Boethius Existed

Bill quotes Ostrich, 

. . . the question of whether a thing could exist without existing in the present. The logical presentist might then question what is meant by ‘no longer exists’. The natural interpretation is ‘existed, but does not exist’. But then the thing doesn’t exist, period. Using tensed language we can say, truly, that Boethius existed, but does not exist.  Why not be satisfied with this?    

He goes on to say,

My claim is that there is a clear difference between ‘exist(s)’ used in the present-tensed way and ‘exist(s)’ used to express existence period, i.e., existence simpliciter.

And,

What I deny, and what the Ostrich seems to affirm, is that the passage of time has annihilated the locale [Scollay Square] in question.

I suspect that by ‘period’ Ostrich means something like ‘QED’, or ‘no more to be said’.  His preceding ‘doesn’t exist’ is present-tensed  and does not express existence simpliciter.   I doubt that Ostrich means to affirm that time has annihilated Scollay Square, if ‘annihilation’ is taken to mean undoing its status as part of the world’s furniture.   The latter term, as I understand it, is time-independent, hence constant.

But let me accept Bill’s concept of existence simpliciter.  I will write it as ‘exist*’.   So ‘Boethius exist*’ is true  but ‘Holmes exist*’ is false.  How does this help with the truth-making of ‘Boethius existed’?  The argument would seem to be that ‘Boethius exist*’  declares Boethius eligible to make-true ‘Boethius existed’.   But this making-true would appear to hold at times prior to Boethius’s temporal existence.    

The difficulty as I see it is that ‘Boethius existed’ expresses a relation between two distinct moments in time:  some unspecified moment when Boethius did indeed exist, and the present.  It’s hard to see how the existence of a state of affairs  at some single moment can support such a relation.   This notion of truth-making is too weak.

Frege's Present Properties

He is famous and he is dead.  Hence, according to Bill, he has the properties being famous and being dead, these being the properties expressed by the predicates 'is famous' and 'is dead'.  But do these predicates express properties?  Being famous is at best a Cambridge property.   'Frege is famous' tells us about the knowledge of people living now rather than something of the man himself when alive.  Of course, people become famous because of something they did or an event in which they took part which becomes widely known.  But one can become famous vicariously and postumously---perhaps something strange happened at one's funeral. 

We have discussed 'is dead' before, in relation to Tom Petty, if I recall.  To understand 'is dead' first we have to appreciate the process by which living things come into existence and pass out of existence.  Second we must understand how, in general, a predicate expressing a property applies to a thing only while the thing is extant. This is the force behind Bill's premise (1).  But this is not to beg the question. I suggest that the relatively rare terms like 'is dead' and 'is unborn' are alienating.   They are saying, of the living thing, that it has ceased living or has yet to live. That is, they deny, of the living thing, that it lives.  They are special cases that follow the grammar of property attribution but do not attribute a property.  I can say, 

In 1847, Gottlob Frege was as yet unborn.

We understand what this means, but that is not by virtue of its attributing to Frege the property of 'being unborn'.

Becoming Past and Becoming Nothing

In a piece from April 2020 Bill asks,

Suppose that 

(1) X ceases to be temporally present by becoming wholly past. 

Does it follow that

(2) X ceases to exist?

Perhaps a spatial analog of (1) will help convey what I mean:

(1*) X ceases to be spatially present by becoming wholly elsewhere.

Now (1*) is not idiomatic English, but the thought is clear.  And the thought is trivially true. Suppose the boundaries of the spatially present are given by the dimensions of my lot.  So when I say 'here' I refer to the area of my lot together with all its sub-areas. Suppose a cat that is wholly within the boundaries of my lot trespasses onto your adjacent lot thereby becoming wholly elsewhere. Max was wholly here in my yard, but now he is wholly there in yours.  Spatial translations such as this one typically occur without prejudice to the existence of the moving item. Thus the cat does not cease to exist by moving from my property onto your property.  (Nor does the cat suffer any diminution of its degree of existence, if there are degrees of existence, or any change in  its mode of existence, if there are modes of existence.)

In short, Max the cat exists just as robustly in your yard as in mine.  Spatial translation is existence-neutral.  No one is a spatial presentist.  No one holds that all and only what exists here, exists.

Surely it is conceivable -- whether or not it is true -- that becoming wholly past is existence-neutral.  It is conceivable that something that becomes wholly past not be affected in its existence by its becoming wholly past.  On this understanding of (1), (1) does not straightaway -- i.e., immediately, without auxiliary premises -- entail (2).  (1) and the negation of (2) are logically consistent.

Now if you insist that (1) entails (2), then I will point out that this is so only if you assume that all and only the temporally present exists.

What to say?  Surely it is conceivable, Bill says, on the strength of his analogy between spatial and temporal translation, that becoming wholly past is existence-neutral. Well, we have arrived at a rock-bottom point of disagreement.  For me, 'becoming wholly past' is synonymous with 'ceasing to exist'.  Bill often speaks as if becoming wholly past were simply a matter of the passage of time.  'Annihilated by the passage of time' is a favourite phrase.  The Berlin Wall wasn't annihilated by the passage of time.  It took pickaxes, wrecking balls, and bulldozers.  Becoming wholly past is not a translation in time.  It's a process that takes place in the present whereby a (material) thing loses its integrity as an individual that stands out from a background of indiscriminated stuff and sinks back into that background.  'Past' here has less to do with time and more to do with existence, or rather its cessation.  So I find Bill's existence-neutrality of becoming past inconceivable.

What are we to make of Bill's analogy?  The temporal analogue of (1*) is,

(2*) X ceases to be temporally present by becoming wholly elsewhen.

