Truth, Time and History: A Philosophical Inquiry 9781350027312, 9781350027343, 9781350027336

Citation preview

Truth, Time and History

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Also available from Bloomsbury A Critical Introduction to the Metaphysics of Modality, Andrea Borghini A Critical Introduction to the Metaphysics of Time, Benjamin L. Curtis and Jon Robson Time: A Philosophical Introduction, James Harrington

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Truth, Time and History A Philosophical Inquiry Sophie Botros

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC 1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Sophie Botros, 2017 Sophie Botros has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN : HB : ePDF : ePub:

978–1–3500–2731–2 978–1–3500–2733–6 978–1–3500–2732–9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Cover image © Francisco Goya y Lucientes, 2017 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

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To Sergei

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Contents Acknowledgements

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Part I Truth 1

The Realist/Anti-Realist Wars 1: Dummett’s reconfiguration of the debate 2: The realists play their trump card

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3 4 19

3: The realist appeal to memory

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Projection, Analogy and Meaning

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1: Projection: an anti-realist haunted realist strategy

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2: The truth value link again

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Part II Time 3

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Tense Theory 1: A continuity that tolerates discontinuity

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2: Presentist and non-presentist tensed solutions

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3: Truth value link realists within the tensed-tenseless spectrum

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Caught in a Timeless Leibnizian Net

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1: Property and essence

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2: Essence as dynamic

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Presentism and Modality

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1: The truth maker lacks structure

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2: The truth maker is ‘hypothetical’

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3: Presentists, anti-realists: Russell’s ‘five minute hypothesis’

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Part III History 6

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Collingwood and Oakeshott: Is History Possible?

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1: Collingwood: ‘history as the re-enactment of past thought’

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2: Historical idealism: a revolutionary conception of evidence?

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3: Collingwood’s ‘question and answer’ at Hadrian’s Wall

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A Realist Present and a Coherentist Past

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1: Can historical texts really replace ersatz times as truth makers?

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Contents 2: The history/fiction controversies

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Conclusion

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Notes Bibliography Index

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Acknowledgements I would like to thank Oliver Black, John Broome, Will Cartwright, Simon Evnine and  David Wiggins for informal discussion of some of the issues. Oliver Black read Chapter 6, and David Wiggins Chapter 4, and also  an early extended synopsis of the book. I am grateful to two anonymous referees at Bloomsbury Academic for insightful and judicious comments. Though I have benefitted from their comments, as I have from all those people whom I have named, none is obviously responsible for any of my mistakes. I am hugely indebted to Paul Johnson, friend and historian, who has guided me, unjudgmentally, in my cross-disciplinary ventures.

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Part I

Truth

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The Realist/Anti-Realist Wars

Perhaps the most metaphysical thoughts we have in the ordinary course of our lives (apart from those about death) concern time, particularly the past. These thoughts are disturbingly various, even contradictory. We feel certain on the one hand that past events really happened: that we were once six years old, that dinosaurs roamed the earth ten million years ago, that Caesar crossed the Rubicon and Napoleon was victorious at Austerlitz. On the other hand, and in another mood, we ask, marvelling: where is the past? For it seems no longer to exist: all that was solid has simply melted away. This insistent and constant miracle of vanishing – which we call the fleetingness of the present – fills us with perplexity. I ask: where is the you of yesterday? Tempted as I am to say that it has turned into the you of today, this does not satisfy me. It fails to do justice to a characteristic discontinuity about time which does not assail space. Thus I can watch you from a spatially fixed vantage point as you move from one side of the room to the other: you are first here then over there. But in so far as this is also a movement through time, my own position cannot be fixed either. I only see you in the present: the present you. I cannot see you traverse from past to present or catch in these perceptions the you of five minutes ago. For it has already fallen, with everything else past, into ‘the dark backward and abysm of time’. Nor is this conflict only a matter of the intellect: it spreads to our emotional life. There, alongside the sense that our memories of the dead are dreams that evaporate when we wake – ‘I dreamt,’ says Cleopatra,1 ‘there was an Emperor Antony/ O such another sleep, that I might see/ but such another man!’, and again, ‘Think you that there was, or might be such a man/ As this I dreamt of ’/ ‘it’s past the size of dreaming’ – we may suddenly be jolted into a perspective from which it is our past life, disclosed through the present – now a mere interpretative medium – that seems the more real and vibrant. The jolt may on some occasions be reassuring. On other occasions it is unwelcome, even shocking, as when long-held assumptions about an incident from one’s past are shattered, and one is forced, in an access of acute pain, to revise one’s understanding of it. Did one too easily – perhaps from self-deception – accept a subsequent story which others, desiring not to cause one further trauma, told one about it? Sometimes what is at the centre of this emotional whirlwind may, in the larger scheme of things, be a comparatively trivial occurrence. A boy remembers playing with a red ball on a rocky beach where, because the second world war had just ended and unbeknown to him, German mines were still lying around unexploded. He remembers the ball bouncing away from him and then

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an explosion. His aunt, thirty years later, tells him that it wasn’t a ball he was playing with but his dog who skipped away and was blown to pieces. This information hits him like live news, as though he were witnessing the event all over again: he is pierced with grief. A girl leaves her pet dog at her parents’ home while she is away at university. Returning one holiday she suddenly notices her dog is missing, although no one has said anything. ‘Where is he?’ she asks, and is told that he had a heart attack when he was running and dropped down dead in the drive. She thinks it odd that they didn’t tell her, and that it is surprising that a healthy young dog should die, but puts it down to overexertion or a congenital heart defect. Many years later, after her parents are dead, her brother casually intimates to her that things were different, and mutters something disjointed about her mother’s car accident in the drive, and the dog being run over. So acutely painful are the implications of her brother’s remarks concerning this long-past incident – the possibility of a cover-up and so on – that she deliberately refrains from continuing the conversation so that she might not hear any more. There are philosophical problems with both of our conflicting convictions: that the past in some sense exists, and can without warning erupt into the present as here, and that it does not exist. If it does exist, then we are bound to ask where and how. As O’Brien remarks to a bemused Winston in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, jolting him out of his naïve, unthinking realism, ‘Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening?’ But if it does not exist, then what are we to make of all our confident beliefs and assertions about the past? Should we hold on to them, but radically reassess their import, agreeing with post-modernist historians, such as Keith Jenkins (1991:8) who baldly, but confusedly,2 declares that ‘seventeenth-century Spain’ is in ‘the library . . . between Dewey numbers’. Should we concede, alternatively, that historical claims are just claims that we pretend to believe, or in relation to which, we suspend our disbelief as, it may be said, we do the claims of fiction. But then Napoleon or Caesar, however mesmeric we find them, would be no more real than Sherlock Holmes, or Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, in the Red and the Black, and the Battle of Waterloo, no matter how much bloodshed it caused, indistinguishable from a fictional battle. Worse still, we might even be forced to admit that our claims about the past, and about our own past, were all quite meaningless. In this chapter and the following, I explore the implications of Michael Dummett’s semantic anti-realist claim (1978:358–74), that the past does not exist independently of our methods of verification, for the truth of past-tensed statements, namely that it is not fixed, but rather a construction out of our present, and shifting evidence.3

1: Dummett’s reconfiguration of the debate (i) Selective anti-realism: the importance of reduction As a preliminary, I situate Dummett’s stance concerning the past in relation to the traditional realist/anti-realist debates. Whereas, for Dummett, this is just one expression of a more global anti-realism, traditional anti-realists have typically been selective. They might exclusively single out for doubt the theoretical entities of physics, such as

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quarks and electrons, or alternatively secondary qualities, such as colour, sound, heat and cold, or yet again numbers, or abstract entities, moral values, causal necessity, other minds, or the past. Moral anti-realism, for instance, may flourish without spreading to other areas. Bas van Fraassen’s (1980) anti-realism about sub-atomic particles, which nevertheless play an explanatory role in theoretical physics, does not compromise his realism about entities which fall within the range of human perception unaided by electron microscopes or other such technologies. The presentists’ denial that the past exists is at once an affirmation of the reality of the present. Thus Mark Hinchliff (1996:123, 131) declares it to be ‘obvious’ and ‘our intuitive and commonsensical view’ that ‘only the present exists’.4 Again, one frequently finds the denial that there is anything in the world corresponding to our colour sensations – a given wave length of light is not, it is pointed out, itself red – coupled with a strong affirmation that primary qualities, such as shape and extension, in contrast to these secondary ones, are (to use Locke’s phrase) ‘in the object’. To deny the existence of the external world, and so shape and extension, is obviously far more sweeping. Even so, if by ‘external world’ is meant simply the natural order, rather than whatever is not subjective, such scepticism may still be compatible with affirming a non-natural or spiritual realm, or a realm of value (as opposed to one of fact). This perceived diversity has made any general characterization of the traditional realist/anti-realist dispute seem unlikely to many philosophers. Is it, they want to know, the same anti-realism that is asserted (or denied) across these different areas, or are there different anti-realisms appropriate to different areas? Still more extremely, some have wondered whether calling all these forms of anti-realism is anything more than a coincidence in labelling (Hale, 1997:271). It may seem, then, that Dummett’s attempt to posit a uniform anti-realism across the board, must – irrespective of how it is further characterized – be a natural target for such objections, and hence that these ought first to be allayed if his application of it specifically to the past is to get a serious hearing. Now it might be suggested that this heterogeneous aspect of traditional anti-realism is exaggerated by those who conflate a negative phase of the anti-realist position with a positive one in which reconstruction is undertaken, of the allegedly deficient realist discourse, and who then often describe the latter as a ‘reduction’, or its author as a ‘reductionist’. That the positive reconstructions can certainly differ fundamentally in different areas is easily illustrated. Talk of quarks and electrons, it has been claimed, should be understood as a way of facilitating the prediction of observational statements. Judgements about colour, it is suggested, are really those which suitably endowed perceivers would make under optimal conditions. Moral judgements, it has been declared, are expressions of subjective feeling, which merely masquerade as statements. Talk of causes compelling their effects has been reduced to that of their being constantly conjoined with them (which is all, it is claimed, we actually see). Not only are different types of reconstruction proposed in different areas, but there may be a multiplicity of competing types even within one area. Moral expressionism competes with the claim that, although moral judgements are statements, they are all false ones in which we project our subjective feelings on to the world, and deceive ourselves into finding them ‘in the object’ (an interpretation which has been applied, in modified form, to mathematical discourse). Both moral expressivism and projectivism, however, jostle

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with reconstructions that attempt to preserve the truth-aptness of moral discourse. Utilitarians hold that moral judgements are really statements about the degree to which a given action, or character, will contribute to the general happiness, and so whose truth value is ascertainable. Impartial spectator theorists maintain that moral judgements are true if they would be made by a suitably placed impartial spectator. Sometimes it is difficult to determine to which of these reconstructions a philosopher subscribes: Hume has been described as an expressivist, a projectivist and as propounding an impartial spectator theory.5 One could perhaps reduce this myriad of reconstructions by excluding all those which seem merely to explain away the realist discourse rather than, by substituting a different subject matter, to salvage a capacity for truth. But this has an unsatisfactory air of arbitrariness. Moreover, where truth is salvaged it is achieved, as we saw, in a variety of ways. It will be countered that this variation in positive reconstruction should not prevent us from acknowledging that traditional anti-realists all typically begin by declaring that something – a past event, say, or a quark, the property green or a moral quality, the number three or a force binding causes to their effects – does not really exist. This declaration can be re-expressed in somewhat more technical philosophical terms as the claim that the world does not contain entities required for the truth of statements in the relevant area of discourse, or that these statements do not ‘track’ the facts. Moreover, of the two components, the negative existential claim is arguably the more important. Not only is it, it would seem, both necessary and sufficient for (traditional) anti-realism in any area, but without it there would be no motivation for a positive reconstruction of the realist discourse. In view of its importance, could not this negative claim be more fully characterized? Many philosophers have pointed to the direction of dependence between judgement and fact as the salient issue at stake between the two sides. Of course we could say that all anti-realists deny that there is any dependence of the problematic judgements, prior to reconstruction, on fact. But we have already effectively included that denial in our original characterization in the idea that these judgements do not, for anti-realists, ‘track’ relevant facts. But there is more to talk about the direction of dependence than this. It is only by assuming a coincidence of some kind between the facts and our judgements under optimal conditions (we are not colour blind, the room is properly lighted, etc.) that it becomes appropriate to ask whether such judgements are true because they match up with independently constituted facts (as the realist will hold) or whether the facts themselves merely reflect our best judgements. But, as we saw, anti-realists do not always, in their positive reconstructions, recognize, or even pay lip service to, a coincidence between facts and judgements, or hence to the capacity of these judgements at some level for truth. As we have seen, moral expressivists are content to point to moral judgements as really no more than expressions of feeling, and projectivists dismiss them as all false. On the other hand, those who refuse to allow that there exist moral properties, inhering in or intrinsic to action, making them right or wrong, and point instead to their ability to maximize utility, aim to ensure not only a coincidence between judgement and independently constituted fact, but that the direction of dependence is from the latter to the former, not vice versa. Hence by attempting to specify further the negative component of traditional anti-realist analyses by incorporating into it a denial that the

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direction of dependence is from fact to judgement rather than vice versa, we forfeit its ability to apply to these analyses across the board. Indeed, it would then only seem properly to apply to the kind of anti-realist analysis that one typically finds of secondary quality judgements, such as those about colour, where their truth is saved by their being reinterpreted as judgements made under a set of optimal conditions, such as those indicated above. Impartial spectator analyses of moral judgements would also come within its narrowed ambit.

(ii) Curbing heterogeneity Dummett’s semantic conception of anti-realism is in part a response to this sense that no attempt to unify the plethora of selective anti-realisms around the denial that a given class of entities exists (or, linguistically, that certain relevant expressions have genuine reference) can succeed, or is (1978:146) ‘entirely happy’. He cites (1982:55) the future and ethics6 as examples where the anti-realist dispute with realists does not seem to be about ‘a realm of entities’ at all. With phenomenalism, he argues (1978:146), it is not so much that, for its defenders, a given type of entity, namely material objects, do not exist as that they are not ‘ultimate constituents of reality’, and so must be reduced to other entities that are: sense data. In neither case, therefore, is what we earlier called the ‘positive characterization’ apparently motivated by a negative existential claim. But Dummett is not concerned with capturing the dispute ‘in its entirety’ (Weiss, 2002:50) at the cost of neglecting other key considerations. (Actually he is prepared to tolerate some lack of generality even in his own account, which he points out (1978:146–7) cannot accommodate the dispute over universals.7) What is in common could, he argues, be trivial, and distracting, from the point of view of the anti-realist/realist debate. Citing an example (1978:145), he argues that ‘The concentration’ by Platonists in mathematics ‘on the reference of terms deflects the dispute from what it is really concerned with’ which is not ‘the existence of mathematical objects but . . . the objectivity of mathematical statements’. This characterization of the crucial issue at stake between anti-realists and realists, although pertaining only to mathematics, already formulates it in terms of a class of statements, and so anticipates Dummett’s subsequent proposal that what in general divides these theorists is their opposing answers to a question about such a class of statements, namely how their truth is determined, or ‘what in general renders a statement in the given class true when it is true’ (1982:55). Expounding his proposal further, Dummett asserts that, for realists, truth is a function of a statement’s relation to a reality existing independently of our knowledge – a reality which renders the statement determinately true (or false) whether or not we are ever able to discover its truth (1978:355, 358; 1982:56, 60, 61). For anti-realists, on the other hand – and Dummett is here influenced by Wittgenstein’s stricture that knowledge cannot transcend linguistic communication – the ‘truth’ of a statement is intimately connected with our capacity for recognizing it as true. Thus his anti-realists reject their opponents’ conviction that there could be truth conditions concerning which we do not, and never will, know what it would be for them to hold (1978:363), or that truth, as it is now put, is ‘(potentially) recognition transcendent’, and point instead to a statement’s justifiability.8

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Although we shall continue, with many commentators, to talk of justificatory conditions as determining ‘truth’, we shall keep it in mind that they are conceptually distinct from realist truth conditions.9 Dummett’s claim (1978:359) that he is not primarily concerned, as are traditional anti-realists, ‘to show [of a given class of entities] that there aren’t really such entities . . . or . . . that such entities are not part of the ultimate furniture of the universe’, that he is ‘opposed’ to ‘this [reductivist] point of view’, is borne out, the suggestion may now be canvassed, by the fact that his semantic anti-realist analysis can be given even of present-tensed statements, such as ‘It is raining now’, uttered by someone as she puts her hand out of the window to catch the raindrops that she sees falling all around. Since these raindrops are thus directly accessible to the speaker – she is not inferring their existence from something else which is accessible when they are not – traditional antirealist doubt, without which these theorists could have no motive for reinterpreting the statement, is simply inappropriate. The explanation of how a Dummettian analysis may nevertheless be appropriate of such present-tensed, or other evidently unproblematic, statements falls immediately out of even the superficial exposition of his theory. We must, as we intimated, let go of the idea, fostered by traditionalists, that anti-realists challenge realists by drawing attention to conditions for the truth of particular statements, or classes of statements, that, they claim, are typically unfulfilled. For Dummett takes issue with the protagonists of the traditional debate, whether realist or anti-realist, over a logically prior issue: what kind of conditions have to be fulfilled for any statement to be true or, again over what it means to say of any statement that it is true. His is not only a more general thesis than theirs, but is also situated at a more fundamental level than that of the traditional disputes. It is therefore a misunderstanding to suggest that he is directly in competition with (traditional) anti-realists, who may argue, as we noted, that the statements in a given area of discourse, are simply masquerading as such, when really they fall below the level of statement, and so are incapable of truth, or though genuine are all false. No Dummettian inquiry concerning the nature of the truth that can be attributed to them is even coherent, given such interpretations.10

(iii) Three moves toward semantic anti-realism This suggestion, although broadly insightful in conveying the radical nature of Dummett’s reconfiguration of the traditional realist/anti-realist debate, neglects to explain the three key moves whereby he achieves this end. The first is to so construe realism that its defining feature is the endorsement not, or not merely, as we have it so far, of a ‘recognition transcendent’ notion of truth, but of bivalence, according to which every meaningful statement is determinately either true or false. The second is to use this feature of realism to argue that a reduction, since it may preserve bivalence, is not sufficient, as traditionalists have held, for anti-realism: if the reduction preserves bivalence, it remains realist, and so excludes anti-realism. The third is to claim that, since giving the justificatory conditions for certain classes of statement may not qualify as a reduction, such reductionism is not necessary for anti-realism. Our suggestion, we saw, treats unproblematic statements as just as much a test of Dummett’s theory as any

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others. Certainly, were semantic anti-realism to be conclusively established, this theory, being perfectly general, would apply equally to these uncontentious statements as to any others. However, in propounding his theory, Dummett necessarily focuses on statements of what he calls the ‘disputed’ classes, so to speak ‘cutting edge’ statements ‘about whose meaning realism and anti-realism [precisely] are in conflict’ (1978:155, my italics). The list he offers (1978:146) – ‘statements about the physical world,11 statements about mental events, processes or states, mathematical statements, statements in the past tense, statements in the future tense’ – does not include (unproblematic) present-tensed ones. With regard to the first move, a certain unclarity is inseparable from Dummett’s conception of realism.12 His argument, requiring, as we noted, that he emphasize bivalence in defining realist truth, leaves the order of priority somewhat murky between this feature and that of (potential) recognition transcendence. The need for clarification would be more urgent could it be conclusively established that the two features were logically distinct, but that is contentious.13 This unclarity spreads to the term ‘disputed’. Dummett, we noted, uses the epithet to refer to those classes of statements whose meaning is declared to be a matter of contention between realists and anti-realists. But what is contentious will vary depending on which characteristic mark of realism appears uppermost in a given context. Where it is recognition transcendence, the statements which qualify as belonging to the ‘disputed’ classes will be those where, merely, their (realist) truth conditions and justificatory conditions come apart. Where the characteristic mark of realism is bivalence, the disputed classes of statements will be those, and only those, where, as Dummett stipulates (1978:155), ‘it is admitted on both sides that there may not exist evidence either for or against [them]’, or again (156) ‘it is agreed by both sides that there [does not] exist any true statement of the reductive class which we should count as evidence either for or against [their] truth’. Only with these statements, Dummett argues, will the opposing views of realists and anti-realists over bivalence drive them decisively apart, the first insisting that the statement possesses, and the second that it lacks, a determinate truth value. Turning to the second move, let us note that Dummett does not wish entirely to expunge the idea of reduction from anti-realism. He continues to use the term ‘reductive’ to refer to statements expressing the justificatory conditions for statements belonging to the ‘disputed’ classes (1978:359. 1982:70).14 Moreover, in pointing to two ways of ‘presenting’ his anti-realist ‘conception’, he outlines, in dealing with the first, a programme which not merely looks like ‘fully fledged’ reductionism, but which he himself identifies as ‘a species of reductionism’. The truth of a given statement of the ‘disputed’ class can, he says (1982:71), only be determined once it has been translated ‘in a manner eliminating its characteristic vocabulary’ into an appropriate statement of ‘some other class’, namely what he calls the ‘reductive’ class, which expresses its justificatory conditions. For him, as for reductionists, the statement belonging to the ‘reductive’ class must thus be intelligible independently of that in the ‘disputed’ class (1982:70, 76; 1978:156, 361). It soon becomes clear, however, that, although such reductionism may, for Dummett, be ‘a first step’ (1982:75) toward anti-realism, it is not ‘sufficient’, ‘it is not intrinsically anti-realist’. It is in defending this retreat from reductionism that he brings to bear his conception of realism as definitively an acceptance of bivalence. Citing (1978:359; 1982:75) a proposed reduction of statements about character traits to those

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about physiological constitution, he asserts that, far from ‘a reductive thesis . . . in itself involv[ing] any rejection of realism’, it can express a ‘sophisticated realism’, depending on ‘the character of the proposed translation’. The reduction will be realist, he explains, even if motivated by the conviction that either psychic entities as such do not exist, or that they are not basic enough to be ‘ultimate constituents of reality’, if the substituted account retains the determinacy of the original, in other words if it respects bivalence. It will do so, according to Dummett, if each character trait is paired in a one/one way with a single physiological configuration the latter constituting the truth conditions for the attribution of that character trait, and being something which a person will either possess or not possess. Thus a trait, such as generosity, will typically be considered to persist in the psyche – perhaps as a special psychic configuration – even when the behaviour which would reveal or display it – say, digging deep in one’s pocket to help a charity, giving of one’s time and energy to assist a friend in distress – is uncalled for by circumstances. That the trait of generosity is in this way logically prior to, and independent of, the generous behaviour follows from the claim that the trait causes (and so is inferable from) the behaviour. But it is conceivable that an individual will never find himself in circumstances calling forth from him this generous response. (Perhaps he will always be too poor and needy.) But we can still say, even then, that he either possessed or did not possess the character trait of generosity. There is a fact of the matter – the psychic configuration is either present or absent – concerning whether he is generous or not. Likewise, even if talk of character traits, such as generosity, is reduced to a matter of physiological constitution, provided character trait and physiological condition are in a one-to-one correspondence, there is always an answer to the question whether a person is, or is not, generous. This reduction, as Dummett writes (1978:361–3), ‘leaves intact the laws of bivalence and of the excluded middle for statements of the disputed classes. The reduction does not undermine but justifies the realist conception’. With a behavioural analysis, the matter is, he argues, quite different both from the original account in terms of character traits and from the reduction to physiological constitution. Here, to possess the character trait of generosity just is to behave generously when circumstances call for it. Generosity just is digging deep in one’s pocket to help a charity, and just is giving one’s time and energy to assist a friend. It consists in this behaviour, or behaviour like it, and does so without remainder. But what happens to the ascription of generosity when the circumstances that call for it never arise? Taking the example of courage, Dummett imagines the situation of a person who lives so sheltered a life that he is never confronted by the dangers which could prove (or disprove) his mettle.15 Is there, Dummett asks, an answer to the question whether a person, so sheltered from the world, is courageous or not. Certainly we cannot fall back on the idea of a persisting psychic core of bravery which this person could be said either to have possessed, or not to have possessed, even if we never knew it, for ex hypothesi there is no such thing. Dummett concludes that there simply is in such circumstances ‘no true statement about the person’s behaviour that would render true the statement that he was brave’. But nor, he maintains, is there any ‘true statement about his behaviour which would render true the statement that he was not brave’. The reduction to behaviour, unlike either the original account in terms of character traits, or the reduction to

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physiological constitution represents what Dummett calls ‘the further step’ which leads to anti-realism proper, to the rejection of the law of bivalence, and to the acceptance of the idea that there can be, as he puts it, ‘gap[s] in reality’ (2004:95).16 In the third move, Dummett, having argued that reductionism is not sufficient for anti-realism, now argues that neither is it necessary. ‘Anti-realism’, he writes (1978:361), ‘does not need to take a reductionist form’, and again (1978:158) ‘Reductionism is not in general essential to anti-realism, nor essential to it in particular cases’. Indeed, he tells us (1978:254–9) that ‘The most interesting forms of anti-realism are not reductivist in character’. Earlier, we noted that he alludes to two different ways in which his antirealist conception may be presented. It maybe, as we saw, that the statement, expressing the justificatory conditions of the statement belonging to the disputed class, is intelligible independently of this latter statement, this latter statement being translated into the former without residue, in a manner (Dummett, 1982:66) ‘definitive of reductionism’. But in describing the alternative, Dummett explains that (1978:361) The [justificatory] conditions which establish the truth or falsity of a statement of the disputed class [may be] ones which we are simply capable of recognizing as obtaining, when they obtain, without our having any means of expressing the fact that they obtain otherwise than by the use of statements of the disputed class.

He illustrates with a number of examples. One of these is from mathematics. Dummett first explains why mathematical statements belong to the disputed classes. A realist about mathematics – a Platonist – holds that the relevant truth conditions, consisting in the existence of abstract mathematical objects, inhering in a realm outside the causal and spatial-temporal order, are inaccessible to us. He argues, however (1978:361), that it is impossible to offer reductionist analyses of such statements because ‘there is here no reductive class of statements intelligible independently of the disputed class’. All there is (1982:70) ‘for our understanding [here] to consist in’ is ‘our possession of a proof of [the given mathematical proposition], and our capacity to recognize it as such when we see it’. But there is (71–2) ‘no general way of characterizing a proof [of such a proposition] independently of a language in which that proposition can be expressed’. A second example is material object statements, and Dummett discusses them (1978:158–9) in criticizing one of the most celebrated forms of traditional, selective, anti-realism, phenomenalism, which seeks to salvage the truth of statements belonging to this disputed17 class by translating them without remainder into statements of another class: sense data statements. He proposes again that only the second, or alternative, method is appropriate in dealing with ordinary material object statements. It is not only that such statements are standardly (unless, say, the object is hidden behind another or some such) matters of direct observation so that any statements of justificatory conditions could hardly be more certain than the original statement. It is also, as Karen Green (2001:11), points out that, according to Dummett’s verificationism, which is to be distinguished from ‘the outdated, discredited philosophy of the logical positivists’, ‘our understanding of what verifies or falsifies [such a] statement [will

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typically] involve considerable theory’.18 Such statements are therefore not in the first place made on ‘independently stateable grounds’ which could come apart from the supposed truth conditions, or therefore be plausibly construed as inferences in particular from independently understood statements, such as sense data statements. ‘None have grounds’, he writes, ‘which could be understood separately from the statement which they are grounds for’. Consequently there can be, so to speak, no ‘handle’ on to them from below the level of material object talk, which could allow such talk to be expunged in favour of pure sense data talk, as phenomenalists require. His point is not on this count to proscribe sense data statements, as part of the phenomenalist programme: that is tangential to his aim. It is rather to show that a negative existential claim, and the ‘reduction’ of statements of the disputed class to ‘statements of some other class’ – here to sense data statements – proposed by phenomenalists as the remedy, is not only unnecessary to his anti-realist theory, but would involve a misunderstanding. He therefore recommends his theory as capable of avoiding the objections which he has suggested are, as in this case, fatal to their anti-realism. As Bob Hale (1997:286) pointedly comments, ‘The charge of irrelevance to traditional disputes over realism is thus quite misplaced: what has been done, rather, is to disclose antirealist options in those disputes which had not been sufficiently noted.’ A further example (1978:363; 1982:72), which will be of particular interest for our larger inquiry, is the class of past-tensed statements. Evidence for such statements, he points out, may include memories which, being always memories of the past, cannot be expressed without the use of the past tense. Consequently, it is impossible to ‘eliminate’ from the reductive statement ‘the characteristic vocabulary’ of the statement of the disputed class, or hence carry through that scheme of translation, which traditional antirealists, cleaving to reductionism in these areas, would think desirable. Although no translation is effected, doubt is still ruled out since, Dummett holds (1978:155): ‘the truth of [such a] statement can consist only in the existence of the [relevant] evidence’, or again (1991:7) ‘the anti-realist feels unknowability in principle to be intolerable and prefers to view our evidence for and memory of the past to be constitutive of it’ (my italics). With these uncompromising remarks of Dummett’s about the past in mind, and having completed this brief exposition of his theory, I now turn to indicate the kind of disruption which we could expect to be caused to our largely realist, if – in our more philosophical moments – conflicted, intuitions, were we without more ado to embrace that theory. Let us return to our earlier example. Imagine a year has passed and the speaker who was depicted as stating ‘It is raining’ in the presence of rain now thinks that she remembers that it was sunny that day one year ago in her locality. Her friend agrees. Let us also suppose that there are no weather records for the precise location, although the records that do exist show it to have been sunny in the general vicinity. She is therefore now justified, both Dummett and the realists would (or so we shall take it) agree, in asserting, ‘It was sunny one year ago today in my neighbourhood.’ But Dummett, as we have noted, goes further: for it to be justifiable to assert a statement is for that statement to be true. This is because, for him, the statement, uttered one year on, that it was sunny a year ago at the given location, just means, among other things, that people are prepared now, a year on, to testify to its having been sunny there that day a year ago. But the realists’ truth conditions, given the potential recognition

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transcendence that, according to realists, they enjoy, have no such built in obsolescence, and do not vary with the time variant conditions for justified assertibility. The realists will therefore keep their options open, contemplating the possibility (which here ex hypothesi is the case) of their truth conditions contradicting the anti-realists’ justificatory ones. Moreover, this seems to accord with those commonsense assumptions about the fixity of the past which our more flighty speculations would have to overturn if they were to gain any purchase over us. As we observed, Dummett’s anti-realists also oppose realists in rejecting bivalence. Consider the following variant on the above example. Fast forward many years, and imagine that our speaker has lost all memory of that day long ago. No one else alive remembers what the weather was like in the speaker’s neighbourhood, no diaries tell of it, and all relevant weather records have been lost. There is nothing left to go on. Again, both Dummett and the realists will still agree about something. They will agree that our speaker is neither justified in asserting that it rained that day, nor justified in asserting that it did not rain. But the significance for each of what they are agreed about could hardly be more different. According to Dummett, for the statement to be true that it rained that day, many years ago, just means that there is evidence now of its raining then, on the basis of which the statement can now justifiably be asserted. For the statement to be false that it rained that day many years ago likewise just means that there is evidence now that it did not rain that day, on the basis of which it can now justifiably be asserted that it did not rain. But as the situation has been described, there is no evidence either way, and no prospect of finding any. For Dummett, therefore, there is no justification for affirming that the statement, even though we can never know which of these values it takes, is either true or false. The principle of bivalence is thus suspended for this so-called ‘undecidable’ statement or, as Dummett graphically puts it, there is a ‘gap’ in this region of reality. Realists – and here our ordinary settled intuitions will have little challenge from our more adventurous thoughts in siding with them – hold to the conviction that there is, even in these circumstances, a fact of the matter, which determines, although we may never know what it is, the truth value of the statement in question.19 It would moreover, I suggest, be mistaken to allow ourselves to be deflected from acknowledging the intuitive difficulty with taking on board Dummett’s suspension of bivalence in respect of those past-tensed statements, such as the above, whose subject matter is gross events of the physical world by the fact that this curtailment may seem far less counter-intuitive where the subject matter involves, as in Dummett’s example, cited earlier, traits of character. For the reason here is that the idea that there are specific psychic mechanisms or configurations may simply not survive our commonsense scrutiny. We may consequently doubt, with Dummett, that there is a determinate answer to the question whether we are, or are not, brave in a way that would have led us, had we been, say, citizens of Nazi Germany, and knowing the terrible reprisals that would have been visited upon us had this been discovered, to have sheltered Jews in our homes. We may even wonder, more generally, whether it is possible coherently to abstract a conception of oneself, and one’s reactions, at a particular time, from the total situation of which they are an integral part, and project it, unchanged and intact, into a different situation, at another time – as for instance Housman20 perplexedly attempts to do in these verses:

14

Truth, Time and History When first my way to fair I took Few pence in purse had I And long I used to stand and look At things I could not buy Now times are altered: if I care To buy a thing, I can; The pence are here and here’s the fair But where’s the lost young man?21

In summary, it might seem, Dummett gives with one hand, and takes back with the other. He is prepared to extend truth to statements, including past-tensed ones, to which even traditional realists would grant only inaccessible truth conditions, provided only that they can justifiably be asserted. By the same token – and here is the sting in the tail – he deprives statements of a capacity for truth (or falsity), and hence of meaning, whenever there is no conceivable way of establishing that truth value, and so no grounds for asserting either the statement or its contradictory. What can the traditional realist do, it may be asked, in light of this encroachment, this provocative appropriation of truth for anti-realist purposes, which wrenches statements about an apparently fixed past, from an underlying fact of the matter, except to contradict his opponent? Every meaningful statement, the realist will be tempted to repeat defiantly (with as we have seen the backing largely of common sense) is either determinately true or false, and is so independently of whether there is any relevant evidence bearing on it or none. But many, impressed by Dummett’s ideas, will counsel caution: aren’t the realists chopping off the very branch on which they are perched? For wouldn’t they have to admit that, where a past-tensed statement is concerned, it is only from this spurned evidence that they in the first place gain a conception of its truth conditions, even though, as Dummett, (1978:155), puts it, they then supposedly ‘have a conception of the statement’s being true even in the absence of such evidence’. Not only this, but it is only from such evidence that we can subsequently infer that the relevant truth conditions obtain, or did obtain. Past-tensed statements, after all, are not like statements about events taking place at a great distance, but which we could in principle go and see for ourselves. Of course, we may be justified in making an assertion about the past, and yet this turn out to be mistaken. But the conclusion that we were wrong will not be reached by travelling back in time, and witnessing the relevant past events. They now lie, on the realists’ own admission ‘beyond our furthest epistemological grasp’ (Norris, 2002:62). The conclusion will only be reached by rechecking our original assertion against new evidence or by bringing new methods of interpretation to bear on old evidence. The updating of the Ancient Egyptian New Kingdom to 1,500 years before Christ, when earlier it had been placed at 3,000 years, was due to the development in the twentieth century of carbon dating. Can the truth (or falsity) of the relevant pasttensed statement plausibly be ultimately a relation ‘wholly between the statement and its truth maker’ (Wright, 1994:77), on which we in no way impinge? Indeed, is the realists’ holding to such a metaphysically costly idea merely a consequence of the form in which Dummett casts his quarrel with them, and from which, with less over-reaction, they might extricate themselves?

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(iv) Two attempts to get realists off Dummett’s metaphysical ‘hook’ (a) Wright, deflationism and superassertibility Before turning in earnest to Dummett’s challenge to the traditional realists over the past, we pause and consider a couple of affirmative answers to the question just posed which, were they acceptable, might seem to get them off his metaphysical hook, and cut short our discussion. The first is provided by Crispin Wright, in Truth and Objectivity (1994). Wright would not so much prevail on realists to discard their evidence transcendent notion, as seek to bring the Dummettian debate as a whole within the fold of other forms of realist/anti-realist debate, which invite the prospect of a less metaphysically contentious construal. According to this construal, a minimal level of truth is guaranteed to all realist discourse, with realists then joining battle with their corresponding antirealist opponents over more ‘substantial’, ‘local’, notions of truth, governed and conditioned therefore by the practices pertaining in their particular areas. The question that we must press is whether it is the same ‘minimal’ standard in the Dummettian debate as in these others, and if not – if there are ‘double standards’ – whether Wright’s strategy does not leave Dummett’s realists exactly where they were at the outset. The credentials of Wright’s ‘minimal’ notion of truth as ‘metaphysically lightweight’ (13), and so neutral between realists and anti-realists, are owed to its being based squarely in the deflationist tradition, according to which the whole meaning of truth is given by the ‘Disquotational Schema’: ‘ “P” is true if and only if P’, and where truth is not a genuine property, just a device of ‘disquotation’ (14, 28–9), or ‘assertoric endorsement’. This Schema allows for the sentences of a discourse, given minimum standards of ‘syntactic discipline’ (as Wright puts it) to express truth apt propositions, providing for their use as the antecedents of conditionals, their capability of being negated and like features. That it also entails a norm of warranted assertibility follows, Wright argues (16–17), from the fact that in order for sentences to be determinate in content, there has to be a recognized distinction between their proper and improper use. Since these sentences are assertions, that will be a distinction between cases where what they assert is, and where it is not, warranted. The deflationists fall short (15, 33), according to Wright, not in lacking the internal resources to offer a more substantial notion of truth than mere warranted assertibility, but in refusing to countenance one, when their own premises, on pain of instability, demand it (15, 19, 21, 22, 71). In demonstration, he elicits from their thesis (33–4, 72) a number of intuitive platitudes which, he says, exhaust the essential features of truth. These include: ‘to assert is to present as true’, ‘any truth–apt content has a significant negation which is likewise truth-apt’, ‘to be true is to correspond to the facts’,22 and ‘a statement may be justified without being true and vice versa’. They entail, Wright concludes, that, while warranted assertibility and truth coincide in normative force, they potentially diverge in extension. Deflationism, Wright maintains, can only be ‘purified of instability’ by recognizing a norm of assertoric discourse (18, 33) distinct from warranted assertibility (21, 71). Thus he opens the way for the consideration of a more ‘substantial’ notion, or notions, of truth, built upon the minimalist foundation, essentially provided by the deflationists, but leaving behind its important ‘neutrality’ (12–13, 76). Wright notes that, although he has criticized

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deflationism (37) for refusing to acknowledge a positive notion of truth, he has not so far provided such a notion in conjunction with his own minimalism. While pointing out, in mitigation, that his aim is not to offer an analysis of truth, he concedes (38) that a positive account is required, even at the minimal level, of those aspects which distinguish truth from warranted assertibility. Having rejected Putnam’s proposal that truth be defined as ‘warrantedness under epistemologically ideal circumstances’ on grounds that it cannot satisfy the minimal platitudes, he introduces the property of ‘super-assertibility’. He defines it thus (48): ‘A statement is superassertible if and only if it is, or can be, warranted, and some warrant would survive arbitrarily close scrutiny of its pedigree and arbitrarily extensive increments to or other forms of improvement of our information’. But he acknowledges (61) that superassertibility, being ‘constructed out of the [minimal] notion of assertibility’, although pushed to the limit, is an evidentially constrained property, and so favourable to anti-realists. It is precisely with the introduction of superassertibility, thus understood, that cracks appear, at least from our point of view, in Wright’s account. How, we want to know, can this notion be implicated in the minimalists’ across the board truth predicate – as certain commentators23 have taken it to be – and so common ground as much between the parties to Dummett’s debate, as to any other realist/anti-realist debate, if it does not share minimalism’s ‘neutrality’ (27, 76)? Wright states unequivocally (77–8) that ‘the Dummettian debate . . . provides one very clear illustration of how, once a minimal conception of truth has been conceded as neutral, the issue between realist and anti-realist may nevertheless be joined’. Suppose, we ponder, that super-assertibility is included in the minimal conception of truth – a shared assumption of both realists and anti-realists – before the issue between them is joined. Suppose now that Dummett’s anti-realist is victorious. But the claim that truth involves‘no more than superassertibility’ cannot be a conclusion, or outcome, of the debate, or an achievement of the victor, if it was already among the agreed premises. Yet Wright (78) describes it in exactly these terms: ‘If the anti-realist wins the debate, it is open to him . . . to contend that . . . the truth predicate within the discourse may be construed in terms of superassertibility, and its application taken as nothing more than a reflection of the minimal assertoric character of the declarative sentences in question’. Consider now that Dummett’s realist, with his conception of truth as evidentially unconstrained, is victorious. As Wright observes (78), this ‘will enforce a distinction between the discourse’s truth predicate and super-assertibility’. But then it cannot be said that truth here has characteristics, which in Wright’s words, are merely ‘additional to’ super-assertibility: realist truth undercuts super-assertibility altogether. But surely it cannot undercut what was not a bone of contention in the first place between the parties? Wright’s position is in fact more tentative and qualified than might at first be apparent. In his reply to commentators (1996:920), he repudiates ‘[any such] across the board identification of truth with super-assertibility’, attributing this position rather to Dummett, with his global pretensions for anti-realism. A ‘local’ espousal of realism, he concedes in the same reply, may entail that ‘superassertibility is not a satisfier of the minimal platitudes with regard to the given discourse’. Moreover, a careful scrutiny of his original exposition (1994:57) makes it clear that super-assertibility ‘validates the minimalist’s basic platitudes’, only ‘subject to certain additional assumptions’, namely

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that (57ff; 1996:865) ‘truth must be knowable in principle’. He does not see this as excluding the possibility that realists and anti-realists can ever, having agreed on a minimal conception of truth as superassertibility, join combat on an equal footing. Quite the contrary: this will be more often the case than not. It will all depend, he explains, on whether the ‘local’ notion of truth is, or is not, evidentially constrained. Generally, Wright suggests, it will be a constrained one. He gives examples from comic and moral discourse, writing that ‘there seems no sense to be attached to the idea that the comedy of a situation may not elude the appreciation of the most fortunately situated judge or that the moral significance of an act might lie beyond human recognition’. We introduced Wright’s strategy because it held out the promise of bringing Dummett’s version of the realist/anti-realist debate under the less metaphysically contentious rubric of other such debates, as conceived by Wright. But it may seem that the qualifications now in place must render any such integration, or regularization, out of reach. Wright affirms (78) that: ‘The crucial matter for debate, in all cases, [is] whether any of the properties of a local truth predicate additional to the essential minimal set may somehow justifiably inspire a realist perspective on the discourse concerned’ (my italics). But one must feel that he is hardly entitled to make such a sweeping claim. For, with regard to the Dummettian debate, ‘the local truth predicate’, being evidentially unconstrained, is precisely not ‘additional to the essential minimal set’ (with the implication that it leaves the set intact), but can potentially undermine it. The only alternative, it seems, is to allow ‘double standards’, so that minimalism can be carefully adjusted, or cut back – superassertibility being excised – to take account of the metaphysical pretensions of the particular local notion of truth.24 Admittedly the Dummettian debate can be brought tolerably into line with the others, in that neither it, nor they, will have any bearing beyond their own specific local area. Thus suppose again that Dummett’s anti-realist were the victor locally, that is to say, suppose, where discourse about the past, or mathematics was concerned, he had shown that it must be interpreted anti-realistically. His findings would not bear at all on, say, the realist/antirealist debate about morality, or comedy, or scientific unobservables, which will each have their own local standards of truth. Wright’s strategy certainly then reverses the direction of influence as Dummett sees it. For Dummett’s anti-realist does not start out piecemeal with a consideration of discourse about the past, and then happen to realize that he can extend his thesis to all other areas. He has adopted an anti-realist stance toward the past, precisely as an application of a prior more global anti-realist programme, meant to combat evidence transcendence across the board. But Wright’s strategy does nothing, it would seem, even if it curbs its reach, to turn down the metaphysical temperature of that particular debate itself.

