Are presentism/eternalism, etc. metaphysical or empirical claims?

Some claim that presentism is falsified by special relativity. Does that make presentism a contingent truth? If the speed of light were infinite, would that change matters for presentism? Do eternalism or the growing block theory, if true, have the status of metaphysical truth?

Comments

[John Keller]

Current orthodoxy has it that the ability to be falsified does NOT make a claim contingently true or false. Kripke and Putnam give the canonical arguments for this, commonly called the existence of the necessary a posteriori. I, along with most people, think their arguments (for the existence of the necessary a posteriori, at least) are persuasive. Those that disagree have a big research project on their hands, which is difficult to evaluate at this point. The work of, for example, Chalmers, Jackson, and Stalnaker on two-dimensional semantics is an important part of that project.

[John Keller]

The second part of your question: orthodoxy claims that if true presentism is necessarily true. But there are prominent philosophers, like David Lewis and Peter van Inwagen, who do NOT think that (all) metaphysical theories are necessarily true if true. I myself am torn on the issue, although I don't think EVERY claim metaphysicians argue about is non-contingent, many of them certainly feel like they should be necessary.

[Adrian Bardon]

Thanks for your comments. As for the first one, I would certainly agree that you can falsify a claim to necessary truth! It is easy to falsify 2+2=5, for example. The issue is whether facts about the speed of light, or other contingent facts, MAKE presentism true or false. In your second comment, you suggest that "orthodoxy" states that presentism is a metaphysical truth. Is that your view? Why or why not? Whether or not metaphysical truths are all necessary would be the next question if we decide that this is indeed the status for presentism or a competing theory.

[Andrew Moon]

Hi Adrian,
When you say, "The issue is whether facts about the speed of light, or other contingent facts, MAKE presentism true or false", are you saying the issue is whether those facts could be truthmakers for presentism? Those sorts of facts don't seem to be the sorts of that would be truthmakers for presentism. Or do you mean something else by "making true"?

[Rickard Vester]

I am not sure wether presentism or eternalism are contingent truths. One strange thing, I think Thomas Crisp wrote this, is that the Growing Block View is contingently true (given that the universe has not existed for ever, somehow). Because at the first instance of time, both presentism, the Growing Block View and Eternalism would be true.

[John Keller]

I'm sorry Adrian, I sould have said 'empirically falsified' in my first post--an important qualification!

As regards my own views on the non-contingent nature of presentism, as I say, I am undecided on the issue. It is the kind of claim that seems like it should be necessarily true if true. But seeming doesn't count for much these days, especially in light of the kind of externalist considerations I mentioned.

Finally, as regards what MAKES presentism false: insofar as I understand what it is to make something false, I would say that what makes presentism false is the existence of other times/past objects. E.g., times that "contain" dinosaurs and times which "contain" my grandkids. These facts are plausibly contingent, or at least only accidentally necessary. I think current physics gives us a certain amount of evidence that those other times/objects exist, and so for the falsity of presentism. If presentism is true what makes it true is that no non-present times or objects exist--at least in conjunction with the fact that past times/objects existed.

Or in any case, that is how I think about it. I think Ted Sider has a nice discussion of related issues in his book.

[Adrian Bardon]

John,

You can empirically falsify 2+2=5, say, by taking two apples, adding two more, and discovering that you now have four.

I am not clear on "accidentally necessary." Are you saying it is possible that the speed of light could have been infinite?

[Adrian Bardon]

Rickard,

Very intriguing point from Crisp, but was there a first instant, and can we speak meaningfully of how things really are at an instant?

[Jonathan Tallant]

Isn't there a pretty strong intuition that both presentism and eternalism will, if true, be only contingently true given the apparent possibility of timeless worlds? Given only a pretty weak combinatorial theory of possibility you can construct a world that seems to include only a timeless point (Sider talks about this in 'Four DImensionalism' and there's a recent Analysis paper by Nikk Effingham and Jo Melia that looks to show something pretty similar). I take it that such a world is neither eternalist nor presentist since both are theories of time and time would not be real at such a world.