But does this make any sense?  Everything is constantly becoming elsewhen as the clock ticks, but most things remain present.  So there is more to ceasing to exist than merely becoming elsewhen.  There are significant disanalogies between space and time.  A non-moving body can remain in the same place but not in the same time.  Translation in space necessarily involves translation in time: instantaneous displacement for a material body does not occur.  Suppose a body were to be translated forwards in time to the neighbouring century.  Its mass would vanish temporarily only to reappear one hundred years later, a violation of macroscopic mass conservation.  The problems of translation backwards in time are well known from fiction.  These are Moorean facts about time that Bill is ignoring. Or so it seems to me.

On Ceasing to Exist---Further Thoughts

In this piece written in December 2019 I commented on an argument Bill published earlier that year.   Bill presented this seemingly inconsistent 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.

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 names or 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.

Presentism and truthmakers again

Bill was kind enough to respond to a post of mine on Presentism and Truthmakers.

The idea expressed there is that the truthmaker of

(T)  Kennedy commands PT109, 

uttered in 1943 is also the truthmaker of 

(S)  Kennedy commanded PT109, 

uttered in 2022.  S is a rule-governed transformation of the made truth T---the verb tense merely changes from present to past.  Bill objects that the truthmaker of T---a state of affairs existing in 1943---no longer exists in 2022.  And there is nothing else in 2022, according to presentism, that could count as a truthmaker for S.  I guess my reply has to be that a truth and its maker need not be contemporaries,  and I will try to sketch out how this is possible.  But first it's worth pointing out that we are looking at the basis of the tense logic rule  p-->FPp.

Suppose we are observing an ongoing process or event.  We will say, for example, "Kennedy commands PT109", "Caesar is crossing the Rubicon", etc, in the present tense.  We then turn away and cease observing for some time.  We are aware that processes and events have beginnings and ends.  We cannot then say with certainty that Kennedy commands PT109.  But we have a memory of Kennedy commanding PT109 which we take to be veridical.  We express this memory as "Kennedy commanded PT109",  "Caesar was crossing the Rubicon",  using the past tense.  The tense difference distinguishes between the sources of experience---sense perception and memory.  Clearly memory is laid down while an event is ongoing or shortly after and as long as memory lasts it will be reported in the past tense.  There are exceptions to this.  While she was alive I would not have expressed my memory of my mother's eye colour by saying "Her eyes were brown",  because we know that eye colour lasts a lifetime and we don't think of it as a process or event.  But generally the past tense correlates with memory recollections and the present with ongoing sensory experience.  We learn to make this distinction as we learn our mother tongue.  Later, as our conceptualising of time develops and refines, the tense distinction associates more with our understanding of past and present.   How does this help with truthmaking?

On this view the link between truthmakers and truthbearers is essentially a causal one extending across time.  Once the experience of a truthmaker has been committed to memory the truthmaker can pass out of existence without compromise to any truth expressed from the memory of it.  Thus the truthmaking relation does not entail the simultaneous existence of maker and bearer. Moreover, a truth made by acquaintance can be passed by description in spoken or written form down the generations.  In this respect it is no more egregious than less contentious relations.  "Lincoln was taller than Trump" expresses a known truth.  Lincoln's death preceded Trump's birth but we have an accurate record of his height.

I am beginning to think that I do not understand the truthmaker objection to presentism.  At least, not to the kind of presentism that I'd want to defend.

Why Existence Simpliciter?

Here Bill writes,

Let us now consider a concrete example, Winston Churchill. The gross facts or Moorean data are not in dispute. WC existed, but does not now exist. So far, no metaphysics. Just ordinary tensed English, and a bit of uncontroversial historical knowledge. Reflecting on the data, we note that some of what is said now about WC is true, and some false. WC is now the logical subject of both true and false predications (predicative statements). And this despite the fact that WC does not now exist. [1] At this point a philosophical problem arises for the presentist. On presentism, only that which presently exists exists simpliciter. What did exist and what will exist does not exist simpliciter. How can something that does not exist simpliciter be the logical subject of such presently true past-tensed contingent affirmative statements as 'WC smoked cigars'? [2] This is the question to which presentism has no good answer. It would be a very bad answer to say that the past-tensed sentence is true now because WC existed. For on presentism, WC is nothing; he is not just nothing now -- which is trivially true -- but simply nothing, i.e., nothing simpliciter. And if WC is simply nothing, then he is not 'there' (read existentially, not locatively) to be the logical subject of predications.

I suspect the sentences I have underlined are somewhat problematic for Bill.  Consider the sentences [1].  They have the form A despite B, with  

A =  WC is now the logical subject of both true and false predications.
B =  WC does not now exist.

Bill's expectation is that A cannot be true if B is true.  Yet it is.  The temptation is to weaken B to make it consistent with A.  So we grant WC existence simpliciter.  The latter is understood as consistent with inexistence now and grounds A.  This grounding is expressed in [2]:  WC must exist simpliciter for 'WC smoked cigars' to be true.  

Earlier in the piece Bill says,

To locate the bone of contention in the philosophy of time over which presentists and 'eternalists' fight, we must navigate, if we can, between the Scylla of self-contradiction and Charybdis of tautology. Mixed metaphors aside, the issue is whether the past exists simpliciter. When I say that the past is real, I mean that past items exist simpliciter. I do not mean that past items exist now -- which would be self-contradictory -- or that they existed -- which would be trivial. What I mean, and what the dispute is about, cannot be understood without this notion of existence simpliciter. And the issue is meaningful only if this notion is meaningful. So what is existence simpliciter?

Existence simpliciter is often introduced as a means of elucidating a non-trivial presentism. Bill claims that the idea is indispensable.   I have to disagree.  It seems to me that the idea benefits more the anti-presentist, especially if he has a direct reference theory of names in the background.   My kind of presentism may be trivial to state but it stands in opposition to such metaphysical gerrymandering.  But it leaves tricky questions to be faced:  How can we refer to past things if they are now non-existent?  How can truths about the past be possible if the past 'isn't there'? What do I mean by 'the reality of the past'? I am pushing the problem out of the philosophy of time and existence into another, broader region.