(b) Norris, projectivism and conceptually structured properties The second answer – we shall consider it in Christopher Norris’s version (2002) – does specifically claim to ‘defuse’ this very debate, seeing it as unacceptably extreme, even ‘pathologically’ driven, on both sides (63). An intermediate position is thus sought which would allow ‘more moderate’ realists to specifically address ‘the problems . . . posed . . . by Michael Dummett’s global challenge to realism’ without their having to

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embrace [that] evidence transcendent truth, distinctive of ‘hard line ‘metaphysical’ realism’ (62). The influential proposal which Norris describes (favoured among others by Mark Johnston, 1989 and Alex Miller, 1998) takes off from the traditional antirealist reconstruction of secondary quality judgements as those suitably endowed perceivers would make under optimal conditions. (This is the basis for just one of Wright’s realist/anti-realist cruces) An attempt is then made to rebalance the elements of this reconstruction so that the truth of such judgements is no longer just a function of their own nature and structure, but also of the objective world. Realist and antirealist elements combine in the notion of ‘conceptually structured properties’, replacing the extreme realists’ ‘conceptually unstructured’ ones, and the result generalized to other relevant areas (58–9), which will exhibit different degrees of ‘objectivity’ (66). The difficulties with which the proponents are forced to deal concern, among other things, the alleged circularity of the enterprise. In what sense, it will be asked, can the ‘objective world’ be treated as over and against our judgements, and to that extent ‘response independent’, when its properties are themselves partially the result of our concepts. There is in fact considerable doubt whether such a modification could possibly be acceptable to realists, and not just to those already committed to evidence transcendent truth. However, even if this model, drawn from the realm of colour judgements, could be applied to different areas, it would have very little, despite Norris’s contrary claim (61), to do with Dummett’s anti-realism. It seems to be responding to the specific problem traditional, selective, anti-realism poses for realists in this area, but that is not the problem Dummett raises for them. This can be seen once we leave the general level of Norris’s exposition, and remind ourselves of Dummett’s differentiated approach to the various types of statements. When traditional anti-realists propose to reinterpret the judgement, say, that a particular apple is red, as the judgement a suitably endowed perceiver would make under optimal conditions, they do so, as we saw earlier, out of the conviction that this property does not really exist, is not part of the fabric of the world. They hope nevertheless to salvage some kind of truth for the judgement: it will be true just in so far as it would be made by an ideal perceiver. But as we have emphasized, Dummett’s redefinition of truth as justified assertibility is not motivated by a conviction that a particular entity does not really exist or, again, that a particular type of statement does not carry the ontological commitment it seems to. Although Dummett’s is certainly a general theory, it cannot be seen as a generalization of a particular solution to such a deficiency in a particular area. A statement is problematic for Dummett in two circumstances. The first, as we have seen, is when, on a realist analysis, evidence, which for Dummett is the condition for justifiably asserting a statement is seen only as a means of inferring the existence of an inaccessible state of affairs which is held to constitute the statement’s truth conditions. The difficulty is resolved for Dummett by insisting that the truth of the statement is actually constituted by the existence of this very evidence so that it makes no sense to acknowledge the evidence yet question the statement’s truth. The other circumstance, as again we have seen, is where the statement is ‘undecidable’ because there is no evidence either for or against it. However, ordinary colour ascriptions do not seem to be problematic, for Dummett, in either of these ways. They do not qualify as statements

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of ‘the disputed class’.11 Rather they fall into the category of statements, as do present-tensed ones, which as matters of direct observation are not in the first place made on independently stateable grounds from which they would have then to be inferred, and which could render them vulnerable to scepticism. (This is not to say, as Green points out (see again note 18) that in understanding what thus directly verifies, or falsifies them, considerable theory may not be taken for granted.) Consider a person uttering the statement ‘This is green’ as she stands in broad daylight staring at the green sample held up before her. Even the realist does not take the sight of this sample as just evidence, for the speaker, of the existence of some other state of affairs, which is itself inaccessible, but which constitutes the truth conditions of her statement; the sample before her constitutes the truth conditions. Certainly a sceptical philosopher may have to follow a tortuous inferential route in order to reach his conclusion that secondary qualities, such as colours, do not really inhere in objects as the realists claim, but that should not make us doubt the immediacy, if implicitly theory-laden nature, of our ordinary attributions of colour to objects. This is enough, for Dummett, we suggest, to keep them out of his ‘disputed’ categories, even though his anti-realist programme, being absolutely general, has a notional application, as we have seen, to them, as much as to any other type of statement. The rationale for taking colour judgements, then, generalizing from a particular traditional anti-realist reconstruction of them as a way of finding a halfway house between Dummett’s anti-realism and traditional realism, as systematic theories, is undermined by the fact that these judgements do not in the first place represent the requisite bone of contention. Norris fails to recognize this because he is unclear about the distinction between Dummett’s anti-realism and that species of traditional, selective, anti-realism, namely projectivism, which is intended to form ‘the basis’ of the proposed ‘more moderate’ realism. After clarifying (62) that precise aspect of Dummett’s view which, he affirms, causes problems for the realist, he immediately goes on, without apparently noticing the discrepancy, explicitly to describe the opposition, which the new hybrid account is meant to resolve, as one between ‘hard line metaphysical realism and outright projectivism’ (my italics).

2: The realists play their trump card Putting to one side then both of the above answers, and with Dummett’s realist opponents therefore unmoderated, we turn to his challenge to them precisely with regard to the past. Let us be clear, the curtailment of bivalence in this area, and the related claim that past ‘facts’, such as that dinosaurs roamed the earth ten million years ago, come into, and go out of existence with shifts in the evidence, is not just resisted by philosophical realists, but disturbs our ordinary realist intuition. This is not to deny that, as I observed earlier, we are also at times painfully aware of the past’s insubstantiality or phasmagorical nature. Ordinarily, however, we hold that the past is fixed: ‘What has happened has happened,’ we declare tautologically. Moreover, it is precisely here that traditional realists in this area will play their trump card – one indeed which is intimately connected with these convictions about fixity. Whatever the prospects for

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realism in general, they will say, there is a peculiar feature of our understanding of tense, the ‘truth value link’, which shows that what just now was claimed to be impossible – direct access to states of affairs which will later constitute the truth conditions of a past-tensed statement – is not so at all. This principle, they will explain, precisely allows us to circumvent any evidence existing at the later time. By doing so it forces into contradiction anti-realists, such as Dummett, who accept its legitimacy. They will proceed to spell out the principle in order to show how it accomplishes both feats they have claimed for it. (Below I use the symbol ‘→’ to indicate direction of inheritance of truth, as will become clear in a moment.)

(i) The circumvention of evidence: Present → Future (a) A past-tensed statement whose future utterance is made true by an event now The truth value link, which is essentially a formalization of several observations that have already been made, can be simply and unambiguously expounded: SB is sitting in her study today, 15 April 2009. The present-tensed statement ‘SB is sitting in her study on 15 April 2009’, uttered today is therefore true. The past-tensed statement ‘One year ago SB was sitting in her study’, were it to be made one year from now, on 15 April 2010, would, it must indubitably seem, also be true. From this imagined future vantage point, then, it must really have happened that SB sat in her study on 15 April 2009. It follows that a distinction can be drawn between the truth conditions of the statement ‘One year ago SB was sitting in her study’ (to be uttered one year from now) which, it would seem, are once and for all fixed by SB’s now sitting in her study, and mere evidence for this statement – memories of SB sitting in her study on that date, fingerprints on the furniture etc. – which can change. Consider now, in order to see how the danger of anti-realists contradicting themselves arises, this scenario: a group of us, including several anti-realists, are sitting with SB in her office today. We can obviously affirm that: (μ) ‘SB is sitting in her office today’ uttered today is true.

It will follow, simply on the basis of the original formulation of the truth value link, that: (π) ‘SB was sitting in her office a year ago’, were it to be uttered a year hence, would also be true.

Now let us suppose that we also firmly believe that, one year hence, all evidence of SB sitting in her office will have been lost. Given their claim that truth is a function of verification, surely the anti-realists among us must also deny that the statement, ‘SB was sitting in her office one year ago’, should it be evinced one year hence, will be true. Since this past-tensed statement cannot be both true and false, they surely contradict themselves. The contradiction can be tracked down to a qualification of (π) which has so far been taken for granted. Making it explicit, we get:

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(π1) ‘SB was sitting in her office a year ago’, were it to be uttered one year hence, would be true, even if there were at the time of utterance no evidence to support it.

But (π1) is in conflict with: (π2) ‘SB was sitting in her office a year ago’, were it to be uttered one year hence, would be true, only if there were at the time of utterance evidence to support it.

But (π1) appears to follow from the truth value link, while (π2) seems to be just a consequence of the anti-realists’ theory of truth as verification. If they are to avoid the contradiction, therefore, yet hold to both the truth value link and their verificationist theory, the anti-realists must argue that the truth value link entails nothing as extreme as (π1), and verificationism nothing as extreme as (π2). Now what is extreme about (π1) for the anti-realists is the implication, once the qualification is in place, that truth transcends the means at our disposal for determining it at different times. As we shall see, however, the anti-realists, in maintaining that their theory of truth as verification does not entail anything as extreme as (π2), propound a notion of the truth value link which is precisely shorn of this implication. The question then will be whether anything recognizable as the truth value link is left. Are the antirealists, in other words, justified in claiming that its characterization, as entailing truth’s transcendence of our means of verification at different times, which may at first have seemed plain commonsense, is a realist appropriation of the principle, with the consequence that the neutrality of (π1) is undermined?

(b) Anti-realists’ response: but ‘true’ means ‘verifiable now’ ‘The present-tensed statement, “SB is sitting in her office today” ’, the anti-realists, in their clarification of verificationism, will first explain, ‘is, by the truth value link, equivalent to the past-tensed statement “SB was sitting in her office a year ago”, should such a statement be uttered a year from now’. Hence if the present-tensed statement is true, so also is the past-tensed one. It follows that the past-tensed statement inherits its title to truth from the present-tensed one. But ‘SB is sitting in her office today’, uttered this very day, is true because, and only because, it is verifiable now. Hence ‘SB was sitting in her office a year ago’, were it to be uttered one year hence, would be true, because, and only because, it also is verifiable now. The truth of the past-tensed statement, to be uttered a year hence, does not therefore depend at all on whether we suppose there to be evidence of SB sitting in her office at the time the statement is uttered, a year hence. It cannot therefore be undermined by any speculation to the effect that this evidence will be absent then. As such verificationism accords perfectly with the truth value link, any risk, the anti-realists will conclude, of their contradicting themselves is shown to be a fantasy of realists. But, the realists will contend, their opponents have precisely not acknowledged the truth value link. In allowing the title of truth to the statement ‘SB was sitting in her office one year ago’, uttered one year hence, to depend on a condition so transitory as the verifiability now of its present-tensed equivalent, they have acknowledged only a

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drastically enfeebled version of that principle. They have hived off a mere rule for the transformation of tensed statements, made at one time, into differently tensed statements made at another, and thrown away its essential core: the commitment to truth’s independence of the vagaries of our knowledge at any given time. The anti-realists will now remind their opponents that all they are being charged with is incurring a contradiction on their own terms. Hence it cannot be relevant how they arrive at their conception of truth, or that it differs from the realists’ in being a matter of current verifiability. The contradiction of which they are accused is between the truth of the statement that SB is sitting in her office today, uttered today, and (on the hypothesis that all relevant evidence will have by then been wiped out) the alleged falsity of its past-tensed equivalent ‘SB was sitting in her office one year ago’, uttered one year hence. But anti-realists will repeat: our theory is not that a statement is true at a given time in the future only if it is verifiable at that time, it is true at a given time in the future if it is verifiable now. As the statement ‘SB is sitting in her office today’ is ex hypothesi verifiable now, its past-tensed equivalent will, by the truth value link, also be true at the given time in the future. Consequently there is no contradiction.

(c) A standpoint outside time versus immurement in the present You avoid contradiction, the realists will complain, by confining yourself to stating the conditions now – today, 15 April 2009 – for affirming as true a statement such as ‘SB is sitting in her office today’, uttered now, or its past-tensed equivalent, ‘SB was sitting in her office a year ago’, uttered one year hence. You are not prepared to say whether it will be right, at some subsequent time, say 15 April 2010, to affirm as true the past-tensed statement ‘SB was sitting in her office on 15 April 2009’ uttered on 15 April 2010, or at a still later time, 15 April 2011. The realist, however, as the anti-realists see it, is here trying to get them to imagine standing outside the present, and occupying, as though it were the present, a future time, say 15 April 2010 – effectively just one of a series of possible future times that they might imagine successively occupying as present. By doing this, the realist hopes to lure them, the anti-realists will say, into admitting that, at this particular future time, 15 April 2010, the truth of ‘SB was sitting in her office on 15 April 2009’, uttered on 15 April 2010, or later still, on 15 April 2011, is a function of what will be verifiable on 15 April 2010, for then, this latter time, and not 15 April 2009, will be the present time. They could then conclude, assuming that on 15 April 2010 all evidence of SB sitting in her office a year earlier is wiped out, that a contradiction is again incurred. But the anti-realists will explain that, because we are immersed in time, the present is an inexorable condition of our being. Our relation to the present, they might add, turning to poetry in order to communicate this inexorability more vividly, is rather as Larkin perceives our relation to ‘days’ when he writes, in his poem of that name, ‘What are days for?’ and replies, ‘Days are where we live’, only to exclaim, ‘Where can we live but days?’ They will repeat that the conditions of verifiability of a statement made now, or of its past-tensed equivalent uttered in the future, are those, and only those, holding now. The truth value link itself, they will allow, plays its part by enabling us to transform present-tensed statements, uttered now, into appropriate past-tensed ones, to be made

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in the future, while conserving their truth from one time to the other. But, they will warn, the price we pay for truth’s stability is our habitation of the present: if we try to imagine ourselves no longer occupying the present, we cannot expect the future and past not to have shifted also, and they will cite with approval Prior’s remark, ‘If I am glad the pain will be over in five minutes, this is not the same thing I shall be glad about in five minutes’ time when I say, “Thank God it’s over now!” ’ Matching rhetoric with rhetoric, the realists will only accuse the anti-realists of disabling the truth value link from performing its proper role in relating us to the real future and real past, and commandeering it for the production of mere phantasms of future and past, playing like light and shadow on the horizon of a present, beyond which is utter darkness. We are not, they will insist indignantly, stranded thus in the present, nor tossed chaotically on an ocean of time. Now is just one moment in an orderly succession stretching from what is presently in the future, but which will become present, to what was future and present but is already past. But their problem is how, without begging the question by speaking of truth as reaching out beyond our means of verification, they can go beyond these metaphors, and give substance to their notion of the real future and real past as distinct from the future and past which the anti-realists have already allowed for in their own appeal to the truth value link.

(ii) The circumvention of evidence: Past → Present Approaching the challenge more cool-headedly, the realists will conclude that what they must do is to find a way of compelling their opponents to back-track on their claim that the condition of truth for any statement, however tensed, and whenever uttered, is its being verifiable now. For if only they can get the anti-realists to admit that the truth of, say, a past-tensed statement made in the future is a function of its verifiability at that future time (rather than now), they will be able legitimately to reintroduce their notion of a real past, and a real future, and lure the anti-realists into contradiction once more. But how can they do this? Developing suggestions of Crispin Wright (1987:187–8), we look at an argument, offered by realists, to show that the anti-realists’ very acceptance of the truth value link entails the impossibility of their holding apart the version of verificationism which they are willing to endorse from that which they repudiate on the grounds that it leads to contradiction. The argument is complex and has a number of steps.

(a) A past-tensed statement whose utterance now is made true by a past event The realists first recapitulate the truth value link under its original formulation thus: the present-tensed statement ‘SB is sitting in her office today’, uttered today, is, according to this formulation of the truth value link, equivalent to ‘SB was sitting in her office a year ago’ uttered in a year’s time. Hence if the former is true so is the latter, and vice versa. They then reinterpret the principle in such a way that its scope is extended from ‘SB was sitting in her office a year ago’, uttered in a year’s time – it is extended, in other words, from the statement, which in the original formulation will be past-tensed from an envisaged future standpoint – to cover statements that are past-tensed now,

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such as ‘SB was sitting in her office a year ago’, uttered today. It is thus maintained that just as ‘ “SB was sitting in her office a year ago”, uttered in a year’s time’ is, by the truth value link as originally formulated, equivalent to ‘ “SB is sitting in her office today”, uttered today’ so the statement ‘ “SB was sitting in her office a year ago”, uttered today’ is, by the extended truth value link equivalent to ‘ “SB is sitting in her office today” uttered a year ago’. Hence if the latter is true so is the former, and vice versa. In thus extending the scope of the truth value link, as originally formulated, to cover the new instances, they offer the following justification or explanation. ‘We are agreed’, they will say that if ‘SB is sitting in her office today’ uttered today is true, ‘SB was sitting in her office a year ago’, were it to be uttered a year hence, would also be true. Here then we have an example of how a past-tensed statement uttered in the future is made true by evidence existing now for its present-tensed equivalent. But it is equally an example of how a statement uttered at a later time is made true by the evidence existing at an earlier time (before the utterance of the statement) for its present-tensed equivalent. Suppose now we relocate the utterance of the past-tensed statement from future to present. Surely in an exactly analogous way we can say that this past-tensed statement, if true, is true in virtue of evidence existing at the earlier time – evidence, that is, existing before the utterance of the statement, and perhaps no longer existing – for its present-tensed equivalent, uttered a year ago. Returning to our example, we get ‘ “SB was sitting in her office a year ago” uttered today’ is true if ‘ “SB is sitting in her office today” uttered a year ago’ would have been true.

(b) The reinterpreted truth value link applied to the revised verification principle The next step in the realists’ argument involves the substitution of the verificationists’ preferred version of their principle ‘The statement, S, is true, if and only if it is verifiable now’ for ‘SB is sitting in her office today’, as it occurs in ‘ “SB is sitting in her office today” uttered a year ago, was true’. Thus they obtain ‘ “Statement, S, is true, if and only if it is verifiable now”, uttered a year ago was true’. The realists then point out that ‘ “SB is sitting in her office today”, uttered a year ago’ is, by the extended truth value link equivalent to ‘ “SB was sitting in her office a year ago”, uttered today’. Thus, substituting, they obtain: if ‘ “Statement, S, is true, if and only if it is verifiable now”, uttered a year ago’ was true, then so is its equivalent: ‘ “Statement, S, was true a year ago, if and only if it was verifiable a year ago”, uttered today’.

(c) The collapse of ‘verifiable now’ into ‘verifiable at that time’ Consistency demands, the realists now assert, that the verificationist principle, like any other principle, be formulated, whenever it is uttered, even when uttered in the past, in exactly the same way. Thus the anti-realists must agree that, were someone to have declared a year ago that ‘a statement, S, is true, if and only if it is verifiable now’, they would have spoken truly. But, the realists will continue, we have just seen that ‘Statement, S is true, if and only if it is verifiable now’ uttered a year ago is equivalent, by the reinterpreted truth value link to ‘Statement, S, was true a year ago, if and only if it was

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verifiable a year ago’, uttered today. But for someone to affirm today ‘Statement, S was true a year ago, if and only if it was verifiable a year ago’ is to affirm precisely that version of the verificationist principle which the anti-realists repudiate. If the antirealists are to stand by this repudiation, they must, the realists point out, ipso facto deny that ‘a statement is true, if and only if it is verifiable now’ would have been true if uttered a year ago. But this, they state, is an expression of the very principle they affirm. Thus, the realists conclude that the verificationists avoid the one contradiction (which is a consequence of their acceptance of the truth value link as originally formulated, see pp. 20–21 above) only by incurring (once the scope of the truth value link has been extended to cover the new instances) another. They are obliged, merely in endeavouring to adhere to their chosen version of the verificationist principle, to affirm a different version of the principle, namely that a statement S is true at a given time, if and only if it is verifiable at that time. But this is the very one they have just repudiated (on pain of incurring the first contradiction).

(iii) The circumvention of evidence: Future → Present I will consider three replies that the anti-realist might make to the realist argument as so far laid out. The first two I shall discuss which, together with the realist rejoinder, will occupy much of the rest of the chapter, accept the extension of the original formulation of the truth value link, but reject the argumentative process which leads from its application to the verificationist principle to the alleged further contradiction. The third reply calls the whistle earlier in rejecting, not the realists’ redescription of the operation of the truth value link in the more general terms of ‘earlier’ and ‘later’, but their attempt to bring within its scope of operation, thus redescribed, statements that are already past-tensed uttered now. It will only be considered when the full force of the antirealists’ conviction concerning our immurement in the present has become clear.

(a) Anti-realists: ‘don’t assume that the verification principle must have retrospective reach!’ The first, and less radical, of the two anti-realist replies, focussed upon the later stages of the argument, rejects the claim that consistency demands that the anti-realists, in affirming the principle ‘a statement, S, is true, if and only if it is verifiable now’, must hold that they would also have endorsed this principle, had it been expressed in the past. The anti-realists thus go immediately to the nub of the issue, pointing out just how limited is the role that the reinterpreted truth value link really plays in the realists’ new argument. It is appealed to only once it has been established that the anti-realists would have affirmed the principle ‘a statement S is true if and only if it is verifiable now’ had it been expressed a year ago. It is this alleged past affirmation of the principle whose proper present expression is, according to the reinterpreted truth value link,‘a statement S was true a year ago, if and only if it was verifiable a year ago’. Of course if the antirealists are already taken to endorse the principle, ‘a statement S was true, if and only if it was verifiable a year ago’, when uttered today, it can be concluded, merely reversing the direction of inference, that, by the reinterpreted truth value link, they would also

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have endorsed the principle ‘S is true, if and only if it is verifiable now’ when it was expressed a year ago. But this would be an example of an erroneous pattern of argument: affirming the consequent. All the spotlight must fall therefore, these anti-realists will insist, on the precarious move from the affirmation of the principle ‘a statement, S, is true if and only if it is verifiable now’, when expressed today to its affirmation when expressed a year ago. But what could possibly, the anti-realists will ask, legitimize such a move? The realists, they will complain, seek to brush over the difficulty of this transition by insisting that ‘Consistency demands it’. But the anti-realists will retort ‘Consistency with what?’ Admittedly, they will say, if you already a year ago held to the principle ‘for any statement, x, x is true, if and only if it is verifiable now’ then consistency would demand that, if you wanted to know whether a particular statement, T, was true, you must apply that principle to T thus: ‘a statement, T, is true if and only if it is verifiable now’. But if you didn’t adhere to the principle at that time, there would be no inconsistency in demurring from the principle ‘for any statement, x, x is true if and only if it is verifiable now’, when uttered at that time. The realists, enervated, will throw up their hands. ‘It is not a matter,’ they will tell the anti-realists, ‘of whether you adhered or did not adhere to the principle then, it is whether you adhere to it now. It is what you would judge, from your present committed position, about what you ought to have held to then which counts. A principle, they will say, has a retrospective reach. Your adoption of it today reverberates backward indefinitely, catching in its net every other occasion on which you might relevantly have affirmed it, and stipulating what ought to have been your response then. Consequently, from your standpoint now, you are obliged to maintain that you were wrong a year ago not to have endorsed the principle “a statement, S, is true if and only if it is verifiable now”, when it was expressed to you then.’ But the anti-realists will seize on this allusion to their present viewpoint as playing into their hands. ‘Our present viewpoint,’ they will say, ‘imposes other constraints on us which trump any requirement, such as you claim we have, in adhering to our principle now, to maintain that we were incorrect not to have held to the principle when expressed a year ago. For, as you have taken great trouble to explain to us, had we then endorsed the principle that we presently endorse, it would, by the reinterpreted truth value link, have led us into contradiction now. Anti-realists will continue: surely your whole point was to show that we could not acknowledge the truth value link and yet avoid some kind of contradiction. But we have shown you that the truth value link, even in its reinterpreted form, is silent as to the retrospective reach of a principle one presently adheres to, and so is powerless to demonstrate that we must now subscribe to two different and conflicting principles.’ The anti-realists have sought to meet the realists’ challenge by simply saying that, had the principle been expressed a year ago, they would not then have affirmed it, although when expressed at the present time they do. They have thereby shown that their acknowledgement of the truth value link, even in its reinterpreted form, is not compromised. It seems hard for their opponents to get around this reply without begging the question by muttering about the anti-realists privileging the present over the past and future, and withdrawing further behind their time-relative blinkers. So far then there appears to be a stale-mate.

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(b) A future-tensed statement whose utterance now is made true by a future event The going can be made tougher for the anti-realists by changing the focus from the past-tensed version of their principle to a future-tensed one. A series of parallel moves are made to those made in relation to the past-tensed version. The anti-realists first have to agree that, by the truth value link, merely as originally formulated, if ‘SB is sitting in her office today’ uttered today is true, then ‘SB will be sitting in her office one year hence’ uttered one year ago, would also have been true. But this, the realists point out, is an example of how a future-tensed statement uttered a year ago is made true by evidence coming into existence after the utterance of the future-tensed statement, evidence namely for the truth of its present-tensed equivalent, uttered today. The utterance of the future-tensed statement is next relocated, just as was the utterance of the past-tensed statement. The relocation, however, of the utterance of the futuretensed statement is from past to present rather than, as with the utterance of the pasttensed statement, from future to present. Having argued as before for the legitimacy of this relocation, the realists, returning to the example, now feel justified in concluding that ‘SB will be sitting in her study a year from now’ uttered today is true if ‘SB is sitting in her office today’ uttered a year from now will be true then. The realists next apply the reinterpreted truth value link, just as before, to the verification principle itself. Again, the anti-realists are reminded that they repudiate the principle ‘a statement S is true at a given time, if and only if it is verifiable at that time’ (and indeed are obliged to if they are serious in their acknowledgement of the truth value link even as originally formulated). Their principle is rather that ‘a statement S is true, if and only if it is verifiable now’. The anti-realists are now asked to envisage their principle being expressed in a year’s time. Surely, their opponents will innocently inquire of them, they would still wish to stand by it, wouldn’t they. Scarcely waiting for a reply, the realists round swiftly upon them, pointing out that actually they cannot do so without also endorsing what is, by the reinterpreted truth value link, its equivalent uttered today: ‘a statement S will be true, if and only if it is verifiable in a year’s time’. But that principle, realists will remind their opponents, they have just told us they reject.

(c) Realists: ‘one cannot subscribe to a principle one says will not hold in a year’s time!’ The anti-realists appear to have only two, equally unpalatable, options. The first, which parallels their treatment of past utterances of their principle is to say that, while they now hold to the principle that ‘a statement S is true, if and only if it is verifiable now’, they will not hold to it in a year’s time. But the realists will reply sarcastically: ‘You will hardly inspire much confidence in anyone you are trying to persuade of your principle that you confess that you yourself will not hold it in a year’s time!’ The alternative is for the antirealists to say that they will hold to the principle in a year’s time, but add that they will be wrong to do so. The realists will reply, equally sarcastically, that whereas the first solution shows only that the anti-realist is erratic and unreliable, the second points to something more disturbing – a kind of pathological dissociation from the person she will be in a

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year’s time. Of course, this might be explained away by the anti-realists saying that she expects to undergo a brain-washing process between now and next year, so that she cannot be held responsible now for her view then. But the realists will curtly reply to their opponent that they are not hypothesizing any such catastrophe befalling her.

(d) The threat to realism from fatalism defused It may seem that the realists have at last succeeded in blocking their opponents’ escape route. Their opponents, however, have as yet merely exploited their least radical alternative. Not only this, but the realists, in switching their focus from the past-tensed, to the future-tensed, version of the anti-realists’ principle, have rather rashly committed themselves to something that, in a more aggressive, less hounded mood, the anti-realists would exploit with glee. The hole they have begun unwittingly to dig for themselves is not in reinterpreting the truth value link, nor in extending its application from statements of fact to the anti-realists’ principle itself. It lies, much earlier, in their assertion that there is an equivalence between the present-tensed statement ‘SB is sitting in her office today’ uttered today and the future-tensed statement ‘SB will be sitting in her office a year hence’ uttered a year ago. This equivalence, they have been holding, is entailed by the truth value link simply as originally formulated. It will be objected: you say that it follows from the truth of the statement ‘SB is sitting in her office today’, uttered today (say, 12 April 2009) that the statement ‘SB will be sitting in her office one year from today’, uttered a year ago, was already true then. In this case the future-tensed statement was true in the past, true before the event to which it refers came about. But the past, you realists hold, is inviolate: no one can alter it. Consequently the event of SB sitting in her office on 12 April 2009, although still lying, on 12 April 2008 in her future, could not be changed by SB (or indeed anyone else): they would strive in vain to avert it. In short, the realists’ endeavours to block their opponents’ escape route appears to have ended with them impaling themselves on the fatalistic hook. Even accepting that the future-tensed statement, uttered a year ago, being equivalent by the truth value link to the present-tensed statement uttered today, was true then, there are a number of retorts that the realists might essay in order to avoid fatalism. One main retort would be to resist the identification of ‘true’ with ‘already true’ or ‘true then’. This identification, they might contend, erroneously suggests that truth has a temporal dimension, when it is only the events which make a proposition true that occur in time. Thus they might explain that, although the statement ‘SB will be sitting in her office one year from now’, uttered on 12 April 2008, was true – timelessly true – SB only performs the action which makes it true one year later. She does not absurdly go back into the past, and make something, that did not happen, happen or make something not happen that did happen. They would hope in this way to drive a distinction between the idea of the future course of events being determinate, which they would permit, and its being determined, or necessitated, which they would reject as incompatible with freedom. This strategy is of course highly controversial, not least, in this context, because the realists would already, anti-realists would point out, be begging the question.

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Anti-realists after all hold that we cannot even understand a proposition unless we are in a position to ascertain its truth, which in turn requires, for every proposition, that there exist present determinants of its truth. Even leaving aside the particular dispute with anti-realists, it is optimistic to say the least to suggest that the strategy would salvage any convincing notion of freedom. Moreover, the stripped down notion of change as little more than a subjective feeling of time flow, which is all that we are apparently left with, may well seem hardly enough to account for the sense we have of the impact of change and annihilation in our lives. However, it is far from clear that the realists’ espousal of the truth value link must commit them to the view that time does not affect a proposition’s truth value (whether or not a fully fledged fatalism is its consequence). Certainly just assenting to the transformation, via the truth value link, of the present-tensed statement uttered today into the past-tensed statement uttered in the future is not sufficient on its own for this view. As Aristotle was at pains to argue in his discussion of the sea battle, there is a difference between holding that, once a (present-tensed) statement becomes true (because the relevant event occurs), it thereafter remains true, and holding that a statement which is true now always was true, true ten thousand years ago, true in the Ice Age, in fact true long before the events occurred which would account for its truth. What is to stop the realists (except where, as here, they have been carried away by a short-sighted desire to close one of their opponents’ avenues of escape) from drawing the line as Aristotle did, and so refusing to countenance any extension of the truth value link which would legitimize the transformation of present-tensed statements, uttered in the present, into relevant future-tensed statements uttered in the past? The future-tensed statement ‘SB will be sitting in her office a year hence’ would not have been true had it been uttered on 12 April 2008 since the statement ‘SB is sitting in her office today’, only becomes true on 12 April 2009. Perhaps it will be objected that holding to the truth value link cannot be a matter of degree, but must be an all or nothing business. But again it is unclear why this must be so. Perhaps it will be categorically asserted that the truth value link applies to ‘tensed statements generally’. Yet what but a craven desire for generality would lead anyone casually to assent to this, given the damage thereby done to ordinary intuitions such as that there is an asymmetry between the closed past and open future, that time and change are more than the subjective veil that Augustine saw as obscuring a static reality? It would be particularly ironical since the strength of the truth value link, as limited to the transformation of present-tensed statements, uttered in the present, into appropriate past-tensed statements uttered in the future, is to underscore the common sense view that what is true remains true, that truth cannot be ‘lost’ (M. Davidson, 2013:153–72). Resisting generalization would also pull the rug from under the feet of anti-realists who, in a more belligerent mood, would like nothing better than (as Dummett does at one point) to contrast their appreciation of our ‘immersion in time’ with the realists’ supposed atemporality, offering them a dichotomy between the reality of the past and the reality of time. This is not of course to say that there might not be independent reasons for espousing eternalism, but these are not under scrutiny here. The only question is whether endorsing the truth value link on its own must commit us to this theory.

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(e) Anti-realists: ‘but “true” will not mean the same in a year’s time’ At this juncture, the anti-realists move to the second of their pair of replies to the realist argument as laid out earlier, and which focus, we pointed out, on its later stages. (The final reply, which concerns the first step, we shall come to shortly.) This predicament only follows, they will counter, on a crucial but false assumption: that the meaning of the truth predicate – and hence of the past-tensed statement itself, as a claim to truth – will remain constant between now and a year’s time. However, they do not. Without this assumption, they argue, there can be no contradiction. Now it is frequently claimed (see in particular Crispin Wright, 1987:192–3) that the anti-realist, in thus denying that the meaning of the past-tensed statement will stay constant over the time gap, is effectively construing the truth predicate as a sort of indexical. The idea, we may take it, is roughly that an indexical is a context-sensitive expression (the phrase coined by David Kaplan, 1977:506) which transmits this sensitivity to the content of the statement in which it figures and, on the construal now proposed, so does ‘true’. It is important to distinguish a modest version of the anti-realist reply, which we shall consider first, from a more extreme one. According to the former, the anti-realist contends that were a person, in a year’s time, to declare (from lack of relevant evidence then) that ‘SB was sitting in her study a year ago’ is not true, ‘he will not’ (Dummett (1978:373), ‘in a year’s time mean the same by “true” as he now means by it’ (when he predicates it of the future utterance of the statement). The more extreme contention is that: ‘[this person] cannot by any means at all now express the meaning which he will attach to the phrase in a year’s time’. The quotation is again from Dummett, and follows on in the text without differentiation from the previous one, as though the intention were merely to vary its expression. This impression is reinforced by Dummett’s providing for these remarks only one justification – in terms of ‘the world chang[ing]’. Crispin Wright prefers, in characterizing Dummett’s anti-realist’s reply – identifying it (1987:191) as the anti-realist’s last move in the debate described in ‘The Reality of the Past’ – to concentrate on the associated change in meaning of the statement of which ‘true’ is predicated.25 It seems possible again to distinguish a modest from a more extreme version of the reply. He writes (1987:192): ‘the content of a statement, whenever it is made, will in so far as it involves a claim to truth be a function of when it is made’. More extremely, on the next page, we find: ‘there is no recovering of the content of a statement that . . . will be intended to answer to a different [i.e. not current] population of facts’. Wright, it should be noted, substitutes (1987:193) talk of a changing ‘population of facts’ (a term of art which, although not ideal, I shall provisionally myself adopt) for Dummett’s changing ‘world’ as the sole justification for the new apparently unitary stance he has in these different descriptions attributed to the anti-realists. One way of bringing out the significance of the move from the modest to the more extreme version of the anti-realists’ reply is by asking how apposite is the alleged analogy between the truth predicate and indexicals as regards each version. I will argue that, with the more modest version, provided we are prepared to accept an oversimplified account of how indexicals contribute to the meaning of statements, the analogy is pertinent. On the other hand, its very aptness only serves to expose the inadequacy of this version of the reply to the task at hand. With the more extreme

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version, however, exploring the possibility of an analogy between the truth predicate and an indexical, not only elucidates the otherwise obscure claim being made, but brings home just how extreme it is, by showing to what extent our ordinary use of indexicals would have to be amended and extended in order to uphold the analogy. Dummett, as we have suggested, expresses the reply more modestly as follows: ‘[one] will not in a year’s time mean the same by “true” as he now means by it’. How far then does the truth predicate, on this first construal, compare with a common, and indeed paradigmatic, indexical such as ‘here’? The following parallel might be suggested. The content of a statement containing ‘here’ is a function of the location of the speaker or speakers. It follows that two people, one in London, one in Manchester, one declaring, and one denying, that ‘It is raining here’, make statements with different contents, or meanings. Hence they do not contradict each other. In a roughly analogous way, the content, or meaning, of a statement claimed to be true is, the anti-realist might say, a function of the ‘population of facts’ to which it answers at the time it is made. Therefore ‘SB was sitting in her office a year ago’ uttered a year hence can, without contradiction, be true now when we anticipate this future utterance, yet not true when the time anticipated actually arrives. The statement, as a claim to truth, answers to different ‘populations of facts’ at different times, and so has different meanings. It will be objected that of course two people do not contradict each other when one says something about London, and another denies something else about Manchester. But this description of what they are doing is contestable. Nor is it enough merely to concede that they use the same form of words. For that is not coincidental. Their using the same form of words is connected with their intention one to assert, the other to deny, the same thing with respect to their locations: that it is raining where they are. If this weren’t so, why do we find it so natural to say that, while the statement ‘It is raining here’ is false, when the speaker is in Manchester, it would be true were she to have uttered it in London? A statement with a single meaning has undergone a change of truth value due to the context sensitivity of one of its components: the indexical ‘here’. The objector puts his finger on an important ambiguity concerning indexicals. For our intuitions tell us that when the context changes, the meaning of a statement containing an indexical, while in some sense changing, also in some sense remains the same. It is this sameness of meaning that permits talk of an alteration in the statement’s truth value. In order to remove this ambiguity, while preserving our intuitions, a distinction is helpfully drawn by Kaplan (1977:505–7) between what may be called a statement’s ‘propositional meaning’, or ‘content’ (it is raining in London/ it is raining in Manchester), which changes across contexts, and its ‘linguistic meaning’, or ‘character’ (it is raining at the speaker’s location) which is essentially contributed by the indexical, and remains the same. But if ‘true’ is supposed to behave like ‘here’, on this account, we shall have to say that it no more changes in meaning than does the indexical. Just as ‘here’ invariably means ‘at the speaker’s location’, so ‘true’ invariably means (for antirealists) ‘justifiably assertible’. The anti-realist might, however, question whether the indexical is responsible for the element of constancy in the meaning of ‘It is raining here’ in different contexts. Surely, he will say, it has just been admitted that it is precisely the indexical that is contextsensitive, and hence that by which variation is introduced into the content of the

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statement as a whole. In order to preserve again both intuitions he might suggest that the distinction just drawn between propositional and linguistic meaning be applied to the indexical itself, and not confined to the statement as a whole. Accordingly, ‘here’ could be said to have a single linguistic meaning or character – the location of the speaker (wherever that is), and different contents across different contexts – London, Manchester, etc. He might then fruitfully preserve the analogy with ‘here’ while continuing to maintain that ‘true’ changes in meaning across the relevant contexts. Alternatively, he might concede for the sake of argument that neither ‘here’, nor ‘true’, do change in meaning, but offer (as Dummett at one point does, 1978:373) this reformulation of his position: ‘I cannot now say by means of [true] what I will later be able to say by means of it’. Just as I cannot, when in London, say by means of ‘It is raining here’ what I will later be able to say by means of it when in Manchester, so I cannot now say by means of the claim ‘ “SB was sitting in her office a year ago” will be true, uttered in a year’s time’ what in a year’s time I will be able to say by means of the claim ‘ “SB was sitting in her office a year ago” is true, uttered now’. Let us suppose that it were uncontentious that statements containing an indexical, such as ‘It is raining here’, have different meanings in different contexts. Let us also suppose that an analogy could plausibly be drawn between these indexicals and the truth predicate, so that we might see how a statement could, as a claim to truth, have different meanings relative to different ‘populations of facts’ at different times. Far from solving the problem now posed for anti-realists by their opponents, it underestimates, and misdiagnoses, it. Their problem is not one of explaining how, in order to avert a contradiction, a past-tensed statement such as ‘SB was sitting in her office a year ago’, as a claim to truth, will change in meaning as the ‘population of facts’ to which it answers changes. This is guaranteed by the verificationist principle itself according to which meaning is a function of the (changing) mode of verification. The collision that the anti-realists are so eager to avert is not, as we should already have realized, internal to verificationism. It is between this theory and the truth value link itself. According to the latter principle, we shall recall, if a past-tensed statement is true, it is for ever afterwards true, irrespective of the paucity or even absence of relevant evidence. This is not so for verificationists.

(f) Anti-realists ‘we cannot express the meaning which we shall attach to “true” in a year’s time’ The anti-realists have gone ahead already, and – an advance that this modest version of their reply would not seem to have registered – sought to avoid the clash by restricting the scope of their principle to the present. Their opponents, however, we shall recall, drawing on a reinterpretation of the truth value link, attempted to demonstrate that this restriction could not be sustained. Thus the pressing need, in order to uphold this restriction decisively, for the anti-realists to offer their current reply. It is not enough, however, that because meanings change, a statement can be true at one time and false at another without contradiction (which is as far as the modest version goes). It must be shown more extremely that (as Dummett puts it) ‘we cannot by any means at all now express the meaning which [we] will attach to the expression [“true”] in a year’s time’.

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Anti-realists are thus, according to the extreme version of their reply, envisaging no less than a breakdown in our ability to make sense now of the claim being true that ‘SB was sitting in her office a year ago’ as it will actually be made at this later time (and not merely as we now envisage it being made). What looks like a meaningful statement is, they are suggesting, only masquerading as one – being really an empty form of words. Now it is not difficult to see that ‘true’, on this extreme version of the anti-realists’ reply, emphatically does not behave like an indexical. An indexical (we suggested) possesses alongside its linguistic meaning, which remains fixed through different contexts of utterance, a varying content which is a function of the interaction between these different contexts and its linguistic meaning. Put another way, the indexical, thanks to its linguistic meaning, can be serially reattached to a statement on different occasions of its utterance, with the result that both the indexical, and the statement as a whole, are imbued with different contents corresponding to the variation in context. If, however, we were to try to pull apart a statement, as a claim to truth, from the mode of its verification which, for anti-realists, furnishes its meaning – if we were to try to isolate the statement from, in Wright’s paraphrase, (1987:193) ‘the population of facts’ to which ‘it is intended to answer’ – we would, on their extreme reply, drain both the statement, and ‘true’ as predicated of it, of meaning. There is therefore, where the truth predicate is concerned, no equivalent of the indexical’s linguistic meaning to carry over into a future context of utterance, where it can be imbued with a content reflecting the new context. To take our example, there is, for anti-realists, only what makes the statement true now – the direct observation of SB in her office: evidence which ex hypothesi will be lacking at the later time. Of course, as we have seen, in so far as the evidence is before us of SB in her office today, we can, according to anti-realists, say now not only that the statement ‘SB is sitting in her office today’, is true today, but also that ‘SB was sitting in her office a year ago’ would be true were it to be uttered in a year’s time. Their concern, however, is with the statement ‘SB was sitting in her office a year ago’ when, that later time actually having arrived, it is claimed (or denied) to be true. As then, according to our hypothesis, the evidence which was its mode of verification – and that from which it derived its meaning – has been wiped out, and its umbilical cord with the present severed, it ceases to be more than a mere form of words. While indexicals therefore are responsive to new contexts in a way that the truth predicate, according to the anti-realists’ extreme reply, is not, it is instructive to ask how these indexicals would have to behave if there really were an analogy. We must imagine something along these lines: when you use ‘here’ for the first time to refer to your location you automatically fix its meaning for all future occasions of your use of it, irrespective of where you will be on these future occasions. Thus if you were in London on this first occasion then ‘here’ will always, when you use it, mean London. Even if you were to say ‘It is raining here’, intending to inform someone of the weather in Manchester, when you were there, you would succeed only in referring back to London. You would end up speaking a kind of self-defeating nonsense. This only partially coherent attempt to project on to ‘here’ something of the way anti-realists are construing the truth predicate is only likely to provoke more puzzlement. It will be objected: sometimes at least (if not on our earlier hypothesis) we have a good idea of the sort of evidence that is likely to be available at a later date. There

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is therefore nothing to prevent us, in these circumstances, from anticipating just how a statement’s meaning (given that it is a function of its mode of verification) will have changed by the later date. We know already that the statement ‘SB was sitting in her office a year ago’ will no longer be assessed for truth in a year’s time by direct observation of SB sitting in her office on the day in question. It will be a matter of consulting our memories, and perhaps indirect evidence such as records pertaining to that day, photos taken on the day, finger prints, and so on. Can we not therefore fashion out of our conception of this sort of evidence an appropriate meaning, or content, for ‘true’ as it might later, when that time actually comes, be predicated of the statement? But then how can anti-realists possibly maintain that there can be ‘no recovering the content of a statement that will be intended to answer to [such] a different population of facts’? Of course humans during the last ice age could not have anticipated our methods now – drilling into the ice core and measuring the ratio of heavy to light oxygen atoms – of establishing the truth of statements concerning their climate 15,000 years ago. They could not therefore (according to verificationists) have grasped the meaning of these past-tensed truth claims as we make them today, and which are intended to answer to our current ‘population of facts’. But this inability is due merely to empirical factors, and besides the anti-realists do not suggest that their new strictures only apply where the time interval is of this magnitude. Our perplexity at the anti-realist position is, perhaps surprisingly, due, even at this stage when the need for a radical reply to the realists’ invocation of the truth value link has been brought home to us, to our failure to grasp just how radical their answer is, and just how uncompromising their claim that we are immured in the present. We have so far been unable to take on board the scale of the upheaval that the anti-realists envisage when they contemplate, first, the present and, then try, with much more difficulty, to contemplate the later time, when it has actually arrived, and has become itself the present. For, as they see it, there are no fixed points of reference between the two. All the familiar landmarks that we might have expected to use in order to reorientate ourselves will have at this later time been swept away. It will once more be objected: didn’t we just now say that it is implausible to suppose that there will be no continuity of evidence from one time to the other? Are not those SB’s very fingerprints that we observe a year later, and are they not a common point of reference? That, the anti-realists will reply, presupposes just what they are not prepared to allow: that, from the perspective of the later time, when it has actually arrived, we shall have independent access to what was present and is now past, and can discern what is in common between then and now. In an attempt to explain their thought further, they will ask us to consider the wellknown picture of the duck-rabbit. First, they will say, you see what is before you as a duck and then, under instruction to see it as a rabbit, and after staring a while, you see it as a rabbit. No new lines have been sketched in, and none rubbed out. It is just that the very lines that, before, presented to you the image of a duck, now delineate a rabbit. That is to say, you ‘see’ the rabbit in the very same marks on paper in which just a moment before you ‘saw’ a duck. Now suppose, the anti-realists will continue, that however hard you try to ‘see’ the duck again, you cannot: those very lines which earlier traced out a duck, obstinately continue to form themselves, before your eyes, into a rabbit. Somewhat

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analogously, the anti-realists will say, if you concentrate when a year has passed on your various bits of evidence, of SB in her office a year before, trying to glimpse the past itself behind them, as though it somehow persisted wraith-like independently of them, that past will constantly collapse back into, become absorbed by, be swept up into, the past which is presently being constructed out of this very evidence. Hence the curtain that in this way falls between two ‘presents’, falls absolutely, for anti-realists, irrespective of whether evidence remains or has been wiped out.

