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.

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.

On Truthmaker Maximalism

Bill has a piece out opposing truthmaker maximalism:

7) Consider now the analytic proposition *Every cygnet is a swan.* As analytic, it is true solely in virtue of the meanings of 'cygnet' and 'swan.' It is true ex vi terminorum. Its truth is not contingent on the existence of any cygnets. Why does it need a truthmaker? It certainly does not need anything external to it to make it true. The concept cygnet includes the concept swan, so that, by sheer analysis of the subject concept, one can arrive at the truth in question. That's why we call it, following Kant, 'analytic.' Clearly, nothing external to an analytic proposition is required to make it true. It follows that it cannot have a truthmaker. Or rather it follows if a truthmaker of a first-order truthbearer is an entity that is external to the truthbearer and resident in the realm of reality beyond the sphere of representations broadly construed.

Bill says that the concept cygnet includes the concept swan.  It would seem this inclusion relation between the concepts cygnet and swan is what makes true the proposition *Every cygnet is a swan*.  Is this relation internal to the truthbearer?  Perhaps one could argue for this if we think of truthbearers as meanings transcendent of sentences.  But surely not if we take sentences to be the truthbearers.  So Bill's example of an analytic truth can be thought of as having a truthmaker external to itself.  Is it beyond the sphere of representations too?  Maybe not.  But then Bill goes on to say,

The Platonic proposition expressed by '7 is prime,' for example, makes-true the general Platonic proposition that there are Platonic propositions.

So he does appear to allow some truthmakers to lie in said sphere.

Truth and God

Bill offers an argument to the effect that truth requires God.

Among the truths there are necessary truths such as the laws of logic. Now a truth is a true truth-bearer, a true proposition, say. Nothing can have a property unless it exists. (Call this principle Anti-Meinong). So no proposition can have the property of being true unless the proposition exists. A necessary truth is true in every metaphysically possible world. It follows that a necessarily true proposition exists in every possible world including worlds in which there are no finite minds. But a proposition is a thought-accusative that cannot exist except in, or for, a mind. If there is no God, or rather, if there is no necessarily existent mind, every mind is contingent. A contradiction ensues: there is a world W such that, in W, there exists a thought-accusative that is not the thought-accusative of any mind.

Bill suggests four ways of rebutting the argument.  Here is a fifth.  We can deny that the laws of logic are propositions.  A law of logic is more like a function that given a proposition returns a true proposition.  For example:

LEM: p → p ∨ ¬p

In a world without propositions there is nothing for LEM to work on to deliver a true proposition.   Bill's argument does not rule out such a world.

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.

Does Deflationism Rule Out Relativism?

Bill thinks so.  He summarises:

No deflationary theory of truth is a substantive theory of truth.  All relativistic theories are substantive theories.  Ergo, no deflationary theory of truth is a relativistic theory of truth.

Yet it seems to me that to arrive at this dichotomy both the deflationist and the relativist have 'factored out' the most significant relativistic aspect of all this.  Namely that the truth of 'snow is white', 'grass is green', and the rest, is relative to, or at least dependent upon, the existence of speakers of English.  This becomes obvious if we render

'Snow is white' is true

not as the bald

Snow is white

but as

The stuff we English speakers call 'snow' is the colour we call 'white'.

It's as if the deflationist, having forgotten this, is happy with an empty theory of truth.  The relativist has also forgotten this but isn't happy with the result, and scouts around for an idea to fill the vacant space.

Perhaps another way of putting this is to say that if we are looking for a truthmaker for 'snow is white', then we need to look beyond snow and beyond white and include, as part of what makes 'snow is white' true, we English speakers ourselves.

Again, Bill says,

One version of deflationism is Quine's disquotationalism according to which the function of the truth-predicate is to remove the quotation marks from a quoted sentence. Thus "'Snow is white' is true" says exactly what 'Snow is white' says, namely, that snow is white. And "'Grass is green' is true" says exactly what 'Grass is green' says, namely, that grass is green. And so on. There is nothing common to these sentences in virtue of which they are true. 'True' is just a device of disquotation; it does not pick out a genuine property.

But we can render these sentences as

The stuff we English speakers call 'snow' is the colour we call 'white',
The stuff we English speakers call 'grass' is the colour we call 'green',

and it's apparent that these sentences have a common form in which the correct word for a certain colour property and the correct name for a certain stuff are used to assert that the stuff has that property, and it does. Is this irrelevant? Naive correspondence?