Presentism and Regret

Bill offers the following argument against presentism,

1) There exist states of regret.
2) Every such state has as its accusative an event that exists.
3) Every such state has as its accusative an event that is wholly past.
Therefore
4) There exist wholly past events.
5) If presentism is true, then there exist no wholly past events.
Therefore
6) Presentism is false.

Bill asks, Doesn't this argument blow presentism clean out of the water?  I'm afraid I can't agree.   I think 'exists' here is being used in three distinct senses: 

a) 'there exist' (1, 4), ie, quantification over items past and present.
b) 'event that exists' (2), ie, is real as opposed to imaginary, say.
c) 'there exist' (5), ie, there are present.

We can rewrite Bill's argument without using 'exists' as follows:

A. There obtains, now, a state of regret, r.
B. There has occurred a real, wholly past event e, the accusative of state r.
C. There have occurred real, wholly past events.
D. If presentism is true then no wholly past event is occurring at present.
E. ???

But A to D are not inconsistent.  I would say they are entirely 'Moorean', as Bill would say, and are expressed in everyday tensed language that we all understand.  They make no metaphysical claims. Where, exactly, is the problem?

The only possibly problematic aspect I can think of is that we allow that the state r and event e be diachronic.  Bill may feel that for e to be the accusative of r, e and r must be synchronic.  E must be 'there' for r, as it were.  But that would need justification.  Bill would say that, under presentism, the event e 'is nothing', by which he means that e is not and never was anything at all.  This overstates what the presentist claims.  He certainly agrees that the event e is not ongoing.  But he does not agree that e never was.  He would probably want to tell a causal story in which the event e leads to the state r and may well have ceased to be ongoing before r comes into existence.

An Exchange on the Reality of the Past

I have been reviewing pieces from Bill's Time and Change category.  One post from 2020 was in reply to a comment of mine on an earlier piece.

Morning Bill,

I sometimes think our disagreement is about how certain terms are to be used. Compare these claims,

1. The past is in some sense 'there.' Deny that and you are saying that the past is nothing, in which case historians have no object of study.

2. The past was in some sense 'there.' Deny that and you are saying that the past was nothing, in which case historians have no object of study.

I think of 'the past' in this context as collectively referring to multiple things and events. 'The wholly past' denotes a subset of the past. There is also in these sentences an implicit universal quantification over these sets. So I test the truth of these assertions by choosing randomly an element, usually Julius Caesar, making a textual substitution, and asking how comfortable I am with the modified assertions.

1'. JC is in some sense 'there.' Deny that and you are saying that JC is nothing, in which case historians (of JC) have no object of study.

2'. JC was in some sense 'there.' Deny that and you are saying that JC was nothing, in which case historians (of JC) have no object of study.

I find I'm perfectly happy with (2'). Not so with (1'). 'JC' names a thing in time so tenseless 'is' is inapplicable. I have only present tensed 'is'. My presentism says that JC in no sense is 'there'. It follows that JC is nothing, but in my view it doesn't follow from that that historians of JC have no object of study. The problem I have is that I find (2) so innocuously the right thing to say that I'm constantly surprised that you always opt for formulation (1). Is that Problemverlust?

Bill replied:

David B,

Good comment; clear and clarifying. When I speak of the wholly (purely, merely) past, I mean past temporal items that do not overlap the present. A storm that is only half over is then not wholly past, although phases of it are wholly past. A storm is a process. I don't consider myself a process, although this is a debatable point. But I clearly have a past. But I am not wholly past, leastways, not yet. I think we agree on this use of terms.

The difference between (1) and (2) goes to the heart of the matter. You plump for (2) and (2'). JC WAS in some sense 'there.' That suffices for him to be an object of historical study. You can even drop the 'some sense' business and flatly state that JC did exist and that this suffices, etc.

My objection/question is that if JC DID exist, but is now nothing, how can HE now be an object of study? When we investigate JC, the objects of investigation are not causal traces in the present. These traces are pointers to the object of study. We can learn about a burglar from his footprints, but the latter are not what interest us except as a means to identifying the burglar.

>> 'JC' names a thing in time so tenseless 'is' is inapplicable. <<

This is a telescoped or enthymematic argument. I accept the premise, but I think the conclusion is false. Why can't something in time tenselessly exist? 'Tenselessly exist' does not mean 'timelessly exist.' If there are items outside of time, then they tenselessly exist. But it is arguable that an item can be temporal and yet exist tenselessly.

This is one of the crucial issues that needs to be taken up in later posts.

There the exchange ended, attention no doubt moving on to one of those later posts.  But I'd like to answer Bill's question:  if JC DID exist, but is now nothing, how can HE now be an object of study?  My answer is to say that we can study something without getting acquainted with it.  The historian  will look at documents, artifacts, etc, and try to construct an account that is consistent with these vestiges of the past and also with the accounts of JC's times constructed by other historians looking at other sources.  This is not so different from studying an object of the present with which we are not acquainted.  We acquaint ourselves instead with writings, photos, etc, and thus build an understanding of the thing, independent of its continuing to exist.  Perhaps we are back with the recurring problem of reference to the non-existent.

Investigating the past

Bill opens a recent piece with this.

On presentism, the present alone exists, and not in the trivial sense that the present alone exists at present, but in the substantive sense that the present alone exists simpliciter.  But if so, then the past is nothing, a realm of sheer nonbeing. But surely the past is not nothing: it happened, and is in some sense 'there' to be investigated by historians and archeologists and paleontologists.  