(g) Past facts let in ‘by the back door’ It is perhaps in this uncompromising and dogmatic spirit that the anti-realists will give their third and last reply to the realists’ argument, which focuses on its first step. As we shall recall, in order to avoid the charge that they could not, without contradiction, both accept the truth value link and retain their verificationist principle, the antirealists pointed to what they suggested was a misunderstanding by their opponents. Their principle, they explained, is that the truth of a statement, however tensed, depends on whether it is verifiable now, not on whether it was, for a past-tensed statement (or will be, for a future-tensed one), verifiable at the relevant past (or future) time. But the realists retorted: once you accept the truth value link, your two versions of the verificationist principle come down to much the same thing, and so you cannot after all escape contradiction. In order to demonstrate this conclusion, however, the realists had to admit at the start of their argument that it was necessary to go beyond the original formulation of the truth value link. Its scope had to be extended from those statements (figuring in the original formulation) that will be past-tensed from an envisaged future standpoint, to statements that are already past-tensed, viewed from the present. (Likewise its scope has to be extended from statements that were futuretensed from an envisaged past viewpoint to statements that are future-tensed, viewed from the present.) But the anti-realists, fixing their attention exclusively on this earliest stage of the realist argument will simply refuse point blank to countenance even their extension of the scope of the truth value link into the past (or future). They will say: of course certain past (or future) tensed statements are made true by virtue of facts relating to a time before (or a time after) the making of the statement. But these facts are always and only present facts. It is because, and only because, SB is sitting in her office now that we can truly now say that ‘SB was sitting in her office a year ago’ will be true, were we to utter it in a year’s time, and that ‘SB will be sitting in her office in a year’s time’ would have been true, were it to have been uttered a year ago. We cannot say: just as the past-tensed statement, ‘SB was sitting in her office a year ago’, uttered in a year’s time is made true by virtue of the present fact of SB sitting in her office today, so the pasttensed statement ‘SB was sitting in her office a year ago’ uttered now is made true by virtue of the past fact of SB having sat in her office a year ago. For that is to slip in past facts by the back door, and under cover of spuriously sliding back in time (from present-to-future to past-to-present), or forward in time (from present-to-past to future-to-present), the operation of the truth value link, as instanced in the original formulation. There is no such thing, the anti-realists will repeat, as ‘past facts’ if by

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them we mean something we cannot recognize as true now, and nothing said so far suggests that the truth value link must give credence to them. Their stance here is all of a piece with their conviction that we are immured in the present. It is difficult to see, if they stick doggedly to it, how realists can make inroads into it by way of the truth value link. On the other hand, that principle itself is intuitively very powerful, as the antirealists acknowledge in trying so ingeniously and assiduously to circumvent it. Its power, it might be said, can only be matched, on the opposing side, by such a strongly held conviction, no matter that strength here may seem to outrun its rational justification.

3: The realist appeal to memory In the remaining pages of the chapter, we briefly consider how realists might still try to counteract the almost blinkered force of this conviction, by invoking memory. Memory, they will assert, precisely presents us with the past as it actually was, not as time has changed it. But the anti-realists will counsel that this is a far more tricky and difficult idea to convey than the realists make it sound. Since the past event must not endure, or have a history, or a time-span, in our memory, it must appear, there and then, at the very moment of recall. Nor will it do to say that, on the realist view, memory preserves the past in the present. This would raise questions concerning the relation of the past event to the vehicle, or medium, in which it is preserved, and confront the realists with all the difficulties of a representative theory of memory.

(i) Models of memory: mental image and physical trace On this model, the anti-realists will remind their opponent, there are two chief candidates for this mediating role: either a mental image of the past event, of which we are conscious, as we are of other types of mental content, or a physical trace – ‘a mediated residue’ of the event – ‘encoded’ in the brain, and of which we are typically unconscious. Obviously on the mental image theory, it necessarily follows that the past event itself is no longer something of which we have any direct awareness. Moreover, as representationalists admit, it is ‘dead and gone’, irretrievable, except by inference from those effects which persist, however falteringly or fleetingly, as images in the memory. A line of the poet R.L. Stevenson (1912) is apt: ‘The surviving memory signal[s] out of the dark backward and abysm of time the images of perished things.’ As the image cannot be compared with the ‘perished’ thing, it is impossible to tell whether it in any way resembles the original. But the case might seem equally hopeless as regards physical traces, of which we are unconscious, but which have, apparently by some causal process, been laid up, and stored, in the brain so that, much later, the event, of which they are traces, can be recalled. Here, the event has become detached from any physical, or mental, moorings; it has been left behind, and swiftly sinks into the immense and impenetrable darkness of which Stevenson speaks. The anti-realists will acknowledge that, at first sight, the problem might thus seem even more acute for the ‘trace’ version of the theory than the ‘mental image’ version. For

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traces, being grossly physical, will necessarily deteriorate over time. Nor is it only a gradual, or ‘phased’, degeneration which has to be contemplated. Wittgenstein wondered whether ‘the things stored up may not constantly change their nature’.26 The ‘trace’ version has, however, been developed in a way which, rather than attempting to head off these objections, seeks – perversely from the realist angle – to incorporate the complained of instability as a positive feature. Its defenders27 have thus moved toward embracing that very dynamism concerning the past, posited by anti-realists, but so inimical to realists. One early and eminent supporter, Frederick Bartlett (1932:211–12), writes that there is ‘no reason to regard [traces] as made complete, stored up somewhere and then reexcited at some much later moment. The traces that our evidence allows us to speak of are interest-determined, interest-carried, traces. They live with our interests and with them they change’. Truth is thus compatible with some transformation at the time of recollection. Others speak of ‘present resources’ being used ‘to shape and anchor the past’, warning that memories ‘do not sit still in cold storage’. The representative theory, in the revised trace version, presents then far graver difficulties for realists than for anti-realists.

(ii) Memory not an atemporal yardstick Still, in combating the theory quite generally, the realists may consider that they have one vital card to play: our knowledge of the past through memory, they will observe, is characteristically non-inferential. When I remember, the realists will say, that I was with SB in her office that day a year ago, I do not (normally) infer it from any present evidence, whether images before my mind, or (ludicrously) my own memory traces, or others’ memories, or the fingerprints belonging to both of us on the door handle. It follows, they will conclude, that the representative theory, depending on inference, cannot be correct. They go on: if someone challenges me with the question ‘How do you know you were in SB’s office that day’, I do not typically cite these various bits of evidence in justification of my claim. It suffices, unless there is reason to distrust my word, for me to declare ‘I was there’, or ‘I know because I was there’. But this, the realists will claim, indicates that memory, in certain circumstances, can be so to speak its own guarantor. But how, they will ask, is that possible unless the past event itself, when we remember it, is there before us just as it was when it originally occurred. The anti-realists will happily agree that there can be a peculiar immediacy about knowledge gleaned from memory, if this just means that the realists’ assertion concerning their being in SB’s office a year ago is not inferred from evidence. They will, though, point out that the ‘trace’ version of the representative theory is immune from this criticism since it does not, like the mental image version, rely on any inference. How could it, since the person remembering is unaware of the traces laid up in their brain which make their act of recall possible? The anti-realists will grant that memory, although it does not usually involve inference, and hence is in some sense ‘direct’, is by and large reliable. But they will offer a caveat. The contrast between its ‘directness’ and the ‘indirectness’ of other evidence is misleading. There is, they will say, no hard and fast distinction here. A practised archaeologist, for instance, excavating a bronze age grave, will describe himself as ‘seeing’ immediately the clumps of dark brown, peat like,

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substance, discovered beside the human remains, as the heads and stems of meadowsweet that mourners had placed in with the burial. Of course, such skilled people make errors. But even memory is on occasion mistaken, so requiring to be checked against supposedly more ‘indirect’ evidence, just as the latter requires corroboration by reference to memory (where that is possible). That memories are mostly reliable is itself, they will add, something that could only have been known in the first place through checking. They will accept of course that this procedure would itself involve a certain reliance on memory. But that is just to say that not all memory claims can be questioned at the same time, not that each may not individually require verification. The anti-realists are keen to stress that there is no essential connection between directness and infallibility – dream-experiences are ‘direct’, they will point out, but hardly veridical – since this encourages, via the belief that memories are at least sometimes self-guaranteeing, the idea that they afford a faithful window on to the past. They will insist: memories cannot be regarded as atemporal yardsticks remaining intact through change.

(iii) Robert Southey’s ‘The Battle of Blenheim’ The temporal nature of memories is well illustrated, they might suggest, in a further effort to help the realist to grasp their thought, in a poem such as Southey’s ‘The Battle of Blenheim’, whose dramatis personae are Caspar, a survivor of the battle, now an old man, and his grandchildren Peterkin and Wilhelmina. The poem recounts how Peterkin is playing in the fields where the famous battle between the English, under the Duke of Marlborough, and the French had been fought some fifty years earlier. He finds a large, smooth, round object and rolls it nonchalantly across the grass to his grandfather, sitting in his garden, asking what it is. His grandfather, sighing wistfully, replies: ‘’Tis some poor fellow’s skull who fell in the great victory’. He then describes a catalogue of mounting enormities perpetrated at that time. Many thousands of men, he says, were slain, pregnant women miscarried, children were murdered, his father was driven from his home, rotting corpses littered the battlefield. But while the children’s spontaneous reaction – the medium through which we now grasp what Caspar’s own reaction must have been at the time – is one of growing horror at the devastation, leading Wilhelmina to denounce the perpetrators as wicked, Caspar himself does not apparently share it. He corrects them: ‘Nay, nay,’ he says, ‘it was a famous victory.’ We soon realize that the reason for the dispassionate, if wistful, manner in which he recounts the bloody events is precisely this conviction, albeit vague, that they represented ‘a famous victory’ – a refrain which, as can be seen from the complete poem, qualifies his report of each calamity: It was a summer evening Old Kaspar’s work was done, And he before his cottage door Was sitting in the sun And by him sported on the green His little grandchild Wilhelmine

The Realist/Anti-Realist Wars

She saw her brother Peterkin Roll something large and round Which he beside the rivulet In playing there had found He came to ask what he had found That was so large, and smooth and round Old Kaspar took it from the boy, Who stood expectant by, And then the old man shook his head And with a natural sigh, ‘Tis some poor fellow’s skull’ said he, ‘Who fell in the great victory ‘I find them in the garden For there’s many here about, And often when I go to plough The plough share turns them out For many thousand men’ said he ‘Were slain in that great victory’. ‘Now tell us what ‘twas all about’ Young Peterkin he cries, And little Wilhelmina looks up With wonder-waiting eyes, ‘Now tell us all about the war And what they fought each other for’ ‘It was the English’, Kaspar cried ‘Who put the French to rout But what they fought each other for I could not well make out But everybody said’ quoth he ‘That ‘twas a famous victory My father lived at Blenheim then, Yon little stream hard by, They burnt his dwelling to the ground And he was forced to fly So with his wife and child he fled Nor had he where to rest his head

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Truth, Time and History ‘With fire and sword the country round Was wasted far and wide And many a childing mother then, And new-born baby, died But things like that, you know, must be At every famous victory ‘They say it was a shocking sight After the field was won, For many thousand bodies here Lay rotting in the sun But things like that, you know, must be After a famous victory ‘Great praise the Duke of Marlboro’ won And our good Prince Eugene’ Why ‘twas a very wicked thing! Said little Wilhelmina ‘Nay, nay, my little girl’ quoth he, ‘It was a famous victory And everybody praised the Duke Who the great fight did win’. ‘But what good came of it at last?’ Quoth little Peterkin ‘Why, that I cannot tell’ said he ‘But ’twas a famous victory’.

The impact of the poem lies, the anti-realists will comment, in the shocking dissonance between what we surmise must have been Caspar’s reaction to the battle at the time it was waged (as now expressed in the reactions of the children) and his present memory of it. The two stances cannot exist side by side. For if we adopt (as we shall do if we take this to be an anti-war poem) the perspective of the children, or Caspar’s, as we surmise it to have been fifty years before, his refrain ‘It was a famous victory’ is simply drained of its meaning as the catalogue of suffering and devastation mounts up. On the other hand, in so far as we adopt Caspar’s present perspective, it is the force of the claims about the suffering and devastation fifty years ago that dwindles to insignificance. The past, this poem intimates, is not something which bears its identity on its sleeve, so to speak. The evidence – the skulls, Caspar’s memories – are not independent measuring tools by which to assess the veracity of his present vision of the past. They are themselves part of the very fabric of that present vision. In terms of the duck-rabbit analogy, the lines which ex hypothesi earlier depicted a duck, obstinately now form themselves for him, and those who share his vision, into a rabbit. The realists, retreating, do their best to salvage something. Yes, they admit, occasionally memory claims are mistaken, but when I do veridically remember, isn’t

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that because here at least I am in direct contact with the past event? Memory, they might now propose in clarification, is more like a species of perception, only trained on the past. Of course if the light is dim we may misperceive an object right in front of us. But where there are no such impediments – the object is before me in broad daylight and I am in full possession of my faculties – doesn’t what I say stand as a guarantee of its own truth? In an analogous way, memory may fail, or play tricks on us. It is constantly reinterpreted – for instance, a collective memory may replace a personal one, and its emotional and moral significance shifts. Thus, time may leave a ‘patina’ which obscures memory’s core of atemporality, of ‘givenness’. However, where all such interferences are excluded, at least in principle (it may never, the realist admits, be possible to exclude them in fact), wouldn’t memory then be its own guarantor? Of course, the anti-realists will reply, there is no problem with the suggestion that one may choose to count ’true’ a statement to the effect that a ball is red, when it is made by someone, possessed of all his faculties, and viewing the ball in broad daylight. But the realists’ claim about the infallibility of an unclouded memory is clearly meant to express a more substantial truth. The trouble is: it can only do so, if by their talk of the ‘direct contact’ that we have with the past through memory, they mean something like ‘privileged access’. Now the term ‘privileged access’ as originally introduced by philosophers, to describe the especially intimate relation we have to our own psychological states and sensations, supposedly renders our claims about them immune from doubt. But to equate the ideas of ‘direct contact’ and ‘privileged access’, in this context, is not only to leave behind the perceptual model that the realists seemed here to be proposing, but confusedly to drag back elements of the representative theory which the realists say that they have rejected. Only if the past event was mediated in our memory by an image, might we appropriately invoke the notion of privileged access. But all we would then have infallible knowledge of would be of our image, not the event: a main reason for rejecting the representative model. Returning to the perceptual analogy, the anti-realists object that it not only reintroduces by the back door the very temporal dimension which the realists sought to banish from memory, but leads to absurd questions. If memory were per impossibile to bring us into contact with the actual past event, it would necessarily do so some time after the event has occurred. How are we to know that the event has not undergone some change in the interval?28

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Projection, Analogy and Meaning

The last chapter saw the realists largely on the attack, seeking to take advantage of their opponent’s admission that the truth value link was too important simply to be ignored, and claiming that the anti-realists could not thus accept it without incurring a contradiction. But it also saw the realists pulled up short by the anti-realists’ refusal to budge on their conviction that we are immured in the present. The realists struggled, apparently vainly, to lift memory out of the temporal flow in which their opponents had placed it, and so to represent it after all as a bulwark of continuity from past to present. In this chapter, we see the realists forced into using the truth value link defensively. For the anti-realists, eager to press home their sudden ascendancy concerning the issue of memory, now turn the tables and confront the realists with a challenge of their own. Your argument, they say, has failed to establish that we have before us in memory those truth conditions which alone for you validate a past-tensed statement. Since you are proposing no other way in which these conditions might be accessible to us, it is unclear how we can have a grasp of them at all on your view. It is not just that, if we have no grasp of them, we cannot say when they are, or are not, satisfied. Since they constitute, for you, meaning-giving conditions, it is also that, on your view, we could not even know what we were saying when we say ‘It rained yesterday’. The realists are frequently depicted as resorting to the truth value link, this time defensively, only after trying out a couple of other moves. It is helpful to begin with a brief mention of these moves for two reasons. First, the anti-realist response to them already reveals the latter’s reliance1 on a crucial Wittgensteinian inspired ‘publicity’ requirement for knowledge. Secondly, we see how these realists, unlike those who either dispute the Wittgensteinian assumptions, or hold that we can display our understanding of a statement otherwise than by publicly expressing our assent when confronted by the evidentially relevant conditions,2 immediately concede this requirement. The requirement then forms no less than the shared background of their appeal to the truth value link to explain how meaning can be projected from present, to past, tensed statements. Exposing the extent to which this appeal is infiltrated by anti-realist ideas, which not only threaten its status as genuinely realist, but pass on to it certain inherent confusions concerning the underlying Wittgensteinian themes, will be the main focus of our chapter. As shall be seen, however, this will not leave the antirealists with the advantage. The Wittgensteinian ideas on which their critique of the ‘projection’ strategy is based can, I shall argue, once the misunderstandings are

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corrected, be turned back upon the anti-realists. Having distanced the truth value link from the flawed, defensive, use of it, I conclude with a restatement of its undoubted intuitive power in aggressively challenging anti-realism. While this power alone cannot deliver to realists any decisive victory, given the anti-realists’ obdurate conviction of our immurement in the present, the anti-realists will need a strong reason to overturn the principle. I finally introduce Dummett’s charge – served up almost as an aside (1978:369, 373) – that the realists, unlike the anti-realists, cannot account for our living in time. Could this charge break the deadlock?

1: Projection: an anti-realist haunted realist strategy (i) A preliminary appeal to ‘implicit’, and ‘indirect’, knowledge Perhaps you are right, the realists will reply, we cannot have explicit knowledge of the truth conditions of past-tensed statements. Indeed, we agree, we could not in general have such verbalizable knowledge on pain of incurring an infinite regress since then an individual would have already to be equipped with a fairly extensive language in order to learn a language.3 But surely we can have implicit knowledge of the truth conditions. Their opponents will object: understanding a statement is a practical ability – we must be able (Dummett, 1978:224) to display it publicly, or ‘manifest’ it. Our implicit knowledge, for instance, of the truth conditions of ‘It was raining yesterday’ must show itself in our assenting to this statement when, and only when, these conditions hold. But you have just agreed that, where this statement is concerned, the truth conditions are inaccessible. How then do you propose that we demonstrate this supposed implicit knowledge of them? Moreover how, the anti-realist will go on, pressing his point further, could we, on your view, ever have acquired the concept of past rain in the first place? For that would, you must admit, involve learning when it is, and when it is not, correct to make such assertions as that it rained yesterday. But our teachers could hardly have taught us this if they could not check whether the appropriate conditions really held when we uttered the statement. You have just granted that these conditions are inaccessible. You cannot really be proposing, can you, that knowledge of them consists in a purely private mental state, cut off from any practical skill, without behavioural manifestation, and undetectable to anyone except the individual speaker herself?4 The realists – evidently, as I have indicated, taking seriously their opponents’ Wittgensteinian indictment of the purely private mental state – still hope to salvage something of their position by reconnecting understanding indirectly with the relevant practical skills. Of course, they will agree, the truth conditions for ‘it was raining yesterday’, are not accessible to experience now. There is none-the-less usually good evidence today of yesterday’s rain – puddles, wet leaves and such like. We can thus easily demonstrate our capacity to recognize whether there exist, or do not exist, such dependable indications that the relevant truth conditions did obtain yesterday. This recognitional capacity, they will explain, ultimately issues from, and rests on, our grasp of the truth conditions themselves. Their opponents, for example Wright, will now ask (1987:241–2) what good

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reason, or indeed need, there is to postulate any such ‘ulterior conception’ from which ‘these abilities [to recognize what is and what is not good evidence] are supposed to flow’. There is after all still no independent test of its existence. Why ‘describe our understanding of these statements as involving knowledge of truth conditions at all’ rather than connecting understanding directly with those manifest conditions under which the pasttensed statement can be justifiably asserted? The realists will now agree that, while evidence for the statement, ‘It was raining yesterday’ can furnish an understanding of what it is like for there to be a puddle, or leaves to be wet, it cannot furnish a conception of those different conditions to which puddles and wet leaves are merely contingently related. It is with the failure of these two preliminary responses that they finally invoke the truth value link itself, now in defence of their position. They thus seek to derive the required conception directly from the truth conditions themselves rather than from that evidence from which the obtaining of the truth conditions would merely be (indirectly) inferred. But these no longer belong to a pasttensed statement, but to a present-tensed one: they are the truth conditions of ‘It is raining today’ rather than of ‘It was raining yesterday’. Since these truth conditions, they now say, actually coincide with the anti-realists’ assertibility conditions they are equally open to view. Their new proposal is that having learnt the meaning of the presenttensed statement, ‘It is raining today’ by being confronted, in a public context, with its truth conditions, we then project this meaning back on to the past-tensed statement ‘It was raining yesterday’ in order to make sense of it, and assess its truth. The sanction for this backwards projection is, they assert, the (reinterpreted) truth value link itself. According to that principle, as we saw, the past-tensed statement ‘It rained yesterday’, uttered today, is equivalent to the present tensed statement ‘It is raining today’, uttered yesterday. As John McDowell (1978:129) who, developing suggestions cursorily entertained by Dummett himself 5 on behalf of his realist opponents, and providing the definitive treatment here, puts their view: ‘Equipped with a conception of what it is for a sentence reporting rain to be true when the rain is falling now’ – and thus, as he adds two pages later, ‘harmlessly from the standpoint of the anti-realist’6 – the language learner uses the truth value link to project a conception of that very same circumstance – the falling of rain – into the past’. There is one other notable feature of the defence as expounded by McDowell.7 This is the drawing of a parallel, for explanatory purposes, between this passage sanctioned by the truth value link, from present to past-tensed observational statements, and the passage, also, they hold, sanctioned by a truth value link, from first person sensation statements made on the basis of direct experience, to third person ones, which cannot be.

(ii) Difficulties in setting up the strategy Several difficulties arise even in setting up this strategy, which may seem to undermine the theory as a viable realism even before the standard critique – which is directed at whether projection itself is successful – can be brought against it. These preliminary problems, of which I now consider two, are also, as I suggested above, a consequence of the realists having already yielded (or being portrayed as having yielded) more ground to the anti-realists than they ought to have done, or is compatible with their position.

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(a) The shortfall between justification and truth; the slide to subjectivism The realists agree with anti-realists that in order for me originally to have learnt what it is for a present-tensed statement, such as ‘It is raining today’ to be true, when uttered today, this statement must be iterated at the same time as I am being confronted by rain. I thus apparently become familiar with the kind of conditions that must hold, or have held, whenever someone utters truly ‘it is raining today’, even when they uttered it in the past. But surely, for realists, someone could have said yesterday ‘It is raining today’, and spoken truly, without having been confronted at the time by rain. She would speak truly just in case the truth conditions obtained for that statement, whether or not she was aware that they did, and even if she thought that what she was saying was false. Of course for her to have justifiably asserted, yesterday, the statement ‘It is raining today’, she must have at least reasonably believed herself to be confronted by rain. Perhaps, then, talk of my making sense of her statement ‘It is raining today’, uttered yesterday, by projecting back upon it my conception of being confronted by rain, could be acceptable. But the conditions for justified assertibility are not, for the realist, truth conditions. On the contrary, for realists, she could have been justified in asserting the statement ‘It is raining today’ yesterday, without its being true, that is to say, she may have been justified in taking it to be true, even though it was not so.8 Perhaps a rain fall was staged, and she was tricked into believing in it. The trouble is that while all the (so called) ‘trainee’ seems to have been allowed to learn are conditions identical with those for justifiably asserting the present-tensed statement ‘it is raining today’, uttered at the appropriate time, an attempt is being made to derive from them a notion of truth conditions. More is evidently being taken out than has been put in. The reason for this short-fall between the realist notion of truth conditions and the anti-realists’ assertibility conditions can be diagnosed by considering for a moment the following pared down reconstruction of what must have happened, according to the anti-realists, when we first learnt to use ‘it is raining’ – an explanation which our realists here apparently heartily endorse. It is offered by William James Earle (1985:329–30): I hear speakers say ‘It is raining’ when it is raining; that is I hear something and I see something which I, hopefully, come to connect. This connection is cemented by my own saying ‘It is raining’ which in some weather is greeted by smiles, in other weather by frowns. The triad . . . that needs to be understood . . . is an uttering of ‘It is raining’, a smile and rainy weather . . . Another . . . conjunction will then be an uttering of ‘It is raining’, a frown, and weather other than rainy. In the case of a sentence like ‘It is raining’ we are at some time able to disregard the smiles and frowns of others. What we may suppose, retrospectively, is that the smiles and frowns of our linguistic coaches were the transparent indices of the weather so that in – temporarily – suiting our utterances to the encouragement and discouragement of these speakers, we were not suiting ourselves to them as such but to the weather as such.

Earle goes on to contrast learning the use of such observation statements with that of moral utterances thus: ‘It is not [similarly] evident that the smiles and frowns of our

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moral coaches can be taken as transparent indices of anything clearly separate from themselves’. But what we must surely be struck by is the similarity, rather than the difference, between the two cases as described. After all, even with the observation statement, that there is something out there independently of the social setting in which I come to talk of present rain – that the smiles and frowns are, in other words, ‘transparent indices’ of a world stretching beyond them – is at best a matter of what the writer admits is retrospective supposition. If there are ‘objective’ conditions which permit us, once we have mastered the relevant concepts, to assert truly that it is raining today, they seem to be as much an outcome of this learning process as anything that existed, in exactly this form, prior to, and independently of, it. But it is surely objectivism in the latter strong sense which the realists must subscribe to if their truth conditions are not to collapse into assertibility ones. Nor, given the way aspects of anti-realism have been inextricably interwoven into this supposedly realist story, can we stop the slide toward subjectivism with what I have called ‘weak’ objectivism in considering precisely what the conception, projected into the past, is supposed to be a conception of, and what it is supposed to be projected upon. We shall doubtless be encouraged to stop with that view by remarks to the effect that it is ‘a conception of what it would be for such a state of affairs to obtain’ (McDowell:128) or of ‘the state of affairs which would have made an utterance of ‘It’s raining now’ true at some past time’ (my italics). Moreover realists are represented at one point as cavalierly dismissing the observational perspective entirely, and declaring ‘Rain is rain . . . how ever I come to know about it’ (quoted by McDowell, 1978:130). If this is so, then presumably I project my conception of this objective state of affairs into what I imagine were the circumstances surrounding the speaker at the time, bypassing her subjective responses to them. But the view is unstable, and we cannot long remain in it. We have only to recall that other description by McDowell (1978:128) of what is meant here by being confronted by rain as having rain ‘impinge on one’s consciousness’, or Wright’s characterization (1993:95) of the conception to be projected as arising from ‘an understanding of what it is like to observe’ e.g. rain falling, to become much less certain that it is appropriate to refer to the requisite conception as that of an even weakly objective state of affairs as distinct from our subjective response to it. Is it we shall ask perplexed a conception of rainfall itself or of what it is to experience rain falling that is, in the ‘projected employment’ to be ‘tagged’ (in McDowell’s words, 1978:129) as having obtained in the past? It will thus begin to seem unlikely that a determinate set of objective conditions (even if only in the weak sense) can be cleanly peeled off from the subjective ones. It is well known moreover that anti-realists are prepared to tolerate a certain ambiguity concerning, as Loux puts it (2003:642–3), ‘the epistemic conditions justifying assertion’ as to whether they are ‘the situations or states of affairs in the world to which a speaker responds in assertion or the states of response to such situations or states of affairs on the part of the speaker doing the asserting’. Dummett seems for instance, as Loux notes, to be in two minds. Some things that he says suggest the (weakly) objectivist interpretation. Others, such as his identification of the conditions warranting assertion of an observation statement with appropriate sense experiences on the part of the speaker, suggest the subjectivist one. Nor is there any agreement, Loux observes, among

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those who have accepted Dummett’s notion of assertibility conditions, with (Loux suggests) Wright veering to a more (weakly) objectivist account and John Skorupski to a subjectivist one in terms of states of information construed as (psychological) states of the speaker, reflecting Dummett’s talk of ‘sense experiences’. Let us be clear, however: ‘subjective’ here does not imply that the speaker is unsure about something he might be sure about – as when he says ‘I seem to see a blue object’, or ‘there is a blue patch in my visual field’, rather than ‘I see a blue object’, because he does not want to commit himself to there really being a blue object before him. Nor does it imply that his statement is incorrigible because it is untestable, as it would be if it were incommunicable. On the contrary, that his having certain sense experiences justify his asserting ‘It is raining now’ is something he originally learnt in a public context, where not merely could his mistakes be corrected but, more fundamentally, the idea of making a mistake itself made sense; the bogey of logical privacy has thus apparently been exorcised. Nor, finally, does ‘subjective’ mean that the object-language in which the assertion is itself couched should be collapsed into talk of sense experiences, into ‘states of the speaker doing the asserting’. The question is only whether anti-realists, or whoever has accepted their account of how we learn the meaning of present-tensed observational statements do, or are entitled to, express the conditions themselves, which justify assertion, in that same object language.

(b) The flawed parallel between present-tensed observation, and first person sensation, statements Now there is, for realists themselves, one class of statements – first person ascriptions of sensations – whose truth conditions not only cannot obtain without our being justified in asserting them – without our recognizing that they obtain – but which are composed wholly and exclusively of subjective experiences. But precisely for this reason they are typically regarded by realists as quite distinct from observational statements. It would be too swift to conclude, though, that the traditional, sharp, realist, distinction between the truth conditions of the two types of statement – observation and (first person) sensation statements – has, in the partial rapprochement with antirealists, been therefore diminished.9 We must remember that the realists, on this story, also subscribe to the anti-realist idea that we originally gained, and could only have gained, a conception of the truth conditions of observational statements in a public context, allowing therefore for the possibility of error – a feature which is absent on the traditional realist view of the acquisition of sensation concepts. But this very fact only leads to a second problem. The realists, according to the story we are considering, suggest a parallel between present-tensed observational statements and first person psychological ones.10 These two types of statement, they inform us, share the role of providing a conception of truth conditions which can be projected on to more problematic types of statement, respectively past-tensed observational statements, and third person ascriptions of sensation. They (or those who are here pulling their strings) ought to be embarrassed by the claimed parallel. They have been portrayed as resorting to the truth value link because they conceded that the conception of the truth conditions of a past-tensed statement such as ‘It rained yesterday’, uttered

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today, could not be a logically private matter. The only way to inject the requisite publicity into it was, they agreed, by projection from the conception we formed (during the learning process) of the truth conditions of the equivalent present-tensed statement: ‘It is raining today’, uttered when it was raining. But in the psychological context, the ‘unproblematic’ statement (McDowell, 1978:131) which is supposed to furnish the material for projection – a first person ascription of sensation – and thereby provide meaning to third person ascriptions of sensation is itself, for realists, avowedly private. ‘We know what pain is from our own case’, they are portrayed (McDowell, ibid:131) as unashamedly declaring, and again that we ‘acquired a conception [of e.g. pain] by having instances of it present to [our] awareness in our own case’, and that (as Wright explains their position, 1987:94) we ‘projected it from our own case’ (my italics). There is thus here no publicity to be transferred. Not only would the whole point of the exercise be lost, if this parallel were allowed to stand, but the realist is now convicted of inconsistently allowing logical privacy in one context while shunning it in another. Put in a different way, the unproblematic and problematic statements in each pair have been reversed in terms of publicity and privacy, when we move from observation to psychological contexts. Suppose it is questioned whether these (anti-realist haunted) realists must insist on the logical privacy of first person ascriptions of sensation. After all, it might be said, they have already embraced their opponents’ anti-realist requirement of publicity in the learning of present-tensed observational statements. Why not in relation to these ascriptions also? But if the use of first person ascriptions of sensation were (as Wittgenstein thought) learnt in a public context, then necessarily the use of third person such ascriptions would have been learnt (as Wittgenstein holds) at the same time. The very problem for which the device of projection was introduced would have of its own accord dissolved, and the resort to the truth value link with regard to psychological statements, which was touted as paralleling that with regard to presenttensed observational statements, would be rendered superfluous.

(iii) Objections to the strategy once set up (a) ‘Reference to the past has not been completely expunged’ Let us suppose we could put aside these difficulties, ambiguities and inconsistencies that arise merely in setting up the strategy, and consider the sort of objections that critics (first and foremost McDowell) make to projection itself as sanctioned by the truth value link. One quick way with it is (see Loux, 2003:653) to declare without more ado that it fails to solve, or even tackle, the problem for which it has been devised. It does not, that is, show how statements, such as those about the past, whose truth conditions are inaccessible, can still have meaning. The equivalent, by the truth value link, of the past-tensed statement, uttered now is not, they point out, a present-tensed statement uttered now, whose truth conditions are indeed available to our consciousness, but a present-tensed statement uttered in the past. But, as Loux puts it, ‘if there was a . . . problem about our acquisition of the idea of a past-tense statement, we hardly answer it by appeal to [a] principle [which] presupposes that we already have a conception of

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the past tense’. The only unproblematic truth conditions, they say, are those of presenttensed statements in the context of present use, and so where past use is concerned we are left exactly where we were before we turned to the truth value link: with an unanalysed notion of pastness. This evidently feeble ploy – or such is the impression conveyed by these critics – has not, they conclude, advanced us an iota. We are likely to be puzzled. Surely realists do not suppose that the truth value link expunges pastness; for why in this case supplement it with something called projection? The latter device is precisely intended to provide a bridge from the present to the past. The idea is that we project a conception of present rain (or, on a subjectivist interpretation, of the appropriate sense experiences on the part of the speaker), via the truth value link, back into the past, so making sense of statements, uttered now, such as that it was raining yesterday, even though their truth conditions are inaccessible to us. No more, the realists might say, responding to this objection, are they trying, by invoking the truth value link, to actually reduce past to present than is St Augustine (1961:267) trying to do so when he observes that wherever the past is, ‘[it is] not there . . . as past, but as present’. It is after all still there, not here. McDowell, however, offers a more protracted dismissal of the defence which acknowledges the role played by projection, but argues that it is unfeasible.

(b) McDowell’s refutation: ‘[It countenances] a leap beyond the bounds of awareness’ This dismissal, though, turns out to be merely a reprise of the (Wittgensteinian) objection made to the realists’ earlier claim that one can have at least implicit knowledge of inaccessible truth conditions, such as those of past-tensed statements. The objection – which we shall recall they accepted – was to lack of a public context in which we could have learnt, by having the truth conditions pointed out to us, and then by being corrected when we made a mistake, the meaning of these statements. McDowell, however, brings this same criticism against the realists’ new proposal that we can make sense of such past-tensed statements by projecting upon them our conception of the truth conditions of the relevant present-tensed ones. For though, McDowell claims, the context in which we originally acquired the conception to be projected is public enough, the act of projection itself, directed as it is upon an inaccessible past, is not similarly public. It is hence not similarly open to correction. Thus McDowell (1978:140) writes: ‘The learner has to do the essential thing himself. He has to break out of the confines of his own means of acquiring knowledge, and in a void where he is not constrained by anything he can have been shown in learning the language, fix on some inaccessible sort of circumstance to be what he is going to express with sentences of a given kind’ and so ‘leap beyond the bounds of awareness’. This critique is, as we noted, inspired by Wittgenstein’s strictures against the private language, although it is worth noting that Wittgenstein is talking about the learning of language in general, and is unlikely to have wished to single out past-tensed statements. Of course his strictures are paradigmatically brought in the case of the acquisition of sensation concepts, such as ‘pain’, where ‘establishing the connexion between the sign and the sensation’ is held to involve (I:258–63) an inward act of ‘baptism’, an ‘inward

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undertaking to use the word in such-and-such way’, an inward ‘concentration of . . . attention’, to which no other person can, logically, be privy.11 However, his point is not the lack of publicity in the setting associated with learning a language. On the contrary, he describes teachers as showing a learner objects of a particular colour, say, green, or asking him to make a pile of all the green objects in the room, and so assumes publicity. His target is the view that this public setting is not enough to ensure understanding. For the learner of colour words, on the view which Wittgenstein opposes (1958:I, 73) only achieves understanding when he succeeds in privately attaching the word, or concept, to a mental object, in the case of ‘green’, say, a mental image of green, a sort of sample of the colour in his mind. But Wittgenstein argues, as he does with sensation concepts, to which he suggests (I:275–8) his opponents tend to assimilate those of colour,12 that without external checks, the learner will not only never know whether he has, or only seems to have, attached the right word to the right experience, but more radically will have no notion of right here at all.13 ‘An ‘inner process’, he declares (I:580), in a famous slogan, ‘stands in need of outward criteria’. At best, the realist appeal to the truth value link together with projection, far from seeming to mark an advance, must look like a mere delaying tactic. They surely realize, we might imagine their critics, such as McDowell, saying, that they will have finally to admit what they have known all along that, public as are the conditions for coming to understand present-tensed statements, the attaching of meaning to past-tensed ones will, on their view, still be a logically private, and hence unfeasible, affair, where ‘the learner has’ in McDowell’s words, ‘to do the essential thing himself ’, much as in Wittgenstein’s colour example.

(c) The spurious appeal to ‘same sort’: Wittgenstein again The appeal to the truth value link, allied to the device of projection, cannot be just dismissed as a delaying tactic. At the very least it introduces a new idea: that the conditions which render ‘It was raining’ true are of the same sort as those which render ‘It is raining’ true. Thus once we have gained (in the requisite public context) a conception of the latter, we have a rule to guide its projection into the past: we are to project it, the rule tells us, on to the same sort of circumstances, or in other words to envisage past rain on the model of present rain. As McDowell (129), rehearsing this reply only to dismiss it, puts the position: ‘Equipped with a conception of what it is for, say, a sentence reporting rain to be true when the rain is falling now, the languagelearner uses the truth-value link to project a conception of that . . . same [sort of] circumstance – the falling of rain – into the past’ (my italics). McDowell – or anyone who wishes to oppose the realists here – owe us therefore an argument showing why the realist proposal, aided as it is supposed to be by the truth value link equivalences is to be turned down, and why therefore they are landed in the ‘void’ McDowell alleges. It must be shown, in other words, that talk of ‘the same sort of circumstance’ is illegitimate as between present and past, even allowing for the truth value link equivalences. Now it might be thought that the argument that McDowell and his followers need in order to defeat the projection strategy – and indeed which they gesture toward without fully expounding – can again be imported from Wittgenstein. This time it will

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be an adaptation of his critique of the ‘Argument from Analogy’ for the existence of other minds,14 and will seek to exploit the explanatory parallel already drawn by the realists between observational and psychological statements. That parallel, as we indicated, requires that the first person psychological statement, whose meaning is presumed to have been learnt privately, is the unproblematic one corresponding, as regards its role in projection, to the present-tensed observational statement, whose meaning is learnt publicly. This immediately gives rise to a difficulty. Wittgenstein’s critique is crucially bound up with his private language argument which is, paradigmatically, a reductio of the idea that the meaning of pain is a (logically) private experience. It cannot therefore, it would seem, be invoked without undermining the supposed unproblematic status of the first person psychological statement (in the explanatory parallel), even before the strategy itself can be assessed as a means of bestowing sense, via projection, upon the third person psychological one. For Wittgenstein (1958, I:253), in other words, the appeal to projection could only be a symptom of a more fundamental failure to grasp that we learn the meaning of ‘pain’ in the immediately interpersonal context of ours and others’ pain behaviour and expressions of pain. Since, however, our truth value link realists, in evident deference to the Wittgenstein inspired anti-realists, cite present-tensed observational statements, as the starting point for projection on to the past, precisely because their meaning is acquired publicly, it must seem that the putative explanatory parallel between these statements and first person psychological ones must break down. For the former, unlike the latter, will escape Wittgenstein’s strictures about privacy, which will hence be irrelevant to them. Wittgenstein’s critique of the Analogists (particularly I:302 onwards, but see also 283), intimately bound up, as it is with the attack on the private language, goes beyond it, and can, as we now show, be used to expose the inadequacy of the projection from present-tensed, to past-tensed, observational statements, even supposing that the meaning of the former has been acquired publicly, and hence unexceptionably for him. First, however, we need to understand Wittgenstein’s attack on the Analogists, concerned as they are with the transition from first to third person psychological statements, before we can apply it to the observational context. Wittgenstein imagines himself confronted by the crucial claim of the Analogists that someone teaches me what is meant when a third person, John, is said to be in pain, by getting me mentally to conjure up the experience which I have already privately learnt to call ‘pain’, and informing me that John has that. Of course, this does not mean, the Analogist will quickly clarify, that John is having my actual experience, that I am feeling my pain in his body – that, he admits, would be nonsense. All that is meant, he explains, is that John has a similar sort of experience to mine when I am in pain. But to this Wittgenstein famously objects, in a move which both doubles back upon the failure of the private language itself, as well as pointing forwards, supposing per impossible that it had succeeded: one first needs a criterion of identity before one can bring two things under it. But (I:253) ‘one does not define [such a] criterion by emphatic stressing of the word “this” [or “that”]’. He proceeds to bring out the sheer queerness (I:302) of my being asked to ‘imagine pain I do not feel on the model of pain which I do feel’ (his italics). Pain, on this view, he continues, names a private experience of mine, how then can I meaningfully apply it in circumstances

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where I am precisely not having this experience, when I do not have e.g. stomach gripes, or a head-ache, or a burning sensation in the chest? Nor may it properly be concluded, Wittgenstein will say, from the fact that John behaves as I would if I were in pain, that a similar experience must be going on in him as would be going on in me at such times. Wittgenstein explains (again I am paraphrasing): of course if John is flailing his arms around, and you flail your arms around when you are in pain, then certainly he is behaving in the same way as you do when you are in pain. That is not in doubt. We have a criterion of identity for flailing arms about, and both your behaviours fall under it. But you admit that his flailing of arms is only contingently connected with his being in pain – a state which, on your own account, is totally private to him. You therefore merely infer it from his behaviour. Consequently his flailing of his arms and his being in pain are, on your view, logically distinct phenomena. But then your behaviour could perfectly well be of the same sort as his, while your respective sensations were quite different. Indeed he might be having no sensations at all: he might be an automaton. Of course, Wittgenstein continues (I:350–351), if I am in pain, and you are in pain, then certainly we have the same sort of experience; but then ‘the stove has the same [sort of] experience as I if it is in pain and I am in pain . . . [So much is] part of our grammar’. It does not follow that I can establish that you – or the stove – is in pain – or say anything meaningful at all, by simply asserting that I have an experience, which I call pain, and that you – or the stove – has the same as that. I do not yet know ‘in what cases one is to speak of its being the same [for you and me]’. But, the Analogist will retort, if a light shines from a first floor window, I can justifiably infer that someone is up there. At least this is what I would expect to find, were I to climb the stairs and enter the room, although of course this person might have left, forgetting to turn off the light. Now a person’s groaning, when he is in pain, is analogous to the window being lighted, when someone is in the room. A person’s groaning when he isn’t in pain, but merely feigning it, is analogous to someone having gone from the room deliberately leaving the light on. But the Wittgensteinian riposte will be that in the pain scenario there is just no equivalent of climbing the stairs to find out whether someone is there: you cannot climb the stairs into someone’s mind in the hope of directly experiencing his pain. Indeed it makes no sense to talk of your feeling his pain, for then it would be yours: you would be in pain (and, he might add, you sought to distance yourself from that nonsensical assumption earlier). Let us see how this second aspect of Wittgenstein’s critique of the Analogists can be applied to the observational context in which we are primarily interested. According to you, we can imagine Wittgenstein saying, addressing our truth value link realists, rather than the Analogists as before, we learn to utter the word ‘rain’, or assert that it is raining, when we have (to take McDowell’s expression) ‘impinging on our consciousness’ certain characteristic sights, sounds and sensations. Rain is therefore, for you, essentially present rain. How then can you meaningfully talk of rain which, being past, precisely does not fall in sheets beyond the window, that cannot be heard pattering on tiles, and which you precisely won’t be drenched by when you go out, or have to put an umbrella up against. The reply will be: when I speak of yesterday’s rain I do not mean that it is literally falling somewhere; that would be nonsense. I call it rain because I mean that, although it occurred yesterday, and so cannot in any conceivable circumstances now

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drench me, it is the same sort of thing as today’s downpour. Wittgenstein will respond as he did to the Analogists in the psychological context: if ‘it is raining’ is meaningful, and if ‘it was raining’ is meaningful then these statements refer to, and would be made true by, the same sort of conditions, obtaining at different times. But it doesn’t follow that I can establish that the past-tensed statement is meaningful by asserting that I am presently confronted by a phenomenon which 1 have learnt to call ‘rain’, and then asserting that past ‘rain’ is the same sort of thing as that. I do not yet know ‘in what cases one is to speak of its being the same [in the past as now]’ and no ‘emphatic stressing [can] define a criterion of identity’.

