or will be" analysis of tenseless "is" would deliver the same truth conditions as the analysis I proposed. In particular, it will also make both "Socrates is a philosopher" and "Socrates is not a philosopher" true. But as a type-B theorist of time, I (and Ted Sider) want to give tenseless interpretations of tensed predications, not the other way round. In modality, your suggestion would resemble Kit Fine's analysis of "there is a world in which p" as "it is possible that there is a world in which p".

As you may have seen in the paper (link *really* corrected now -- sorry), your analysis of "N was F" is Sider's analysis of 'de re temporal predications'. It is only possible for things that presently exist. For past objects, only 'de dicto temporal predications' are possible.

Though I'm not sure I fully understand that distinction. In the modal case, I'd say a predication is de re (otherwise de dicto) iff the description that semantically goes with the name is rigidified (has narrow scope). But for Sider, the relevant descriptions needn't be semantically associated with the name, i.e., they need not be known by competent speakers. In effect, his 'de dicto predications' are a third kind of predication, which one might call 'de indeterminate re'.

Modal counterpart theory also has to allow predications of this kind. E.g. "Sherlock Holmes could have died as a child" seems true to me. But it's not true if the description that goes with "Sherlock Holmes" has narrow scope, nor if it has wide scope. The sentence is de re. But de which re? De any re that satisfies the description.

That's weird. I more and more believe that the lump view, on which we are trans-world fusions, is the best of the lot.

Thanks for the link! That addresses my concern.

I don't think the "is, was, or will be" reading of (ordinary English) tenseless-is vitiates the goal of reducing tensed discourse to tenseless discourse. Here's how I was thinking about it: ordinary English tenseless-is (the one that interacts with ordinary proper names, which is involved in our intuitions etc) turns out to be a tensed operator, albeit a generalized one "is/was/will be". That's a thesis about the *object-language*. Consistently with that, the meta-language can be truly tenseless. We better not have ordinary proper names like "Socrates" in the metalanguage, or we'll have the old problems over again: but philosophers are clever enough to confine themselves to technical terms like "Socrates-stage" where necessary.

How do we manage to be speaking a truly tenseless metalanguage, if natural language is all tensed? By being very explicit about what we're doing, thumping tables, etc. But really, it's not necessary that we (or anyone else) be able to speak the metalanguage. We could think of the philosophical debate as asking what a Lagadonian interpretation of ordinary English could look like.