This extract expresses a key conviction that seems to drive Bill's antipresentism.  Another is the truthmaker objection.  We might squabble over whether the past is nothing or not, but we can certainly agree that it happened.  But is it in any sense 'there' to be investigated?  I don't think it is.  If it were there then history, archeology, and paleontology would not be the difficult disciplines they are.  History would be like journalism.  We would simply go and look to find out about the past.   If there were truth-makers in the present for truths about the past we could just read off those truths from their makers.   But it's not that easy.  Rather,  history, etc, investigate the vestiges (from vestigium, footprint or track) of the past such as documents, artifacts, and fossils that have come down to us.  These are things that existed in the past and still exist in the present, so they are not yet wholly past.  The objective of these disciplines is to construct in the imagination a narrative that's consistent with these vestigia and their reaching us and with nomological truths, and which accounts for them.  Such a narrative may well contain truths but we cannot be sure.  We can't acquaint ourselves with the wholly past.

More recently still he writes,

What ceases to exist becomes nothing. Boston's Scollay Square, which is wholly past, is not nothing.  One can refer to it; there are true statements about it; some have veridical memories of it; there are videos of interviews of people who frequented it; it is an object of ongoing historical research. To dilate a bit on the fifth point:

One cannot learn more and more about what is no longer (temporally) present if it is nothing at all. Only what exists can be studied and its properties ascertained.  But we do learn more and more about Scollay Square. So it must be some definite item.  But, pace Meinong, there are no nonexistent items. Therefore, Scollay Square exists non-presently.  Therefore, what ceases to be present, does not cease to exist. It exists despite being past. It exists tenselessly at times earlier than the present time.  The mere passage of time did not annihilate Scollay Square.

Bill writes as if he takes our ability to refer to Scollay Square, make true statements about it, have veridical memories of it, and so on, to be inconsistent with its being nothing.  I'm afraid I cannot see why the state of Scollay Square has any impact at all on these abilities.  But perhaps Bill would say that his use of 'exists' and 'is' in these paragraphs is tenseless.  He is rarely explicit on this but the appearance of the phrase 'is (not) nothing' is often a clue that one needs to be wary.
But it's debatable that we do learn more and more about Scollay Square.  There's a limited number of vestiges of the square either discovered or yet to be discovered.  All we can do is make more inferences from this evidence and we have no way of knowing if we have arrived at the truth.   And what does Bill mean by 'there are no non-existent items'?  If an 'item' is, loosely, anything we can have an idea of, be it past, future, fictional, merely possible, etc, then there are plenty of items that do no exist. 

Finally, today,

Our penal practices presuppose the reality of the past. But how can presentism uphold the reality of the past?  The past is factual, not fictional; actual, not merely possible; something, not nothing.

The past is an object of historical investigation: we learn more and more about it.  Historical research is discovery, not invention.  We adjust our thinking about the past by what we discover. It is presupposed that what happened in the past is absolutely independent of our present thinking about it.

In sum, historical research presupposes the reality of the past. If there is a tenable presentism, then it must be able to accommodate the reality of the past.  I'd like to know how.  If only the present exists, then the past does not exist, in which case it is nothing, whence it follows that it is no object of investigation. But it is an object of investigation, ergo, etc.

I just don't understand why Bill will speak of (items of) the past in the present tense. Unless he is conflating things of the past with our present ideas of them.  Our idea of Caesar is derived from fact, not fiction.  Somebody was acquainted with Caesar and wrote about him, including Caesar himself! Likewise the characteristics we attribute to Caesar were actualised in Caesar; they did not remain a mere sketch of a Roman general and emperor.  And Caesar was of course something, once, not nothing, always.  I don't see why the past---the things and events now past---cannot be objects of investigation despite their now being nothing.  History is the formulation and revision of our ideas about the past, subject to the constraints imposed by the present vestiges of the past. 

Puzzling Over Puzzling Over Presentism

Bill says,

When Boston's Scollay Square ceased to exist, it did not quit the actual world and become a merely possible object. It became a past actual object.

Hmmm.  When it ceased to exist Scollay Square surely became no kind of object.  Its individuality, its standing out, came to an end and it returned as rubble and dust to the undifferentiated bulk whence it sprang.  Consider, though, the knowledge of Scollay Square in the mind of someone familiar with it.  On learning of the square's demise this knowledge was not erased.  On the contrary, it became enhanced with one last fact:  that Scollay Square was no more.  But this can't be part of the content of the idea of Scollay Square---the properties it possessed, the events it participated in.  It must be a property of the idea itself---that the content applies to no object at all.  Neo-Meinongians will recognise an encoding/exemplifying distinction here.  Yet we still confusingly say that Scollay Square is a past object.  In a later piece Bill quotes Palle Yourgrau on the pictorial representation of the demise of Osama bin Laden,

Time maga­zine had it right when it represented the death of bin Laden, hence his 'nonexistence,' with a picture of him on the cover, crossed out with a big X. If you’re lecturing on the capture and killing of bin Laden, you might draw a picture of him on the blackboard, and then conclude your lecture by drawing, as Time did, a big X across that drawing. That would be the right thing to do. The wrong thing to do would be to simply erase the drawing, to rub it out. A blank blackboard does not represent the death of bin Laden. On the contrary, it represents nothing. Bin Laden, on dying, did not become nothing, just as he did not come from nothing. (Ex nihilo, nihil fit.)

What I think both Bill and Yourgrau miss is that both pictures are appropriate in different ways.  The erased board represents bin Laden himself, now nothing; the crossed out picture our idea of him.  Note how the picture contains a parallel semantic ascent:  there is content---the image of bin Laden, but then this is crossed out. The image remains and the cross is not part of it.  Bill continues, 

There are those who remember Scollay Square. Some of their memories are veridical and some are not. How is this possible if there is nothing that they are remembering?

This is perhaps more easily answered.  No one is remembering Scollay Square as it is now.  They are remembering it as it was when they were acquainted with it. 

What makes the veridical memories veridical? I will assume that we do not want to say that the past exists only in the flickering memories of mortals.  However things stand with the future, the reality of the past is near-datanic.

How can we know which memories are veridical?  Perhaps we can't, memory being less reliable than perception.  But we can be more or less confident depending on consistency among independent witnesses, photographs, documents, and other causal traces. Indeed, the past was.  We remember its being rather than imagine it.