(d) Why the truth value link fails to underwrite projection It is worth asking why the failure of the truth value link to underwrite the realists’ projection strategy should come as a surprise, or why in the first place anyone should have thought that (in Wright’s words, 1987:88) ‘it really does promise to meet the acquisitionchallenge head on’. Why should it have taken the argumentative resources of McDowell to reveal what he finally calls its ‘impotence’? McDowell expounds the realists’ strategy in four stages, two of which – the first and fourth – make appeal to the principle of the truth value link. The appeal at the first stage (see below) is uncontentiously legitimate. But it is left ambiguous whether, when the principle is invoked at the fourth stage, this is merely a reprisal of the earlier, legitimate, use, with the implication that its role in projection is fully discharged by the end of the first stage, or whether it is being called upon at the fourth, to fulfil a new role above and beyond the earlier one. Obviously if one holds the first – mistaken – view (see below) one will be surprised at how the projection strategy can eventually fail: how, it will be asked, could an appeal to the principle that first seemed so sound, now be unsound? If one holds the second, correct, view, one will still want to know in exactly what way, and why, the truth value link is, at stage four, being pushed beyond its legitimate remit. Since, so far as I can see, commentators, although rejecting the projection strategy – Wright (1987:91), for instance, argues that it fails ‘to secure [the desired] ingress [into the past, or other minds]’ – never, for whatever reason – perhaps they think it too obvious – offer a clear, or focussed, answer to this question, I now provide one. Consider first, simplified and reorganized, the four stages of the projection strategy as McDowell expounds it on behalf of the realists (1978:129–30): 1. ‘Appeal to the “truth value link” ’ is defined as appeal to the principle that ‘a suitably dated past-tensed sentence, uttered, say, now, is true in case a suitably related present-tensed, uttered at the appropriate past time, would then have been true’. 2. It is inferred from this that all that is required in order for us to understand this ‘suitably dated past tensed sentence, uttered now’ is ‘a conception of the sort of state of affairs’ which would have made ‘the suitably related present-tensed sentence, uttered at the appropriate past time’, true. 3. But, it is affirmed, ‘a circumstance of the relevant sort (say an instance of the falling of rain) can indeed have been available to the learner’s consciousness, namely on occasions when the appropriate present-tensed sentence was correctly assertible’.

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4. ‘Equipped with the conception’ thereby derived from confrontation with falling rain, ‘the language learner’, it is explained, uses the truth value link to project a conception of that very same circumstance – the falling of rain – into the past’, or in a variant: [Dummett’s realist5] express[es] his view of the efficacy of the truth value link like this: ‘If I suppose that it rained yesterday, then I am simply supposing that there obtained yesterday just the same condition as I have so often observed’. A similar four-stage strategy is offered (130–1) where the transition from first person psychological statements to third person ones is concerned: 1. Appeal to the truth value link is defined as appeal to the principle that ‘a statement ascribing pain to another person is true just in case a self-ascription of pain by him would be true’. 2. It is inferred from this that what is required in order for us to understand the third person ascription of pain is a conception of that sort of circumstance which would make a self-ascription of pain true. 3. But, it is affirmed, the language learner has acquired a conception of that very sort of circumstance ‘by having instances of it present to his awareness in his own case’. 4. ‘The truth value link [thus] enables the language-learner to project a conception of that same sort of circumstance – a person’s being in pain . . . into the inner lives of others.’ The truth value link is thus, at this fourth stage, being called upon to underwrite the similarity between the circumstances which make the present-tensed, and past-tensed, statements true, and again which make the first and third person psychological statements true. But is this a mere reprisal of the appeal made to the truth value link at the first stage, or a new appeal to the principle? Consider a statement of the truth value link in the psychological context: ‘John is in pain’ is true, if and only if ‘I am in pain’ is true, uttered by John. Now the crucial point is that one and the same experience, namely John being in pain, is being referred to in the quoted sentences on both the right hand, and left hand sides of this biconditional, even though there is a change of speaker, its being first a third party, then John himself. Consider also a statement of the truth value link principle in the observational context: ‘It was raining yesterday’ is true, uttered today, if and only if ‘It is raining today’ was true, uttered yesterday. Again, crucially, one and the same state of affairs (or experience), namely its having rained yesterday (or my having had the relevant experience yesterday) is being referred to by the quoted sentences on both the right- and left-hand sides of the biconditional, whether this is expressed using the present or past tense, given relevantly different times of utterance. However, the projection itself only takes off from this point. Thus, it is alleged, because I understand from my own case a self-ascription of pain, I can project a conception of this same sort of circumstance into John’s life, or in other words can affirm of two numerically distinct experiences, my and John’s experiences of pain that they are qualitatively similar. But the permission derived from the truth value link has nothing at all to say on that score; it cannot be further eked out. Likewise, in the observational

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case, because I understand from being confronted by rain the present-tensed statement ‘It is raining now’, I can project, it is said, a conception of this same sort of circumstance into the past. Here again the realists exceed in what they are claiming anything that could be sanctioned by the truth value link. For they are no longer content to point out that two differently tensed statements, uttered at relevantly different times, refer to the numerically identical state of affairs, its having rained yesterday (or my having had the relevant experience yesterday). Rather, they have gone on to allege that two numerically distinct states of affairs (or experiences) one occurring in the present and one in the past, are qualitatively similar. But again the truth value link cannot help with that; its remit has already run out. It was of course at this point that the Wittgensteinians dug in their heels. We have attempted above to fill out the argumentative background against which McDowell’s Wittgensteinian inspired rejection of the projection strategy can be plausibly upheld. We have argued that, even if this strategy could be set up without incoherence as a realist strategy – which, as formulated here, we maintained, it could not be-it would still succumb at a later stage, not least because of the misconceived parallel between the roles in projection of present tensed observation, and first person sensation, statements, which mar it throughout. We have also shown how a crucial failure to pin down the precise extent of the alleged role of the truth value link in the projection strategy, could have bolstered the hope of realists (on this story) that it would survive.

(e) McDowell’s revised realist proposal There is one final realist proposal to be considered: that of McDowell himself. McDowell expounds the proposal towards the end of the paper (1978) in which, as we have seen, he rejects the projection strategy. Although he concedes to the anti-realists the crucial role of direct awareness in the acquisition of concepts, he now argues that we do not need the projection strategy since we can have the required direct awareness even of certain past events. Thus he points to ‘the persistence sometimes . . . in the nervous system of some trace of the impact of a previous event on the senses’. His example is the statement that it rained yesterday. As he puts it, ‘the circumstances of [the] event [mentioned in the statement] having occurred is sometimes itself [still] available to our awareness’ (137, 140). He concludes that ‘the knowledge that an event of the relevant kind has occurred’ – its having rained yesterday – is ‘immediate’. McDowell, then, does not claim that the truth conditions of past-tensed statements are always ‘retained’ as ‘traces’ in this way, but that, because they are retained in some cases, this is enough to enable us to grasp the general kind to which such truth conditions belong, even those that remain inaccessible. At least three types of question are pertinent. First, what is meant by ‘awareness’ here and, connectedly, how is the vague and cumbersome phrase ‘the circumstances of such an event having occurred’ of which it is an awareness supposed to be understood? If it is some kind of immediate perceptual awareness of its having rained yesterday, it would seem to follow that we can have such a perceptual awareness of the past. But whatever is an object of (present) perceptions must, one would think, exist yet, as St Augustine

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observed (Confessions:167), ‘[what is past] no longer exist[s]’, If it is awareness of the alleged traces in the nervous system of the impact on our senses yesterday of its raining – traces which McDowell (137) certainly affirms are present (137) – he would incur a contradiction since he insists that they are, as he puts it ‘not . . . available, even potentially, to the consciousness of someone who remembers’. (In this sense they are no different, it would seem, from the long term physiological traces that we dismissed in the discussion of memory in the last chapter.) Yet without this insistence, not only could he not uphold the status of his explanation as physiological, but he would be unable to exclude (as he seeks to, 137) the need for inference. There is one remaining possibility: that it is just remembering that it rained yesterday. The immediacy of the experience is precisely now underlined by calling it an ‘awareness’ – a term itself made appropriate, and legitimate, by its role in the underlying physiological theory, which guarantees that what we remember is just as we perceived it. But can the speculative, physiological story, at which McDowell gestures, really render it any less open to doubt that what happened yesterday may be delivered up now in memory as (to borrow a phrase of the philosopher of history, W.H. Walsh, 1970) ‘exact and unaltered before us’? Our sceptical questions will be met with the reminder that, for McDowell, our very acquisition of mastery of the past tense relies on such a story. That is to say, it will be impossible, in his view, to explain this mastery, unless we invoke some such physiological mechanism ensuring that, when I recall that it rained yesterday, I possess a knowledge as immediate and unassailable as that provided (barring exceptional circumstances) by the original sense perception itself. However, it is difficult to know how to assess this large claim without going into technicalities beyond our philosophical field of competence. The second type of question that arises is this: since by hypothesis not all past-tensed statements possess truth conditions of which we have an immediate awareness, what distinguishes these statements from the rest? Now the statement, ‘It rained yesterday’ (137), which McDowell offers as an example, suggests, together with the surrounding remarks, that they are autobiographical statements about the immediate past. Miller (2003), in his preliminary discussion (466) of McDowell’s theory, seems to concur, citing a roughly equivalent example: ‘I was in Cardiff yesterday’. However, in revisiting the theory (471), he changes the original example to ‘It rained in Cardiff in April 2000’, which would not naturally be understood as about the speaker’s immediate past experience. Even if we could somehow thus interpret it, it is noteworthy that Miller identifies the other term of McDowell’s contrast apparently exclusively with statements such as ‘Julius Caesar was the victim of a sneezing attack on his 19th birthday’, which would belong to that subcategory of past-tensed statements whose truth conditions are, not merely inaccessible, but ‘undecidable’ because there is no evidence for or against them. But McDowell does not, in drawing his contrast between the two kinds of past-tensed statements, single out ‘undecidables’ from the category of past-tensed statements with inaccessible truth conditions – indeed he does not allude to ‘undecidables’ at all . . . On the other hand the fact that Miller is plausibly able to import a specific reference to them into McDowell’s account (an interpretation also given by Loux, 2003:653) suggests a degree of vagueness on McDowell’s part, in expounding this contrast which lies at the heart of his account.15 Thirdly – an objection mounted among others by Hale (1997:278 and Loux (2003:653–4) – McDowell’s new version of realism appears to be vulnerable to the very

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Wittgensteinian stricture that he brings against the truth value link realists. For just as they, according to him, had to explain how the meaning of a present-tensed statement, whose truth conditions are accessible, could legitimately be projected on to a pasttensed statement whose truth conditions are inaccessible, so McDowell has to explain how meaning can legitimately be projected from one past-tensed statement, whose truth conditions are accessible, to another, whose truth conditions are inaccessible. The appeal in both instances to the idea that the problematic truth conditions are of the same sort as the unproblematic ones is precisely the move which, as we saw, Wittgenstein proscribes, and which McDowell apparently accepts – indeed deploys – in his critique of the truth value link realists. Wittgenstein, we noted earlier, points out that before we can talk of items being of the ‘same sort’ we have to define a relevant criterion of identity. However, that requires exactly the publicity which is lacking as regards the inaccessible situations. Miller (2003:472) suggests that there is a criterion of identity available, namely ‘realist truth conditions’ (his italics) which the anti-realists have themselves granted. But it is by no means clear that this much has been granted by the anti-realists.16

(iv) The Wittgensteinian background Wittgenstein, in addressing the analogists, cautioned, as we saw, that it is only if you and I can both already be said to have pains, that we can intelligibly be said to have the same thing. But he also maintained that it can perfectly intelligibly be said that you have a pain and that I have a pain. We learn what pain is, however, in a public, or social, context. This learning takes place against a background in which both you and I express pain – we wince, we groan, we complain to one another – and in which we offer each other, and receive from each other when we are hurt, help, sympathy, and so on. In fact, the two being intimately related, I learn what it is for you to be in pain at the same time as I learn what it is for me to have a pain. But this background, as we have seen, is precisely missing on the analogists’ account, as also on our realists’ account. Wittgenstein’s argument then does not show, or aim to show, that ascriptions of pain to other people do not make sense. It shows, if it is successful, that they only do not do so on certain flawed assumptions about how we come to acquire the concept of pain. Correspondingly, we should not expect these strictures, as adapted to our context, to show that past-tensed statements do not make sense simpliciter – only that they do not do so on certain flawed assumptions about how the relevant concepts are acquired, in particular the anti-realist assumption, taken over by the realists here, that the meaning of present-tensed statements are learnt prior to, and independently of, past-tensed ones. But Wittgensteinians would reject this prior thought, maintaining, just as in the case of first and third person psychological statements, that the meaning of differently tensed statements must be learnt together. If Wittgenstein’s strictures therefore do the realists damage at one level – that is to say in their attempt to invest past-tensed statements with meaning by appeal to projection from present-tensed ones – it is not clear that anti-realists can point out this damage, while escaping damage themselves at the more fundamental level. Wittgenstein’s critique of private language is in fact closely allied to his critique of the whole idea that we acquire our various concepts in isolation from each other, and

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that the discrete lozenges of meaning that result can then be strung together in almost limitless combinations to form meaningful sentences. He (I:351–2) gives the example of the person who tells him ‘you know what “it is 5 o’clock here” means so, assuming you know what “sun” means, you also know what “it is 5 o’clock on the sun” means’. He objects that while the latter might look like ‘an English sentence; apparently quite in order’, even conjuring up images of grandfather clocks pointing to 5, the moment one tries to give it an application,‘to do something with it’, one is puzzled, and its incoherence manifest. He would likewise dismiss (I:283–4) the similar claim that knowing what ‘ “I am in pain” means, and knowing what “stone” means, one knows what “the stone is in pain” means’. For him, someone who routinely ascribes pains to stones simply does not understand the concept of pain. After all, it is almost impossible even to imagine a stone wincing. Such learning therefore presupposes, as Wittgenstein again puts it (I:257), a whole ‘stage-setting’ in which each concept already has so to speak its prepared place – its ‘post’. As he puts it in full: ‘And when we speak of someone having given a name to pain, what is presupposed is the existence of the grammar of the word ‘pain’; it shews the post where the new word is stationed’. Dummett, in rejecting the idea that we could acquire concepts privately, appears prepared to take on board only some of what Wittgenstein says when he claims that meaning is use. He continues, it seems, as Loux (2003:650) remarks ‘to suppose that linguistic understanding is simply a matter of pairing sentences, one by one, with observable situations. Thus, his acquisition argument assumes that learning the meaning of a sentence is learning to correlate it with the appropriate observable state of affairs’. But crucial as it is to Dummett’s verificationist anti-realism, this prioritizing of language’s information conveying function is an integral part of what Wittgenstein was jettisoning, in his later work, when he maintained that meaning was use. He would have objected: the function of language is not merely to describe, to represent, to report, but also to express feelings, to command, to ask questions, to confess, to exclaim, and much else, as is apparent from his extensive and diverse list of language-games at I:23. These potentially damaging implications of Wittgenstein’s critique can, however, in our context perhaps be contained. For it is only if the anti-realists choose to appeal to the Wittgensteinian strictures in seeking to undermine the realists’ projection strategy that they court the risk of being damaged themselves. However, the observation may leave them distinctly uncomfortable, so that if it does not lead them to withdraw their arguments against realist projection, it may place some kind of brake upon them. A question that arises is whether anyone embracing Wittgenstein’s account of how we acquire language could seriously any longer be described as a ‘realist’, even if he thereby saved past-tensed statements from the incoherence that Wittgensteinians would otherwise charge him with. Any satisfactory answer would be complex and contentious, and many would protest that Wittgenstein explicitly refers (I:402) to ‘Realists’ (together, they would have to admit, with ‘Idealists and Solipsists’), as led astray by philosophy, conceived, as he conceives it, as a kind of ‘illness’. They would be bound to point out too that realists, even more than the anti-realists, are, according to Wittgenstein, obsessed with description, providing (I:291) ‘word-pictures of facts’, as the pre-eminent function of language, to which he firmly opposes his metaphor (I:11) of the assorted ‘tool-box’ of language. On the other side, it will be pointed out that

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Wittgenstein is sometimes claimed to be a ‘quietist’, who sought in the end to ‘leave things as they were’, or rather to restore ordinary thought, and language, to what they had been before philosophers twisted them out of recognition. It will then be suggested that such everyday thought exhibits a kind of unexceptionable realism, unembarrassed by metaphysical pretension. It will therefore be concluded that perhaps, after all, at least a metaphysically denuded realism could be compatible with Wittgensteinian ideas. As, however, any treatment of these issues would also take us too far away from our moorings, I shall not essay one here. I would rather point out that Wittgenstein and his sympathizers, in dismissing realism, in any orthodox sense, would be likely to dismiss at the same time our whole concern in this book with the metaphysical status of the past as itself misguided, as they would other apparently pressing metaphysical issues.17 I do not find thus bypassing such live philosophical topics satisfactory, and so leave the Wittgensteinian answer behind as a loose end.

2: The truth value link again (i) Anti-realist emasculation of the truth value link Putting aside the flawed use of the truth value link to underwrite the realists’ projection strategy, and returning to contemplate once more its offensive use, we now develop further remarks made toward the end of the last chapter, by considering how realists can, by paying more careful attention to its exposition, buttress the truth value link against the sometimes almost imperceptible depredations of their opponents. It is hardly surprising, as we saw, that Dummett, acknowledging the principle as ‘a fundamental feature of our understanding of tensed statements’ is eager to establish its compatibility with his verificationist principle, namely ‘Statement, S, is true at t, whatever time that is, if and only if it is verifiable now’. But he is only willing, we shall recall, to endorse the truth value link under what we called its ‘Original Formulation’, and resists its ‘Reinterpretation’. To recap: suppose “SB is sitting in her office”, uttered today’, is true. According to the Original Formulation, both the following would be true: (i) ‘ “SB was sitting in her office a year ago”, were it to be uttered in a year’s time’ and (ii) ‘ “SB will be sitting in her office a year hence”, were it to have been uttered a year ago’. Now admittedly the past tensed statement, in (i), and the future-tensed statement, in (ii), are made true by virtue of a fact, relating to a time before, and a time after, respectively, the utterance of the relevant statement. But this is the present fact of SB sitting in her office today. The truth conditions of both (i) and (ii) therefore, coincide with those conditions which would allow Dummett to verify them now, and hence, applying either the truth value link principle or Dummett’s verification principle, will yield the same results. When, however, the truth value link is Reinterpreted, its scope is extended. We can then also (legitimately) say: If ‘ “SB was sitting in her office a year ago”, uttered today,’ is true, then (iii) ‘SB is sitting in her office now’, were it to have been uttered a year ago’ would have been true, and again we can say: If ‘ “SB will be sitting in her office in a year’s time”, uttered today’ is true, then (iv) ‘ “SB is sitting in her office today”, were it to be uttered in a year’s time’ would be true. Whereas therefore the

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principle, in its Original Formulation, allows us only to determine, for present-tensed statements, uttered in the present, given appropriate changes in tense and time of utterance, its truth value link equivalents, the Reinterpreted principle allows us to do this over a much wider range of statements, including past-tensed, and future-tensed, ones, uttered in the present. But here ‘ “SB was sitting in her office a year ago”, uttered today’, and hence its truth value link equivalent, (iii), is made true, by a past, not a present, fact, just as ‘ “SB will be sitting in her office in a year’s time”, uttered today’ and hence its truth value link equivalent (iv), is made true by a future, not a present, fact. Since past facts are no longer verifiable, and future ones are not yet verifiable, if verifiable at all, the Reinterpreted truth value link and Dummett’s verifiability principle, which stipulates that truth be determined in terms of verifiability now, come apart. Naturally Dummettian anti-realists will seek to give the impression that embracing the principle in the attenuated form which avoids this collision involves no real emasculation of it. Before pointing out just how mistaken this is, and hence why, in order to preserve intact the power of the truth value link, its realist defenders must insist on the full, rather than the attenuated, version of the principle, I first clear up a possible misunderstanding. It might be thought that, provided we insist on the Reinterpretation of the truth value link principle so that it can be seen to cover, say, past-tensed statements, uttered in the present, we shall avoid such a risk of emasculation. But this is not so. For there is a way of treating the Reinterpretation, in turn, in isolation – ignoring, that is, its genesis in the original formulation – which also defuses its power. We can imagine for instance circumstances in which an anti-realist may be prepared to acknowledge the truth value link equivalence between ‘It was raining yesterday’, uttered today, and ‘It is raining today’, uttered yesterday. However, he will have first verified the past-tensed statement, uttered today, on the basis of present evidence, and then derived from this (past-tensed) statement its truth value link equivalent, namely the present-tensed statement, uttered yesterday. He will merely be paying lip service to the truth value link principle in that he will not regard it as in any way committing him to the existence of a real past, independent of the present. On the contrary, for him, both statements are constructed out of present evidence. The past-tensed statement, uttered today, is directly so constructed, while the present-tensed statement (thought of as uttered yesterday) being merely its truth value link equivalent, inherits that status. The anti-realist in fact reverses what we might call ‘the direction of influence’ of the statements between which the truth value link equivalences hold, as it would be propounded by truth value link realists. For the former ‘It is raining today’, uttered yesterday, was true, if and only if ‘It was raining yesterday’ is true uttered today, where truth is a function of today’s evidence. For the truth value link realists, on the other hand, ‘It was raining yesterday’ uttered today is true, if and only if ‘It is raining today’ uttered yesterday was true, where this is a matter of the obtaining yesterday of the appropriate truth conditions, whether anyone knew about them or not. Why must realists insist on the Reinterpretation of the truth value link being acknowledged as a reinterpretation of the Original Formulation? A kind of analogical reasoning is involved in moving seamlessly from the Original Formulation to the Reinterpretation. It can be expressed as follows. Just as circumstances, making true a

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present-tensed statement uttered now, can, because this statement is equivalent to an appropriately related past-tensed statement, uttered in the future, also make true this past-tensed statement, so were we to resituate these circumstances in the past – to ‘slide them back’18 so to speak from present to past – they could, by making true a relevant present-tensed statement uttered then, also, reaching out across time, make true the equivalent past-tensed statement uttered now. The refusal by realists to allow the antirealists to split the original formulation from the reinterpretation would therefore be no less than a refusal to concede their assumption that we are immured in the present, and that all beyond it, for all we know, may wildly mutate in inchoate darkness. At the very least then, by forbidding this break up, or abrogation, of the truth value link principle, the status quo is restored between the two camps. It may well be said, however, that it leaves the realists in a better position than that of merely trading one assumption for another. For this principle is intuitively powerful in a way that the anti-realist conviction is not, and therefore it is not easy for anti-realists to sweep it lightly aside. There would have to be a compelling reason for them to do so. The question becomes then: have the anti-realists any arguments in their arsenal strong enough to allow them to reject the unemasculated principle?

(ii) Dummett: the truth value link realists cannot account for our ‘living in time’ Clearly they would have to show that despite its role in our ordinary understanding of tense it is inextricably tied to some other position which is independently untenable. Now Dummett does not attempt any such demonstration. Nor is this surprising since he has chosen to go down the alternative route, and seek to disarm the principle. However, he sometimes hints in this direction. Thus at one point (1978:369), he ascribes to the truth value link realists an eternalism, according to which ‘the past still exists as past, just as it was when it is present’. He elaborates further, stating that on their view ‘a description of things as they actually are in themselves will treat all moments of time alike and prescind from the particular view of them which an observer who is in time, and views the world from the particular point he is then at is forced to take’. In other words, what appears to be change is in reality merely a subjective distortion due to viewpoint. But a world in which there is ultimately neither change nor loss is one in which, according to Dummett, time is unreal, and that he holds to be unacceptable. It would not of course immediately follow, unless one were again begging the question, that the only alternative to this eternalism, whose defenders, Dummett says, ‘would like to stand in thought outside the whole temporal process’, is his own radical relativism of the present moment – although Dummett himself suggests that it is. On the contrary, it would be most natural to give some content to the idea of time’s reality, or of living in time, well short of Dummett’s immurement in the present, and then to argue that this is unacceptably missing from the eternalists’ account. Anti-realists of Dummett’s persuasion, although they would have made a start, would still have to provide an argument as to why those adopting the more moderate, ordinary, view of what it is to live in time should exchange it for their extreme view. If on the other hand it could be shown that eternalism could accommodate the degree of change that the

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ordinary view entails, his anti-realism would be substantially weakened. If those taking the moderate view could be persuaded that actually what they thought was change was illusory, anti-realism would have been undermined. There are, however, difficulties with this whole enterprise as it stands. For whatever the conclusions reached, they would only follow if we accepted in the first place as fair and accurate Dummett’s portrayal of the truth value link realists as eternalists. But why should we? Certainly it would be rash to call them eternalists simply on the basis that they propound a principle according to which differently tensed statements, uttered at relevantly different times, are held to be equivalent, and hence to have the same truth value. Indeed we might find it difficult to believe that any philosopher could be using a principle – the truth value link – which we ordinarily accept, as the basis for a view – that time does not really flow, that change is an illusion – which we would all ordinarily reject. How we might wonder could our seemingly innocuous and apparently fundamental belief in this principle lead to these surely counter-intuitive conclusions? This in turn might encourage us to ask whether, even if Dummett’s truth value realists are eternalists, propounding extreme negative views about time and change, it is not possible to use the truth value link as a basis for an affirmation of the past’s reality carrying no such commitment. Alternatively we might doubt whether Dummett’s truth value link realists can be eternalists – a doubt strengthened by McDowell’s portrayal of these realists – the very ones apparently figuring in Dummett’s own paper – as holding that ‘the past is dead and gone’. For this gives the impression that they do, after all, recognize in some sense ideas of passage, change and loss indicative of time’s reality. But then either they are not eternalists, or eternalism is, despite what Dummett says, compatible with some temporal notions. To these issues we next turn.

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Tense Theory

At the start of this chapter, there are three questions on our agenda. Firstly, are truth value realists (as Dummett alleges) eternalists? Secondly, can eternalists, propounding a theory according to which nothing passes, yet conjure out of this tenselessness (as Dummett assumes they cannot) some passably adequate account of living in time, and of the associated notion of change? And thirdly, if truth value link realists are not eternalists, what more moderate, tensed, options are there for rendering change, consistent with the truth value link principle? It should be pointed out that in tackling these questions, we are moving into a novel philosophical area – tense theory1 – in which we must find our bearings before we can begin to provide any answers. Rather, then, than approaching the questions directly, I shall take a somewhat longer route around, starting with the construction of a spectrum of positions concerning change, extending from the purely dynamic to the (apparently) purely static. The rest of the chapter, focusing on change as, crucially, alteration in the properties of an entity, argues that, among tenseless theories, neither temporal parts, nor stage theory, can capture its dynamism. Our outline of presentism suggests that this tensed theory, although admirably accounting for the element of discontinuity integral to change, has apparent internal difficulties which make it prudent to resort to it only if no more moderate, non-presentist, tensed option is available. Although I briefly consider, and reject, one such theory, which stresses, in explaining change, the incommensurability of different modes of tensed existence, I leave the more compelling candidate, Wiggins’ sortalism (usually treated within identity theory) for discussion in chapter 4. I finally return to truth value link realism, seeking to demonstrate that it cannot be classed with the tenseless theories, but properly belongs with non-presentist tensed ones, and draw out some implications of this identification. Let us be clear, while truth value link realism in its contest with Dummettian antirealism figured large in the early stages of our inquiry, providing it with a starting point, and direction, we must be prepared, as we gradually prosecute the inquiry, for other theoretical positions to move into the foreground. In particular, as we shall see, presentism, with claims ultimately to provide, as chapter 5 will maintain, the most satisfactory basis for an account, such as we are seeking, of time and change. This will qualify our original narrower remit, putting it into perspective, and leading us forward.

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1: A continuity that tolerates discontinuity (i) A spectrum of positions on time and change We can distinguish at least four positions on change. The two extremes already mentioned can, without more ado, be located along our spectrum. There is at one end Dummett’s radical relativism of the present. Then there is, at the opposite end, eternalism, according to which, as we saw, time being linear, past, present and future are all on an ontological par. Thus there can be no coming into existence, nor going out of existence. Neither seems, on the face of it, conducive to the idea of change, or to the related notions of loss and passage, albeit for opposing reasons. The former renders us, we saw, unable to hold on to a stable vantage point for long enough to recognize a past state of affairs as having changed into a present one. The latter confronts us with eternally, or ‘tenselessly’ existing states of affairs. It is, moreover, unlikely that either position would be entertained, if at all, except as a result of prolonged and escalating philosophical argument. There are, however, a pair of more moderate positions, which are, by contrast, and encouragingly, distillations of ordinary experience, one in the direction of imaginative understanding, the other – to some extent a critique of the first – sharpened by systematic reflection.

(a) Two intermediate positions: ‘simple temporal passage’ versus ‘alteration in properties’ The first of the pair occupying the middle portion of the spectrum, but next along from Dummett’s radical relativism of the present, is change as what I shall call simple temporal passage. Highlighting the peculiar shifting quality of the present, it is a distillation of that almost eerie awareness that occasionally hits us (elicited perhaps by the ticking of a clock at dead of night) of the relentless succession of moments, as they endlessly process toward non-entity. Thus we seem constantly to be looking forward to a future, which gradually becomes nearer to us until it becomes itself present, when we, so to speak, momentarily move in step with it, before its then receding into the past, only to become steadily more and more past. Suppose, for example, that it is now 2.50pm. At first 3pm is in the future, but ten minutes pass and it becomes present, and now it is already 3.10, and 3pm is left behind only to become further and further past, as the present shifts to these later and later moments. Thus we have the sense that time flows, rolls on, endlessly – for there seems no end to the future coming on, or to the passage of time. But although the metaphors used here are spatial – we tend to think of events floating through time like boats down a river – such passage seems quite different from movement through space. The future – unlike any physical location from which we set out – is, we say, not yet existent, while what is past – unlike any spatial location at which we might arrive – has already ceased to exist. Moreover, whereas we can typically move either back or forward in space, the flow of time is always inexorably in one direction – from one temporal horizon, that of the future, through the present, to the other, represented by the past. For us, what is past, or – expressly to invoke tense – what was, has ceased to exist absolutely. Thus there is an intimate link between time’s flow and the poignant ideas of loss and irrevocability.

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These impressions bite deep, and can be heightened by literary and linguistic devices. Consider, for instance, the effect of using the historic present to describe tragic figures from the past, whose fate we already know. The sheer renewed vivacity of life that the present-tense narration momentarily lends these figures is almost immediately undercut by the thought of their impending annihilation, so that it is as insubstantial and flickering phantasms, flitting across a darkening stage, that we actually experience them. Carlyle (2002:28), describing Marie Antoinette on the Eve of the French Revolution states that ‘Like Earth’s brightest Appearance, she moves gracefully environed with the grandeur of Earth’. But he marvels (8) that what is ‘reality’ is yet also ‘a magical vision’, a mere ‘timephantasm yet reckons itself real’, since ‘utter Darkness is soon to swallow it’. This felt unreality of Marie Antoinette’s existence even then before Darkness swallowed it, spreads to the readers, and momentarily tinges with unreality their own present existences, as they imagine likewise looking back on them, as though they also belonged to the past, from a distant future. In this mood, although they may not go as far as Thomas Hardy, who to avoid the regret of passing time, sought to inhabit his daily existence, as if his life were already past, and he ‘a spectre’ without ‘solidity’, they perhaps consider enviously the timeless abstractions of geometry and mathematics. For the triangle simply is – not merely is now – a three-sided figure whose angles add up to 180 degrees. The shimmering interplay between reality and the insubstantiality of phantasm, which is inseparable from the idea of temporal passage, is again exploited with extreme unsettling effect but this time in a recent work of fiction: Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement (of which I follow here the screenplay). The thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis – the date is 1935 – mistakenly believes she has witnessed Robbie, the son of her parents’ housekeeper, attacking her older sister, Cecilia, and raping her friend. Her suspicion is fuelled by her own amorous feelings for Robbie, and consequent jealousy at the sexual love Robbie and Cecilia feel for each other, which she is at some level aware of, and troubled by. Robbie is arrested solely on her testimony, and serves three years in prison before being released on condition that he will enlist in the army. He and Cecilia, now a nurse, are able to meet just once, for a snatched half hour, while he is on leave, and they confess their love, and vow to be together once the war is over. Cecilia gives him a picture of the cottage with a view of the white cliffs of Dover where they will live. There follow two scenes: in one, Robbie is staggering delirious on the beach at Dunkirk during the evacuation, and finally is helped to a shelter, where he falls asleep clutching Cecilia’s picture. In the second, Briony, having eventually realized that she had been mistaken about Robbie being the rapist – it had been her brother’s houseguest – and filled with remorse, goes to see Cecilia and Robbie who are apparently together, and asks them to forgive her, and promises to clear his name. It then transpires – Briony is now a dying seventy-seven-year-old novelist – that what she has recounted are episodes in her recent novel. It turns out that Cecilia and Robbie were never reunited after the war. Robbie died of septicaemia on the beaches of Dunkirk, and Cecilia was killed by a bomb in London. Now Briony explains how she had decided to change the actual course of events. Not only would the deaths of Robbie and Cecilia, before they could be reunited, have been too pitiless for the reader. She also wanted to atone for her wrong – she would, she admits, never have had the courage actually to go to them and confess her mistake – by granting them in her novel the happiness which they never had in life. Thus a scene follows in which they are seen blissfully happy in their cottage. Why we are by the

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end at once disconcerted and puzzled, our emotions thrown into disarray, can best be understood by describing our conflicting thoughts. On the one hand we find ourselves feeling, with Briony, that from her temporal perspective now – the lovers being long since dead, the tragic incidents long since over – that it really comes to very much the same whether she has merely written a novel in which things are put right, giving them back their happiness fictionally, or had actually put them right then. Moreover, from the point of view of morality, we reason, good intention is often supposed to be all. But then on the other hand, and at another level, we are aware that even by being drawn into this reasoning we are taking as actually ‘real’ what is only real in make-believe: perhaps it is that underlying awareness, and not the fact that the protagonists are, for Briony now, long dead, and the happiness that they would have experienced, had it been theirs, would have long since vanished, which explains why, paradoxically, we think it doesn’t matter which choice she made. After all, the whole series of events, including the ‘real’ ones are fictional, and Briony is fictional – a fictional author. But that realization is again clouded over, and contradicted, by the sadness we actually experience on realizing that Robbie and Cecilia were never after all reunited, that their final happiness is doubly imaginary. The last notion of change highlights, as I say, the shifting nature of the present. It concentrates on time as essentially just a process of continual creation and annihilation, and in so doing captures something both strange and yet familiar to us. If the sense of the past as somehow phantasmagoric, and hinting at the present’s own dissolution, is uncomfortable, and so we tend to keep it at arm’s length, our historical and literary examples only illustrate how we may nevertheless be coaxed into recognizing it as ours. However, those who adhere to the third notion – the other one occupying the middle of the spectrum, but closer to the eternalist end, and so further from the Dummettian anti-realists – point out that change requires more than this: it requires continuity as well as discontinuity, stability as well as flight. For these theorists – who thereby illustrate a second crucial aspect of living in time, as well as providing a philosophical corrective to simple temporal passage – it is the process by which a temporal entity has first one property then another, or loses the original property, while continuing to exist through the change. According, then, to this notion – so-called qualitative change, or alteration – temporal things must sometimes in some way survive time’s passage. But our second notion has seemed to allow no room for this: necessarily, whatever is created does not exist before its creation nor survive its annihilation. Let us have before us two examples to illustrate the third notion of change and the constraint which governs it. One and the same candle is straight at 9pm, bent at 11pm (there is, let us say, close by a source of heat), one and the same leaf is green on 20 October and brown on 1 November. Indeed if the candle, or leaf, did not retain its identity, if it did not persist as the same candle, or leaf, between the relevant times, it could not, one would intuitively think, be said to have changed. If, for instance, we have two candles, one of which is straight at 9pm, and the other bent at 11pm, we shall obviously not say – indeed it would be incoherent to say – that either candle has undergone change just because of the other’s having a different shape from its own. It must seem then that our account of the temporal world must make room for continuity as well as discontinuity. Indeed, destruction or disintegration – say a statue of Hercules is smashed to pieces – becomes here a kind of limiting case. The statue does not survive (the accepted criteria

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of identity for statues will not permit talk of its doing so, as they would if, say, merely an arm was broken off ), but something else does: the smashed pieces. The problem posed for change as simple temporal passage, which our third notion highlights is that, as we have seen, it does not seem to allow for the required element of continuity. On the contrary, it seems to consist in momentary comings into existence and goings out of existence. (As Larkin puts it in his Letters to Monica, ‘a moment is no longer present than it is past’.) But if temporal passage – the flight from future, through present, to past – cannot make room for enduring things – so-called ‘continuants’ – and this is a requirement of change, then how, we must ask, can it be a form of change at all? If it is replied that what undergoes this passage cannot be said to be enduring objects – they are the subject only of qualitative change and we should not confuse the two – but rather events, it will be retorted that events cannot coherently be said to change, they are changes precisely in enduring things, or (as E.J. Lowe puts it, 1998:54) ‘in the properties and relations of persisting things’ (see also A.N. Prior’s, 1968:2–4, subtle but qualified endorsement of this claim). Unless we are Buddhist logicians willing to settle for an ontology of mere instants, we may well ask how we could have been right when, in trying to describe what it is like to live in time, we sought to capture the continual change which marks it by pointing to simple temporal passage. Nor are the difficulties with the notion of change as simple temporal passage – as incessant creation and annihilation – only ones of conceptual coherence. Even our experience of living in time requires us to qualify the ontological symmetry between past and future that this notion seems to imply. If the past is, as this notion entails, non-existent, then it is so, it will seem, in a different manner from the future. For we find, if we train our minds on the past, that it immediately takes on a determinate form, it teems, for long stretches, with actions and events, figures leap out at us. Things have, we say, for better or worse, turned out one way and not another. The future admittedly is not entirely a tabula rasa either. Our anticipations cast shadows upon it, while our intentions even mould it to some extent. Nevertheless, until we act nothing is irrevocable. Only when a sequence of events has been deliberately set in motion, which no one has any longer a power to halt, does it seem otherwise. One might think of how, in the moments after the pilots had loosed their bombs from their racks over Dresden during the Second World War, they could only wait for the conflagration below, which they knew with absolute certainty would occur. Even then it could not plausibly be maintained that there was, before the fire took the path it did through the city, a determinate path that it must take. Thus the future appears largely open and indeterminate, compatibly with its status as not yet having come into existence. By contrast, the past seems to consist in sets of facts, any claim about which is taken to be corrigible: there is one way, we are tempted to say, and only one way that the past is. But how, we shall ask, is such corrigibility (if we are ultimately right to take it as such) compatible with its non-existence?

(ii) Difficulties raised by the notion of ‘alteration in properties’: eternalist solutions However, it is not only change as simple temporal passage that is beset by difficulty; so is qualitative change, or alteration. Recall: if the candle, which earlier was straight, is to

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be said to have become bent, it must remain identical through the change. Mark Hinchliff (1996:120) and many others have taken this to involve a contradiction: that it must therefore be both straight and bent. As Hinchliff strikingly puts it: ‘If the straight candle persists, it is the bent candle.’ But how, he asks, can the same candle have incompatible shapes? There would be no puzzle if there were two candles which had the incompatible shapes. On the other hand, there would seem to be no change either.

(a) The contradictory properties ascribed to distinct temporal parts It is at this juncture that the eternalists re-enter the picture. Content that simple temporal passage – our second account of change – is fatally flawed, and accepting Hinchliff ’s challenge, they seek to clear the third account of leading to a contradiction. They want at once to assimilate it to their own fourth position, and preserve it as an account of change, not changelessness. Given that we have so far regarded their position as almost off the spectrum as an account of change, we shall naturally wonder how they could possibly hope to succeed in this. Their argument (see Mark Heller, 1992:695–7, for a classic statement) goes something like this: here is a single entity, a candle with, apparently, two incompatible shapes at two different times, 9 pm and 11pm. How is this possible? Well think of the candle as extending through time, as well as space, think of it, that is to say, as a four dimensional, or space-time, ‘worm’, rather than the usual three dimensional object. This ‘candle-worm’, then, persists through time (or ‘perdures’, as they say) by having different temporal parts, none of which is identical to the candle – worm itself, the latter being merely ‘the sum of these parts’, or a ‘composite’ of them. Now it is these different temporal parts that have the different shapes or, as it is put again, these different shapes are assigned to different temporal parts. Thus the property of being straight belongs to one temporal part but not another, and likewise with the property of being bent, or again the candle, or candle-worm, has one temporal part at 9pm which is straight, and a different temporal part at 11 pm which is bent.

