Eternalism, Counting Across Times and the Argument from Semantics

Abstract

In his 2004 paper ‘Tensed Quantifiers’ (in Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, ed. Dean W. Zimmerman. Vol. 1, 3–20. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), David Lewis presented an apparently powerful case for eternalism by arguing that we cannot account for the truth-conditions of sentences like ‘There have been forty-four presidents of the United States’ and ‘There will be five more presidents of the United states’ and maintain a non-revisionary attitude towards their truth-values, without committing to the existence of ‘past’ and ‘future’ things. Related arguments can be found in works by Ted Sider, and by Zoltan Gendler Szabó. We can call the fully developed form of this argument the Argument from Semantics (AfS). In this paper, I counter the AfS by showing that these truth-conditions can be captured without commitment to the existence (in a present tense sense or a tenseless sense) of things—such as Socrates and Abraham Lincoln—which we take to have existed but not to exist, or things—like the particular children of those born today—which we take it do not exist, though they will.