Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Presentism, Eternalism, and the Triviality Problem
- 2 Weak Interactions: Asymmetry of Time or Asymmetry in Time?
- 3 Presentism and the Flow of Time
- 4 Presentism and the Notion of Existence
- 5 Meyer’s Struggle with Presentism or How We Can Understand the Debate between Presentism and Eternalism
- 6 Dynamic Presentism and the Grounding Objection
- 7 Brute Past Presentism, Dynamic Presentism, and the Objection from Being-Supervenience
- 8 Entropy and the Direction of Time
- Bibliography
- Index of Subjects
- Index of Names
6 - Dynamic Presentism and the Grounding Objection
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Presentism, Eternalism, and the Triviality Problem
- 2 Weak Interactions: Asymmetry of Time or Asymmetry in Time?
- 3 Presentism and the Flow of Time
- 4 Presentism and the Notion of Existence
- 5 Meyer’s Struggle with Presentism or How We Can Understand the Debate between Presentism and Eternalism
- 6 Dynamic Presentism and the Grounding Objection
- 7 Brute Past Presentism, Dynamic Presentism, and the Objection from Being-Supervenience
- 8 Entropy and the Direction of Time
- Bibliography
- Index of Subjects
- Index of Names
Summary
This chapter analyses the grounding objection to presentism, arguing that presentists who claim that only present things exist have no ontological basis for their claims as they themselves refer to the past. It attempts to demonstrate that the objection is invalidated when we consider a dynamic version of presentism, that is one which introduces a dynamic ontology by means of the notion of dynamic existence. Not only does this approach facilitate the introduction of a metaphysical category of the past (past things and past facts) which provides an ontological basis for past-tense propositions, but also allows us to explain why the future is open (in contrast to the fixed past) and why contingent propositions about the future lack truth value and do not need truthmakers.
Introduction
It seems that whatever we claim to be true has to be anchored in some way in reality. And it also seems that if we take the correspondence theory of truth into account—the most natural one to adopt—we should expect that propositions are true if and only if (iff) they correspond to the facts. Truthmaker theorists take this theory as claiming that every truth has something that makes it true, namely a truthmaker. So, for example, D. M. Armstrong (2000: 150) wrote:
I hold the view that every truth has a truthmaker. The truthmaker for a particular truth is that object or entity in the world in virtue of which that truth is true. (…) The truthmaker is the “correspondent” in the Correspondence theory of truth, but with the repudiation of the view that the correspondence involved is always one-one
In its extreme form, namely Truthmaker Maximalism (TM), an example of which appeared in the above quotation from Armstrong, the truthmaker principle can be stated in the form:
TM Every true proposition has a truthmaker.
If we accept TM, a tough problem which remains for adherents of the socalled dubious ontologies such as, for example, presentism, modal realism, or Platonism, who want to meet the challenge put forward by the truthmaker theory, is the question of whether all their ontological claims really have truthmakers and where these truthmakers should be sought.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- In Defence of a Dynamic View of Reality , pp. 112 - 128Publisher: Jagiellonian University PressPrint publication year: 2022