(b) ‘But it must be the object itself which has the contradictory properties, otherwise it cannot lose or gain them’ This stratagem certainly avoids the apparent contradiction that Hinchliff (1996), Sally Haslanger (2003) and others point to. However, consider: the property of being straight, on the eternalists’ view, always belongs – belongs, as the eternalists would put it, tenselessly to the relevant temporal part of the candle: the part temporally situated at 9pm. But this is just to say that this temporal part of the candle never loses or gains the property of straightness, it simply possesses it forever. The spatial analogy is with a road which is, say, smooth for one stretch, potholed over a second, and smooth again for a third stretch. The first stretch does not lose its smooth surface, still less go out of existence, when you move on to the potholed stretch. Nor does this latter stretch lose its potholes, or cease altogether to exist, when you reach the second smooth stretch. Just as there is nothing ontologically special about the place where you are, as opposed to places at some distance from you – ‘here’ as opposed to ‘there’ – so on the eternalists’ view, there is nothing ontologically special about the present as opposed to the past –

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‘now’ as opposed to ‘then’. Thus there is nothing special about that temporal part of the candle which exists at the present moment – 11 pm – and is bent, as opposed to that part whose straightness belongs to the earlier time, 9pm. Both states of affairs are equally existent. But this tenseless alternation of properties gives more of an impression of stagnation than change. This objection is well expressed by Lawrence Lombard, quoted by Heller (1992:699) as follows: . . . to treat objects on a par with respect to spatial and temporal parts, as the [four dimensional] account would have us do, would make an apparently persisting, ordinary thing’s being different at different times no more significant, from the point of view of change, than such a thing’s being different at different places. It would be no more reasonable to think that some thing had changed on the grounds that it was blue yesterday and red today than it would be to think that something had changed on the grounds that its left half is blue and its right half is green . . . to the extent that it offers an account of change at all, the [four dimensional account] offers a ‘static’ conception of change . . . seeing change as involving nothing more than the replacement of an object in one state by another, distinct object in another contrary state.

Heller suggests that Lombard’s problem is illusory, due to the fact that he can’t take off his ‘three-dimensional’ spectacles, which make him ‘see’ only the (temporal) parts with their respective attributes ranged, so to speak, in a row, rather than the whole of which they are composed to which their properties can be attributed. Heller attempts (700) to correct this view, which he claims fails to acknowledge the unity of the whole, as follows: The parts, like the whole, are just the material contents of filled regions of spacetime. I am not composed of a series of shortlived people; I am composed of bits of matter that fill sub-regions of the region of spacetime that I fill. The correct picture is not one of people being replaced by other people, but rather one of a physical object filling all of its boundaries.

But this account seems dubious in that it evidently mires him in a drastically reductive materialism with no indication of how description at the level of ‘bits of matter’ is supposed to be related to that at the level of ‘persons’. More pertinently here, it does not, as he acknowledges (702), even then get him off the hook of its only being the temporal parts that have the properties intrinsically, the temporally extended whole, only partially existing at any one time, having them only by virtue of its temporal parts having them. This whole thus, as we already indicated, only has these properties at different times in the way that a spatially extended entity has different properties at different places, and that, he agrees with us (703), is not sufficient for change in the real sense. But we do, he now says, answering his own objection, sometimes describe an object as changing in virtue of its having different properties at different places. He cites the example of getting instructions about finding a friend’s house, ‘You might be told “. . . it’s exactly two miles after the road changes from paved to dirt”.’ Yet again he poses an objection:

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direction of change depends in this case on the order of our description, not solely on how the world is and, so long as there is also available, as in the spatial situation, ‘a direction neutral perspective’, ‘it is not real change’. We may be tempted to interpret Heller as here turning his back on that blatant eternalism which in Dummett’s characterization ‘treats all moments of time alike and prescinds from the particular view of them which an observer who is in time and views the world from the particular point he is then at is forced to take’. But he does not do so exactly, or if he does, it is only, it seems, because he is prepared to pull the rug from under his own feet after he has stood on it in order to expound, and defend, and make sense of, the eternalist position. As he rather inexplicably, and unsatisfactorily, puts it (704), ‘The four dimensional perspective does allow us, so to speak “to view all of time at once” but this in itself does not eliminate the direction of time . . . the four dimensionalist need not deny this disanalogy between space and time.’ He seems to want to have it both ways. A rather different eternalist approach (mentioned by Haslanger, 2003:333) is to redefine change so that it occurs, and only occurs, when an object’s temporal parts have incompatible properties. But this seems merely perverse in standing on its head the incompatibility verdict of those like Hinchliff, or Haslanger herself. Moreover, it seems equally an admission of defeat to claim (see Haslanger, 333) that such a view is unfamiliar to us only because we live in time, and to assure us that while, admittedly, it does not capture the ‘phenomenology’ of our experience, it does capture the underlying ontology. This is to dismiss (just as Dummett accused them of doing) that experience as illusory, for whose special dynamical character, we had thought, the eternalists (if only to prove his charge unjustified) had undertaken to provide some convincing account.

(c) Sider’s stage theory: an attempt to meet the ‘proper subject condition’ The only systematic competitor to temporal parts theory is ‘stage theory’, perhaps most powerfully propounded by Theodore Sider (1996). This theory makes what is sometimes called ‘the proper subject condition [of change]’ (Haslanger, 2003:317) paramount. This condition formalizes our clear sense (already alluded to) that if, say, a candle is to be said to change from being straight to bent, it must be the candle itself that has both properties. It must have them, that is to say intrinsically, and not just in virtue of its having one part, existing at one time, that is straight, and having another part, existing at another time, which is bent. But this seems to be all the temporal parts theorist can account for, and so violates the proper subject condition. Now, it will be suggested, stage theory offers to rectify this short-coming, thereby injecting a measure of dynamism into the static picture conveyed by the temporal parts theorists. It invokes, as its name suggests, the concept of ‘stages’. It may seem, however, that the term ‘stage’ – at least as normally understood is misleading here. For the proposal is that the candle – ‘the ordinary object’ no less – is identical with a ‘stage’ co-existing with me now, say a stage that is bent. But ‘stages’ are only coherent, one would naturally think, as stages of something, yet one cannot add under one’s breath, in order to complete the sense: ‘of the candle’, or ‘of the candle-worm’, since it is precisely the stand alone stage that is the candle. As Sider (433), using his example of persons, plainly puts it: ‘Not only do I accept person stages: I claim that we are stages’ (his italics), and he adds: ‘likewise . . . statues are

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statue-stages, coins are coin-stages etc’. On this variation, there may be no temporally extended composite to refer to. Even if such a composite were countenanced, it would play no theoretical role in accounting for change. Indeed (as Haslanger, 2003:334, points out) ontological ‘minimalists’ sometimes regard it as a virtue of this position that there is no need ‘to postulate sums of stages’.2 The view can, it is true, be expressed, apparently unexceptionably. We can speak – writers do speak – of the candle being identical with the stage that co-exists with me now, or say that candles are stages, or ‘we are stages’ (Sider, above). But these remarks are ambiguous between stage, and temporal parts, theory unless they are understood as entailing, queerly, that a (whole) candle is ‘a’ stage, rather than ‘stages’, and again that I am a stage, rather than that I am (a succession of) stages. That is to say, there is no back-up, or hinterland, of other stages contributing to a joint identity in which the candle-stage, or me-stage, participates. As Sider asserts (437), reverting to his person example: ‘I am an instantaneous stage that did not exist before today, and will not exist after today’, and again (446) ‘Ted [does not exist] at more than one time’. Without these entailments, the remarks quickly collapse into an expression of something very like the temporal parts account, with a person, or a candle, as a successions of stages constituting, as did successions of parts, a temporally extended composite. Nor is this queerness merely verbal. It cannot be cleared up by choosing a different word from ‘stage’. To appreciate this, consider just one of the implications that Sider himself draws from the supposed fact that each stage is a fully fledged person, or candle, and which he then seeks to mitigate. ‘If we take the “timeless perspective”, and ask how many people there ever will be . . . or have been [say] . . . sitting in my office, during the last hour’, we shall, he writes (448), have to say that as ‘persons on this view are identified with stages, and as there are infinitely many stages between any two times’, then ‘assuming that time is continuous and that there is a stage for each moment of time’, there will be infinitely many persons. Leaving to one side this strange implication of stage theory, and Sider’s attempts to mitigate it,3 the question will, still more pertinently, be raised of how the candle-stage can, even on this theory, fulfil the ‘proper subject of change’ condition, unless it can be said to have persisted through the relevant time interval. But, it will be inquired, how can we conceive of it doing this except as part of a temporally extended composite, such as the candle-worm? In order to answer this objection, Sider (437) draws upon David Lewis’s concept of otherworldly counterparts, adapting it from the modal to the tensed context. According to Lewis, an object possibly has a given property if and only if there exists in a possible world an object which has this property, and bears the counterpart relation to the first object.4 In an analogous fashion, Sider would analyse the claim that, in our scenario, the (intrinsically bent) candle-stage was formerly straight as entailing that it has an (intrinsically) straight stage-counterpart at the earlier time. The candlestage persists in other words by having stage-counterparts at other times, or – a word that has been coined to capture this precise idea – by ‘exduring’. Whereas therefore, for the temporal parts theorists, the candle-worm ‘perjures’, or persists, by having distinct temporal parts at distinct times, for stage theorists the candle-stage ‘exdures’, or persists by having stage-counterparts at other times. In this way, the candle-stage, to which its properties belong intrinsically, meets, it is claimed, unlike the candle-worm, both conditions for being a proper subject of change.

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(d) Haslanger and the denial that persistence requires identity It is commonly accepted that change requires persistence, and that persistence requires identity. The temporal parts theorists agree, hoping to secure, as it were, a collective identity for the temporal parts by treating them as a composite, which exists, if not fully, at least partially, throughout a relevant time interval. But the identity of this worm is not therefore (Haslanger, 2003:336) that of a ‘proper subject of change’, which would require having its properties intrinsically. Being a composite, as we have seen, the candle-worm has these properties only derivatively, only in virtue of its parts having them intrinsically. Stage theorists agree with defenders of temporal parts that change requires persistence, but they endeavour to secure, as the latter cannot, the proper subject condition by denying that persistence requires identity; they claim that it requires only that the stage has, at other times, Lewis-like stage-counterparts. Can we really agree that the deficit is made up? It cannot be denied that the candlestage which co-exists with me now, and is bent, is so intrinsically. But in what sense, if at all, can we say that it has the property of straightness at all, let alone intrinsically? If it does not, how can it meet the proper subject condition? Haslanger maintains (334) that stage theory can ‘accommodate . . . temporary intrinsics’. She goes on: ‘intrinsic properties are instantiated by exduring objects (which are stages); the candle’s being bent or being straight is not construed relationally (it is neither a relation to times, nor a relation to parts that have the intrinsics)’ (her italics). It is significant, however, that she speaks only of the candle’s being intrinsically bent or intrinsically straight, not of it being intrinsically bent and intrinsically straight. Nor should we laxly read it in this latter way. For Haslanger’s remark, understood so that it is consonant with Sider’s original proposal, has to refer to two independent, or discontinuous, scenarios, one in which a candle-stage that co-exists with me now is bent, and the other, in which a candle-stage, which is co-existent with me now, is straight. Crucially, straightness and bentness are not being predicated of one and the same candle-stage. Only given this understanding can we see why, for her, ‘history-dependent intrinsics’, such as being a horse, but not occurrent intrinsics, like straightness, are a problem for stage theory. The problem, as she sees it, is that to say of a stage that it is a horse, unlike saying of a (candle-) stage that it is bent, depends on how that very same stage is at another time. In other words, the past characterization of a horse stage enters into its present characterization. But she complains: ‘there is no way that it (the stage) is at other times’, adding ‘It is some way or another at other times by virtue of counterparts at those times’ (her italics). So being a horse, she concludes, cannot be intrinsic to its proper subject, namely the horse stage that co-exists with me now; it ‘depends on how other things are’. Sider, using the example of boyhood, anticipates the problem, which he admits ‘initially seems devastating’ He writes (437) ‘I once was a boy, this fact seems inconsistent with the stage view, for the stage view claims that I am an instantaneous stage that did not exist before today, and will not exist after today’. Accordingly, he acknowledges, I cannot look back and say, unless falsely, ‘I am the irritating young man’. But, he argues, someone making this claim, couched as it is in present-tense terms, doesn’t mean what he actually says. He really means something which is true, namely: ‘I was an irritating young man’. Sider’s solution is to stress the past tense, and to propose that it can be so analysed as to

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accommodate a change of subject. He writes: ‘I am the one with the temporal properties, even though this property involves the boyhood of another object’ (my italics). Again (446), citing the analogy between his treatment of ‘previously’, and Lewis’s of ‘possibly’, he writes: ‘Although I do not exist at more than one time . . . I both exist now and previously existed in the past’ (his italics). He himself enunciates in two different places the outstanding objection. On page 437, he puts it like this ‘Statements that look like they are about what once happened to me are really about what once happened to someone else’. On page 446, he quotes John Perry’s remark that ‘the little boy stealing the apple is not strictly speaking [on stage theory] identical with the general before me’ (his italics) and ‘[the stage view] denies what is clearly true: that when I say of someone that he will do such and such, I mean that he will do it [not] someone else’. Sider replies to this objection in what may seem a half – hearted way in that he continues to admit that it is a’ legitimate cause for concern’. Moreover, in so far as he does reply – by insisting that he has given an analysis of the statement in hand, and that there is no requirement that this should be consistent with the meaning of the unanalysed statement – is unlikely to quell that concern. It leaves us puzzling how what we ordinarily say, and apparently mean, has supposedly drifted so far apart from the real, underlying, meaning of our statements. Haslanger (2003:335), describing stage theory as in this way ‘straining the limits of credibility’, finds it hard to regard this ‘systematically reconstruing [of] statements expressing persistence facts’ as an analysis, preferring talk if it as a ‘replacement’ or ‘underlier’ or ‘substitution’ (327), in that it is specifically invoked in order to rectify an admitted, standing, deficiency in the proposed account. Furthermore, in delivering this verdict, she seems to have in mind not merely ‘lasting intrinsics’ (though earlier she claimed only to find difficulty with these), but the apparent violation of the identity condition more generally by stage-theorists. It may be felt, moreover, that they push against the limits, methodologically speaking, of what can be seriously considered a solution at all.5 It will suffice here to conclude our discussion of stage theory, as the second of the two main eternalist strategies for dealing with change, with the following methodological comment on this theory by Haslanger (2003:335): If an ontology on which nothing exists for any substantial length of time can be construed as satisfying the identity condition on persistence, namely, that things persist by continuing to exist through time, then it is hard to see how the identity condition has constrained our ontology at all.

(e) A lacuna in the eternalist account of the difficulty with change: Leibniz’s Law introduced Granting that the third position – change as alteration – gives rise to a problem that cannot, without sacrificing integral features of that notion, be resolved by assimilation within an eternalist, or tenseless, framework, I shall shortly move on to consider tensed solutions. First, however, I shall pause to revise, and reconfigure, the problem itself. Now it has not, so far as I know, been remarked that there is a lacuna in the argument that got us to this point, as expounded by Hinchliff, Haslanger and others, for its being impossible to account for change in an entity’s properties without incurring a

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contradiction. Hinchliff, we saw, in a remark distinguished by its elegant brevity, maintains that if the straight candle persists it must be bent. But a philosophically untutored person, refusing to be stunned into submission by the almost Zen-like quality of the remark, may quite legitimately inquire: why does it have to be the straight candle that is bent, why not just the candle, of which first it was (understood of course in a pre-theoretical, non-Siderian, tensed sense) straight and now it is bent? Again, this same person might agree with Haslanger (2003:316) that ‘if an object persists through a change then the object existing before the change is one and the same object as the one existing after the change’, but ask pointedly why its being identical requires it to retain its erstwhile property, especially since change also requires it to lose the property? If writers, such as Hinchliff and Haslanger, do not recognize that a step is missing in their argument it is, I suspect, because, despite wanting eventually to reject eternalism, they are, in setting up the problem, influenced by that very picture. Thus it is only when construed as a four dimensional, or spatio-temporal, composite that the candle can seem to persist in that tenseless way which permits us in the first place, suppressing the tensed copula (‘was’), to say of it that it both is bent and is straight. However, they repudiate that eternalist solution, which stresses that the candle has distinct temporal parts which are respectively straight and bent, or that (Hinchliff, 119) ‘the candle is straight at t and [is] bent at t1’. (Hinchliff actually presents this claim, evidently to be taken as that of a philosophical ingenue, as theoretically neutral, but the disappearance of the tensed copula, and its replacement by the tenseless ‘is’, significantly undermines this neutrality.) These writers are therefore obliged, as it were, to ‘shrink’ the fourdimensional6 candle, along with its properties, so as to fit it into the three-dimensionalist confines of a single tensed moment, rendering the properties contradictory.7,8 Does this mean that change as alteration presents no problem once we divest ourselves of a certain eternalist picture? Far from it – it is just that we need to supply the missing step in the argument. It is Leibniz’s Principle of the Indiscernibility of Identicals, sometimes called simply ‘Leibniz’s Law’,9 which states that for any x and y, if x and y do not share all their properties – if they differ in any property – they cannot be identical. Why does Hinchliff omit to mention Leibniz, and Haslanger mention him (351) only as an afterthought? I think it is because they approach the question of change from the perspective of tense theory rather than from within identity theory itself: two areas of research which often go on in isolation from each other. (There are exceptions, however: Heller, for instance (1992:696), cites Leibniz’s Principle as the cause of the problem.) Now there is a rich seam of literature – most notably David Wiggins’ classic 2004 work, Sameness and Substance Renewed – concerning whether ‘diachronic’, as opposed to ‘synchronic’, identity can properly be called identity at all, and how, if it can, Leibniz’s Principle is to be accommodated.10 Any tensed theorist, in accounting for change, will therefore, as we shall see in chapter 4, do well to take note of this literature in attempting to come to terms with the Principle.

(f) The problem of combining continuity and discontinuity again How, if at all, are change as simple temporal passage (the second account) and as the alteration in its (intrinsic) properties of an enduring entity (the third) related? At first

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sight, it might seem that they cannot be related. The problem posed by simple temporal passage is altogether more fundamental than that posed by qualitative change. It concerns how anything (any concrete time-bound particular) endures through time at all. Since evidently nothing remains from moment to moment, it cannot be a question of something remaining – the bent candle – being the same candle, which was earlier straight. The problem arises because, as we saw, temporal passage is an unceasing process of creation and annihilation, so that impermanence, transience, evanescence, is of its essence. The problem, on the other hand, posed by qualitative change is how a thing with a certain property, say straightness or greenness, can remain the same thing when it loses that property, and becomes bent or brown, Here it precisely is relevant – indeed the sole cause of the difficulty – that the entity does not, and necessarily cannot, if it is to change, retain the same properties. This latter problem arises more precisely, as we have seen, because of two conflicting requirements. The first concerns change: an entity undergoes change if, and only if, it genuinely loses a property. But it can only be said to lose a property if it retains its identity. It has to lose the property, not something else. The second requirement concerns the concept of identity: Leibniz’s Principle of the Indiscernibility of Identicals precludes anything being the same thing if it now has different properties. But if something else, which just lacks the property, takes its place there is no genuine loss of a property, and so no change. What then, we shall ask, could the problems thrown up by simple temporal passage, and by the alteration in its properties of an enduring entity, possibly have to do with each other? Further scrutiny suggests that they are oddly complimentary. For the first problem is posed by the apparent fact that things go out of existence as they cease to be present and become past. Put more sensationally, the condition of their being time bound is that they are constantly disappearing. Thus the puzzle: how can any thing endure through time at all? The second problem is posed by the requirement that a property, which an entity has supposedly lost, has, if the entity is to be said to change, somehow to go on being attributable to it. Put again even more paradoxically: an entity can only really lose a property, if it remains the same entity, but that means keeping the property. Thus the candle, now bent, has somehow to go on being straight if it is to be said to have changed from being straight to bent. Might there be a way by which tensed theorists, aiming to capture the dynamism of change, could combine the troublesome discontinuity of temporal passage, with the troublesome continuity required by change as alteration in properties, in order to make up the deficiencies and offset the embarrassments of the accounts taken separately? This would of course mean revising, or qualifying, our assumption that, precisely because it does entail discontinuity, temporal passage cannot be change at all.

2: Presentist and non-presentist tensed solutions (i) Presentism introduced Now the eternalists, or atemporalists, have already in their own solution, drawn attention to the fact that the divergent properties, required by the third account of change, belong to the same entity at different times. However, they interpret the phrase

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‘different times’, as one would expect, atemporally, and so precisely not as an invitation to invoke temporal passage. Taking ‘different times’ to refer specifically to temporal passage, what kind of answers are available to tensed theorists as to how such passage makes it possible for the same entity to diverge in its properties? It is crucial to the idea of temporal passage, as we have seen, that ceasing to be present and becoming past is ceasing to exist. One kind of tensed theorists – the presentists – rather than being embarrassed by this going out of existence, make it the cornerstone of their reply. Only the present exists, they declare, or again, to be is to be now. The candle, therefore, is only bent. On the other hand, no other object exists to which the candle’s erstwhile straightness can be separately assigned. Hence, the presentist will explain, if anything was straight, it is this bent candle now. It will be objected: if the candle itself was straight, have we not the problem all over again of its having to be both straight and bent, or again of its having both to lose and to retain its straightness? But the presentist will reply: certainly the candle was straight, but precisely for this reason only the property of having been straight is being attributed to the presently existing candle. The fact that it is thus a past-tensed property explains how we can thus attribute it to the candle even though it is now bent. He will explain: there is nothing contradictory about the candle (presently) having the past-tensed property of straightness and the present-tensed property of bentness because having been straight (as Hinchliff, 1996:126 remarks) is precisely not a way of being straight, any more than not being straight is a way of being straight.

(a) Presently existing ‘bearers’ contrasted with other notions of grounds, realist and verificationist It is clear that, for presentists, if no candle exists now, it cannot be said that it was straight, any more than that it is bent. In this way the truth of the statement that the candle was straight appears to depend on there being, as it is put, a present bearer – namely the existing candle – for the relevant past-tense property. Such bearers are often said therefore to be, for presentists, ‘grounds’ of, or ‘truth makers’ for, relevant past-tensed statements. This, however, quickly leads to misunderstanding, and – what is significant here – to a failure to distinguish presentism from a view such as Dummett’s according to which the present in which we are immured is, in a certain sense, ‘shallow’, without depth or resonance. Only when this misunderstanding is cleared up can the somewhat surprising idea be entertained that even presentism, among the tensed theories, may possibly, at least in some versions, be less antithetical to truth value link realism than Dummett’s position. That is not to say that truth value link theorists could be presentists. The terms ‘ground’ and ‘truth maker’ are used in three main ways. They may refer to realist truth conditions. Here they are thought of as a set of circumstances to which the content of the given statement corresponds. If the statement is past-tensed, its truth maker(s) will also be past. Clearly the presentists’ bearer of past-tensed properties, if only because it is, and must be, present, cannot be a ground, or truth maker, of a pasttensed statement in that sense. Alternatively, one may point as ground, or truth maker, of a statement, whether past, present or future-tensed, to a present state of affairs. This will be a ground, or truth maker, for a relevant future-tensed statement if it constitutes,

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given certain physical laws, a sufficient cause of the future event; for a relevant pasttensed statement, if it can be construed as an effect of the past event. The non-existence of the future is not necessarily a stumbling block to a present state of affairs being a ground of, or truth maker for, a future-tensed statement. Of course, it will first have to be argued that one thing can be the cause of another even though this other has not yet occurred. The non-existence of the past, however, is, for presentists, a stumbling block to a present set of circumstances being a ground of, or truth maker for, a past-tensed statement. An effect cannot occur without a cause, but there are, for presentists, no past causes in the sense of causes which exist independently of the present, and continue to act by their effects on the present. Thirdly, a present state of affairs may be cited as the ground of a past-tensed statement in the sense of constituting its assertibility, or verifiability, conditions, as Dummett would understand them. The candle’s now being bent (or our observation that it is) might be cited as among the conditions (together with the candle’s current softness and the proximity of a source of heat) for asserting that the candle was straight. For Dummett, as we saw, that the candle was straight does not refer to a past existing independently of the present; it is merely a construction out of – even a fabrication from – the present evidence. But nothing like this follows from presentism, or is part of presentist theory. All the presentists say is that, if the candle was straight, that is a past-tensed attribute of the present candle. They says nothing about how we know whether the candle was straight. Still less do they suggest that the meaning of the past-tensed statement, the candle was straight, is intimately tied to our ability now to verify it, with the implication that we are, as Dummett claims, immured in the present. Presentism is not, in other words, an epistemological theory, still less of a verificationist variety. Precisely because, for presentists, as we have them so far, the truth of a past-tensed statement is in no way dependent on the state of our knowledge now, there is no reason to suppose that, for them, as for Dummett, the past itself fluctuates with fluctuations in present evidence. To take our example, there is no reason to suppose that, for past-tensed presentists, in sharp contrast to Dummett, were the current evidence of the candle’s having been straight to be wiped out, the past-tensed statement that it was straight would cease to be true. A striking, uncompromising and vivid statement of the presentist position here, to which we shall have cause to return, is that of Craig Bourne (2006:8), himself an ersatz presentist (see chapter 5 below): ‘We want to say that it is either true or false that a certain brontosaurus had two plants for breakfast, regardless of whether there are any traces of this fact in the present’.11

(b) Lucretius and the idea that a past-tensed property can shift from one bearer to another Someone may query: even if all evidence of its erstwhile straightness is absent, you are at least supposing that the candle, bent as it is, still exists to function as present bearer of past-tensed properties. But suppose there is no present bearer, then surely, by your own reckoning, there is nothing to which to attribute a past-tensed property, and so no longer any truth concerning the bearer’s having had this property. In this way at least the past is just as dependent on the present as it is in Dummett’s theory. But even this is not so. For

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it does not follow that it must always be the same bearer, that some other bearer could not take its place, thus saving the past-tensed truth. It does not follow therefore that, for presentists, the truths that there was a candle, and that it was straight, necessarily disappear when that candle ceases to exist. These theorists can adopt (as does John Bigelow, 1996:44–6) the stratagem of their ancient predecessor, Lucretius, and ascribe the past-tensed attribute of, say, having carried aloft a straight candle, to a bearer that still exists, viz. a surviving candelabra. In this way, Lucretius sought to preserve the truth that Helen of Troy was ravished, although the subject herself was dead, by ‘transferring’ the event of her having been ravished to the tract of earth, on which the kidnapping occurred, and which still existed. He wrote (as quoted by Bigelow, 1996:45): Again, when men say it is a fact that Helen was ravished or the Trojans were conquered, do not let anyone drive you to the admission that any such event is independently of any object, on the ground that the generations of men of whom these events were accidents have been swept away by the irrevocable lapse of time. For we could put it that whatever has taken place is an accident of a particular tract of earth or of the space it occupied.

Indeed, the implication here is that all past eventa might be preserved by tying them eventually to eternal per se existents, such as atoms and the void.

(ii) Advantages of presentism (a) A present with remarkable temporal ‘depth’ We have then a presentist ontology in which there are both present things and pasttense properties that are irreducible to anything present, in which, as Bigelow nicely puts it (1996:47), present things ‘are burdened with a certain sort of past’. It must seem that one main advantage of this theory is that it depicts the present as having a remarkable temporal depth that is alien, for instance, to a theory like Dummett’s.12 Additionally, we now have the idea of certain of these present things acquiring ‘more properties and histories’ as time goes on, so that, as again Bigelow nicely puts it ‘there is a sense in which the past can never be lost since the world will always be one with the properties of having been thus and so’. Indeed there is no reason why this (past-tensed) presentist could not accept, in a manner that even a historian like Carlyle could applaud, that certain past-tensed properties, now transferred to other bearers, might have necessarily gone unappreciated by anyone at the time when they were presenttensed properties of people or things existing at the time, and can only now be appreciated. As Carlyle, remarking (2002, I, 2:6, and again 14) on how changed France was, and how changed Louis also, at that moment in 1774 when he lay dying, continues: [changed] . . . further than thou yet seest! – To the eye of History many things, in that sick-room of Louis, are now visible, which to the Courtiers there present were invisible. For it is well said, ‘in every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing’.

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This is all very well, an objector will comment, seeking now to reveal the drawback behind the apparent advantage, but didn’t we turn away from tenseless to tensed theories, first considering presentism, in the hope of importing into change, as alteration in the properties of a continuing entity, that element of discontinuity from temporal passage, which might restore its dynamism. Now certainly presentists introduce into this third notion of change just that measure of discontinuity which enables them to dissolve the problem of an entity’s having contradictory properties. They maintain, as we saw, that one of these properties is past tensed, and that no past-tensed property exists (existence being an attribute only of present things). But surely, the objection will be pressed, the claim that the past-tensed property no longer exists carries quite deliberately, and brutally, with it the idea that this property is genuinely lost to the entity undergoing change: that was precisely how dynamism was restored. But somehow presentists, like Bigelow, all the while that they are insisting that the past is lost, smuggle it in again by the back door, and even grant it a kind of permanence surely incompatible with taking seriously temporal passage. It may be retorted: we cannot have it both ways: there cannot be deleted from the notion of temporal passage, inherently dynamic as it is, all representation of movement, or hence of movement from and to. These presentists want us to realize that to deny existence to the past, on the grounds that only present things exist, is no big deal since it does not involve reducing the past to the present. Past times do not, as one presentist puts it, ‘plain exist’, but they did exist in all their colour and determinateness: they are not mere constructions, as Dummett’s are, out of the present. From a totally different quarter comes the accusation that past-tensed properties, in ‘pointing beyond’ how things are to a primitive and unanalysed notion of how they were, which was touted above as an advantage, in fact renders these properties ‘suspect’. This objection loses some force when we recognize that it comes from, among other sources, a faction within presentism, which opposes quite generally ‘hypothetical’ properties. Past-tensed properties are simply, for this faction (see Sider, 2001:39–41 and Crisp, 2007:121–2), among the offending properties. Those properties, other than past-tensed ones, which they dismiss as hypothetical, are either dispositional, such as that possessed by this glass now, namely that it would shatter were it dropped, or counterfactual, or modal, ones. To oppose this faction by maintaining, among other things, that we just see a glass’s fragility, and do not need to reduce it, in order to understand it, to relevant structural properties, physical make-up, etc., takes us beyond our brief here (but will be considered further in chapter 5). We can say already that the fact that some practitioners have chosen to embrace a form of presentism because of their more general convictions does not require the theory itself to be shackled to these views, especially as it would mean stripping it of that very temporal depth which is such an attractive feature. We have a sense that the past, to use Balzac’s phrase, has its ‘crevasses and spaces’ which our increasing historical knowledge merely ‘rushes like water to fill’. Presentism – remarkably given its claim that only the present exists – manages to do justice to this sense of a hinterland.

(b) Lucretius’s ‘shifting bearer’ A second advantage of presentism – which, as we shall see in a moment, also has an underside of difficulty – springs from its characteristic attempt, just described, to capture

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temporal passage within the burgeoning histories with which a few existents are eventually ‘burdened’. For in this way it appears to avoid the difficulty that events (to take Prior’s example) the death of Queen Anne, can go on ‘changing’, bizarrely, after they are over since they get more and more past. When Lucretius insisted on there having to be present bearers for past events and properties, his concern was not so much with the question how there can be truths about events that are no longer taking place, that do not exist because they are past. He was concerned with how there can be truths about any event or property, present or past. This was because, for him, these events and properties have as he described it no per se existence, no existence in themselves. For him, the only per se existents were matter and void: these were the only substances. Events and properties were mere ‘accidents’ of matter and space, and dependent for their existence on these substances. So it is that, for Lucretius, even when an event is actually taking place it needs a bearer. Both poet and philosopher, he writes (quoted by Bigelow, 1996:45): If there had been no matter or space or place in which things could happen, no spark of love kindled by the beauty of Tyndareus’ daughter would ever have stolen into the breast of Phrygian Paris to light that dazzling blaze of pitiless war; no Wooden Horse, unmarked by the sons of Troy, would have set the towers of Ilium aflame through the midnight issue of Greeks from its womb. So you may see that events cannot be said to be by themselves like matter or in the same sense as space. Rather, you should describe them as accidents of matter, of the place in which things happen.

Perhaps it was a reading of Lucretius that persuaded Prior, who was originally so exercised by the absurdity of changes apparently still occurring to events long since over, to become a presentist, and so argue that it is not events that undergo change, but, as our third notion has it, entities, and only entities, that do so. Nevertheless, this Lucretian method by which the apparent restoration of the past is accomplished while its non-existence is declared, leaves difficult, unanswered, questions: for instance, to adhere to Lucretius’s terminology, is there any limit on the number of properties and histories that, say, a tract of earth could acquire? When there is nothing left of the earth itself but scattered atoms, can these scattered atoms be bearers in the required sense, or will the truths in question then at last disappear? A.N. Prior (1968: particularly 12–13), although having recourse to Lucretius’s shifting bearer, tellingly does not let it do all, or even the principal part, of the work of explanation, but invokes the idea of ‘general facts’. Admitting that facts, such as that Queen Anne reigned over England, has been dead for many years etc., are not strictly facts about Queen Anne, he suggests that they might best be thought of as ‘general’, rather than ‘individual’, facts. He gives as an example of a general fact ‘That someone has stolen my pencil’, and of an individual fact ‘That John Jones has stolen my pencil’. He explains that the general fact does not have to assume, as the individual one does, that there is any specific individual with respect to whom I allege, or believe, that he stole my pencil. However, at the same time, Prior supplements his appeal to general facts with a version of Lucretian transference. He writes that ‘if [the fact that Queen Anne reigned over England] is about anything [individual], what it is about . . . is the

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earth maybe, which has rolled around the sun so many times since there was a person who was called “Anne”, reigned over England etc. ’ . He then amalgamates the two solutions by invoking the idea of a part general, part individual, fact. Thus he proposes that a fact such as that Queen Anne reigned over England might be considered irreducibly general, as far as the dead queen is concerned (since, as he puts it, ‘there is not now anyone of whom it was the case that she was called “Anne” etc.’) and individual in so far as it concerns the earth. Finally, and somewhat inconsistently, he canvases the possibility of ‘irreducibly wholly general facts’ – which would dispense with allusion to the earth as present bearer.

(iii) Objections to presentism Together with these uncertainties surrounding the Lucretian solution, which Prior, it would seem, never really resolves, there are two key objections to presentism which are already easily formulable on the basis of our delineation so far. The first can be posed as a sceptical question. Doesn’t the presentist have to concede that if, as is claimed, the pasttensed statement continues to be true even when all present evidence is absent (there are no relevant photographs, or memories, no nearby source of heat, the candle is not presently soft, and suppose that not every candle necessarily starts out straight), there must be something in the past making it true. Thus the objector puts their finger upon the paradox that presentists apparently unflinchingly embrace when they insist on being, in some sense, realists about the past, yet resolutely deny its existence. The second objection is that having been straight just is, it will seem, and contrary to what presentists claim, more like being straight than not being straight. Moreover, suppose having been, and being, straight, far from representing differently tensed equivalents, are actually unrelated. This surely undermines our earlier suggestion that a past-tensed predicate of a present existent might once have been a present-tensed predicate of a past existent, from which the predicate has been transferred. Again, consider memory: surely it only makes sense to say I am nostalgic for how something used to be – the lawn having once been neatly cut whereas now it is overgrown – if having been neatly cut is more like being neatly cut than not being neatly cut (as is the lawn’s present state). Could one suggest perhaps that for a lawn to have been neatly cut in the past stands to its being neatly cut now as a lawn being neatly cut in a fiction stands to a lawn being neatly cut in fact? But to this it will be objected that, for presentists, there is only one lawn and that is real enough: the present lawn, without which talk of its past history would be illegitimate, whereas there are posited in the other case two lawns one fictional, one real. These objections, if no others, seem sufficiently troubling for us to consider whether a less extreme non-presentist theory might serve as well, and without the invocation of Lucretius, to capture the dynamical aspect of change.

(iv) Non-presentist tensed theories: two proposals Non-presentists deny that only the present exists, holding that the past exists also, and only excluding the future. Some commentators say that it is precisely their denial of the

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future’s existence which marks them out from tenseless theorists. (The difference is often rendered metaphorically in terms of a ‘growing block’ in contrast to the static fourdimensional block associated with eternalism.13) But if the past, for them, exists how, it will immediately be inquired, can they satisfy that requirement of change according to which it must be the same candle which is, as in our example, both straight and bent? They cannot after all avail themselves of that element of discontinuity that presentists exploit by denying that the past exists. For surely the candle’s straightness, although past, continues, on their account, to exist in some sense, alongside it’s (present) bentness. We can discern two different proposals as to how the problem might be solved. Occasionally both are canvassed by the same author (see Lowe below), although then neither is more than gestured at, nor is any attempt made to relate them. Non-presentists on the first proposal, for instance, Lowe’s, will remind us that they are precisely tensed theorists. For them, the difference between past and present is not, as for tenseless theorists, just a matter of relative position in a linear succession – a continuum so to speak – of times: rather we are talking about distinct and incommensurable modes of existence. The other proposal does not obviously exploit tense. This is perhaps because it has been imported from that area of inquiry – that into the nature of identity – which, as I remarked earlier, has largely gone on in isolation from tense theory which is specifically concerned with the problems of incorporating the discontinuity of temporal passage into an account of change as alteration. According to the aptly named ‘sortalists’, we typically identify objects under recognizable kinds – tree, boat, human being – each of which is associated with a characteristic sequence of changes, such that the object can undergo these changes, without ceasing to fall under the kind in question – that is without ceasing to be a boat, or a tree or a human being. Nevertheless coming into being and passing away have their place in this account also. Only they are not predicated any longer of anonymous moments, or instances, of constantly fleeting time, but of these very objects to the extent that they first exemplify, and then cease to exemplify (by changing beyond the stipulated limit) the given kind. I shall, in the next chapter, as indicated at the outset, develop in detail, and assess, this second type of solution, and finally ask whether non-presentism is in general ultimately as intellectually satisfying as presentism – capable in the version we elaborated, of what we called a remarkable temporal depth. Here I shall say a little more about the first solution.

(a) Lowe: past and present as irreducibly tensed modes of existence Lowe (1998), while resisting the presentists’ rejection of the past’s existence, sets out to show how an element of discontinuity can be incorporated, without incurring a contradiction, into the notion of change, as alteration in the properties of an enduring entity. Now it may seem somewhat paradoxical that we cannot without more ado express this rejection of presentism positively by ascribing to Lowe the view that the past exists, along with the present. This would give the wrong impression on two counts. Firstly, it assumes that we can talk about existence in time in a temporally unqualified way, and secondly, it suggests that the past does not differ from the present in the kind of existence that it enjoys. For Lowe, however, and with regard to the first point, past things exist only in a ‘tensed way’ (1998:58), or in ‘tensed mode’ (50). Moreover, he

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makes it clear that this temporal qualification is not meant to single out past from present existence as in some way lesser or inferior. He writes (51), ‘What it is for something to exist in time is for that thing to be a subject of tensed predications – for it to have had, or to have now, or to be going to have some property.’ Thus even present existence is, for him, irreducibly tensed. Indeed, Lowe criticizes (49) presentism, as a theory which, with its ‘implicit denial of the “reality” of the past and future . . . show[s] a quite unjustified favouritism toward the present’. This impression is further reinforced by his remark that ‘all the tenses are on an equal footing’. Nevertheless – we turn to the second count – he maintains that, despite their equal ‘status in logical grammar’, past, present and future are – and here (57) he contrasts his view with that of eternalists – ‘ontologically distinct’. In such nuanced remarks, Lowe is attempting then to steer a course between the Scylla of presentism, according to which the past is non-existent, and the Charybdis of eternalism where it enjoys, equally with the present, an untensed existence, an existence, as Lowe (58) puts it, ‘simpliciter’. But it will be queried: is there such a middle course? If the past exists in any sense, how can Lowe, and other non-presentist tensed theorists both acknowledge that discontinuity which they claim change necessarily involves, and avoid contradiction? The tensed theorists, in replying, will seek to disabuse the questioner of the spatial analogy which they will allege lies behind the question. The difference, they will say, between past and present is not for us a matter of relative position in a linear succession – in a continuum so to speak – of times, which can therefore be said (like points on a line) to co-exist. We do not, that is to say, allow our use of ‘predicate modifiers’ (as Lowe calls such expressions as ‘yesterday’, ‘last year’) to lead us to reify the past as a queer kind of realm, stretching out behind the present. Our talk is only of distinct, and incommensurable, modes of existence, and this by no means commits us to such a picture, or hence incurs the stated dilemma. In countering the idea that past and present co-exist, Lowe does not leave it at that, but goes on to explain that the past does not exist when the present exists. This may seem just to play into the hands of the eternalists who, seizing upon it, will comment: ‘if the past ceases to exist (in its way) when the present comes into existence (in its way), doesn’t this entail that when the past existed the present did not exist? But then how, after all, can these tensed theorists avoid, even if they claim to eschew the linear model, thinking of the entity undergoing change as splitting into separate temporal parts, of which one – the past one – goes out of existence when the other – the present one – comes into existence? After all, these eternalists will explain, even we do not hold that past and present exist at the same time: that is precisely reflected in our notion of temporal parts – parts which exist at different times. It is therefore, they will conclude, not true to say that, for the tensed theorists, the dilemma does not arise. Rather they have implicitly gone along with the eternalist solution, sacrificing in order to avoid contradiction, the ‘proper subject condition’ for change. The tensed theorists will of course fiercely rebuff this suggestion, seeing it as still influenced by the eternalist conception of time as a dimension in which objects are extended, analogously with the way they are extended in space. They will seek (see, for instance, Lowe, 57–8), to clarify the eternalist position so as to disentangle their own from it. According to eternalists, they will say, that distinct things exist at distinct times, say between 5 o’clock and

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6 o’clock, and between 6 o’clock and 7 o’clock, respectively, entails, not that one or other of these things fails to exist at the alternative time, but that both exist simpliciter, and so co-exist at all times. The tensed theorists will also wish to reject the accusation that they surreptitiously endorse temporal parts. Lowe writes (58): ‘to say that a presently existing object has persisted is just to say that that very object did exist in the past and still does now’ (my italics). But this statement, as it stands, seems to be no more than a protestation, unsupported by argument, that he, and other tensed theorists, do not violate the proper subject condition. Lowe has earlier (53) referred to tensed theorists as explaining the persistence of a single object through time by reference to the object’s ‘being wholly present at each moment of [its] existence’. He admitted there, however, that this tenet is really just a rejection of temporal parts theory, and in no way explains positively how such persistence is possible, compatibly with an object’s losing or gaining properties. Indeed, we might think, it makes the contradiction more blatant. For how, we shall ask, can an object go on possessing all its properties (as Leibniz requires) while losing some and gaining others? As I promised, I shall examine in depth the other non-presentist-tensed proposal, namely the ‘sortalist’ proposal, in the next chapter. Meanwhile, I return to the first question posed at the beginning of this chapter, and seek to show that truth value link realists are tensed, not tenseless, theorists, espousing like the former, an essentially dynamical model of change.