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.

Pain and time

Bill gives us another aporetic triad:

1) A wholly past (felt) pain is not nothing: it is real.
2) For (felt) pains, esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived.
3) Wholly past (felt) pains are not perceived.

Each of these propositions is extremely plausible if not self-evident, according to Bill.   Yet they result in contradiction.  So it would seem that there is something very problematic about our ordinary thinking about pains and other sensations that are stretched out in time, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Really?  I can't believe so.  Indeed, it's simple enough to relieve the contradiction whilst retaining the gist of these propositions by rewriting (1) as

1*)  A wholly past (felt) pain was not nothing: it was real. 

Here we are talking about a wholly past thing in the past tense---what I have been calling 'common sense presentism'.  The question becomes, Why does Bill want to talk about a past pain in the present tense?  Here is his justification for his (1):

To say that an item is wholly past is to say that it does not overlap the present. A felt or phenomenal pain is a pain exactly as it is experienced  from the first-person point of view of the one who endures it, with all and only the properties it appears to have from the point of view of the one who endures it.  It is not to be confused with the physical cause of the pain if there is one. Now yesterday's excruciating migraine headache, which is wholly past, is not nothing: it happened.

I have argued elsewhere that to say of a thing that has been and gone that it is 'wholly past'  is a manner of speaking that should not be taken as presently attributing the property 'wholly past' to it, so I shall let the first sentence pass.  We should note though that the 'is not nothing' in the last sentence can be conveyed equally well with 'was not nothing'.   Bill continues,

It is now an object of veridical memory. Since the memory is veridical, its intentional object cannot be unreal.  The pain  is also a subject of presently true past-tensed statements such as 'The pain was awful.' Given that veritas sequitur esse, that no true statement is about what is wholly unreal or nonexistent, yesterday's migraine pain cannot be unreal or nonexistent. The remembered wholly past pain is actual not merely possible; factual not fictional; real not imaginary.  Of course, it is not temporally present. But it is real nonetheless.  It is or exists. It is included in the ontological inventory.  To deny this is to deny the reality of the past. 

With the underlined sentences Bill departs from ordinary language---the 'datanic' we might say---and begins to speak in the terms of a theory.  A very misleading theory, in my view.  But in any case, if the 'intentional object' of today's memory is yesterday's pain, and the memory is veridical, then we can say that yesterday's pain could not have been unreal.  We don't require the present tense here.   So we can paraphrase what Bill says with

Since Bill's memory of yesterday's pain is veridical, the pain must have been real.

Bill no doubt also remembers the pain ceasing to exist.  The pain was awful and then it was gone.   So it's surprising that he makes a narrow interpretation of veritas sequitur esse.  Truly, the pain was awful.  So the pain could not have been unreal or non-existent while truly it was awful.  The pain was actual and was not merely possible.  The pain was factual and not fictional.  The pain was real and not imaginary.  Of course the pain has gone but it was real nevertheless.  This is not to deny the reality of the past.  And can't an inventory be a history?  The point of all this is to show that Bill can say what he wants to say in past-tensed ordinary language.

I conclude that Bill's justification for (1) rests on a narrow present-tensed understanding of VSE.  Later in the piece he says that one might reject (1) by rejecting this too.  He seems to be claiming that rejecting VSE requires a problematic Meinongian move:

...there are truths about beingless items and one can refer to such items.  Even though JFK has ceased to exist, he is still in some sense available to serve as an object of reference and a subject of true statements.

I'd agree that such a move, expressed this way, is probably not sustainable.   What on Earth is a 'beingless item'?  But why do we need some theoretical alternative to narrow VSE when it's a pre-theoretical given that we can make true statements about objects and events that no longer exist?  To back up (1) Bill needs to justify his counter-intuitive interpretation of VSE.

Common Sense Presentism

Bill's position is that philosophical presentism is a substantive thesis: what no longer exists does not exist at all, and what does not yet exist does not exist at all.  Much hinges on the distinction between not existing and not existing at all, which no one seems able to clarify.  Instead I propose 'common sense presentism'.  This is not so much a thesis as a practice.  Namely, the practice of speaking of past things and events using the past tense and eschewing the present.  In his latest piece on this topic Bill says,

Two points. First, what was has an ontological status superior to that which never was -- which has no ontological status at all. Second, what was, though logically contingent at the time of its occurrence, is now in a sense necessary, but without ceasing to be logically contingent. The mere passage of time works a modal promotion, from contingency to necessitas per accidens, accidental necessity. Socrates freely drank the hemlock, hence his drinking was logically contingent. But once past, the deed cannot be undone by god or mortal, chance or fate. Cannot. Under the aspect of eternity, however, the heroic act remains logically contingent.

It strikes me that to speak of a past thing or event using the present tense is to beg the question against the presentist.  It presumes that the thing or event has some sort of present existence.  And just what does Bill mean by assigning an 'ontological status' to a thing or event?  Let's take a concrete instance of Bill's general statement.  For example, 

Julius Caesar has an ontological status superior to that of Sherlock Holmes.

I suspect that the names here are being mentioned not used.  We are not ascribing properties to objects or setting objects in some relation.  There are no such objects.  Instead we are reminding ourselves that 'Julius Caesar' names a long gone historical personage whereas 'Sherlock Holmes' names a character in a work of mere fiction, and the former outranks the latter in 'ontological status'.  Likewise, by ascribing 'accidental necessity' to the event of Socrates drinking the hemlock we remind ourselves of the historicity of this occurrence.  That Holmes played the violin has no such historicity.  To talk of undoing an historical event is to make a category error.  The temporal locus of change and its contingency or necessity is the present and the present alone.  Only ongoing events possess any 'modal status'.  Of course, once an event is no longer ongoing we can refer to the modal status it possessed while ongoing.  But this requires the past tense.  Socrates drinking the hemlock was a contingent event. It isn't now anything, let alone necessary.

