Eternalism, Temporalism, Neutralism

Abstract

In her Transient Truths (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), Berit Brogaard defends temporalism about proposition content from the more traditional eternalist views. I argue that both temporalism and eternalism are equally capable of accommodating all the data, and thus suggest that we should adopt a neutralism that holds there is no serious or resolvable dispute. Contra Brogaard, I argue that neither disagreement patterns nor belief dynamics favor temporalism over eternalism. I also suggest that Brogaard's defense of operator over quantificational semantics for tense is unnecessary, because quantificational tense semantics can be given a temporalist reading, and operator tense semantics can be given an eternalist reading.