On Ceasing to Exist

I have been reviewing Bill's postings on Time and Change looking at his anti-Presentist arguments.   Some, like this one from March this year, depend on what Bill terms the 'veritas sequitur esse' principle.  Here is the first half of the post.

John F. Kennedy ceased to exist in November of 1963. (Assume no immortality of the soul.) But when a thing ceases to exist, it does not cease to be an object of reference or a subject of predicates. If this were not the case, then it would not be true to say of JFK that he is dead. But it is true, and indeed true now, that JFK is dead. Equivalently, 'dead' is now true of JFK. But this is puzzling: How can a predicate be true of a thing if the thing does not exist? After a thing ceases to exist it is no longer around to support any predicates. What no longer exists, does not still exist: it does not exist.

I am of the metaphilosophical opinion that the canonical form of a philosophical problem is the aporetic polyad. Here is our puzzle rigorously set forth as an aporetic tetrad:

1) Datum: There are predicates that are true of things that no longer exist, e.g., 'dead' and 'famous' and 'fondly remembered' are true of JFK.
2) Veritas sequitur esse: If a predicate is true of an item x, then x exists.
3) Presentism: For any x, x exists iff x is temporally present.
4) The Dead: For any x, if x is dead, then x is temporally non-present.

The limbs of the tetrad are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent. To solve the tetrad, then, we must reject one of the propositions. It can't be (1) since (1) is a datum. And it can't be (4) since it, on the mortalist assumption, is obviously true. (To avoid the mortalist assumption, change the example to an inanimate object.) Of course, if an animal dies, its corpse typically remains present for a time; but an animal and its corpse are not the same. An animal can die; a corpse cannot die because a corpse was never alive.

One cannot plausibly reject (2) either. To reject (2) is to maintain that a predicate can be true of a thing whether or not the thing exists. This is highly counter-intuitive, to put it mildly. Suppose it is true that Peter smokes. Then 'smokes' is true of Peter. It follows that Peter exists. It seems we should say the same about Kennedy. It is true that Kennedy is dead. So 'dead' is true of Kennedy, whence it follows that Kennedy exists. Of course, he does not exist at present. But if he didn't exist at all, then it could not be true that Kennedy is dead, famous, veridically remembered, and so on. Kennedy must in some sense exist if he is to be the object of successful reference and the subject of true predications.

There remains the Anti-Presentist Solution. Deny (3) by maintaining ...

I have two objections here.  First, in the formulation that Bill gives of VSE it is false.  Take the predicate 'does not exist' and apply it to the mythical creature called 'Pegasus'.  The resulting sentence, 'Pegasus does not exist', is true so Bill's VSE would allow us to conclude that Pegasus does exist.  An immediate contradiction.   Bill's VSE begs the question against the Presentist who would not concede that JFK has to exist in order to be famous or veridically remembered.  'JFK is famous'  does not assert that an extant JFK has the property of 'being famous'.  It says that many people now know his name and can tell you something about his role in US politics.  Indeed, you needn't ever to have existed in order to be famous.  Sherlock Holmes, perhaps.   But you do need to once have existed in order to be veridically remembered.

Second, Bill puts great store on the predicate 'is dead'.   But it seems to give us an immediate counter-example to (2).  For if 'is dead' means 'has ceased to exist' means 'no longer exists', then as BIll himself says at the end of the first paragraph, 'JFK is dead' implies 'JFK does not exist, contradicting VSE.

Bill is fond of characterising the Presentist as saying of something no longer extant that it does not exist at all.  I accept that wording.  I don't think the 'at all' adds or subtracts anything.  But that is not to say that it did not exist at all, that is, ever.   Obviously, if JFK didn't (past tense) exist at all he could not be dead, famous, remembered, etc.  Is Bill being a little loose with tense in the underlined phrase?

Bill says, 'Kennedy must in some sense exist if he is to be the object of successful reference and the subject of true predications'.  Does this reveal an attachment to a certain theory of reference or theory of propositions?

Conclusion added in March 2020

I'm more puzzled by Bill's inconsistent tetrad than by the thought he is trying to capture.  Bill says that it's puzzling that a predicate can be true of a thing that doesn't exist.  But why?  We make past-tensed predications of things that don't exist all the time.  In 1943 Kennedy commanded  PT109, for example.  Neither exists now though they both did in 1943.  This is surely 'datanic', as Bill would say, of how we speak of the past.  The problem is that Bill's tetrad introduces theoretical terms like 'predicate', 'temporal presence', 'tenseless existence', etc, and principles like Veritas Sequitur Esse on which we rightly place less trust than we do on ordinary language.  The philosopher's new-fangled tools need further refinement.