Elsewhere in this piece Bill makes much of the apparent conflict between the implications of presentism and

the widespread commonsensical intuition that 'has been' is better than and therefore different from 'never was.' 

But it seems clear from his examples that the intuition in question is that it is better to be able to look back on a life of achievement and incident than otherwise.  This is a matter of human psychology.  How is it relevant to our understanding of time?

Presentism and Truthmakers

Bill runs through the truthmaker objection to presentism:  truths about the past are truths now and hence need present truthmakers yet under presentism there don't seem to be any.  Let's consider a variant of Bill's example: 

S. Kennedy commanded PT109.  

That's true.  But what in the present grounds this truth? On the face of it, that's a rather weird question.  Why should we expect there to be something about the world now that grounds a truth about the past? But Bill has a point I think: we say that S is true, now.  Bill rightly dismisses Ed Feser's half-hearted attempt to reconcile presentism and truthmakerism.  So what should we say about this puzzle?

Consider this sentence:

T.  Kennedy commands PT109.

In 1943 T was true and we may suppose that in 1943 the world was in some way that made it true.  But now in 2019 that way has long since ceased to be and T is no longer true.  How then do we express the way of 1943 from the vantage point of 2019?  We can't just use T as that is false.  Instead, the rules of English, unchanging over the intervening period, tell us to use S, a modification in tense of T.  The past way, once expressed by T is now expressed by S.  S is not a brute truth.  It's a rule-governed transformation of a made truth.

Presentism again

Bill has been posting once more this month on presentism.  His latest takes to task those who would see 'exists' and 'is present' as synonymous. 

One misunderstanding floated in the Facebook Medieval Logic forum is that presentism in the current analytic philosophy of time is the thesis that 'exists' and 'is present' are synonyms.

Well, according to the SEP some discussion of this view, known as Existence Presentism, has appeared in the literature.

But Bill argues against any synonymity.  First, he says that 'exists' applies to God and to abstract objects well enough, but 'is present' does not.  These things are 'out of time'.  I reply that if these things don't present themselves they hardly stand out (ex+sistere) either.  But let's concentrate on concrete objects. Bill goes on,

Now suppose there are no timeless entities and that everything is 'in time.' It would still not be the case that 'exists' and 'is present' have the same meaning or sense. The following questions make sense and are substantive in the sense that they do not have trivial answers:

Is everything that exists present? Or are there things that exist that are not present?

But the following questions have trivial answers:

Is everything present present? Or are there present things that are not present?

The answer to the first question in the second pair is a tautology and thus trivially true. The answer to the second is a contradiction and thus trivially false.

Since the first two questions are substantive, 'exists' and 'is present' are not synonyms.

Perhaps we should grant this. But if not synonymous then at least co-extensive. Here is an analogy: In the world of plane geometry, 'triangle' and 'trilateral' are co-extensive.  Every triangle is a trilateral and vice versa.  And I suspect that if one were to give a really sharp definition of 'triangle' one would have to bring in trilaterality, and vice versa.  The reason for the co-extensiveness is that the two terms focus on different aspects that all figures in an easily understood class must possess.  Something similar may be happening with our understanding of 'exists' and 'is present'.  Bill's question, Are there things that exist that are not present? may be like asking, Are there triangles that aren't trilateral? Here is a suggestion:  just as the concepts 'triangle' and 'trilateral' can be arithmetised, that is, explained in terms of sets of pairs of real numbers, can we so arithmetise 'exists' and 'is present' (at least for concrete objects)?  We might arrive at a kind of four-dimensionalist picture in which the lives of objects are tube-like regions in  space-time.  The location, orientation, and shape of each object at a given moment is given by a cross-section perpendicular to the time axis [this needs a diagram].  What we mean by 'exists' and 'is present' can be explained in the terms of this model.  Of course, the model could be taken to support an eternalistic understanding of 'tenseless existence' too.  One can 'see' the finite tube-like regions that correspond to objects.  But these four-dimensional sets of points aren't the objects themselves, they are more like biographies of objects.  They contain all the geometric information that is to be known of objects over their lifetimes.

Perhaps also we could use such a model to tease out what the eternalist means by 'tenseless existence' or 'existence without presence'  We could ask if the model gives an adequate history of matter.  If it doesn't, what does it omit or where does it go wrong?  If it does, the eternalist ought to be able to explain what he means in the terms of the model.  That would be illuminating.

Times as Maximal Propositions

Bill begins a recent piece,

1. Here are three temporal platitudes: The wholly past is no longer present; the wholly future is not yet present; the present alone is present. Here are three closely related controversial metaphysical theses: the wholly past is no longer; the wholly future is not yet; the present alone is. The second trio is one version of presentism. I grant that presentism is appealing, though it would be a mistake to take it to be common sense or immediate fallout from common sense. The platitudes are Moorean; deny them on pain of being an idiot. Not so with the heavy-duty metaphysical theses about time and existence advanced by the presentist. We can reasonably ask what they mean and whether they are true.

2. Now even presentists will admit that the past was not a mere nothing. Last Sunday's hike had some sort of reality that cries out for accommodation. After all it is now true that I hiked eight hours on Sunday. Even if there are no truth-makers, there still must have been something that the true past-tensed sentence is about. Here I distinguish between two principles, Truth-Maker and Veritas Sequitur Esse.

3. We should also keep in mind that past times and events did not have the status of the merely possible. When Sunday's hike was over it did not change its modal status from actual to merely possible. It remained an actual event, albeit a past actual event. Soren Kierkegaard WAS engaged to Regine Olsen, but he was never married to her. Intuitively, the engagement belonged to the sphere of the actual whereas the marriage belonged to the sphere of the merely possible, not that it is possible now. Neither event was a mere nothing. Furthermore, the engagement had, intuitively, 'more reality' than the marriage. What was was more real than what might have been. Historians attempt to determine what the actual facts were. They are constrained by the reality of [the evidence of] the past, whence it follows that past had some sort of reality. Historians are neither fiction writers nor students of mere possibilia.