3: Truth value link realists within the tensed–tenseless spectrum (i) Truth value link realism and presentism Truth value link theorists are likely to reject presentism out of hand (although we shall later encounter the ersatz presentists who seek to show that the principle is compatible with their presentism). This rejection will extend even to those ‘deep’ presentists who, with their attribution to present existents of irreducibly past-tensed properties, will precariously seek to endorse, in some sense, the past’s ‘reality’. The crucial point for truth value link realists is of course that this supposed ‘reality’ does not, for these presentists, rescue the past from non-existence. By contrast, for truth value link theorists, it is the existence in the past of a relevant set of conditions which makes true (and meaningful) a statement such as ‘the candle was straight’, uttered now. It will not do to reply that to say that these conditions exist in the past is to speak loosely, and that what is really meant is that they existed, but do not any longer, which presentists could endorse. For, according to truth value link theorists, having existed is still a mode of existence, not of non-existence. The past-tensed statement, ‘The candle was straight’, uttered now, can be translated, according to them, into the present-tensed statement, ‘The candle is straight’, thought of as uttered at the relevant past time. This equivalence is due, as we saw in the last two chapters, to the fact that the past-tensed statement (uttered now) owes its truth, and meaning, to one and the same, or numerically the same, set of conditions as the present-tensed statement (uttered in the past). It is not only therefore that the whole structure of justification of a past-tensed statement, uttered now, is alien to presentists in that it rests on a correspondence between this past-tensed

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statement now and its truth maker in the past. It is also that truth value link theorists model a candle’s past straightness – the condition of its having been straight – on what it would be like for it to be straight at present, on how the candle would appear to someone witnessing its being straight now. But the presentists considered so far are adamant that for the candle to have been straight is no more like what it is for it to be straight now, than for it not to be straight. If truth value link realists are tensed theorists, then, they belong to the non-presentist variety. But how can we establish that they are tensed theorists? By contrast with presentists, and in common with non-presentists, truth value link realists, we know, hold that the past exists. The question is whether this existence is a tensed one, as it is for non-presentists, or tenseless, as eternalists hold. It is often thought to be definitive of truth value link realism that it endorses timeless truth, understood as the thesis that whatever can be truly stated at a particular time, can be truly stated at another time, with a suitable change of tense. But is timeless truth – the idea that truths are thus conserved, or held stable, across time – the same as tenseless truth? Clearly if we slip into exchanging the first epithet for the second, truth value link realism will immediately seem to be a form of eternalism, with its conjunctions of changeless facts and its repudiation of time’s transitory aspect. I shall now argue, however, that the familiar equivalences, posited by truth value link realists, between differently tensed statements, uttered at different times, cannot be taken in this way.

(ii) Truth value link realists and eternalism Tenseless theorists, such as J.J.C. Smart – we cite his early phase, and so the ‘old’, rather than the ‘new tenseless theory of time’, because the contrast to be explored is easily lost amid the latter’s qualifications and ambiguities14 – seek to eliminate tensed language, and provide tenseless equivalents. Key among tensed expressions – expressions to which temporal perspective is intrinsic – are the temporal copulae – ‘is now’, ‘was’, ‘will be’. There are also adverbial phrases such as ‘in the past’, ‘in the future’, ‘at present’, ‘long ago’, ‘five minutes ago’, ‘yesterday’, ‘today’, ‘tomorrow’, and the tensed verbs – it rained, she spoke, they will leave etc. – which they qualify. Their translation into tenseless language is in two parts. First, tensed verbs, including the temporal copulae, are rendered nontemporally. Thus ‘is now’, ‘was’ and ‘will be’ are all replaced by an ‘is’, whose sense is no different from that it would have if the subject of predication were an abstract entity. Thus if the candle is bent it is so in the same, eternal, tenseless, sense as the number 2 is even. Secondly, the notion of ‘token reflexivity’ is introduced. This puts at the heart of the new analysis a particular kind of relation: that of whether the utterance, or ‘tokening’, of a tensed statement occurs earlier than, simultaneously with, or later than the event to which it refers. It is a relation which, again, if it obtains, does so, in an eternal, tenseless, way. Thus the statement ceases to be about an event in isolation – transient because viewed from a perspective in time – and is about this relation. It is because the statement, its content and truth conditions now radically altered, makes in this way overt or explicit reference to its own utterance that the tenseless analysis is called token reflexive. Consider Smart’s seminal example (1949:492) of the boat which moves – let us say in two hours – from a position upstream from an observer on the bank, to a position

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where it is level with him, thence moving downstream. When the boat draws level, the observer can truthfully make three tensed assertions about its position. He can say: ‘The boat was upstream two hours ago.’ The translation, containing only non-temporal copulae, is: ‘The occasions on which the boat is upstream are earlier than this utterance by two hours.’ Secondly, he can state truly: ‘The boat is now level.’ This translates as: ‘The occasions on which the boat is level are simultaneous with this utterance.’ Finally, he can truly state: ‘The boat will soon be downstream.’ This is tenselessly rendered as: ‘The occasions on which the boat is downstream are a little later than this utterance.’ Why should anyone suppose that truth value link realists are eternalists who embrace tenselessness? Let us remind ourselves: according to the truth value link principle (here I apply it to Smart’s own example), ‘the boat was upstream two hours ago’, uttered now, is true if ‘the boat is upstream’, uttered two hours ago, would have been true. Is the idea then that there is a similarity between the equivalence posited here and the tenseless analyses of tensed assertions? Suppose it is replied ‘Yes’. Suppose, further, it is declared that ‘was’ – the temporal copula appearing in the first of the two statements above – is replaced in the second (to which the first is claimed to be equivalent) by a non-temporal ‘is’. And suppose it is added: this is just what happens in Smart’s tenseless transformations of tensed assertions. There are two answers that the truth value link theorists could make. The first accepts for the sake of argument the contention that tense is expunged as we move across the truth value link equation. They point out, however, that ‘is’, in Smart’s tenseless analysis of tensed statements, serves to introduce the adverbial phrase – ‘earlier than’, ‘simultaneous with’, ‘later than’ – which describes the relation between a statement’s utterance and the event to which it refers. This relation, as we saw, is imported as part of the statement’s new tenseless meaning. It follows that ‘is’, in the tenseless rendering, is either the ‘is’ of ‘is earlier than’, of ‘is simultaneous with’ or of ‘is later than’. As we saw, the ‘was’ in Smart’s original (past-) tensed statement becomes, in the tenseless analysis, specifically, ‘is earlier than’. Now certainly the ‘was’, in the first of the two statements of the truth value link equivalence, is replaced in the second by an ‘is’. But this is only appropriate because this second statement is thought of as being uttered simultaneously with the holding of its truth conditions. If we were to attempt to somehow superimpose this relation between the present-tensed statement and truth conditions on to the supposedly tenseless rendering of the past-tensed statement it would obviously be the wrong one – being one of simultaneity with rather than of being earlier than. There is no reason, however, to suppose that truth value link realists see the relation between the utterance of a tensed statement and the event it refers to as playing any such role in its meaning. The second answer rejects outright the non-temporality of the copula ‘is’, as it figures in ‘the boat is upstream’ (which in turn is the italicized part of the truth value link equivalence: ‘The boat was upstream two hours ago’ uttered now is true if ‘the boat is upstream’ uttered two hours ago would have been true’). On the contrary it has here the sense ‘is now’. Indeed if ‘now’ were reinserted, so that the statement read ‘the boat is now upstream’, the claimed equivalence between the two statements, given their different times of utterance, would only be the more accurately pinpointed. Moreover, the phrase ‘two hours ago’, which qualifies the utterance of the second statement, ‘the boat is

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upstream’, means two hours before now. It thus takes as its temporal reference point the ‘now’ which qualifies the utterance of the first statement, ‘the boat was upstream’. But, as we pointed out, ‘now’ is intrinsically perspectival in just the way tenseless theorists repudiate. In other words, the truth value link theorists’ ‘now’ escapes the clutches of the implicit ‘now’ of ‘the boat is upstream’ every time it is reiterated anew that ‘the boat was upstream’, whether that is, two hours on from when it would have been true to say ‘the boat is upstream’, or three hours, or more. Tense is thus not expunged as we move across the truth value link equation. Admittedly writers seeking to explain, on behalf of truth value link theorists, how we come to grasp the meaning of past-tensed statements, given that we are in direct contact only with the present, suggest (as we saw in the last chapter) that this meaning is derived by projection from present-tensed statements. They thus accord a certain priority to the latter. But such epistemological considerations only cloud the issue here, which is simply the retention by tensed statements of their truth value across time. That ‘the boat was upstream’ and ‘the boat is upstream’, given their varying times of utterance, have the same truth value is due to their sharing identical truth conditions. But there is nothing to suggest that truth value link theorists regard the present-tensed statement, in being uttered at the very time these truth conditions obtained, as somehow more valid than its past tensed equivalent. For, since the past-tensed statement is said to be uttered ‘now’, these truth conditions already, from this temporal perspective, exist in the past. They have therefore only that existence which past things have – in other words a tensed existence, although a differently tensed one from present things and events. So disparate seem the aims, on the one hand, of tenseless theorists, attempting to render, tenselessly, tensed assertions, and those on the other of truth value link realists, trying to ensure that tensed statements retain their truth value across time, that it is difficult even to relate them intelligibly. Perhaps, though, we could, if rather messily, bring out the contrast like this. It is because Smart’s three original assertions, although uttered on the same occasion (when the boat is level), differ in tense, that they can be used to chart the different positions of the boat as it moves from upstream, past the observer, and on downstream. Each assertion has thus a correspondingly different content and different truth conditions from the others. Nor are their tenseless counterparts meant to convey less varied information. Of course, their content, and truth conditions, have been altered so as to foreground a particular kind of relation – either that of being earlier than, simultaneous with or later than – between each utterance and the event to which it refers. Turning to the two assertions that truth value link theorists hold to be equivalent, their difference in tense, given that they are uttered on different occasions, ensures, quite contrarily, that they describe one and the same event: the boat’s being upstream. They thus have the same content and the same truth conditions. In this way, truth is seen to be preserved across time. No account is offered (or seems even to be entertained) of how the difference in tense might be rendered tenselessly.

(iii) Truth value link realism and non-presentist-tensed theory This is all very well, it will be said, but if the truth value link realists are not eternalists, propounding a tenseless view of truth and time, then they must be tensed theorists of

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one of two types: presentists or non-presentists. We have already seen that they cannot be presentists. But surely non-presentists do not concern themselves with the question of how statements can retain their truth value across time. Isn’t this concern definitive of truth value link theorists? Haven’t we left them stranded, in a no-man’s-land? I shall finally argue that it is a misunderstanding of any but the crudest non-presentists that they look with equanimity on the idea that tensed statements have time variant truth values, and do not seek to remedy this, just as truth value link theorists do. Certainly if tensed theorists neglected to consider, in determining its truth value, the time of utterance of a statement, such as ‘the boat is now level’, and simply looked to see whether, when they themselves are entertaining it, the boat is level, they would diverge from truth value link theorists. For this present-tensed statement will sometimes be true and sometimes false. If the boat was level two hours ago, the present-tensed statement would have been true two hours ago, while if the boat is no longer level now, it is false now, and if the boat draws level again in two hours, the statement will again become true. Time variant truth values – bewildering as they are – would thus be countenanced. It hardly takes a philosopher, though, to see that, unless one is told the time a tensed statement is uttered, or put again which utterance of the claim ‘the boat is level now’ is to be considered – an utterance now, or two hours ago, or in two hours’ time – one cannot fix once and for all the statement’s truth value. But tensed theorists today are perfectly aware of this. They themselves insist – reflecting after all ordinary intuition – that information about when a statement is uttered must be fed into the determination of its truth value. It is going too far, however (as we have seen with truth value link realism), to suggest that just because tensed theorists insist on knowing the time of utterance of the tensed statement in order to ascertain its truth value, they embrace, like tenseless theorists, token reflexivity – only qualified as ‘mixed’ because they retain tensed expressions. It is going too far, if one defines a token reflexive analysis, as Smart does, as one in which the statement, or token, is held to make explicit or tacit reference to its own utterance. It is also going too far even if one says, talking about tensed theorists, that the statement’s truth conditions include the relation (earlier than, simultaneous with, later than) between its utterance and the event it refers to. To say that you can’t establish whether the statement ‘the boat is level now’ is true or false until you know whether you are to consider the boat’s position now, or two hours ago, or in two hours’ time, and you can only know that when you know the time of the statement’s utterance, seems no more than ordinary common sense. The idea that one is thereby introducing the relation between this utterance and the boat being level – a relation claimed to hold eternally – into the statement’s truth conditions goes well beyond anything that one has here to be entertaining. Apart from anything else, such token reflexivity in this context seems to lead to absurdity. Suppose we take it (as is surely reasonable) that tensed theorists would wish, like truth value link realists, to endorse our ordinary understanding of tense, in holding that ‘the boat was level two hours ago’ said in two hours’ time has the same truth conditions as ‘The boat is level now’ said now. Evidently, on the token reflexive analysis, the truth conditions of the past-tensed statement, envisaged as being uttered in two hours’ time, will include the relation of being two hours earlier, that will then hold between the boat’s being level and this future utterance. But how can this future relation also be part of the truth conditions of the present-tensed statement, uttered now?

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To suggest that non-presentists embrace a ‘token-reflexive’ analysis of tensed statements would seem to be a misconstrual, just as it was, we suggested, when applied to truth value link realists. This appears to be so even when the analysis is qualified as ‘mixed’.15 Nevertheless non-presentists and truth value link realists share in common the desire to stabilize the truth value of tensed statements across time by drawing attention to when they are uttered. Equally, there seems no reason to doubt that they would also share that ordinary understanding of tense which expresses itself in the truth value link equivalences we have discussed. I conclude that these convergences are sufficiently marked to justify describing truth value link realism as a form of nonpresentist tensed theory. If I am right, they can be taken to embrace, just like any other tensed theorists, a dynamic notion of change. They will do so, moreover, without relinquishing their claim that the past is real, or indeed that it exists, although its existence will be an appropriately tensed one. Here of course truth value link realists diverge, like other non-presentists, from those other tensed theorists: the presentists who deny existence to the past altogether.

(iv) Dummett’s charge regarding ‘living in time’ rejected I have not tried to hide the unresolved difficulties that beset non-presentists in embracing a dynamical model of change, while granting to the past that (admittedly tensed) existence which they hope will make it possible for tensed statements to have timeinvariant truth values. (I have suggested indeed that presentism is the more intellectually, and perhaps also emotionally, satisfying – a suggestion which I shall build upon dramatically later in the book.) Clearly these difficulties will spread to truth value link realists in so far as they are themselves correctly described as non-presentists. Crucial here, however, is our general conclusion that truth value link realists belong in the tensed, rather than in the tenseless, camp. Returning now to Dummett’s attack on them, it was only, I observed earlier, by making the assumption that we are immured in the present that he was able (by splitting the original formulation from its reinterpretation) to defuse the power of the truth value link. I asked therefore whether he had any independent argument for his opposition. All that could be found were remarks – no less potentially damaging for their seeming to be casual and throwaway – to the effect that truth value link realists embrace an eternalism, according to which change is no more than a subjective distortion of viewpoint, and which fails absolutely to recognize that we live in time. We have shown that such remarks are unjustified. They cannot be used therefore to provide an independent means of discrediting his opponents, and so far the unemasculated truth value link must still be held to retain its power (although, as we shall see in due course, this will prove to be at best an interim conclusion). It is finally interesting to compare Dummett’s description of truth value link realists, holding (1978:370) that ‘the past still exists as past, just as it was when present’,16 and McDowell’s of them holding that ‘the past is dead and gone’ (1978:132) with our own findings. It might seem that Dummett is on the right track when he qualifies the past as, for them, ‘still exist[ing] as past’ (my italics). This, after all, could suggest that the past has just that tensed existence which we have seen is attributed to it by truth value link realists and non-presentists. However, when he adds ‘just as it was when present’,

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this betrays his confusion. For, as we saw, past-tensed existence is considered to be quite unlike, and indeed irreducible to, present-tensed existence. McDowell’s description on the other hand of the past as, on their view, ‘dead and gone’ suggests something, at least at first sight, too close to the presentists’ dismissal of the past as a nonentity to be compatible with the granting to it, as we have suggested truth value link realists and other non-presentists do, of a distinctive tensed existence. Of course McDowell’s talk here is somewhat rhetorical, certainly metaphorical. But it is not clear that even presentists – at least deep presentists – would concur with his description if it meant that irreducibly past-tensed properties could not meaningfully be attributed to present things. Consider again Carlyle: there is an early passage (2002: I, 2, 8), in which he reflects, Shakespeare-like, upon the passing of men. He writes that even momentous individuals – ‘the Merovingian Kings on their bullock carts . . . Charlemagne . . . with truncheon grounded . . . Pepin [with his] eye of menace . . . Rollo and his shaggy Northmen . . . shrill Fredegonda, shrill Brunhilda with their hot lifescold’ are now ‘. . . gone into Night . . . all gone; sunk, – down, down, with the tumult they made’. But he balances this account of apparent loss and waste, so that it is not just an expression of, as we might put it, the vanity of all things, by pointing – as we might imagine a deep presentist would do – to present things – the edifices, the cathedrals, the towers, ‘long-lasting grim with a thousand years’, as well as to ‘beliefs’ and ‘creeds’ and ‘Ideals’ and ‘Laws’, and ‘Cities’, in which this past has (for the historian) culminated, and irreducibly inheres. Thus he can conclude, ‘Call not the Past Time, with all its confused wretchedness, a lost one.’ In the next chapter, we shall discuss the second – powerful – solution offered by non-presentist tensed theorists to the difficulties encountered, in embracing, against the background of Leibniz’s Principle of the Indiscernibility of Identicals, both the partial stability of objects over time and a dynamical notion of change. It is to this camp, we have argued, truth value link realists are ultimately best assigned.

4

Caught in a Timeless Leibnizian Net

Realists about the past, relying on the truth value link, far from being (as Dummett alleged) eternalists are, I have argued, tensed theorists, of a non-presentist variety. As such, they are much better placed, I have suggested, to do justice to the dynamical elements in the notions of time and change than tenseless theorists. This should not surprise us. Of course, truth value link realists hold that an event must have occurred in the past for the statement that it did occur to be true, and that such a statement, once true, is always true: it can never again be the case, however far into the future we project ourselves, that the event has not occurred. However, it does not follow that they therefore treat time and change as mere illusions of our perspectival viewpoint. For events, I have suggested, can neither be said to change or not to change,1 rather they ‘occur’, or ‘recur’. It is entities that change: icons and tomb paintings, humble objects such as ships, shoes and tables, and living organisms, such as trees, human beings and caterpillars. Non-presentists, however, on the one hand dismissing the presentist denial that the past exists, yet on the other repudiating sheer flux,2 have to explain how that partial stability of objects over time is possible which is not merely compatible with, but necessary for, dynamical change. What they must tell us is how these changing objects maintain their identity across time – their diachronic identity as it is sometimes called. But this latter notion brings many difficulties in its train. How, if at all does it differ from the ordinary synchronic notion, inextricably bound up as this is with Leibniz’s Principle of the Indiscernibility of Identicals? Must it not differ, if it is to incorporate the requisite discontinuity, yet how far can it do so without ceasing altogether to be identity? In the last chapter I briefly described, and criticized, one main type of nonpresentist-tensed solution, that associated with E. J. Lowe, which stressed the ontological incommensurability of past and present modes of existence. I shall devote the latter half of this chapter to another such account, that of David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance Renewed, 2004), which, although usually taken as a contribution to the debate on identity and individuation is here chiefly interpreted as a contribution to tense theory. In attempting a reconciliation with Leibniz, Wiggins argues, as I indicated earlier, that change is necessarily of entities falling under kinds, with each kind associated with a set of ‘persistence and survival conditions’ for entities of that kind. These conditions stipulate which properties, being essential to an entity of the given kind, cannot be lost without its destruction, and which, being inessential to it, can be lost, and yet the entity survive.

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Now even granting that such persistence and survival conditions enter, as Wiggins (2004) claims, into our common ways of talking, a moment’s reflection will leave us puzzled as to how appeal to them can be any help in reconciling change with Leibniz’s Law. To see the difficulty, consider a lump of bronze which is all that remains of a statue after a fire. Unlike the statue, whose persistence and survival conditions, stipulating that shape must be preserved, exclude its surviving the fire, and hence accord with Leibniz’s Law, the lump of bronze, whose persistence and survival conditions include no such requirement, does survive. But then invoking the relevant persistence and survival conditions for an entity of such a kind, in such circumstances, far from reconciling change to Leibniz’s Law, may seem to set us on a confrontation course with it. For the Law entails that there are no properties whose loss (or gain) such an entity – any entity – can survive. Two broad approaches can be taken in seeking to avoid this collision. It can be maintained that no entity, falling under a kind, really does possess properties not included in its essence: the properties whose loss one had first thought the entity could survive, it could not really do so – or if it did survive them, they could not properly be its properties. There are different versions of this response. The two most notable diverge in drawing their insights from different sources, in the one case from everyday, and in the other, from scientific, discourse. The second approach, of which the most notable proponent is Wiggins (2004), is to argue that the persistence and survival conditions for kinds, on the one hand, and Leibniz’s Law on the other, have different areas of jurisdiction, or more colloquially different ‘remits’, and hence do not compete, or come into conflict, when applied in reaching an identity judgement. At least four different strategies fall within this broad approach. It is important to situate Wiggins’ proposal against the larger background, and hence, before turning to it, I consider, and reject, the first approach in both versions

1: Property and essence (i) ‘All an entity’s properties are essential’: the argument from everyday discourse Considering first our everyday discourse about ordinary things, there seems little chance of establishing the thesis that all an entity’s properties are either essential or do not belong to it. Consider a boat (I use the example of an artefact, but I could have taken a natural organism). It has a number of essential parts – those without which, we recognize, it could not be the kind of thing it is, viz. a seagoing vessel. Thus it is possessed of (or has the property of possessing) a hull, a keel, to which frames are fixed, a rudder and tillers which are structurally related in such a way as to enable it to fulfil its characteristic function. But these do not exhaust its properties. Imagine that it is painted green, and some of its planks are warped and its masts splintered. We could scarcely sensibly hold that it did not survive being painted yellow or having a mast and some planks replaced. Nor on the other hand does it seem plausible to suggest that being yellow, or possessed of the new mast, are not properties of the boat at all.

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It may be replied: the thesis that all an entity’s properties are essential properties may not hold with ordinary artefacts, but surely it does with that special type of artefact, a work of art. Do we not take any change in the pictorial surface of a great painting as potentially compromising its identity? As we observed, one could replace the masts of an actual boat without its ceasing to be the very same boat, but one could not fiddle in a radical way with the masts of the SS 152 depicted in Christopher Wood’s 1927 pencil drawing of that name, without its ceasing to be in the full sense that drawing. Again consider Whistler’s iconic 1871 portrait in the Musée D’Orsay, Paris: Arrangement in Grey and Black: the Artist’s Mother. We judge that, with its great subtleties and fine distinctions of colour and line, it is so to speak, balanced on a knife edge, so that the slightest alteration made to these lines and colours would constitute a disturbance, potentially dispelling its magic and undermining its integrity as the work it is. But it is not only when we regard a pictorial detail as a consummate expression of the artist’s skills that we are likely to condemn its being touched up as damaging its artistic unity. It has been remarked of Walter Sickert’s 1911 Nude on a Bed: Mornington Crescent that the subject lacks a chin. Sickert seems not to have drawn it in. But it would be naïve and misguided to suppose that this – seeming ‘defect’ – could simply be rectified by someone without more ado picking up a piece of charcoal and ‘completing’ the picture. These attitudes, it may be added, explain more generally why restoration, even undertaken with the best of intentions, as opposed to the clumsy gratuitous interferences we have just mentioned, is only allowed to proceed, if at all, conservatively. Actual replacement of paint, where it has been lost, and filling and repainting to recreate the missing parts of an image, is regarded with the gravest suspicion. Often indeed restoration is concerned with undoing such effects. If a painting is varnished, an attempt will be made to establish whether this was done by the artist or by later – possibly anonymous – hands. If the latter, the varnish will typically be removed on grounds that far from preserving the painting, the varnish only ‘diminish[es its] essential qualities’, or again ‘compromise[s] the essential aesthetic [of the work]’.3 Our differing attitudes to works of art and to more commonplace objects, such as boats, it might be explained, has to do with our regarding the former as ends in themselves rather than, like the latter, as means to an end, to which material continuity is largely irrelevant. But it is also positively advantageous to aesthetic experience that the work before the viewers should remain exactly as it was when the artist put down his paintbrush as this links them with the white hot act of creation itself. Although the first part of this explanation is unexceptionable, the second makes an assumption which cannot in practice be sustained, namely that a painting becomes the unique work it is at the moment of completion by the artist, with any change thereafter undermining its artistic integrity. It leaves out of account, for instance, the fact that a painting may leave the studio or workshop with certain apparent blemishes. There may, for example, be a residue of glue on its surface, probably left over from the lining process after the paint was dry. Only if restorers are certain that it was an oversight by the artist (even if he undertook to line it himself) and hence extraneous to the work of art proper, will they seek to remove it. But then it is evident that a work of art does not, so to speak, ‘carry its identity on its sleeve’, its identity is not something which just ‘hits the eye’, but may involve interpretation by consideration of the artist’s intentions.

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Secondly, and still more crucially, it fails to acknowledge that paintings, independently of any interference by human agents, naturally age, and thereby lose some properties, and gain others. We cannot deny that these changes affect their aesthetic value but are we really to agree with Leibniz that they do not survive as those works of art at all?4 However – a point which our interlocutor may seize upon with some initial glee – it may seem that our observation about the need for interpretation, and the importance of the artist’s intentions, can assist Leibnizians here. For the effects of time are often regarded by restorers as least compromising of the integrity of a work when, in addition to the absence of outside agency, the artist is known to have accepted them, and even looked forward to them, as in some sense natural. For instance, certain cracks have been allowed to remain in Picasso’s the Demoiselles d’Avignon because Picasso embraced them in advance, not as destroying the unity of the work, but as showing that it ‘had a life of its own’, and only required that the parts of the work ‘all ag[ed] together’.3 Even supposing we allow that certain changes that a work of art may sustain over time can, because endorsed in advance by the artist, be regarded as somehow integral to the work’s identity, more expansively interpreted, we shall still want to know what to say where, as is more frequent, there is no evidence of such an endorsement by the artist. In fact restoration experts now regularly distinguish between those changes which could have been prevented from occurring – for instance, the fading of a watercolour due to exposure to too much light – and where there is a standard, and hardly onerous, method for preventing them, and those which could not have been avoided. The idea seems to be that if, say, a museum should, and could have been expected to, take certain recognized precautions to prevent damage to a painting and they did not do so, this failure can be counted voluntary, a doing rather than an omission. As such, it is tantamount to the painting having suffered some deliberately inflicted damage, and undermines (pro Leibniz) its integrity. If this damage could not have been prevented the work (contra Leibniz) will survive with its identity intact. It can hardly be said therefore, even of works of art, that in any general way their identities depend (or that we take them to depend) as Leibniz’s Law stipulates, on their retaining all, or even most, of the properties that they possessed when they were first completed.5 Still it might be countered that those properties whose loss they can survive remain severely limited compared with ordinary artefacts and natural organisms. But even this argumentative gain for Leibnizians is challenged by the acceptance of the patination of certain sculptures, placed on the exterior of buildings, as actually enhancing the work’s uniqueness. Nor is this an isolated phenomenon. There are certain works of art, those that are also Ikons, where certain kinds of change are not only tolerated, not only found desirable, but actually welcomed. When, some years back, the London National Gallery borrowed a number of Ikons from Russia for one of their exhibitions, a gallery expert immediately pronounced these Ikons – some nearly a thousand years old – to be in a ‘filthy condition’. Consequently the Gallery gave them a ‘superficial cleaning’, removing the layers of grease that had accumulated over the years. When the Ikons were returned, their Russian Orthodox owners were consternated, holding that the integrity of these objects had been compromised. The Ikons indeed acquired an artistic identity when the painters had finished their work.

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But only then did they begin to acquire their much more important (for their owners) religious identity, when worshippers began to pray before them, burning oil lamps and candles for this purpose. The layers of grease formed on their surface came from the lamps and candles, and were evidence of the countless prayers said in front of them over centuries. These layers were an integral part of the Ikons’ holiness. By removing them the National Gallery cleaners had subtracted from that crucial dimension of their identity which had only gradually been achieved through the changes that time had wrought in them as objects of communal veneration.

(ii) All an entity’s properties ‘flow from’ its essence: the argument from science As we have seen, for Leibniz, no entity falling under a kind could possess properties not included in its essence; otherwise the entity could, contra Leibniz, survive changes in some of its properties. Anyone wishing to secure compatibility with his principle therefore would have to show that even properties whose loss an entity seemed at first sight to be able to survive, could not really do so. We argued above that no such demonstration was possible. Not even of works of art, we maintained, is it true that their every property is such that losing it would destroy their identity. It might now be objected that this argument is worthless: we have merely described our ordinary practices. According to these, we treat the properties of a given kind of object as belonging to one of two categories – they either belong to the object’s essence or they are independent of, and so accidental to, it. This fails to acknowledge that any property, although not part of an object’s essence, may still be a consequence of, or ‘flow from’, it in such a way that the property cannot change without incurring a corresponding change of essence. Discovering this more indirect connection, however, especially when taken to be causal, often involves protracted scientific research – and could even involve a revision in our account of the essence itself, as for instance when, in regard to the chemical elements, atomic number was substituted for atomic weight.

(a) Fine, Gorman, Copi and a preliminary example from chemistry This distinction between the properties of an object belonging to, and those ‘flowing from’ (Michael Gorman’s expression, 2005:287) its essence is by some philosophers placed within the category of essential properties. A recent example is Kit Fine (1995:56–7), who differentiates between a thing’s ‘constitutive’ and ‘consequential’ essence. But this asymmetrical dependence is sometimes characterized as a relation between essential and accidental properties. It has been argued (by Gorman 2005:281– 2, 284 who takes the relevant connection, unlike Fine, to be causal) that in so far as an object’s other properties are completely explained by its essential ones, these other properties, although accidental, can themselves be considered necessary and indispensable to the object’s existence. Consequently an object cannot survive even the loss of such accidents. He suggests that just such an explanatory link exists between hydrogen’s atomic number and its proneness to chemically bond: if it were no longer prone to chemical bonding it couldn’t be hydrogen.

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Gorman (2005:288) allows that an entity might, or might not, have such ‘necessary’ accidental properties. Other writers, such as Irving Copi (1954), although firm believers in scientific progress, are willing to countenance not merely one type of distinction between essential and accidental properties (where accidental is understood in the ordinary contingent sense), but a whole host, relative to the different fields of inquiry and discourse. They look forward to a time, however, when ‘as sciences become more unified, no properties of a thing will be wholly accidental . . . and all will be derivable from the real essence’ (Copi, 1954:718), so that if a property is not so derivable, it will follow that it is not really a property of the thing. We already have, they might say, a precedent for reassignment in these circumstances. Certain precious gems have been discovered to owe their distinctive colours to slight impurities in the elements of which they are composed. The purple of amethyst is due to tiny quantities of iron in quartz, while the pink of rose quartz to traces of titanium. Ruby and sapphire are both, by chemical composition, coriandum which is red when it has slight chromium impurities, and blue when it contains traces of iron or titanium. Clearly if these traces were removed, samples of the mineral would become colourless. But neither the presence nor absence of such traces affects its basic composition. Hence the samples would have become colourless while still being coriandum. But then the ‘distinctive’ colours of such samples – the red of rubies, and the blue of sapphires – are not properties of their compositional mineral.

(b) The scientific pessimism behind Locke’s distinction between real and nominal essences At first sight proponents of this scientifically minded approach might seem to include no less a figure than Locke. For Locke tells us (1961: Bk.3, Ch.6, sect.6) that on ‘[the] real constitution of anything’ depends those other sensible properties from which our abstract idea of the object, which is its ‘nominal essence’, derives. In the following passage he states this dependence, reminding us as well that whatever is essential to an object is so because of the kind of thing it is: Supposing the nominal essence of gold to be body of such a peculiar colour, and weight, with malleability and fusibility, the real essence is that constitution of the parts of matter on which these qualities and their union depend, and is also the foundation of its solubility in aqua regia, and other properties accompanying that complex idea.

Given the existence of such a connection between ‘real’ and ‘nominal’ essence, it would seem to follow that any change in the latter – even as Locke affirms in colour – will alter the real essence, and so the object, as Leibniz requires, will cease to exist. It soon becomes clear that when Locke states that the nominal essence of gold lies in its colour, malleability and fusibility, and even when he tells us that this nominal essence depends on a real essence, he has nothing like the perspicuous scientific model in mind that we outlined above, and which points to the dependence of various properties of an element on atomic number. Locke’s nominal essence does not stand to

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real essence as these properties do (on the recent model) to an element’s atomic number, even though he speculates somewhat misleadingly that there are resemblances out there, in reality, to which nominal essences may correspond. For him, the real essence being ‘the constitution of [an object’s] insensible parts’ (my italics) is unknowable. The direction of influence is, for him, from nominal to real essences rather than vice versa and is epistemological rather than ontological. That is to say, there is nothing out there that dictates that we divide up reality in certain ways rather than others, no sacrosanct natural boundaries between different kinds of thing, independent of our concepts: reality is infinitely divisible. It is we who take the initiative by, so to speak, bundling together the ideas we derive from the sensible properties of our experience, into different parcels, taking only what is in common and leaving out what is peculiar, to form the nominal essences of different sorts or species. Moreover, as we might not immediately hit on the most material differences and agreements between objects, the way that nominal essences divide up kinds is for Locke always provisional. Because ‘the terms of our common discourse have for the most part received their birth and signification from ignorant and illiterate people’ they are typically ‘confused’, even though they may ‘yet serve pretty well the market and the wake.’ For Locke (Bk.3, Chp. 11, Sect.10), it is not only ‘the vulgar’ who in their haste make errors of classification, but also scientists. He remarks upon the ‘sad experience’ (Bk.3, Chpt.6, Sect. 8) of chemists seeking in vain ‘for the same qualities in one parcel of sulphur, antimony or vitriol, which they have found in others’.

(c) Opposing this pessimism: for and against It is hardly surprising that current upholders of the claim that all genuine properties of an object will ultimately be shown to derive from its essence – that, as Copi (1954:716) uncompromisingly puts it, ‘the essences science seeks to discover are real essences rather than nominal ones’, judge Locke too pessimistic. His views, they observe first, are driven by sceptical theoretical tenets that we are unlikely now to share: that the only objects of knowledge are ideas in our minds, and that experiment and observation yield only judgement and opinion not knowledge. Secondly, they argue, Locke was, naturally enough, influenced by the relatively rudimentary state of eighteenth century science. Of course, they will admit, scientists still make mistakes, but they correct them. Again they will remind us: chemists once took the essence of the different elements to lie in their atomic weights. Then they found that elements with similar atomic weights could vary widely in properties. The gas argon, for instance, which does not react readily with other elements nevertheless has a similar atomic weight to the very active solids lithium and sodium. They therefore concluded that the chemical properties of an element were only roughly related to its atomic weight and what really mattered was the atomic number. There are several ways that one might seek to resist the claim in hand. One is to argue that the explanatory account of essence can never be purged of its subjectivity since what is salient from an explanatory point of view is always dependent on the interests and abilities of the explainers. But this argument can be resisted (as Copi resists it) by maintaining that for one thing to explain another, in the relevant sense, is not

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merely an epistemic matter but requires a certain mind-independent relation between them. Another is to propose that their contention would entail a thorough going determinism which would undermine the very terms in which the original aspiration was couched. ‘Strict determinism’, as W. Oliver puts it (1954:727), ‘has the effect of negating the ontological reality of discrete objects, for each is seen as merely the node of an indefinite set of causal influences impinging on it from environing regions’. He continues: A discrete object, that is also a real object and not merely a provisionally selected and named set of localized qualities, or localized effects of a converging set of causal influences, must be granted a modicum of existence in its own right: that is to say an ability to survive and influence other objects.

But this argument is conducted at a level of abstraction and generality that makes it difficult to assess. Coming from the other direction, but going further, one might simply assert, as does Van Frassen (cited by Baruch Brody, 1980:150) that ‘. . . modern science is not formulated in terms [either] of causes [or] . . . essences, and it seems doubtful that these concepts can be redefined in terms which do occur there’. This also seems too ambitious and sweeping to be easily defended. Accepting, quite contrarily, the propriety of talk, in the domain of chemistry, of the essence of an object determining its other properties, one might nevertheless hold that this talk cannot plausibly be extended to the objects of ordinary experience. Rather than pursuing this avenue, I prefer to remain within the domain of chemistry and pose a radical working question. What justification is there, if any, for the specific yet key claim, apparently an article of faith for some philosophers (see e.g. Gorman, 2005:288, Brody, 1967:445, and 1980:139– 45) – and one from which one assumes they would propose to generalize – that the other properties of an element are derivable from its atomic number or, slightly less strongly, that atomic number ‘figures fundamentally in explanations of the [element’s] possessing the other properties it does’?

(d) Why atomic number cannot explain all an entity’s other properties: hydrogen, helium, iron The atomic number of an element, according to chemists,6 is the number of protons in the nucleus of its atom, and determines what element it is. If an element changes its number of protons it is not the same element. For example, if hydrogen has more than one proton it is no longer hydrogen; if helium has more than two protons it is no longer helium. The atomic number of an element, we can therefore be confident, belongs to its essence, as philosophers would understand this term. But there is much more to an atom than the positively charged protons of its nucleus. There are also within the nucleus neutrons. These are electrically neutral particles, required to prevent the nucleus from falling apart. Their number is equal to the number of protons only in an electrically neutral atom. Different isotopes of the same element are precisely those occurrences of the element in which the atom has the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons. Secondly, there are the negatively charged, much lighter,

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electrons, which spin in a series of orbitals, or ‘energy levels’, or ‘shells’, around the nucleus, at ever greater distances from it. These shells may be filled – that is to say they have electrons in them – or empty. An atom of iron, for instance, has 26 protons and 26 electrons arranged in four shells containing 2 in the first shell, 8 in the second, 14 in the third, and 2 in the fourth. The number of electrons will only be equal, as in this example, to the number of protons in an electrically neutral atom. Different ions of the same element are precisely those occurrences of the element in which the atoms are not neutral but carry an electrical charge because they have either lost electrons, as with positively charged ions, or gained them, as with negatively charged ions. In both cases, their electrons are unequal in number to their protons. (With some metals indeed electrons are no longer tethered to their atoms, but move freely through the entire metal.) Now the number of either neutrons or electrons in an element’s atom can change, the chemists tell us, without its ceasing to be that element. Unlike the number of protons therefore, where the loss or gain of a single one destroys the original element in any form, the number of neutrons and electrons can be altered while the original element survives. An ion of iron, for instance, is still iron, although its atom has lost an electron. Neither the number nor configuration of electrons is therefore even partly constitutive of its essence. Turning from the structure of their atoms to the properties of elements, these are of two main types: chemical and physical. The first type concerns their electrical reactivity, or in other words the proneness of an element’s atoms to chemically bond either with each other or with atoms of other elements. This accounts for such everyday features of an element as, for instance, its resistance to tarnishing. Now whether an element is reactive or inert is, chemists inform us, determined by its valence electrons – the electrons in the outermost, or valence, shell of its atom. It is a function, first, of how many electrons there are in this last, high energy, shell. If, for instance, there are eight valence electrons, the orbital is already full and the atom will not need to lose or gain electrons in order to achieve stability, and is therefore inert (as are the ‘noble gases’). Reactivity is secondly a function of the extent to which the protons in the nucleus are screened from these valence electrons by electrons in the intermediate shells, and also of whether an electron is alone in an orbit or one of a pair. It is, we saw earlier, this proneness to chemically bond which is typically cited by philosophers as showing that even those properties of an element which do not belong to its essence, still derive from it. Now they agree with the chemists that atomic number constitutes essence. They are thus obliged to claim – and do claim – that an element’s proneness to bond is derived from, or determined by, its atomic number. But our account above simply does not support this contention. The reason that an ion of iron remains iron when its atoms bond with atoms of oxygen to form molecules of the more stable iron oxide, is because its atomic number remains unchanged through the bonding process. Put again, an element can, purely in virtue of the unaltered number of protons in its nucleus – its atomic number – survive such chemical reactions. But this is hardly to say that atomic number determines these reactions. On the contrary, as we saw, it is the number and disposition of the valence electrons which determine both whether an element is prone to bond, and its actual bonding behaviour in given circumstances. But these electronic configurations, we saw, do not form part of the

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atom’s essence; that is why, although they are part of the atom, they can reconfigure without turning it into an atom of a different element. There are two ways that this conclusion might still be resisted, and an attempt made to trace back the chemical properties of an element to its atomic number. It might be suggested that the number of protons determines the number and configuration of the electrons, which then in turn determine its bonding properties. But there are as far as I can see no grounds for such a claim. That there are the same number of electrons as protons in an electrically neutral atom is not such a ground. Alternatively one might suggest that ‘atomic number’ indicates the number of electrons, as well as of protons, since these are equal in an electrically neutral atom, and then substitute ‘atomic structure’ for ‘atomic number’. One would thus be attempting to bring in, as it were by the back door, electronic configuration as part of the essence. This is just a fudge, since we know already that the electronic configuration of an atom of, say, iron, can change without its ceasing to be an atom of iron. Nor does the case look more hopeful where the physical properties of an element are concerned, such as colour, lustre, hardness, or softness. For these not only may involve the electronic configuration of the atom – the colour of gold is due, we are told, to absorption of light when an electron in one of its orbits jumps to a different one – but are often tied to factors beyond the structure of the atom altogether: for instance, to the crystalline lattices between atoms or ions. To take just one example graphite and diamond are both composed of carbon atoms, having the atomic number 6, but graphite is very soft while diamond is very hard. This difference is due to the fact that the carbon atoms in graphite are arranged into sheets which can slide past each other, while those of diamond form tough interlocking three dimensional structures, each atom bonded tetrahedrally to the other. Obviously it can have nothing to do with atomic number since this is the same in both diamond and graphite.

(e) Philosophical unclarity about atomic number, and the relation of essence to properties Philosophers who favour an explanatory characterization of essence do not always agree as to the extent of the dependence of the object’s other properties on it. Nor, turning to their frequent illustrations from chemistry, do they agree about what precisely constitutes essence in the special case of the elements. They are not even always consistent in their remarks. Apart from the earlier quotation from Copi, other uncompromising statements of the general claim are Copi’s paraphrase of Locke (Bk.3. Chpt.3. Sect.8): ‘all (other) properties of a thing depend on its real constitution or real essence’, and the following which Oliver takes (1954, 719) to be basically Copi’s position: All attributes of natural objects are equally essential, because tied rigidly to the nature of the object by causal connections. Any distinction between necessary and accidental attributes is heuristic only . . . a basically eliminable distinction which will progressively disappear as our knowledge of nature approaches completeness and perfection.

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And again (724): There is an ontological causal relation between the real essence and all the properties displayed by any object exhibiting that essence, and this relation would justify deduction of properties from knowledge of the essence if we had adequate knowledge of the latter.

