Antirealism, Presentism and Bivalence

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 I am entirely in agreement with Dummett that the present is not pointlike. In chapter 5.1 of Dolev (2007 Dolev, Y. 2007. Time and Realism, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) I argue that, more generally, we cannot speak meaningfully at all of the ‘present’s duration’. It is events that have durations, and the present gets associated with events of varying durations, depending on the context in which the present is alluded to. It is true that in ‘Dummett’s Antirealism and Time’ I claimed that Dummett’s antirealist cannot even think a thought because a thought could be seen as consisting of temporal parts, some of which are past, others of which are future. And if past and future events cannot be accessed at all, then a thought cannot be formulated. But this claim does not rely on the thesis that the present is pointlike. All that it presupposes is that there are contexts in which a thought is made up of temporally consecutive parts, none of which has to be regarded as pointlike, but some of which are not present. 2 I have reformulated its central elements in Dolev (2007 Dolev, Y. 2007. Time and Realism, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), Ch. 4.5. 3 All this is spelled out in greater detail ibid., Ch. 4.5. 4 I am taking it for granted that memories cannot be reduced to present experiences that involve only present materials, any more than past‐tense sentences can be reduced or translated to present‐tense ones, or to ‘tenseless’ ones. Memories involve past experiences, just as past‐tense sentences are about past events (I provide arguments for these claims ibid., Ch. 5.3). 5 Ibid., Ch. 4. 6 I am ignoring here the difference between asserting ‘p ∨ ¬p is true’ and asserting ‘p is either true or false’.