4. I take it to be a Moorean datum that past events and times were not nothing and also were not merely possible. Hence a theory of time that cannot accommodate these data is worthless. How can the presentist accommodate them? He has to do it in a manner consistent with his claim that past and future items do not exist at all, that only temporally present items exist. 

Well, not quite.  If you compare the above with Bill's original you will see that I have taken the liberty of changing Bill's present tense usages into past tense and underlined them.   Is the presentist required to do anything at all? 

Actualism and Presentism

There is an interesting parallel between our difficulties in formulating presentism and those in formulating actualism, as Bill explains here.  If we understand actualism to be the claim that

A.  Only the actual exists,

then Bill says

One is very strongly tempted to say that to exist is to be actual. If 'exists' in (A) means 'is actual,' however, then (A) is a tautology. But if 'exists' in (A) does not mean 'is actual,' what does it mean?

I agree that there is such a temptation. But I don't agree that the problem lies in our understanding of 'exists'.  I take that as a rock-solid given.  Rather, we must investigate what we mean by 'the actual',  'the possible', 'the past', and so on.

There is a temptation to take the possible as the extension of the concept possible; likewise, the past as the extension of the concept past.  We say Caesar is a past Roman,  Balls is a possible prime minister, and so on, as if past and possible functioned as concept words.  But I think this is a mistake.  For the extension of possible prime minister  is  a superset of the extension of prime minister whereas the extension of female prime minister  is a subset.   Likewise, the extension of past Roman exceeds the extension of Roman, though I might be accused of question begging in claiming this.  However, I note that the extension of past Roman just goes on increasing with time, whereas that of female Roman may increase and decrease, as it did following the fall of Rome.  So there is a case for regarding possible etc as other than concept terms.  If this is right, how are we to understand them?

What follows is speculative.  I claim that past and possible and their ilk act as 'adverbs of assertion'.  They qualify whole sentences, as in

Pastly, Caesar crosses the Rubicon,
Possibly, Ed Balls is prime minister,
Fictionally, Holmes is a detective.

Though we ordinarily distribute the adverbial operators into the sentences, as in

Caesar crossed the Rubicon,
Ed Balls is a possible prime minister,
Holmes is a fictional detective,

their logical structure is  that of an operator applied to a sentence.  The presence of the operator modifies what we take as the truth value of the sentence.  Pastly asserts that there was a time when the sentence was true though it may not be true now.  Possibly warns us to take the sentence with a pinch of salt.  It's truth value is indeterminate. Everything told us by an untrustworthy source we might preface with possibly.  Fictionally reminds us that the sentence comes from or paraphrases an element of a story.  It has no truth value. It is not an attempt to say anything about the world.

The question now is what we are to make of proper names introduced by sentences under such operators.

Pastly, there is a Roman called Caesar,
Possibly, there is an MP called Balls,
Fictionally, there is a detective called Holmes.

The first primes us that the name 'Caesar' in forthcoming sentences will refer to this no longer extant Roman.  The second that 'Balls' will refer to a putative MP, with the caveat that there may be no such person.  What follows concerning said 'Balls' may be utter flim-flam, but it may turn out true.  The last primes us not to worry about the truth of sentences asserting properties or actions of 'Holmes'.   Note the element of semantic ascent:  this is information about sentences about Caesar, not information about Caesar.   And since a sentence about Caesar contains the name 'Caesar' it seems reasonable to suppose that this information is associated with the name itself.  So we appear to have names introduced under the pastly operator, the possibly operator, the fictionally operator, and so on.  I would hazard a guess that a well-educated Westerner is familiar with as many, if not more, pastly and fictionally names as presently names.  Possibly names tend to be much fewer in number since we require them to be verified and become actually names, else we tend to forget them.  One exception springs to mind: Jack the Ripper.   

My guess is that it is because the actually and presently names are subsets of all the names in our possession, and because we are tempted to think that actual and present are concept terms that pick out subsets of the available existents that we are inclined to think that presentism and actualism must be substantive metaphysical claims.  But they are not.  They really are the trivial claim that

the present = the actual = the existent

and

the past = the merely possible = the fictional =  ∅.

 

Moore and Rutherford

Following the Maverick's Presentism discussion (see here for latest and follow Bill's 'related articles' in that post for earlier) has been like living on a Möbius band: you go round a circle and fetch up where you started but the world is now upside down.

We have taken as reference Ned Markosian's A Defense of Presentism.  Here is his opening paragraph.

Presentism is the view that only present objects exist. According to Presentism, if we were to make an accurate list of all the things that exist – i.e., a list of all the things that our most unrestricted quantifiers range over – there would be not a single non-present object on the list. Thus, you and I and the Taj Mahal would be on the list, but neither Socrates nor any future grandchildren of mine would be included. And it’s not just Socrates and my future grandchildren, either – the same goes for any other putative object that lacks the property of being present. All such objects are unreal, according to Presentism. According to Non-presentism, on the other hand, non-present objects like Socrates and my future grandchildren exist right now, even though they are not currently present. We may not be able to see them at the moment, on this view, and they may not be in the same space-time vicinity that we find ourselves in right now, but they should nevertheless be on the list of all existing things.

Although he hands over a hostage in his talk of 'unrestricted quantifiers' it's clear enough what Markosian means by Presentism and Non-presentism and the contrast between the two, especially if we restrict ourselves to concreta.  The census form asks us to give the names of the people who live in our house. Not the names of those who used to live here (difficult), nor of those who will live here (impossible). If 'exist' functions as a bona fide tensed verb then we know by analogy with the census instruction what Markosian is asking us to do. So much is obvious, commonsense, Moorean. So why is the non-presentist unhappy that the presentist has not included Socrates on his list? (This shows there is a disagreement before either party has tried to define his position in some mutually agreeable language) The answer, according to Markosian, is that NP has theoretical reasons for including Socrates. One, apparently, is that if Socrates didn't exist then propositions about him couldn't exist either, and this, according to NP, rules out our saying true things about Socrates, which we Mooreanly do. So NP has argued himself into a tricky corner. His way out is not to abandon his theory but to elaborate it further with the notion of 'tenseless verb'. To cap this he convinces himself that the whole discussion must be couched within his own theoretical terms and insists that the P must play on the NP's ground. The P will at this point refuse the invitation and concentrate on exposing the problems with the NP's theory.