That then renders consideration of whether STR shows presentism contingent somewhat superfluous.

Of course, Effingham and Melia and Sider all start from eternalist worlds to generate a timeless world, but something pretty similar could surely be established using presentism as a starting point.

[John Keller]

Hi Adrian,

I'm sorry, I was just reading some stuff on Molinism, hence the jargon. 'Accidentally necessary' isn't doing any real work in my post above. I just meant that we're stuck with the existence of dinosaurs: it is metaphysically impossible to bring it about that dinosaurs never existed. Nonetheless 'dinosaurs exist' isn't much of a definition or analysis of the claim that the past exists: that was the only point of brining up accidental necessity.

If you think 2+2=5 is empirically falsifiable, doesn't that answer one of your original questions? You bring up in the original post a possible (analytic?) connection between empirical falsifiability and contingency and I was gesturing (badly) towards arguments that purport to show that there is no such connection. But perhaps I misunderstood your original intent. I think we agree on the important issue (as I see things): there are non-contingent claims that can be empirically falsified/disconfirmed. So the MERE empirical falsifiability of presentism does not show that it is non-contingent.

[Adrian Bardon]

I am making no claim in my original post, just raising a question. But the idea is, might someone suggest that presentism is false if the speed of light is finite AND true if it is not? The biconditional is what would make it look contingent.

And there is the subsidiary question, which I find independently interesting, which is: could the speed of light possibly be infinite?

[John Keller]

Last comment first: I have no idea, but it is interesting to think about what it would be for the "speed" of light to be infinite. If the light "travelled" instantaneously, would it mean that photons are multiply located? Or is the idea that light wouldn't be/involve photons? If the latter, then the kind of externalism issues we've been talking about arise: Light is necessarily electromagnetic radiation.

First comment last: I think all I've meant to be claiming is that I don't think the existence of the biconditional makes it looks contingent, unless you reject various commonly accepted claims. Compare: water is H2O iff the stuff in my glass is H2O. That only makes 'water=H2O' look contingent if you haven't been convinced by Kripke.

[Adrian Bardon]

John,

Galileo plus just about everybody else before the 19th century thought that light is transmitted instantaneously; are you suggesting they were not talking about light?

The water is H2O analogy looks like apples and oranges to me. Aren't there some propositions that are contingent depending on prevailing circumstances? Isn't that what being contingent means? The question is whether "only the present exists" is like that.

[Brian Kivett]

I am just beginning my study of the existence of time, so you guys are hard to follow. But it seems that if humans moved and functioned at the speed of light then time would take on a different meaning all together. Gravity creates the illusion of time in human perception. If we lived, moved and functioned in the water, instead of land, our perception of time would change. Light is measurable and not instantaneous. If it were, all light from all sources would be everywhere at once. By arguing that time does not exist you are qualifying its reality. Tree falling in a forest type of thing.

[Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson]

Hi Andrew

I can’t get rid of the suspicion that your question reflects some confusion between contingently/necessarily true and empirical/metaphysical truth. In fact, what is a metaphysical truth? Perhaps a brief rehearsal of the central notions might be helpful.

First of all, if presentism is falsified by the theory of relativity it is not a truth at all, not even a contingent truth. A contingent truth is a proposition that happens to be true because it corresponds to a certain contingent feature of reality, i.e. to a fact that happens to obtain but could just as well not have. For instance, the proposition ’there exist human beings on Earth’ is contingently true because although it is as a matter of fact true now, humans might never have evolved if things had turned out somehow differently. Contingent truths are then typically true claims about contingent facts, i.e. about features of reality that happen to be a certain way but could have been different than they in fact are.