Brody is more cautious. He speaks (1967:445) of essential properties ‘as those which are used to explain the other properties of the object’ or are ‘the key to explaining’ (my italics) the other properties of [e.g.] sodium’. He states (1980, 152) that our confidence in a certain property, or properties, being the essence of an object will increase the more other properties of the object it can explain. He muses, however, toward the end of the earlier article (1967:446), whether ‘having introduced the essence and the natural kind of an object, we [won’t] then want explanations only in terms of them’ and answers doubtfully: ‘I feel very unsure about this whole move. We seem to be able to introduce essences even though they cannot, and it seems unlikely that they could come to, explain some properties of the object’. Perhaps this is why in his book (1980:145) he claims only that appeal to essential properties is ‘an essential part’ of such an explanation which must also appeal to relevant laws. Gorman, we saw, argues that there are certain accidental properties of an object, which because they are completely explicable in terms of the object’s essence are ‘necessary’ or ‘indispensable’. But he also allows that an object may have ordinary, contingent, accidental properties. These are ones whose complete explanation will involve not only appeal to its essence but also to the external circumstances holding at the time, e.g. the presence of other atoms, and so on. It is true, however, that, for Gorman, an object could conceivably lack accidental properties of either kind. Turning to the more specific claim, Gorman (2005:282) remains consistent in maintaining (and here he accurately reproduces the view of chemists) that it is atomic number – or more precisely the number of protons in the nucleus of its atom – which constitutes the essence of a chemical element: if this changes, he states, the original element cannot survive. He also maintains – somewhat confusedly, since he also adverts to the crucial role of electrons and their configuration – that the number of protons alone provides a sufficient explanation of the proneness of an element, e.g. hydrogen, to bond chemically. Brody, taking sodium as his example, states (1967, 445) that its atomic number is, as essence, the key to explaining its other properties, in particular its combining with chlorine in the ratio one to one. However, in his later book (139) he substitutes for ‘atomic number’ the term ‘atomic structure’. This, we saw, as chemists understand it, includes much more than the number of protons in the nucleus. It includes the number of neutrons (which may not be equal to that of the protons) and also both the number of electrons, and their particular distribution in orbitals around the nucleus. These latter components of the atom precisely can change without the original element being destroyed. They cannot therefore, if this is Brody’s implication, be part of its essence.

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(f) Leibniz’s principle of the indiscernibility of identity reaffirmed According to the ‘sortal’ concept of identity, as we saw, an object of a given kind survives through time in virtue of its continuing possession of certain properties that are essential to being of that kind. These form a stable background against which its other, accidental properties, being independent of the essential ones, can be lost while the object itself remains intact. Unfortunately the idea that an object can survive the loss of even a single property, we can only repeat again, conflicts with Leibniz’s Law. Nor is this conflict in any way ameliorated when we turn to more specialized areas such as aesthetics or science. It is simply not true, as we have seen, that a work of art cannot survive the loss of a single property. The suggestion on the other hand that, through lack of scientific knowledge, we consistently mistake for accidental properties those which are indirectly dependent on an object’s essence does not appear to be borne out in the field of chemistry. An element’s atomic number, we saw, provides precisely that stable background against which its other, accidental properties – chemical and physical – can change without, contra Leibniz, endangering its survival as that original element. This is not surprising. Even such staunch defenders as Copi get cold feet when they face squarely the idea that every change is an essential one since it entails that any change in an object’s properties destroys that object. Judging this outcome (1954:718) ‘unwelcome’ and to be ‘evaded’, he falls back on ‘common sense’ and ‘practical usage’, assuring us that ‘our ordinary sortings will continue to be based on nominal rather than real essences so that changes can continue to be classified as accidental or essential in the traditional way’. He might have echoed Oliver’s warning that ‘A real object must be granted a modicum of existence in its own right – an ability to survive and influence other objects’, otherwise we risk a world of flux. The difficulty is that Leibniz’s requirement, exigent as it undoubtedly is, is also extremely powerful. To reject it is as much an affront to common sense as are the implications, noted above, of taking his requirement seriously. For consider the concept of identity. Identity, we recognize, is the relation which each thing bears just to itself, or again (in Humean language), a thing is ‘the same with itself’, and cannot be another thing. Identity is a binary relation, a two place predicate, with the same thing in both places. But if it is the same thing in both predicate places, then whatever is true of it in the one place is true of it in the other, and must be so since any difference would give rise to a separate entity. (As Wiggins pointedly exclaims (27), ‘How if a is b could there be something true of the object, a, which was untrue of the object, b? They are the same object.’) Put again, whatever is identical with itself must have all and only the same properties as itself. Of course, a thing might be referred to by two different names in the two predicate places. Thus we might ask whether, say, x is the same (dog, planet, human being) as y. But to accept that they are the same is necessarily also to accept that x has all and only those properties which y possesses. What is identical with itself must be absolutely and completely indiscernible from itself. But our ordinary practice allows us, and must allow us, if it is to do justice to those elements of discontinuity which is integral to temporal passage, to talk of an object preserving its identity across time – being identical with itself – although it genuinely loses some properties (and gains others). But if it does so, as Leibniz challenges us to ask, and as we ask again, how can it be identical with itself?7

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2: Essence as dynamic We turn then to the other broad method for avoiding a collision between the persistence and survival conditions for kinds on the one hand and Leibniz’s Law on the other. This maintains that the two criteria have different areas of jurisdiction, or ‘remit’, when employed in reaching an identity judgement. Thus they might be taken to govern different notions of identity, or alternatively they might be invoked, as Wiggins invokes them, at different stages in the process of making such a judgement. With the first strategy, there are two contrasting pairs of notions of identity that might be in play: diachronic and synchronic, or relative and absolute. In either case, the persistence and survival conditions for the relevant kinds will be held to govern the first of the pair, and Leibniz’s Law the second.

(i) First strategy: Leibniz’s Law governs different notions of identity (a) Diachronic/synchronic identity The suggestion (first strategy, first pair) that the relevant persistence and survival conditions determine whether a and b, encountered at different times, are diachronically identical, while Leibniz’s Law governs their identity at a time, or synchronic identity, is effectively Lowe’s position when (1998:76) he poses the question: how there can exist objects such that we need to be able to say, without fear of contradicting ourselves, that one and the same such object may undergo a change from possessing one intrinsic property to possessing another incompatible one. [Lowe’s italics]

and replies: My answer is that the identity over time of certain objects consists in the preservation of certain relationships between their constituents at any given time: thus . . . the identity over time of a tree consists . . . in the preservation of certain functional biological relationships between the objects that constitute its component roots, trunk, branches, leaves and so on at any given time. The reason why this view of the diachronic identity of such objects provides an answer to the problem of intrinsic change is that it explains how, consistently with a tree (say) being numerically one and the same tree at times t and t1, it may none the less differ in respect of some of its properties at the two times – differ because its diachronic identity is consistent with a degree of replacement and/or rearrangement amongst its components, sufficient to allow for growth and maturation and so forth.

Putting the position more schematically: if a is F (say, small and shrubby) at one time, and b is Not-F (being tall and massive) at a later time, this is no bar to a and b being (the) identical (tree). It is only if a is F and b is Not-F at the same time that it must follow that they are distinct. It could not, of course, be that being F and not-F even at

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different times is never here a bar to identity. For suppose failing to be F at the later time meant that an object did not fall under the kind, S, to which the object at the earlier time, in then being F, belonged. Consider a bronze statue that has melted to a shapeless mass in a warehouse fire. Those who seek to explain change by appeal to kinds will be obliged to say that, since retaining its shape is an essential property of the statue, the statue cannot lose its shape and survive. The difference in properties at different times certainly bears on judgements of identity. The very premise of this strategy is likely to be thrown back in the proponent’s face. For confining the fulfilment of Leibniz’s Law to being a necessary condition of synchronic identity, and putting diachronic identity beyond its scope, simply invites (a challenge we already noted) the objection: what business have you calling that identity at all since it clashes with Leibniz? Nor is this a solution which Wiggins would settle for. To those whom he describes as ‘speak[ing] of identity over time and distinguish[ing] this from identity at a time’, he says firmly (32): ‘identity is just identity’. Confronted by this opposition, defenders of the strategy may seek rapprochement by suggesting that diachronic identity can be brought within the scope of Leibniz’s Law, once the properties (to take the example of the tree) of being, say, small and shrubby, and again tall and massive, are taken to be relations to times. For being related as, say, a is, in a small shrub-like way to one time and being related, as b is, in a tall massive way to a later time are compatible properties (or ‘conditions’). Hence possessing both is no bar to a being identical with b. But many, including Lewis, have objected that such ‘temporary intrinsic properties’ are precisely non-relational, being precisely due ‘just to how they are’ (Haslanger, 2003:330), in contrast to relational properties which can be relativized to times, thus accounting for relational changes.8 A concern of a different order, although familiar from our previous chapters, is that change across time is only rendered compatible here with identity at a time or, put again, diachronic identity is only encompassed within synchronic identity (or at least within a partially distorted version of that notion), by adopting in imagination a timeless, or God’s eye view, which, so to speak, holds all relevant times in a single gaze. While this feature of the solution would be unlikely to trouble Lewis since he is an eternalist, it would not be acceptable to tensed theorists.

(b) Relative/absolute identity The suggestion (first strategy, second pair) that confrontation could be avoided by distinguishing a relative, from an absolute, notion of identity might possibly have its genesis in the observation that Leibniz’s Law, as standardly formulated (whatever is true of a, if a is identical with b, must be true of b and vice versa) makes no mention of kinds, and hence is properly applied to the ‘bare idea’ of an object. Now some hold that objects, in so far as they do fall under ‘sortal’ descriptions, can have properties under one description, that they do not have under another, as when one says that something is valuable as a statue, but valueless as a lump of bronze. Identity under a kind, or ‘sortal’ identity, is therefore, for those holding this view, a relative notion to be contrasted with absolute, or Leibnizian identity. The following ‘division of labour’ might accordingly be suggested: while the persistence and survival conditions for kinds govern relative identity,

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Leibniz’s Law, governs an absolute notion, applying just to those objects which ‘in themselves are of no particular kind’, or which can be said, each one, to be truly ‘itself and not another thing’. This strategy does not address directly the problem of identity over time, as the first one did by maintaining that ‘sortal’ identity is just diachronic identity. But, it might be claimed, it does so indirectly. Suppose that a china jug falls to the ground and smashes; someone later picks up all the pieces, and cements them together to form a coffee pot.9 The jug, it might be argued, survives as the coffee pot under the description ‘collection of china pieces’. There are, however, huge difficulties with this strategy. It requires us, first, to concede that ‘sortal’ identity is relative, but this is highly disputable (see below). Secondly, it entails an equally contentious ‘two-domain’ view, according to which, in one domain, objects are antecedently given, already individuated, only waiting to be described, while in the other, identity and distinctness are entirely a function of, and vary with, our descriptive resources. Thirdly, it is inherently unstable. ‘Sortal’ relativists are not typically content to rest with the ‘two domain’ solution, but seek, even more contentiously, to extend relative identity across the board, rejecting Leibnizian, or absolute, identity as illusory. Fourthly, the application to identity over time is flawed. The reconstruction of the argument that suggests itself is as follows:10 the jug, prior to smashing, is the same collection of pieces as the collection of pieces after the smashing, and the jug prior to smashing is the same utensil as the jug prior to smashing, therefore the jug prior to smashing is the same utensil as the later collection of pieces. But this obviously does not follow. Fifthly and connectedly, if the jug really is – is identical with – the coffee pot under the description ‘same collection of china bits’, it can apparently survive the loss of an essential property – shape – even though that precludes its counting as the same utensil as the coffee pot. But if no property is essential it is unclear what this shifting ‘it’ is, and hence what we are ascribing identity across time to. Finally, we cannot expect this appeal to find favour with Wiggins. This is not merely because, as with the first, two notions of identity are in play, so flouting again his dictum that ‘identity is just identity’, but also because relative identity is being countenanced. Wiggins is as keen as any relativist to hold that one cannot speak of a being identical with b without bringing them under the relevant kind – a is the same statue as b, or the same human being as b – thus endorsing what he calls (22) ‘the sortal dependency of individuation’. However, he adheres to Leibniz’s Law, arguing forcefully against the possibility that something, a, could be identical with b under one ‘sortal’ description, yet not under another.

(ii) Second strategy: Leibniz’s Law is applied after persistence and survival conditions According to the second strategy – the one, we noted, adopted by Wiggins himself – whether a is identical with b is a two-stage process, with Leibniz’s Law being applied only at the second stage. It is thus ascertained whether a and b have the same or divergent properties, leading to the appropriate identity (or distinctness) judgement, after it has been established what these properties are by reference to a’s and b’s persistence, and survival, conditions, as belonging to their respective kinds. Obviously the pressing question here is just what justifies this procedural order in applying the two criteria. It will hardly do to point out that Wiggins has already applied them in this

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order in a famous early article where he seeks to demonstrate that two entities – a tree and the aggregate of cellulose molecules that compose it – can occupy the same space at a single time.11,12 Nor does any justification seem to be offered there for thus invoking Leibniz’s Law only after it has been established, by appeal to their respective persistence and survival conditions, that, of each pair of co-occupants, one has been destroyed, while the other has survived. It is not enough of course to stress that in its favour is that, in the context of a single entity changing across time, a confrontation between the two criteria of identity is avoided.

(a) ‘Continuants’ as basic to immediate experience There is in fact a crucial difference, for Wiggins, between the situation of specifically a philosopher applying Leibniz’s Law to refute a philosophical position, as he himself does in his co-location paper, and that of an ordinary individual identifying, and reidentifying, the common things, or ‘continuants’, that he encounters (2004:3; 22–3) in ‘finding [his] way around the world’. Even if applied after the persistence and survival conditions, Leibniz’s Law, in the co-location argument patently does real work since its authority is invoked to combat an entrenched philosophical position. In ordinary life, however, Leibniz’s Law is rather, on Wiggins’ view, a tacit stamp of approval of the identity judgements already made. He maintains, for instance (56), that it is the persistence and survival conditions, not Leibniz’s Law, that, in furnishing an account of what constitutes identity, ‘organizes our actual method here’ and hence determines no less than what we treat as relevant tests, or evidence. He states (57) that, in settling questions of identity by these ordinary methods, we are precisely settling the Leibnizian question. Again he writes (58) that one must ‘already have discovered that a= b before one can establish that a and b have all, and only, the same properties’, and yet again that we don’t start with ‘Fx, if and only if Fy’; we reach it from identity. The order of application of the two criteria, as enshrined in our everyday practice, is best elucidated, Wiggins seems often to imply, by describing the ‘whole skein’ (19–20) of practices to which it belongs, rather than by seeking a justification for it from outside. Let us then look in a little more detail at Wiggins’ description of this ‘skein’ of practices. Key to Wiggins’ description here is the notion of a continuant as basic to our ordinary lived experience. Thus, he explains, we grasp the continuant itself as our subject-matter, not some fractionation of it, at the very same time as we grasp what it is to single anything out at all. As he goes on (3): ‘in singling out objects we carve off from the world, or isolate from among objects of our experience, various continuants or things that persist through change’. Precisely because a continuant is something with a past – a history – and a potential future, singling out and reidentification – ‘tracing, keeping track of the thing through change’ – go ‘hand in hand’. As Wiggins puts it (6) ‘[the] singling out [of a substance, s, at a time, t,] is prolonged into keeping track of it’, and again later (159) ‘[this] singling out reach[es] backwards and forward to any or all of the times before and after t, at which s exists’. In this way (6), we ‘draw [an object’s] spatio-temporal boundaries’. The world we find our way around is therefore, quite immediately, a world of continuants, and not, in Wiggins’ memorable phrase (32) of ‘phase thick laminations of their four dimensional counterparts’, or ‘thing-moments’ which we unify into four dimensional wholes.

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Wiggins naturally emphasizes that it is as a continuant of a given kind that an object has the identity that it has. It is not just that there are, associated with belonging to such a kind, a set of persistence conditions which indicate the changes that that kind of thing can, and cannot, survive. There is also, where it is a living organism, and belongs to a natural kind, a characteristic pattern of development, ‘founded’, as Wiggins puts it (89), ‘in law-like dispositions and propensities’. This requires us to distinguish, from among the survivable changes, those that it must undergo to fulfil its potential as that kind of thing. There are some ‘phased’ predicates (Wiggins, 33) such as ‘infant’ ‘adult’, ‘pupa’, ‘tadpole’, which an object of the relevant kind ‘must in due course satisfy if only it lives so long’ (unlike, say, ‘conscript’ or ‘fisherman’). This is in effect to import into an object’s essence certain changes which earlier had been banished, along with all other survivable changes, to its penumbra of accidental properties. These changes, and hence the gaining and losing of properties that, as we saw, temporal becoming necessarily entails, is now apparently incorporated within the concept of identity. The erstwhile model of an essential core, from which all change is excluded, surrounded by a belt of changing but inessential properties, or perhaps of a nucleus ringed by its satellites, begins to look misleadingly simple and static.

(b) The ‘true’ claim that identity judgements must conform to Leibniz distinguished from the ‘false’ one that they must be reached via Leibniz This new picture will not pacify the Leibnizians – among them the temporal parts theorists – who will declare it to merely aggravate the problem. They will dismiss it as more of an act of open defiance than a serious attempt at compromise. At least, they will protest, the earlier account, by confining the clash with Leibniz’s Law to the object’s periphery of accidental properties – the shock-absorbers of change, as it were – allowed its essence to conform to Leibniz precisely by not changing, so limiting the damage. But nothing now is being brushed under the carpet. On the contrary, it is being openly asserted that there are some changes, which do not destroy the object, and are not merely peripheral, but (83) constitute the very ‘unfolding of what it is to be [that] kind of thing’. Wiggins’ defence against this objection is that it conflates two claims. The first, which he upholds, is that once we have established that ‘a’ (the man I see now) is identical with ‘b’ (the school boy I knew years ago), it must follow that, in conformity with Leibniz’s Law, ‘no matter what property φ is’, and regardless of whether this property figured in our original inquiry, ‘a has φ, if and only if b has φ’ (57). For him indeed this principle ‘derives from the very logic of the [identity] relation’, and possesses an unassailability only matched by the law of contradiction. The second claim, which he rejects, is that such identity judgements can only be established in the first place by an application of Leibniz’s Law. But applying this principle involves, as we have seen, testing a’s properties, one by one, against b’s, as these properties are manifested at the moment of comparison, any discrepancy immediately entailing a division of objects. It is thus only in endorsing this latter claim that we risk that fractionation which destroys continuants. In fact, Wiggins argues, where the ordinary continuants of daily life are concerned, not only is this method unworkable, but also we establish identity judgements in a wholly different way.

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(c) Argument from ‘unworkability’ for the falsity of the last claim Though the main thrust of Wiggins’ argument is clear, some of the details are less so. What is doing most work seems to be his contention that we must have some prior way of identifying ‘a’ and ‘b’, independently of each other, or ‘in their own way’ (171), before we can begin to compare them. But this could be for three different, if related, reasons. Firstly, it could be just because they are continuants, and any continuant will have in the past exemplified, and will later come to exemplify, properties which, although characteristic of the kind of thing it is, it does not exemplify at the moment of comparison. We must therefore already have identified ‘a’ if, as Wiggins puts it, we are ‘to assemble all [its] properties in order to check them against all the properties of b’. Secondly, it could be that there is a problem internal to the application of Leibniz’s Law as a method of establishing identity, which only the introduction of continuants can rectify. Thirdly, it might be the underlying theory, focused as it is on synchronic at the expense of diachronic, identity, that is at fault. According to this theory, as Wiggins states (177), ‘in so far as we refer, and refer deictically at t, nothing can be involved in the deixis that is not actually there and present at t’. He holds that this is ‘an untenable doctrine of reference’ and that ‘bare words at a time cannot of themselves fix their intended reference’. Assessing this third reason would take us beyond the scope of our concerns, and I shall not pursue it further here. The first reason, if it is to get off the ground, requires us to agree already that continuants – candles, trees, horses, human beings – are basic, irreducible, elements of our experience. However, as we have indicated, Wiggins adduces powerful considerations in favour of this view, not least its being the commonsense one. He points repeatedly, as we have seen to our actual practices. He also brings out the sheer absurdity of his opponents’ position. To mention just one way in which he does so, having noted (178) that our criterion for being, say, a horse is dispositional and diachronic, he asks how there could possibly be any ‘single recipe for transposing the normal range of attributions to horses into attributions to horse-stages or horse-occurrences’ – each the creature of a single time. Even this, he declares, would be easier than attempting to translate such stage-talk back into talk of the continuants of our ordinary experience. As he observes (178), ‘not everything that looks for a moment, or behaves for a moment, as if it were a horse is a horse’. With regard to the second reason, despite certain suggestive remarks, Wiggins does not systematically set out to show that there is an internal difficulty with the application of Leibniz’s Law. Perhaps he thought that this would have meant committing himself to too much of his opponents’ erroneous framework. Such a demonstration could perhaps, however, strengthen his case, since the irreducibility of continuants, however independently plausible, would not have to be assumed, as with the first reason, from the start. Hence, even if, in the end, it could only be an ancillary consideration for Wiggins, it is worth pursuing a little further. Now the only Leibnizian principle so far discussed is Leibniz’s Law itself, namely the principle of the Indiscernibility of Identicals, and we might already have foreseen the following difficulty with it as a method of reaching an identity judgement. It states that if ‘a’ is identical with ‘b’, then ‘a’ and ‘b’ have all and only the same properties. It is thus, as its contra-positive (if ‘a’ and

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‘b’ are not indiscernible, they are not identical) makes explicit, merely a necessary condition of identity. With respect therefore to any single given property, its application in the attempt to determine whether ‘a’ is identical with ‘b’ will only yield a categorical conclusion where they do not share this property, and hence when they are nonidentical. Leibniz’s Law is silent on whether sharing the property, or indeed sharing all their properties, would entail their identity, and hence, far from sanctioning this conclusion, has no implications whatsoever for it.

(d) Why Leibniz’s Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles cannot help This shortcoming of Leibniz’s Law as a method of establishing that two things are in fact identical, might lead us to turn instead to that other closely related Leibnizian Principle – the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles. This second Principle, after all, is – or purports to be – a sufficient condition of identity, since it affirms that if a and b have all their properties in common, then a is identical with b. But this principle, unlike the first, is of dubious truth. Even putting that aside, there are other problems. Suppose we found that ‘a’ and ‘b’ had in common all the properties that we had so far been able to compare them for, there would always be the possibility of discovering a new property that one possessed and the other lacked. Since a new property, by Leibniz’s Law (the Principle of the Indiscernibility of Identicals), immediately spells a new object, there would always be the possibility of a deviation from identity. This is perhaps what Wiggins has in mind when (57) he alludes to the problem of ‘establishing each of the indefinitely many instances of the schema Φa ←→ Φb’. By relying on its contra-positive (if ‘a’ is not identical with ‘b’ then they are discernible) the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles can be made to yield a categorical judgement. But it concerns discernibility not identity. For we would already have to know that ‘a’ and ‘b’ were not identical before we could use the principle to yield the conclusion that they were discernible. The Principle, in other words, wouldn’t be much use in getting to a categorical judgement concerning identity, only in getting from this judgement to a judgement about discernibility. It may be felt that there is something strained about this argument from unworkability (as I have called it). Nevertheless, it is not clear how it could be countered except by saying that circumstances and context obviously play a role, and at some stage in this methodical, piecemeal, procedure inquirers typically feel justified in jumping to a conclusion, and categorically asserting – occasionally mistakenly – that two things are really one and the same. But Wiggins could reasonably propose, as the only possible explanation of this sudden willingness to leave behind the one by one comparison of properties, the coming into view of a continuant with its life history. He is hardly likely, however, to countenance the Leibnizian method even as a preliminary.

(e) But can our identity judgements conform to Leibniz if they are not reached via Leibniz? Wiggins explains the method we actually use to reach our identity judgements with the following example (56–7):

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Suppose I ask: Is a, the man sitting on the left at the back of the restaurant, the same person as b, the boy who won the drawing prize at the school I was still a pupil at early in the year 1951? . . . Roughly . . . what organizes our actual method is the idea of a particular kind of continuous path in space and time the man would have had to have followed in order to end up here in the restaurant; and the extraordinary unlikelihood (if the man himself were questioned and these dispositions investigated) of certain sorts of memory-dispositions existing in anyone or anything that had not pursued that path. Once we have dispelled any doubt whether there is a path in space and time along which that schoolboy might have been traced and we have concluded that the human being who was that schoolboy coincides with the . . . human being at the back of the restaurant, this identity is settled.

This illustration suggests that identity questions are, importantly, continuity ones. As Wiggins has put it earlier (6) ‘to single x [or y] out is to isolate x [or y] in experience, to determine or fix upon x [or y] in particular by drawing its spatio-temporal boundaries and distinguishing it in its environment from other things of like and unlike kinds, at this that and other times during its life history’. However, an inquiry into whether the respective space-time trajectories of two objects, taking into account the process of change and development characteristic of their kind, coincide, does not figure in the attempt to establish an identity judgement via Leibniz’s Law. If the second claim, that this Law can be used as a criterion of, a ‘way of telling’ (60) whether, two things are identical, may justifiably be rejected, thus far avoiding the attendant fractionation, can the first claim be upheld? Can it, in other words, still be maintained (Wiggins, 12, 2012) that any identity judgement, however reached, must conform to Leibniz’s Law so that, put formally, if x has ϕ, whatever ϕ is, y must have ϕ also. Obviously so long as the first claim had been conflated with the second, or subsumed within it, it would have been impossible to reject the second, and yet the first survive. However, the whole point of Wiggins’ endeavours was to show that these are independent claims, and so do not fall with each other. Still some may doubt Wiggins’ conclusion. They may doubt, that is, whether the judgement that the schoolboy of long ago is the same as the man now glimpsed at the back of the restaurant, reached, as it is, by tracing their respective spatio-temporal paths, and without recourse to Leibniz’s Law, can be a genuine identity judgement, conforming to that Law. In addressing these doubts, let us try to spell out Wiggins’ argument for his conclusion. By tracing, as far as we could, the spatio-temporal paths of the schoolboy and the man in the restaurant, and finding that they coincided, we decided that there was just a single continuant here – a single human being – at different points in his lifehistory. Let us call this single continuant, encountered at these different times, P. Now it follows from the reflexivity of identity (for all x, x is the same thing as x) that P is the same thing as P, or more formally P=P. It then immediately follows, in accordance with Leibniz’s Law, that P has all and only the same properties as P. But as a result of our inquiry, we know that the schoolboy – let us call him S – is identical with P, or S=P. S is not merely a temporal part of P, conceived as a four-dimensional entity. Indeed the point of Wiggins’ rejection of Leibniz’s Law as a mode of establishing identity was that

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it led to just such a fractionation. On the contrary, he writes (2004:31), ‘to find the whole continuant you have only to explore its boundaries at a time’ (and in the accompanying Note he says that continuants are things which ‘persist whole through time’). Again as a result of our inquiry, we know that the mature man – let us call him M – is identical with P, or M=P. He too is not merely a temporal part of P, conceived as a four-dimensional entity. So S=P and P=M, but (by the transitivity of identity) S has any property P has, so S has the property of being identical with M, or S=M. It immediately follows, by Leibniz’s Law, that S and M have all and only the same properties.

(f) Objection of temporal parts theorists, Gabbay and Moravcsik Two writers who remain unsatisfied with these considerations are the temporal parts theorists, D. Gabbay and J. M. Moravcsik (1973), and although we remain as opposed to temporal parts, as Wiggins, we can utilize some of their observations. They ask us (516–19) to examine the following two sentences (I follow their numbering): (6) The young woman I met eight years ago turned into the senior lecturer whom I met last year. (7) The prince whom I met eight years ago turned into the dragon I met last year.

Certainly, they argue, we can substitute ‘is the same as’ for ‘turned into’ in (6) while preserving its sense, thus: (8) The young woman I met eight years ago is the same as the senior lecturer whom I met last year.

This is not possible with (7), as can be seen as follows: (9) The prince whom I met eight years ago is the same as the dragon I met last year.

They explain that, while the persistence conditions for being a human being do not include changing into a dragon, the young woman can remain the same person while becoming a senior lecturer. Nevertheless, they argue, ‘same as’, in (8), does not mean ‘identical with’. If it did, it ought to be possible in (6), which is its equivalent, to substitute on the right side the expression on the left thus: (11) The young woman I met eight years ago turned into the young woman I met eight years ago.

But (11), they declare, is false. On the other hand ‘when we perform the same substitution in (8)’, we obtain a truism: (12) The young woman I met eight years ago is the same as the young woman I met eight years ago.

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Statement (12) is therefore not equivalent to (11). They conclude (520) that this shows the need to interpret the referring expressions in (6) and (8) as distinct temporal stages, or parts, of an entity, instead of the entity itself. In responding, Wiggins (2004:180) criticizing the expression ‘turned into’ in this context, rejects Gabbay’s (1973:6) as ‘an ordinary sentence of ordinary English’, and proposes it be reformulated as: (13) The young woman whom Gabbay met in 1965 came at some time . . . to have the property (γx) (x is a senior lecturer) the very property exemplified by the woman he met in 1973.

More simply, and sticking with the first person formulation we might render this: (13a) The young woman I met eight years ago came at some time to exemplify the property exemplified by the senior lecturer whom I met last year.

Wiggins maintains that in (13), unlike (6), we can properly substitute, for the expression on the left side, that on the right, showing it to be a genuine identity statement thus: (14) The senior lecturer Gabbay met in 1972 came at some time . . . to have the property exemplified by the senior lecturer he met in 1972.

Restoring the first person again, we get: (14a) The senior lecturer I met last year came at some time to exemplify the property of being the senior lecturer I met last year.

If we need a further gloss Wiggins offers (181) ‘the senior lecturer . . . wasn’t born that way’.

(g) The paradox of change again Before considering this reply, let us pause, take a step back, and remind ourselves of the larger context in which we are examining the debate here. We introduced this section by asking whether the account of change, offered by Wiggins and others, of objects under recognizable kinds, could both respect Leibniz’s Law, and allow for the element of discontinuity – of genuine loss (or gain) – which is integral to temporal passage. Only that which possesses a property, our principle of dynamical change stipulated, and not something else which never possessed it, can genuinely lose it: hence the need for the object that changes to remain itself. In rejecting the use of Leibniz’s Law to establish that x and y are a single changing continuant, and so avoiding the fractionation attendant on this method, while still insisting that the identity judgement conforms to that Law, Wiggins has gone some way to respecting the principle of dynamical change. But doesn’t conformity to Leibniz’s Law, required as it is by the principle of dynamic change, also subvert this very principle? For to be identical, according to that Law, is to

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have all and only the same properties. How is this compatible with a genuine loss (or gain) of properties? Does that not plainly entail no longer having all and only the same properties? Returning to the interchange between Gabbay and Wiggins from the point of view of this broader concern something curious and remarkable will strike us. Neither Gabbay, in his haste to embrace temporal parts, nor Wiggins in resisting them, evidently grasp the significance of the expression ‘turned into’ (used by Gabbay and criticized by Wiggins) as it occurs in (6). For it seems there to present us with precisely the above paradox: how is one to capture the dynamism of change, so integral to the idea of temporal passage, when the condition of any change is that Leibniz’s Law be fulfilled, which principle simultaneously undermines dynamism. Consider again the school boy and the man in the restaurant. The schoolboy has (let us suppose) a round face with fleshy pink cheeks, and abundant tousled brown hair whereas M, the man at the back of the restaurant, is greying and balding with a thin face and a pallid complexion. He is tall whereas S is still quite short, not yet having undergone that adolescent spurt of growth which will bring him to M’s height. It would be natural to talk of the chubby schoolboy turning into (Gabbay’s expression), or becoming (as I would prefer less awkwardly and more idiomatically to say), the gaunt older man, or the gaunt man having lost the chubby, pink cheeks of youth, of his having lost his youth in fact. But how can we do this? P=P, we said, P doesn’t become P, how could it, it is already itself (and not another thing). Indeed it follows, by the permanence of identity, that P is always P, and as such always has all and only the properties of P. But if P doesn’t become P, and yet S=P and M=P, so that S=M, S cannot become M either, any more than S the schoolboy can become S, the school boy, or M the mature man can become M, the mature man. Just as P is always P, so S is always S, and M is always M. Just as P has all and only the properties P ever has, so likewise S has all and only the properties that S ever has, and M has all and only the properties that M ever has. But S= M, so S has all and only the properties M ever has, and likewise M has all and only the properties S ever has. Turning from the schoolboy to Gabbay and Moravcsik’s young woman, let us attempt, by introducing a couple of adjectives into (6), to likewise deepen its resonance. Thus: (15) The merry young woman I met eight years ago turned into/ became the grave senior lecturer I met last year.

Now the grave senior lecturer I met last year has to be the same person as the merry young woman I met eight years ago if she is to be said to have lost her youthful gaiety. But to be the same person is, in accordance with Leibniz’s Law, to have all and only the same properties as the gay young woman. But then gaiety must in some sense still be predicable of her, along with the gravity of her more recent years. So how can we convey the sense behind our words that she has irretrievably lost her gaiety along with her youth, that she was once young and gay, but no longer is? It does not help to protest that she is only merry at a particular time, in 1965 (but see below on Wiggins’ use of two – timeless and tensed – perspectives). As Wiggins would hold, a continuant is wholly present whenever she exists, and so it is the young woman – and not a mere temporal

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part or stage of her – who is also the grave senior lecturer of 1972. Only by compartmentalizing, as temporal parts theorists do, so that we have a young, merry, woman-part in 1965, and an older, grave woman-part in 1972, could we prevent this transference of properties to the whole continuant, that is to say to the continuant, who is wholly present at each moment of her existence (see Wiggins again, 2004:31). Wiggins’ reformulation of (6) is not much help. For it puts in place of a statement which at some level invokes time’s passage, one which reports a seeming fixed administrative fact: that the young woman’s senior lectureship is a post she assumed somewhere mid-career. (This becomes especially apparent once the substitution licensed by reflexivity is made.) It is worth noting that, using Gabbay’s example, we can show more formally that the dynamism of change clashes with Leibniz’s Law by pointing, not as Gabbay who misses this clash does, to the failure of reflexivity in (6), but to that of symmetry, which he does not mention. Thus: if the young woman is the senior lecturer, it follows that the senior lecturer has any property the young woman has. One of the young woman’s properties is being identical with the young woman. It follows therefore that the senior lecturer is identical with the young woman. But the substitutions thus sanctioned by the symmetry of identity will not go through in (6): (16) The senior lecturer I met last year turned into/ became the young woman I met eight years ago.

Gabbay seemed on shaky ground when he claimed (in his discussion of reflexivity) that ‘the young woman I met eight years ago turned into the young woman I met eight years ago’ was false. Rather it seemed nonsense. However, (16) is clearly false. Its falsity underlines the fact that Leibnizian identity requires symmetry and reversibility, whereas temporal passage requires asymmetry (to account for time’s arrow, we might say, metaphorically) and irreversibility. Gabbay, by appealing to distinct, unchanging temporal parts of a four-dimensional object only compounds the problem. It is not merely that he has been unable to do justice to its dynamism, it is that he has given up trying to render change at all. Wiggins is far more sensitive than are temporal parts theorists to the importance of the requirement that it is the same object which first possesses a property and then does not possess it. However, when we press his sortal account further, and ask whether he can do justice to change’s dynamism, to the discontinuity implicit in temporal passage, and the idea that properties which were once possessed are genuinely lost, we must answer that, in seeking also compliance with Leibniz’s Law, he cannot. He cites (2004:30) the following claim as a possible challenge, given a sortal account, to the absoluteness of Leibniz’s Law (‘a’ representing Sir John Doe, Lord Mayor of London, and ‘b’ the boy, John Doe): ‘a is the same human being as b, but not the same boy as b’. The statement is put forward as true on grounds that the Lord Mayor, middle-aged and long married, is not a boy at all. Wiggins’ refutation, however, involves his switching back and forth between a timeless ‘is’, and a ‘was’ which signifies a time-bound, or tensed viewpoint. Thus from the timeless perspective, a and b fall under the single substance concept (same) human being. Moreover, it is under, and only under, this concept that they are said to ‘persist whole through time’. It is additionally in virtue of,

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and only in virtue of, their falling under this concept, that the diverse properties exemplified by them at different periods, can be said to belong (timelessly) to both of them. Thus the Lord Mayor, under the concept ‘same human being’ is also (‘is’, here, being taken timelessly) the same boy, and John Doe, the school dunce, is likewise also the same middle-aged grandee. The tensed viewpoint on the other hand is an effort to recognize that we are in time. From this viewpoint, the Lord Mayor, although he is (in the tensed sense) the same human being as b, only was the same boy (as b is). This is because in the tensed sense of ‘is’ the Mayor is not a boy (nor a school dunce), although he was one. It is difficult to avoid the strong impression that, despite the recognition of the tensed viewpoint, it is the timeless one that is doing most work here in the attempt to reconcile change with Leibniz’s Law. We can perhaps sum up thus. At best what Wiggins accounts for, compatibly with Leibniz’s Law, is an object of which it is ‘tenselessly’ or ‘timelessly’ (30) true, whether under the description (to take our earlier example) ‘young woman’ or ‘senior lecturer’, no matter that these apply at different times, that this object ‘is, was, or will be’ φ, or whatever the relevant property. Even properties that are thus apparently ‘lost’ over time, are somehow caught again in this timeless Leibnizian net,13 and genuine change with its sharp discontinuities, subverted.

(iii) Implications for truth value link realism as a non-presentist tensed theory Now non-presentist tensed theorists are of course explicitly committed to giving an account of genuine change, thus uncompromisingly described. In so far, then, as they seek to rely on a sortal account, such as Wiggins’, their position will almost certainly falter. In so far as truth value link realists can be classed as non-presentists, this verdict must, moreover, hold for them too. Consequently, while Dummett’s arguments. being ultimately dependent upon an assumption (that we are immured in the present), have, we sought to show, little genuine force against these realists, the latter’s position is nevertheless compromised (though not, as we have seen, in a way that would rescue Dummett’s anti-realism). Now Wiggins evidently supposes that the only real alternative to his three dimensionalist, sortal, account of persistence and change is temporal parts theory and so he directs all his fire power against the tenseless, four dimensionalist stance already familiar from our previous chapters. Is it conceivable that he has lumped presentism with this latter view, as an etiolated version of it, in which objects, existing only in the present consist in just, as it were, the wafer thin, time-sliver that would remain if one excised all the earlier temporal parts that would characterize such objects on the four dimensional picture? To see that this would be a misconception, consider again the ways in which three and four dimensionalism can be contrasted. For three-dimensionalists, objects extend through space by having different spatial parts at different places. For instance, a refrigerator takes up a certain volume of space by having its freezer compartment occupying the lower half of the space, and its chilled compartment the upper half. It does not extend through time, having no temporal parts. According to four-dimensionalists (as we saw), it does extend through time – in a way analogous to its

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extending through space. For example, the refrigerator takes up a certain period of time (say, the ten years that it is usable, and before it is scrapped) by having its earlier pristine, and relatively pristine, parts occupying the first five years, and its increasingly obsolescent parts the second five years. It follows necessarily that not all of its parts exist at any one time during this period. However, for three-dimensionalists, the refrigerator has no temporal parts at all, so it cannot be the case that, at any single time, it has parts existing at other times, but not existing at that time. This has come to be expressed positively (if a little obscurely) by stating that objects are, for three-dimensionalists, ‘wholly present at each moment of their existence’. But presentists, like three dimensionalist nonpresentists, also deny that objects have temporal parts: there exist, for them, no times other than the present for any such parts to extend into. It must therefore be true for them also that an object cannot have (temporal) parts existing at other times than the present. Their position too therefore must be expressible positively in terms of objects being ‘wholly present’ when they exist. They must therefore be three-dimensionalists. Of course their three dimensionalism will differ from that of the non-presentists, and of Wiggins, because the only time at which an object can, for them, exist, and when therefore all its parts exist, is the present. For non-presentists, however – and this, as we saw, was a cause of difficulty – an object may be characterized as ‘wholly present’ at each moment of its existence, including at past moments. We already saw in the last chapter how presentism possesses a crucial advantage over non-presentism when it comes to the need to incorporate the discontinuity of temporal passage into the account of change as change in an object’s properties. For presentists, the candle of our earlier example is only bent. It does not have to exemplify incompatible properties in order for us to say of it truly that it was straight, since no such state of affairs as the candle’s being straight exists. In that chapter we also went some way to rehabilitating presentism, at least in what I called its deep form, as a theory that need not appeal only to brutal materialists – to the kind of philosopher who is only being slightly ironical when he gives as a ground for its adoption that you cannot, any more than you can feel a past pain, kick a past cat. We began to pull apart, moreover, the notions of the past’s existence and its reality. Now, I do not want to suggest that what I said in the last chapter in defence of presentism, still less the brief remark above, will go very far in placating irritated and puzzled opponents. There is much more to explore if we are to make out a full case for it. But if presentism seemed in my earlier chapter, as I suggested it was, worth taking seriously, it must now, after our recent findings concerning non-presentist-tensed theories in their attempts to render change, seem even more so.

5

Presentism and Modality

The presentists’ dilemma may be concisely expressed: how can a past-tensed statement be true yet the past not exist? The variety of their solutions, and of the objections that are placed in their way, is not similarly amenable to concise exposition. The first thing to strike one about the debate is the difficulty of detaching it from that concerning whether or not truths require truth makers, or must ‘supervene on being’. Must truths, that is to say, be ultimately and exhaustively explicable, as neo-Humeans, favouring an extensionalist and atomistic semantics, hold, in terms of ‘the concrete constituents of the world’,1 or can they ‘float free’, without a basis in ‘the way things actually are’ (Theodore Sider, 2001:39–41; Thomas Crisp, 2007:121–2)? Concealed within this second debate is yet another concerning how far one may credibly go, without undermining the very Humeanism that one aspires to respect, in providing such grounds specifically for modal and past-tensed truths, the former, as we shall see, often being taken to provide (Bourne, 2006:9) an illuminating parallel with the latter. Where modality is concerned, Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (1986), goes as far as to posit a plurality of concrete possible worlds – ‘a crazy ontology’, in his own words.2 The eternalists, in parallel fashion, posit a multitude of concrete times, so that the entities, properties and relations, allegedly existing at these times, can serve as truth makers of past- (and future-) tensed statements. This so-called ‘reductivist’3 programme is thus, in the tensed debate, primarily associated with tenseless theory, which presentists have supposedly repudiated. It might seem therefore that those who try to import it into presentism are really eternalists seeking belatedly to get the presentists to dance to their tune. Underlying this complicated web of philosophical ideas and positions, there is a more fundamental question still concerning the limits of philosophy, or at least of a certain kind of philosophy. Can presentists, in so far as their instincts as philosophers are all toward systematization, toward intolerance of discontinuities, ever do justice to the discontinuity inherent in temporal passage, no matter that its acknowledgement is one of the chief motives for their having embraced presentism in the first place? I shall argue that almost all the presentists, whose theories are current in the literature, must fail here, not just because their instincts are philosophical, but also because, despite their denial that the past exists, their instincts are unalloyed realist ones. They are, I shall show, more often revolted than tempted by Dummett’s radical relativism of the present. Nevertheless, I shall in the final chapter propose a new presentism which, although based in the ersatz presentism of Thomas Crisp (2007) and Craig Bourne (2006a, 2006b), is hybrid in admitting alongside realist components, aspects of the

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idealism of R.G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott discussed in the next chapter. This will take us beyond philosophy into history. As I said, not all presentists recognize the need for truth makers, still less are hard line proponents of Humean supervenience. Briefly, some argue that true past-tensed statements are akin to mathematical truths, such as Fermat’s Last Theorem, or ‘all triangles are three-sided’, and negative existentials, such as ‘there are no hobbits’, in not requiring truth makers. Alan Rhoda (2009:42) refers to such a view, only to summarily reject it, citing arguments of Simon Keller (2004:86). More often, in this respect, they are compared (see Merricks, 2007:120–5) with modal truths. However, this is itself a controversial characterization of modal truths. Lewis, as we have just noted, invokes the whole apparatus of possible worlds to secure truth makers for them, suggesting, as we have seen, an analogy with eternalism rather than presentism. A. N. Prior, one of the most notable of all presentists, also seeks to exploit a parallel between tensed and modal claims in not requiring truth makers. He writes (1968:7): I want to suggest that putting a verb into the past . . . tense is exactly the same sort of thing as adding an adverb to the sentence. ‘I was having my breakfast’ is related to ‘I am having my breakfast’ in exactly the same way as ‘I am allegedly having my breakfast’ is related to it, and it is only an historical accident that we generally form the past tense by modifying the present tense, e.g. by changing ‘am’ to ‘was’, rather than by tacking on an adverb.