Consider this analogy to the present discussion. Rutherford tells us that the Mooreanly solid hand before our eyes is mostly empty space. How is this seeming impasse resolved? R explains that matter will be seen as solid (continuous) when viewed under visible light but discrete when viewed under much shorter wavelength radiation. This allows us to retain the meaning of our commonsense term 'solid' for our ordinary dealings with macroscopic objects in daylight. Likewise, if we are to take the NP seriously, then he has to explain how we are to live with his new tenseless verbs, eg, '(exist)', whilst keeping our old ones, eg, 'exist'. My own view is that NP faces formidable problems. Here's one: It seems that 'I (am) alive' and 'I (am) dead' are both true. So the law of non-contradiction seems not to apply to sentences using (is), and I, for one, will sorely miss it.

Caesar exists no more

Over at the Maverick's, in the course of discussing an argument of Ed Ockham's, Bill makes some strange claims.  First, he says that

There is no such thing as Caesar any more

is a Moorean truth, that is, beyond the reach of reasonable controversy.  For me, and for Ed Ockham, this implies that there was such a thing as Caesar but that there isn't now.  No, says Bill, to reach this conclusion we need the metaphysical assumption of Presentism.  This can be stated as

Necessarily, only temporally present concrete objects exist.

This seems to me a logical truth related to how the adverbial phrase 'temporally present' interacts with the present tensed verb 'exist'.  But No again, Bill seems to say, 

we can reject presentism in favour of the plausible view that both past and present concreta exist, i.e., are within the range of our unrestricted quantifiers.

Under this view it appears that

...there is such a thing as Caesar, it is just that he is past.

Strictly speaking, this is a contradiction:  the second clause takes away what is granted by the first.   What are we to make of this?  I think a clue lies within Bill's phrase

are within the range of our unrestricted quantifiers.

The thought here might be that from

Caesar was a Roman (*)

we can infer, by existential generalisation,

∃x. x was a Roman, (**)

and translating this back into ordinary English we arrive at

There exists x such that x was a Roman. (***)

Echoing Ed Ockham here, I think this shows the perils of an uncritical formalisation.  The last assertion seems to have the imprimatur of formal logic behind it, yet it cannot follow from * for it claims that there is (present tense) someone who was a Roman, and the world's human population might have vanished by now.

The 'there exists' or 'there is' translation of ∃ is idiomatic of the mathematical language for which predicate calculus was developed.  But mathematical talk is untensed, taking place in an utterly static world.  If we want to apply the predicate calculus to the tensed statements of ordinary language in a changing world we need to be a little careful.  In this comment thread Ed Ockham suggests that we should translate (**) as

for some x, x was a Roman,

or indeed just

something was a Roman.

This works perfectly well for the eternal present of mathematics, and I suspect, for ordinary, tensed, language. So I throw down another challenge:  Can anyone offer an example where this interpretation leads to trouble?

Finally, a slogan:  Anti-presentism isn't a substantive metaphysical thesis.  It's a campaign to persuade us to use the word 'exists' in a different way.

I used to be a Presentist but now that's all in the past

Bill gets 2013 off to a flying start with a revamp of a late 2010 posting on presentism.  If he carries on like this I'll have plenty to comment on, though I'm a bit concerned for my blood pressure.

I'm not sure what the thesis of presentism is.  I took it to be the common or garden notion that Bill gets close to in the following:

He [the presentist] seems to be operating with a metaphysical picture according to which there is a Dynamic Now which is the source and locus of a ceaseless annihilation and creation: some things are ever passing out of being and other things are ever coming into being. He is not saying that all that is in being is all there ever was in being or all there ever will be in being. That is the lunatic thesis of the present-moment solipsist.

The presentist can be characterized as an annihilationist-creationist in the following sense. He is annihilationist about the past, creationist about the future. He maintains that an item that becomes past does not lose merely the merely temporal property of presentness, but loses both presentness and existence. And an item that becomes present does not gain merely the merely temporal property of presentness, but gains both presentness and existence. Becoming past is a passing away, an annihilation, and becoming present is a coming into being, a creation out of nothing.

I wouldn't want to talk about the temporal property of presentness.  It's too easy to slide into nonsense like Julius Caesar possesses the temporal property of pastness.  But let's put that quibble to one side.  Bill says that to be a substantive philosophical thesis presentism must avoid the trivial.  To that end he puts words into the presentist's mouth.  Examples:

1. [James, the actor] Dean does not presently exist at all
2. Dean does not presently exist at any time, past, present, or future.
3. It is presently the case that there are past times at which Dean does not exist.

For me, in (1) the presently and the at all are  redundant, but Bill insists one or both must be there to avoid triviality.  Bill then elaborates (1) into (2).  What can I say about this?  I suppose one might say this for a joking, exasperated kind of emphasis, but it's nonsense, isn't it? What could it possibly mean to say that Dean does not presently exist at any time in the past?  It's an absurd jumble of tenses.  Compare with Dean does not presently talk at any time in the past.  Finally Bill claims that (3) follows from (2).  You've heard of GIGO?  This is NINO.  (3), though, is not too distant syntactically from something  a presentist would say, viz,

4. It is presently the case that there have been past times at which Dean did not exist.

Explaining the quantification over time in (4) is interesting but will have to wait for another day.  In the meantime  I'm happy to run aground on the Scylla of triviality.