The idea that presentism, or any other theory of time, is a necessary truth if true at all, has to do with the idea that time (whatever its actual nature) is not a contingent feature of the world. If temporality is not one of the contingent features of the world, then whatever theory of truth happens to be true, that theory is necessarily true. That is, if time is really like eternalism says it is, and temporality is not a contingent feature, then the world could not have been temporal in any other way.

Contingency is of course a problematic notion. I find it difficult to think of contingency in any other way than in terms of how something that already exists could have turned out differently than it in fact did. It is difficult to think of how something that doesn't exist could then have come into existence in a different way than it in fact did. We can easily imagine how things would have turned out differently if Hitler had successfully invaded England, but we cant easily imagine how the world could have become temporal in a different way than it actually is, because we can’t easily imagine how it could have evolved from having been eternalistic to become presentistic or vice versa. It is in fact difficult to imagine the world having existed at all before it became temporal. Maybe this is just due to bad imagination, but perhaps it has to do with the fact that temporality does seem to be one of the most fundamental features of reality, one which is somehow a part of the essence of the world, or of existence, while whether Hitler could have invaded England or not is not.

So, arguably, the question whether a particular theory of time, if true, is necessarily true, has to do with the questions (i) was there an option between, say, a presentistic or eternalistic world when the world was created (the answer is of course no if the world has always existed), and (ii) could the world first have had one temporal characteristic (or existed atemporally) but later changed to have a different temporal characteristic.

[Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson]

Hi again
About my comment above, it was of course directed to Adrian not Andrew. I would also like to add to the above, the reflection that maybe you are asking whether presentism is an empirical theory as opposed to a metaphysical theory (not contingent vs. metaphysical truth), since it seems to be threatened by being falsified by an empirical theory and all the empirical evidence mustered in its favour. This might be justified reading if we take the headline of your question into account. I would then say that theories of time are of course in a sense hypotheses about the nature of reality, but that they are not empirical theories in the same sense as most physical theories. For instance, presentism doesn’t suggest a particular method of measuring “nowness” which would be required if it were an empirical theory (or physical theory) about time. This is perhaps why it is difficult to say definitely that presentism is falsified by theory of relativity. When the theory of relativity is interpreted as excluding a universal “now” this is meant in a very particular and technical sense related to the operationalisation of the notion of simultaneity in physics, i.e. on a way of measuring which events are simultaneous and which are not. It is not clear whether it follows from the impossibility of measuring simultaneity on a universal scale, that there is no intelligible way of thinking of the universe as being in a particular state at any given time. Bourne has an interesting discussion of this in his new book ‘A future for presentism’.

Peace

Rögnvaldur

[Adrian Bardon]

Hi Rögnvaldur, and thanks for the comments.
Yes, the contrast between metaphysical and empirical was more what I was focusing on. As you point out, there is reason to think theories of time don't quite fit the mold of empirical theories--thus the problem.
I have not seen Bourne's book; I had come to the conclusion at this point that, as long as there is no articulated path to the intelligibility of a universal simultaneity, speculation as to some possible or unknowable simultaneity is empty. If we accept the principle of possible intelligibility in the face of unintelligibility, where does it end? What genuinely counts as unintelligible? It seems like this would put us in the path to a radical and debilitating skepticism about reason. But I will check out what Bourne has to say.

[Keith Douglas]

Taking the usual strange understanding of empirical common these days, the answer to the question here seems to be "yes". Or, under a suitable understanding of metaphysical, both disjuncts happen to be. Think of the work of Bunge, Armstrong, Churchland, etc. who all in their own way happen to support the idea that our metaphysics is our (so to speak) most general of hypotheses. They are supported by and can be refuted by scientific findings. (For example, the idea that duration is absolute [rather than relative], is refuted by special relativity.) Consequently there's no clear dividing line between metaphysics and physics. After all, very general theories in what is normally considered science proper aren't tested without subsidiary assumptions. (E.g. gravitation theories.)

[Akin Nu An]

I have to say, these statments are very interesting to read through. I do agree with Keith that 'Consequently there's no clear dividing line between metaphysics and physics.'