Thus, to take our own example, he would analyse a past-tensed statement, such as ‘John was tall’, into a present-tensed one, prefixed by the adverbial phrase ‘It was the case’ or ‘formerly’, rather as one can dissolve modal verbs, such as ‘may’, in e.g. ‘John may be tall’, into non modal ones by prefixing them with ‘Possibly’, or ‘It is possible that’. In neither case, Prior wants to say, does the ‘is’ of the interior sentence commit us to John’s actually being tall, or even, with the tensed statement, of there being a John who is tall. How similar the tense operator is in its effect upon its interior sentence to the effect of a story prefix, such as ‘once upon a time’, on the sentences that follow is a question that I shall investigate. One thing is clear already: if it is similar, then since even though there is no existential commitment in the past tense and modal case, the statements produced can be true. A question would therefore arise about the truth aptness of purely fictional statements. Before detailing some key positions advanced by that important swathe of presentists who do recognize the truth maker requirement – indeed often just taking it for granted – it will be helpful to say a little more about this requirement itself, and how, if at all, it differs from the so-called principle of supervenience, sometimes dubbed ‘Humean’. The ‘truth maker’ for a statement is defined as an entity whose mere existence ‘necessitates’, or ‘entails’, or yet again, ‘suffices for’, the statement’s truth (see Merricks’ thorough discussion of this whole issue, 2007:5–14). Some wish (see again Merricks, ibid:131–3) to render more precise the relation by stipulating that the statement be about the entity, or entities, which is its truth maker. Difficulties over negative existential claims, such as ‘There are no unicorns’, where there is no entity to account for the statement’s truth, or as Sider puts it (2001:36) where ‘we never bump up against any fact whose existence entails that there are

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no unicorns’, have led some writers (those, like Lewis, who recognize a difference between the formulations) to prefer talk of truth ‘supervening on being’, or on ‘what things there are and what properties and relations they instantiate’. These writers claim that this version of the grounding principle ‘merely requires’ (Sider again, 2001:36) ‘that since “there are no unicorns” is true in the actual world, it must also be true in any world in which the same objects exist, those objects instantiate the same properties, and . . . stand in the same relations as they do in the actual world’. Some will insist further (an important point to which I shall return) that the properties and relations referred to here must be fundamental ones (see Crisp, 2007:119). For those, however, who find Lewis’s invocation of a plurality of worlds unnecessarily complicated in this context, Bigelow’s rendering (1996:38) of the requirement may seem preferable: ‘there could not be a difference in what is true unless there were a difference in what exists.’ It is clearly not open to presentists, as it is to eternalists, for whom past times exist, rather as distant places do, to locate the relevant truth makers for ‘There were once dinosaurs roaming the earth’, in a remote time, as we might, in a parallel way, locate the truth makers for ‘Mars possesses some of the prerequisites for life’ on Mars. On the contrary, since for them the present alone exists, the only materials that they can fashion their truth makers out of, and hence in which they can ground past-tensed truths, are current ones. Various candidates have been posited: presently existing, past-tensed facts, such as that dinosaurs roamed the earth (Rhoda, 2009, considers but rejects this view), or past-tensed properties (Bigelow, 1996), presently exemplified by presently existing entities – properties which may have been transferred from entities that have ceased to exist. The world itself, on this view – of which, as a valuable representative of presentism, I offered a preliminary exposition in chapter 3 – has the past-tensed property of having formerly been roamed by dinosaurs, or (Keller, 2004:96), ‘the property of being a world in which’ dinosaurs formerly roamed. Another suggestion, which I have already flagged up, and which will become increasingly important later, is that of the ersatz presentists, who locate these truth makers in their ‘ersatz times’. They model their position on that, in the modal area, of ersatz modalism, or ersatz actualism, which is notable for its attempt to provide the theoretical benefits of Lewis’s modal realism without its exorbitant ontological outlay of concrete possible worlds. I shall group the key presentist positions around two main foci of concern. The first is that the proposed truth maker may lack the necessary structure. Our interest here will be, not so much in the original target of this criticism, namely past-tensed facts, as in the alternatives developed by other presentists for supplying this structure. The second focus of concern is that the proposed truth maker may be unacceptably hypothetical in ‘pointing beyond how things are’. The target is past-tensed properties. It is claimed that only if they can be reduced to more fundamental terms, as allegedly can other hypothetical properties such as dispositions, will they be salvageable. This disquiet is mainly expressed by eternalists pressing their own position. It will be necessary, if we are to gauge it, to disentangle the reduction they have in mind (to tenseless properties, and involving the postulation of a myriad of concretely existing times) from the ordinary physicalist reduction that is usually undertaken with regard to dispositions.

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1: The truth maker lacks structure (i) Haecceities and surrogates The first source of disquiet can be stated more fully thus: the propositions, which are supposedly made true by these presently existing past-tensed facts, have structure, that is to say they have constituents, whose relation to each other mirrors an actual concrete configuration of individuals in the world. The past-tensed facts themselves, however, exhibit no such structure, and hence no comparison can be undertaken to ascertain whether the structure of the proposition matches a relevant structure in the world. Keller (2004:91–2) objects that not only can the truth value of a proposition not be ascertained in such a situation, but that past-tensed propositions are exactly on a par with present-tensed ones in requiring, if they are to be true, that they do mirror such a structure. He writes: Start with a present-tensed truth: The Tower of London is on the Thames. This is a truth about the Tower of London and the Thames, two things that exist and are next to each other. If either the Tower or the Thames did not exist, or if they were not next to each other, then The Tower is on the Thames would be false. So there’s one proposition whose truth depends upon certain things’ existing and exhibiting certain characteristics. Now consider a past-tensed truth about those same things: The Tower of London was on the Thames. That too is a truth about the existing Tower and the existing Thames, and it’s true because those very things were next to each other; if either the Tower or the Thames had never existed, or if they had never been next to each other, then The Tower was on the Thames would be false.

Consider again Alan Rhoda (2009:46): We have a tolerably clear idea of what the fact of Caesar’s being assassinated amounts to – its constituents include presumably Caesar, an assailant, a knife and so forth. But what are the constituents of Caesar’s having been assassinated. What would have to obtain in order for that fact to obtain . . .

He adds, a little further on: . . . to offer a theory of truth makers for some class of truths is to explain their truth. It is to specify the features, aspects or constituents, of reality that ground the truths in question . . . we want an informative account of how reality is different from what it would have been if what is in fact true had not been true.

But such writers ask, if past individuals do not exist how can there be the requisite concrete configuration of them? One response, which is explored in some depth by Keller (2004:96–9), is to posit ‘surrogates’ corresponding to each element of the relevant proposition. Thus it is, among others, the ‘unique essence’ (or more technically ‘haecceity’) of Anne Boleyn to which

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we must refer in assessing the truth of ‘Anne Boleyn was executed in 1536’. Some have dismissed this notion on grounds that it derives from a claim – that each entity is identical with itself, or self-identical – which Hume, denounced as ‘not containing the required predicate and subject’, and as therefore, on their view also, so ill-formed as to be devoid of sense. Those not put off by Hume’s criticism, pointing out that he was no friend of metaphysics, will still want to insist that, whatever Anne’s haecceity, or ‘thisness’, is, it cannot be the real, concretely existing, Anne of 1536. For were the presentists to posit such an entity, their position would hardly be distinguishable from that of the eternalists. In attempting to avoid this pitfall, Keller (2004:97) maintains that haecceities are only properties of the individual, and being abstract, exist outside space and time, unlike existing persons. But this poses several problems. As an individual’s haecceity can ex hypothesi exist without the individual, it can exist ‘uninstantiated’. But it is controversial whether there can be uninstantiated properties. It is equally controversial whether properties are abstract objects (or even more radically – a criticism that Keller (ibid:98) alludes to, citing Lewis, whether the distinction between abstract and concrete is itself tenable). Many hold that they are parts or constituents of physical objects, and being therefore wholly present in a given region of space, are concrete entities. It might even be argued that, property or not, the presentist is not entitled (in order to prevent the collapse into eternalism) to maintain that Anne’s surrogate lacks a space-time location. If the presentists points out that, for them, there is no sixteenth century England, the objector can reply that the relation of Anne’s surrogate to the surrogate of sixteenth century England precisely ‘gives us a sense in which [Anne’s surrogate] is located’ (Lewis). If the presentists reject this suggestion, a quite different tack might be tried. Surely, it might be said, your ultimate purpose in introducing these surrogates is to provide a suitably naturalistic supervenience base for past-tensed truths. But if they do indeed lack a space-time location, and do not therefore partake in the causal order, if as Keller (2004:97) observes (if only to emphasize that presentism need not collapse into eternalism), ‘you cannot execute a property’, it will be questioned whether these could be entities that might serve this purpose. This, however, raises the larger question of what is a proper constituent of the supervenience base to which I shall return later. One major objection to this presentist proposal is the huge outlay of ontological resources it involves. For the statement ‘Anne Boleyn was executed in 1536’ to be true, as Keller notes (ibid:97), the haecceities that presently exist, and configured in the appropriate way, must include ‘the thisness of Anne Boleyn, of the sword with which Anne was executed, and of the swordsman specially brought over from France’. They must also include the haecceity, or property, of being ‘a time at around midday on the 19th of May 1536’. This proliferation of haecceities, at the same time as the presentist strives to keep his position distinct from the eternalists’, produces further awkward consequences. This can be seen by considering Keller’s example ‘Anne was sophisticated’. Anne’s thisness – itself a property of Anne – has according to this statement a further property of its own. This property, says Keller, has to be different from the sophisticatedness that could be attributed to a living existent Anne, when she is herself there to exemplify it. He doesn’t spell out why it must be different (although presumably it is again connected with the attempt to prevent presentism from collapsing into eternalism) or in what this difference lies, although he varies its name, calling it ‘sophisticatedness’.

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Perhaps he recognizes both abstract and concrete qualities, and holds that those exemplified by an existent person are concrete, while those exemplified by the merely abstract property of thisness, must similarly be abstract. Nevertheless, one must wonder what happens to Anne’s sophisticatedness when she is existent. Does it merge with her ordinary sophisticatedness, or does it continue to exist in a shadowy form, abstractly, perhaps still exemplified, even when she is existent, by her abstract thisness?

(ii) Ersatz times A different way of providing the truth makers, or ‘structure’, which, it is claimed, are lacking when it is merely claimed that there exist past-tensed facts is to posit, as I have already indicated, ‘ersatz times’. These are ‘representations’, or ‘stories’ or ‘models’, of ‘possible instantaneous state[s] of the world’ (Rhoda, 2009:14; Hinchliff, 1996:124). Being abstract they are ‘at no temporal distance from the present’ (Thomas Crisp, 2007:130–1); as actual existents, they are available to be made reference to as truth makers. A state of the world is conceived of as the sum total of all the states of affairs it comprises, while states of affairs, in turn, are variously interpreted as facts, or as a combination of entities, properties and relations. Consequently the abstract ersatz representation of a state of the world as a whole also involves ersatz abstract representations of the individual entities, properties and relations that compose it. Thus ersatzists hope to supply for example (Bourne, 2006b:44) ‘the particulars [that] can be invoked as the constituents of [the] fact [that Socrates taught Plato]’. An ersatz time is typically construed (Crisp, 2007:127; Bourne, 2006a:10) as ‘a maximally consistent set of propositions’. It is ‘maximal’ in the sense that every proposition in the set must be determinate, that is to say either true or false. It is consistent in that no contradiction or impossibility may be admitted. Now only that ersatz time is true, or ‘obtains’, or is ‘instantiated’ (Crisp, 2007:131), according to this view, which corresponds to the instantaneous state of the world which (strictly) is ‘actualized’: for the presentist, only the current state of the world. Crisp prefers (131) to speak here of two different senses of ‘actual’ or ‘present’, namely ‘actual1’ and ‘actual2’ and ‘present1’ and ‘present2’ reserving ‘actual2’ and ‘present2’ for the current state of the world. Bourne (2006a:11) speaks rather, in trying to meet Lewis’s objection that our present world cannot be just a set of propositions, of us ‘inhabiting the concrete realization of the present time . . . [the present time being the] only one time that has a concrete realization’. An ersatz time is accordingly false if it represents an instantaneous state of the world which is not actualized, or in Crisp’s preferred nomenclature, not actual2 or, yet again, where the representation has no ‘concrete realization’ (Bourne). The ersatz time is said here to misrepresent the world as it is. Thus an ersatz time which represents the past, since it does not represent the world as it is, but as it was, is false. But although such a representation is false, the presentist reminds us, it would be true, were the instantaneous state of the world it represents actual. Indeed a given ersatz time can be identified as that ‘conjunctive proposition, which contains all and only the propositions that would be true if the state of the world represented were actual[ized]’ (Rhoda, 2009:51).4 A development of this view, due both to Crisp (2007), and Bourne (2006a, 2006b) is the suggestion that abstract times can be ordered by a primitive ‘earlier than’ relation to

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form an abstract ersatz series. This series – sometimes (Crisp, 131) described as an ‘ersatz B-series’5 – imitates, or mirrors, in abstract form (it is likewise ‘transitive, irreflexive and asymmetrical’) the concrete series of times of the eternalist, rather as the ersatz possible worlds, posited by the opponents of Lewis’s modal realism, imitate, or mirror, in abstract form, Lewis’s plurality of concrete possible worlds. These presentists do not, however, hold that all ersatz times are included in such an orderly series. Says Crisp (132): ‘the earlier than relation connects certain abstract times and not others’ and, more explanatorily: ‘It counts among its members only some of the abstract times – those that did or will represent the world’. Specifically as regards the past then, only those times are included which represent the past as it was, and not merely as it might have been. (One must take care here not to refer, as Rhoda (2009:51) does in expounding this view, to the ‘actual’ past, since presentists are actualists for whom everything is actual.) Consider again ‘Anne Boleyn was executed’. This will be true, on Crisp’s view (131–2), and also on Bourne’s (2006a:13–14), according to which ‘past tenses are statements about the present, or rather about where our present’s time is in relation to others’, if the abstract time, representing the relevant state of the world – the world as it is at a given instantaneous cross-section of 1538 – and therefore including the proposition ‘Anne Boleyn is executed’, is ‘earlier than’ (in inverted commas because this adverbial phrase is to be understood in an ersatz sense) that abstract time which represents the present state of the world, or which has an actual concrete realization. ‘Anne Boleyn was executed more than four hundred years ago’ will be true if the ordered series of abstract times reaching back from the abstract time, representing the present state of the world, to that representing the moment of Anne’s execution, occupies more than 400 years. Apart from apparently enabling us to distinguish between two types of non-existent entity – those that once existed and those that never did exist, but might have existed – this theory is claimed (Bourne, 2006a:10, 17) to have what its authors hold to be the important advantage of respecting (unlike, on our reading, Dummettian anti-realism) the truth value link. According to this principle, as we shall recall, if the proposition ‘SB is in her office today’ is true, stated now, then the proposition ‘SB was in her office a year ago’, uttered exactly a year hence, will also be true. Moreover, suppose a year has passed, the utterance, ‘SB was in her office a year ago’, is only true now if ‘SB is in her office today’ was true, when uttered a year ago. But, as Bourne argues (5), if ‘other times don’t exist [for the presentist] . . . it is hard to see how the ontological content of the present time can itself legislate how other distinct entities, other times, can be composed’. It is perhaps unfortunate that Bourne, in order to state the problem, has already to refer to those very ‘other times’ as existents which he has just accepted do not, for a presentist like him, exist. Of course Bourne, although a presentist, holds all along that these other times do actually exist – only as abstractions. It is the orderly relations between them which, he claims, enables truths to be conserved between these times, so honouring the truth value link. I shall consider four objections in ascending order of gravity. I preface them with a clarification. It concerns the puzzling implication of my remarks above that the ersatz presentist regards the past both as existent and non-existent. Which is it, we may ask? The ersatzist may well reply: the former. He will add that his whole point in construing times in terms of sets of propositions which represent, or go proxy for, them, is precisely to allow that, even times other than the present, exist. But, as we have just seen, we also

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find him conceding, as a presentist, that ‘only the present exists’ (Bourne, 2). It must either be, we shall reason, that the past is not, for him, distinct from the present or that ‘exists’ is being used in a compromised, and less than full-blooded, sense when talking about it. In fact ersatz presentists typically prefer to take existence as a base line, and then qualify it as either ‘actual’ or ‘actualized’, or in Crisp’s version as either ‘actual1’ or ‘actual2’. Whereas all times quite indiscriminately possess ‘actual existence’ only the present time, whose ‘concrete realization we inhabit’ (Bourne, 11) is ‘actualized’, or ‘actual2’. Bourne explains ‘Ersatz presentism is the view not that only one time exists, but that only one time has a concrete realization’. But he nevertheless sees this as ‘a mere nominal difference’, holding (11) that it is equivalent to saying ‘presentists do not believe in any times other than the present’. Now it is plausible enough to think of sets of propositions as abstract existents. But these sets are worlds, and when the world constituted by a given set is the present we do nothing less than, as Bourne admits, ‘inhabit its concrete realization’. It is no wonder that Lewis (1986:140), targeting the ersatz possibilists for a similar equivocation over existence, balks at talking in the same breath of a set of propositions and our concrete teeming world. He concludes that if worlds are sets of propositions, then the concrete object that we are part of cannot be called a world. This perceived logical gulf between the notions of a set of propositions, and of a physically realized world inhabited by ‘flesh and blood’ (Bourne, 2006a:13) creatures, such as ourselves, will repeatedly crop up in the discussion below.

(a) The abstract/concrete distinction I turn now to the first objection, which is perhaps itself little more than a comment. Ersatz presentism assumes, as we have seen, that there is a clear distinction between abstract and concrete, but this is controversial. Intuitively, we classify rocks and trees as concrete, propositions, numbers, sets and universals as abstract. But where one might expect to find a unitary principle underlying our practice, there are only competing criteria which do not give consistent results as to whether an object should be classified as abstract or concrete, and do not necessarily accord with our intuitive classifications. The most prominent account is what Lewis (1986:83) has dubbed the ‘Negative Way’. According to this, abstract objects, in contrast to concrete ones, lack a spatio-temporal location, are causally inert and are mind independent (in order to rule out mental items). Just in regard to the first of these conditions, Lewis has observed that, although a set is a paradigmatically abstract entity, a set of located things does have a location, even if a divided one. Thus a set of books may be located on a particular book shelf. Likewise a universal, such as ‘redness’, if as many hold it is part of the cherry that exemplifies it, is wholly present in those regions of space occupied by the cherry. If we take such a view of universals, but wish to continue classifying, say, ‘redness’ as abstract, then mustn’t we say that not all the parts of even a cherry are concrete? Perhaps it will be commented that ersatz times will not at least be one of the counter-examples here since they consist in sets of propositions, and propositions do not have a spatial or temporal location. A different, and older definition (reminiscent of Locke) – the ‘Way of Abstraction’, as Lewis calls it – is that according to which abstract entities are formed by the omission of distinguishing details, or by, as Lewis (1986:84) says, ‘somehow subtracting specificity’, from concrete

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ones. Now the particular ersatz time, or abstract representation, corresponding to the world as it is may perhaps be conceived as formed by subtracting specificity from that world, which after all is the representation’s concrete realization. However, with all those other ersatz times, and representations, which do not correspond to the actual world, there is extant no concrete realization from which they might have been formed by omitting the relevant specificity. In any case it is not really clear whether ‘specificity’ is the right word here since the representation can have as much specificity as you like, if this means ‘detail’, or ‘distinguishing detail’. If it does not mean ‘detail’ then it seems to be just another word for ‘concrete’, and nothing has been explained. One thing that can be said, however, is that, whether or not, when pressed, the distinction between abstract and concrete becomes blurred, not only does common opinion, as we saw, acknowledge that distinction, but it is unlikely to protest at including (providing of course it was explained what they were) ersatz times among the abstract objects. This is because, as again Lewis observes, common opinion is far more relaxed – or far less certain – perhaps ordinary intuition just gives out – about what must be excluded when it comes to abstract objects, than it is where concrete ones are concerned. At any rate if it has no difficulty with the mathematicians’ ‘vast hierarchy of pure sets’ (Lewis, ibid:82), it is unlikely to object to ersatz times. However, perhaps common opinion oughtn’t to be the last word.

(b) ‘Everything is instantaneous’ I pass on to the second objection. This concerns the requirement that any state of the world represented by an ersatz time must be instantaneous (Crisp, 2007:127), including that one whose abstract representation is concretely realized as the present. Now the epithet ‘instantaneous’ suggests a picture of the current state of the world as, so to speak, pressed hard up against, even encroached upon, by other regions of time. It brings to mind that conception of presentism, often entertained by eternalists, or four dimensionalists, according to which presentism is really only an etiolated version of four dimensionalism, in which entities, existing only in the present, consist in just, as it were, those wafer thin slivers of time that would remain if all their earlier temporal parts were excised. Indeed Merricks (2007:124) seems to have just this ‘eternalist’ take on presentism in mind – one which he is keen to reject, concluding that ‘this view [that the present time is some superthin slice of being, 125] is not presentism’ – when he writes: Now consider a view that starts with the eternalist’s picture of time and existence at a time, and then‘shaves off ’ the past and the future, leaving only a thin (instantaneous?) slice called ‘the present’. This view agrees with eternalism that existing at a time – at any time, past, present, or future – is like being located at a place. But, unlike eternalism, this view says that while objects exist at the present time, they exist at no other times, since there are no other times at which to be located. Such a view implies that everything is instantaneous.

As we saw earlier, however, it is only of entities understood, as comprised of temporal parts, that it can be asserted that, at any single time, they possess parts existing at other times, but not at this time. For three dimensionalists, including both non-presentist, and presentist,

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tensed theorists, an entity does not have temporal parts at all, and so cannot even be conceived with parts located at other times in order then to imagine them having been excised. For such three dimensionalists, all the parts of an entity exist at a single time (which, for the presentist, is only the present). They typically repudiate the temporal parts view by stating, as again we saw, that an entity is ‘wholly present at whatever time it exists’. However, it is not just that talk of ersatz times, representing instantaneous states of the world, would not seem to allow enough time for the meaningful interactions of ordinary experience.6 It is also that such talk is not, as Merricks brings out, wholly free of the influence of that spatial metaphor, utilized by eternalists, according to which the present is just one region among others – a region called the present. But for the presentist, the present is not ‘some super-thin slice of being’ (Merricks, 2007:124–5); it is not located at a region at all (see in particular Prior, 1970:246–7). Far from its being required therefore, it may seem to distort presentism to speak of any state of the world, represented by an ersatz time, as instantaneous. Perhaps the description could be defended by insisting on an absolutely sharp division between a state of the world as an actualized representation, which nevertheless remains part of the order of abstract representations – the one actualized representation being that corresponding to the present – and its concrete realization. Such a division is perhaps encouraged by Bourne’s talk (13) of ‘our present’s corresponding time’. The ersatz presentist may then say that it is only the abstract representation of the current state of the world which is confined within strict, but, ersatz temporal boundaries, leaving its concrete realization – of which we ourselves are a part – to overflow, seeping into every nook and cranny of existence, as reality does. One possible difficulty is that ersatz times, as representatives of the relevant states of the world, are themselves available in the present for us to ponder, and so they themselves, although abstract as opposed to concrete, must somehow also partake in this concrete ‘overflowingness’ of the present: are they then somehow of it, but not in it? Could we resist this suggestion by speaking of their timelessness? I am not sure. This uncertainty only reminds us that the first difficulty – concerning the distinction itself between abstract and concrete – has by no means been resolved.

(c) The shifting truth maker Consider a present-tensed proposition such as ‘David Cameron is tall’ which, as the ersatz presentist would put it, is among a set of propositions corresponding to, or representing, that state of the world which is currently concretely realized. The most natural thing to say in answer to the question: what is its truth maker, would seem to be the concretely existing David Cameron, the property of tallness, and the relation between them. (On one common account, mentioned earlier, we may think of the property as wholly present wherever David Cameron is located.) But now consider the past-tensed proposition ‘Napoleon was short’. This is true, on Crisp’s or Bourne’s account, if the abstract time representing the relevant state of the world – one in which Napoleon was short – is ‘earlier than’ the abstract time representing the current state of the world. But someone may complain (see Matthew Davidson’s ‘shifting-truth maker objection’, 2013) that this truth maker – an ersatz time and its relation to another ersatz time – is quite different from the type of concretely existing substance and property which is the truth maker for a present-tensed proposition such as ‘David Cameron is tall’. (The

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problem, it has been observed, is exacerbated when it is the same subject who is first tall, and then later, say in the history books, only was tall.) Nor will it much help to point out that an ersatz time is a representation of a state of the world which includes a short Napoleon. For now we are indeed referring to substances and properties, as truth makers, but they are ersatz ones. As you move therefore from present to past-tensed propositions, there is still a shift in type of truth maker, not now from substances and properties to times, but from concretely existing, to ersatz, substances and properties. Nor given their manifest desire to preserve continuity from past to present, can the ersatz presentists easily shrug off this result. A way of maintaining continuity, and avoiding the shift, and one which certain of Bourne’s remarks suggest, would be to return to the present-tensed proposition ‘David Cameron is tall’ and, observing that there is also an abstract ersatz representation for the state of the world which is currently concretely realized, maintain that here too, the truth maker is still his ersatz representation. It is already unattractive to many to suggest that what makes the past-tensed claim that Napoleon was short true is not Napoleon himself having existed, and having been short, but that there is a ‘story or model’ (Hinchliff, 1996:124) which represents him as that. It can only be more unattractive still to appeal to such a story or model when, as with ‘David Cameron is tall’, there is a competing concretely existing claimant to fulfil the role. Indeed to make such an appeal might seem like deliberately putting one’s head into a noose such as that prepared by Lewis for the ersatz possibilists when he writes (1979:184) ‘given that the actual world does not differ in kind from the [non-actual worlds . . . their position] would lead to the conclusion that I and all my surroundings are [really] a set of sentences’ – a position, he roundly claims, that he cannot believe.

(d) The truth value link again: why presentism cannot rehabilitate it So far, we have taken as examples a pair of unrelated past- and present-tensed propositions, and thought of them as both uttered in the present. A defence of the last way of preserving continuity of type of truth maker across the tenses, by construing it invariably as an ersatz representation, may now be essayed. This, it will be said, is just what allows the ersatz presentist, given his series of abstract times, ordered by the ‘earlier than’ relation, to restore the truth value link, and thus refute the criticism, often levelled against presentism, that (Bourne, 2006a:9) ‘many different pasts . . . are compatible with the present state of the universe’. According to the truth value link principle, he will remind us, a pair of propositions, such as ‘Socrates taught Plato’ and ‘Socrates teaches Plato’, although past and present-tensed, respectively, are, given relevantly different times of utterance, equivalent in truth value. In supporting his contention, the defender will ask us to consider a claim, such as Bourne’s (quoted earlier), that ‘what makes it true that “Socrates taught Plato” is the existence of a proposition that states this is the case for some [specific] time in the past, where a time is a set of propositions that states the other truths about what happens at that time’ (my italics). He will then explain: surely, according to the truth value link, that the past-tensed proposition, ‘Socrates taught Plato’, is likewise true, if the presenttensed proposition, ‘Socrates teaches Plato’, uttered two millennia ago, was true. We shall of course, he will add, have to replace the reference to the proposition being ‘uttered two millennia ago’ with Bourne’s talk of ‘[the existence of a proposition] stating that this is the

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case for some [relevant] time in the past’. When we have done this, can we not see that ersatz presentism conforms to the truth value link. But the truth value link is here misconstrued. The present-tensed proposition’s being true at the relevant past time (a time, for the presentist, ‘earlier than’ the abstract time representing the current state of the world) isn’t, according to the truth value link, what makes the past-tensed proposition true. Both propositions, equally, derive their truth from the concrete existence two millennia ago of the two philosophers in the relationship of teacher to pupil. This state of affairs, by making true the present-tensed proposition, ‘Socrates teaches Plato’, uttered at that time, simultaneously guarantees the truth of the equivalent past-tensed proposition, uttered later. Thus to say that what is past was once present is, for the truth value link theorist, to say that it was once concretely realized. But the two ersatz philosophers in an ersatz relationship of teacher to pupil, used to ground both Bourne’s past-tensed proposition, uttered now, and the equivalent present-tensed proposition, belonging to the set of propositions that constitute the relevant past time, will render these propositions true, even if Socrates and Plato were never parts of a concretely realized world. They will render them true therefore even if the past was never present. A slightly different albeit related way of bringing out the weakness of Bourne’s position here is by maintaining, as Merricks does (2007:131–3), that while such an ersatzist can say that the statement, Socrates taught Plato, is necessitated by the past abstract time, together with its ‘earlier than relation’ to the present time, that is not enough for its truth. For a past-tensed statement to be true what it is appropriately about must necessitate it. But the proposition in question is about Socrates and Plato and their interaction, not about a past abstract time, and its ‘earlier than relation’ to the present time. As Merricks puts it (132–3), using his own example: ‘I say that claims like that the Trojans were conquered are not about a primitive relation holding between one maximal proposition and another. This seems to me as clear an example of a claim’s failing to be about something that allegedly necessitates it as we could want . . . I deny that claims like that the Trojans were conquered are thus about abstract times’. It does not seem then that resorting to an ersatz version of the theory will salvage the truth value link which is so clearly violated by non-ersatz versions. We saw in a previous chapter how this violation occurs. The denial that there are any existents other than current ones undermines the ordinary entailment relations which we take for granted. Thus we assume that if it is true that the leaf was falling, it must have been true at some earlier time to say that the leaf is falling, or if the candle, now bent, was straight, it must have been true at some time earlier to say that it is straight. But as we noted, and as Hinchliff expresses well (1996:126): ‘Having been straight is no more [for the presentist] a way of being straight than not being straight is a way of being straight’. The way the candle is is how, and only how, it presently is, and we are not entitled, without falling into incoherence, to subtract ‘presentness’ from the way the candle is, and substitute pastness, while leaving everything else the same. This discontinuity is, as we saw, no more or less than what the presentists are, or should be, prepared to acknowledge in order to deal with the problem of persistence through change: of how the candle (in Hinchliff ’s example) can remain identical through change, and yet be both straight and bent. The property of straightness must simply cease to exist; that of having been straight is another sort of property entirely. Nothing that the ersatz theorists have yet

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furnished to us – even their reminder that for them both present and past are existing orders of abstract propositions – alters this judgement: the violation of the truth value link is the price presentists have to pay for their acknowledgement of the discontinuity of temporal passage. That this is not always their explicit motive for embracing the theory does not in the end make much difference.

(e) The ersatz series and the course of history This leads to a final objection to ersatz presentism. It is not enough, we saw above, in order to ensure that the time at which Socrates taught Plato (or indeed the time at which these philosophers lived) was ever the present time, that the proposition ‘Socrates teaches Plato’ is among a set of propositions, constituting an ersatz time, which is ‘earlier than’ the abstract time representing the current state of the world. For all this establishes is that if that time were ever present, the proposition ‘Socrates taught Plato’ which is false would have been true. A defender of ersatz presentism might protest: you’ve missed the whole point; that is just what it means to say that Socrates taught Plato. This will seem far too swift for many. One first wants, these dissenters will say, an independent justification, not so far provided, for thus placing some ersatz times, but not others, in the ersatz series, ordered by the ‘earlier than’ relation, which represents the actual course of history – say Hitler losing the Second World War, Prior falling out of a punt (1968:10). The ersatz presentists will point out that the eternalists’ series of concrete times simply follows the contingent sequence of events which constitutes the course of history. But if the eternalists do without a criterion, the presentists will ask, why should they themselves, whose abstract series of times mirrors the eternalists’ concrete series, not do without one likewise. But ersatz presentism is here subject to constraints that do not apply to eternalists. These constraints have to do with the origination of this form of presentism in ideas distilled from the theory of ersatz possible worlds, which were themselves a reaction to Lewis’s modal realism. Now just as Lewis’s opponents have to countenance as many ersatz possible worlds as can be conceived, so ersatz presentists have to countenance as many ersatz times, as many possible instantaneous states of the world, as can be conceived. Only afterwards can an attempt be made to distinguish within this multitude of ersatz possible times, those belonging to the ordered series, which represents history. Eternalists are not, in the first place, confronted in this way by a wider range of times from which they must distinguish a narrower one, and so do not, as do these presentists, require a criterion for this purpose. Presentists have a disadvantage, albeit a different one, compared with ersatz possible world theorists also. For the latter distinguish only between what is actual, which includes the possible, and what is actualized. The ersatz presentists, holding that nothing is actualized except what presently exists, need, as we have seen – at least if they are to accommodate common sense – to divide the realm of that which is actual, but not actualized, into what happened, and what did not happen, but might have happened. Thus again they, but not the defenders of ersatz possible worlds, are in need of a criterion. This criterion is not forthcoming. It will not do, stressing the adjective ‘actual’, to appeal to our actual history as the criterion since, for presentists, that is just as appropriately applied to possible pasts as to what happened. Indeed for this very reason they have robbed us of that ordinary use of ‘actual’, or

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‘actually’. Thus it is that the actual course of history, as we would normally describe it, is no more ‘actual’ for ersatz presentists than is a possible turn – say Hitler invading England – which history might have taken but did not take. Presentists who introduce haecceities, or posit ersatz times, are responding in particular, as we saw, to the inability, in their view, of past-tensed facts to furnish truth makers for past-tensed propositions. According to them, the reason is that these facts lack a feature, structure, which truth makers possess. I have intimated that their own alternative solutions, attractive and resourceful as they are, in particular the appeal to ersatz times face, as they stand, difficulties also. As far as the truth value link is concerned, I argued that ersatz theorists cannot restore it. I suggested, however, that it is misguided of them to try to do so: its break-down is a price that presentists may just have to pay – however philosophically unwelcome – for their laudable determination to recognize temporal discontinuity by denying that the past exists.

2: The truth maker is ‘hypothetical’ According to the second type of objection, brought against past-tensed properties, these properties possess a ‘suspect’ feature – their hypotheticality (see Sider, 2001:39–41; 2003:180–4) – making them unsuitable, contra Bigelow, for the role of truth makers, or to figure as ‘rock bottom’ constituents of the supervenience base. Only categorical properties can be admitted into such a base. This, we are informed, is because they tell us what a thing ‘is actually like’, whereas hypothetical properties – which also include dispositional and brute counterfactual properties – merely tell us what a thing was, or would be, or could be, like. A hypothetical property, like fragility – a glass’s disposition to shatter if dropped – can only be admitted into the supervenience base, they tell us, suggesting a precedent for pasttensed properties, if it is first rendered ‘unsuspicious’ by being reduced to categorical notions, here the actual molecular structure of glass, together with the physical laws that govern its behaviour. It will thus be tethered to, rather than ‘floating free’ of, a basic level of physical fact.

(i) Categoricity is not a panacea for all the ills of dubious ontologies Before trying to assess this objection, let us clear up a preliminary confusion that attends its expression specifically by eternalists keen to replace presentism with their own tenseless theory, and could lead to a premature spurious endorsement of it. Eternalists, we know, propose a reduction of (past-) tensed properties to tenseless ones. Are they suggesting then, in voicing this criticism, that this reduction is of the same kind as that, which they are apparently also advocating, of dispositional properties, such as fragility, to micro physical ones? It might at first sight be thought that it is. Don’t they clearly affirm that the reduction of tensed to tenseless properties, like the microphysical reduction of dispositional ones, is a reduction to properties – categorical ones – having a basis ‘in the way things actually are’ (Sider, 2001:36), or ‘involv[ing] what objects are actually like (Sider, 41) or ‘characteriz[ing] a thing as it actually is’ (Crisp 121). Moreover, isn’t the underlying thought here, as it is with those who undertake to reduce dispositions to the microphysical base, that only categorical properties are, as Hume requires, ‘loose’

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and ‘separate’ (2000: Section VII , Part II ) from each other and everything else, and so are alone qualified to figure in the supervenience base? All this can be conceded. There is, however, another far-reaching aspect of the tenseless view which has no parallel in the ordinary physicalist reduction of dispositions to their microphysical bases. Let us recall that a tensed statement such as, say, ‘the leaves turned brown two weeks ago’ is true, on the standard tenseless, token reflexive, theory of time, if its utterance stands in the appropriate tenseless relation – here that of succeeding it by two weeks – to the event (or state of affairs) which it is about. On such an analysis, since the distinction between past, present and future constitutes no part of reality, all times are on an ontological par. In order, however, to signal our special relation to the present, although without in any way privileging it metaphysically, or detracting from the evidently real existence of non-present times, eternalists typically opt for an ‘indexical’ account of ‘present’, or ‘actual’. Thus, they say, we call ‘present’, or ‘actual’, whatever time we inhabit. However, the reference of such ‘indexical’ terms varies with relevant features of the context of utterance. Consequently, when uttered by inhabitants of other times, these terms will refer to their time: that time being, for them, likewise the only present, or actual time, all the others, together with their denizens, although existent, being ‘non-present’, ‘non-actual’. In comparing this tensed-tenseless reduction to the reduction of dispositional properties to a basic level of physical fact, we had originally assumed with the relevant commentators, that, in both cases, the reduction is crucially to ‘the way things actually are’, where that is understood to mean the way they categorically are, and where that notion, in turn, is construed in Humean fashion, as indicated above. But while ordinary microphysical reduction may be thus correctly described, the reduction of tensed to tenseless properties and relations cannot be so described. While, for eternalists, all tenseless properties and relations are certainly categorical – being precisely designed to meet the Humean requirement of discreteness and ‘self-containment’ (to use Armstrong’s Humean expressions, 1997:80) – not all of them, unlike the microphysical facts, which are putatively the basis of dispositions, can be said to describe the way things actually are. For the eternalists’ analysis of actuality is, as we saw, indexical. What is ‘actual’ refers only to the present time – the time which is now, as opposed to the times which are future or past – just as, for Lewis, only the world we inhabit is ‘actual’, not the possible worlds we might have inhabited. Consequently, the ‘actual’ is only, for eternalists, a subdivision of reality. For reality includes all past and future times as well as present ones. Being short is as much a categorical property of Napoleon, as tallness is a categorical property of David Cameron, although the former individual exists at a past time, and the latter at the present time. Only David Cameron’s tallness, however, is actual, or tells us how things actually are. ‘Categorical’ therefore has a hugely wider extension for the eternalists than it has for those physicalists about dispositions typically toeing the Humean line by allowing only discrete and self-contained entities into the supervenience base. It must cover a proliferating ontology of times, and individuals. Eternalism implies, as Merricks (2007:139) sceptically, but vividly, puts it, that: dinosaurs and woolly mammoths and the fourth-millennium human outposts on Mars and the heat-dead universe all exist . . . that the gladiator battles in the Coliseum

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rage on, each of your eight great-great-grandfathers is taking his first steps, and humans are crossing an ice bridge from Asia to North America for the first time. Because eternalism implies these things, we should reject it . . . do not misunderstand. Eternalism does not imply that the gladiator battles rage on and are located at the present time . . . they are located only at past times . . . But they really do rage on . . . and that is why they serve this very day as truth makers for the [relevant] claims . . .

The eternalists’ claim, moreover, that all these times, and their denizens, concretely exist, even though, being isolated from us spatio-temporally, they are inaccessible to us even in principle through the senses, makes their zeal to reduce past-tensed properties to categorical ones in order to appease Hume, with his dislike of ‘dubious ontologies’ seem almost ironical They seem to forget that Hume’s reason for repudiating the idea of necessary, or intrinsic, connection between ‘matters of fact’ (as opposed to relations of ideas) was precisely an epistemological one: that we receive no sense impressions of such a connection to which we could trace back the idea, and so place it on a firm empirical footing. He writes (2000: Section 7, part 2): There appears not through all nature any one instance of connexion which is conceivable to us. All events seem entirely loose and separate. One event follows another: but we never can observe any tie between them. They seem conjoined but never connected. And as we have no idea of anything which never appears to our outward sense or inward sentiment the necessary conclusion seems to be that we have no idea of connexion or power at all and these words are absolutely without any meaning (my italics).

The analogous kind of reduction to that which eternalists seem to be proposing of pasttensed properties would, in the case of dispositions, such as fragility, not be a reduction to their microphysical bases in the actual world, but a Lewisian reduction in terms of possible worlds.7 Such a reduction would of course face those very difficulties – not least the simultaneous compliance with, and transgression, of Humean precepts – which we have just remarked with the eternalist reduction.8 We are not ruling it out that, were those, who seek to reduce dispositions to their actual microphysical bases, to find this finally unsatisfactory, they might attempt a Lewisian-style modal realist reduction, however farfetched it might seem to many, as the following remark of Merricks (2007:139) testifies: And I find the view that gladiator battles rage on and Martian outposts really do exist no more believable than David Lewis’s view that some pigs really do fly and some donkeys really do talk. And I do not find Lewis’s view believable at all, not even when I keep clearly in mind Lewis’s point that the flying pigs and the talking donkeys are not located in the actual world.

All that it is necessary to point out here is that merely seeking, or undertaking to offer, an ordinary microphysical reduction of dispositions does not commit them to such a thing.

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(ii) Prospects for micro physical reductions of dispositions (a) The trouble with dispositions is that they are Meinongian (Armstrong) With eternalism out of the picture, let us return to the objection, observing that it assumes the feasibility of an ordinary micro physical reduction of dispositional properties, such as fragility. This of course is the basis of the exhortation to reduce presently existing past-tensed properties in a similar way. We shall briefly consider the prospects for such reductions before turning to a direct comparison with past-tensed properties, unmediated and unobscured by the aspiration to render them tenseless. Dispositional properties are standardly understood (though this itself has in recent years been importantly questioned9) as involving a ‘stimulus’ and a ‘manifestation’. A ‘dispositional’ analysis – of a glass’s fragility – is thus given in terms of its shattering (the manifestation) if dropped (the stimulus). Suppose we wish to transport a fine glass vase, and pack it in thick wadding so as to minimize the possibility of its being broken en route. It reaches its destination undamaged. Suppose now someone asks us: why did you pack it in all that wadding? We reply ‘because it is fragile’, and we do so, even though that adjective makes essential reference to an event – shattering – which never occurred. Were we instead to deny that glass in protective packaging is fragile, fragility would become a merely extrinsic property of the glass, and its possession a sheer matter of external circumstance. Physicalists, such as David Armstrong, dismissing such attempts to shore up the account, have thus complained that dispositions, having ‘within [themselves], essentially, an implicit reference to a non-event’, are Meinongian. It is precisely to rescue them from this dubious Meinongian – and wholly unHumean – state that they seek to reduce them to their microstructural causal bases.

(b) For and against Armstrong’s micro-physical reduction Armstrong’s argument for the reduction of dispositions is this: since dispositions are properties that play a certain causal role, and since their causal bases are what play this role, it follows that dispositions are reducible to their causal bases, in other words to given micro-structural properties. It is therefore, he concludes, these categorical properties that we are really ascribing when we apparently ascribe dispositional properties. This analysis of dispositional properties, although accepted by several philosophers (Bigelow for all we know might approve it), is not of course uncontroversial. I can do no more here than give a brief taster of the debate. One objection is that a disposition, such as fragility, is realizable in a whole variety of microphysical structures. It would follow that diverse causal bases of fragility were identical with each other. But this is a familiar consequence of endorsing different levels of description. It could perhaps be avoided, if deemed necessary, by taking care to be more specific about the type of fragility one is discussing by explicitly associating that type with the precise material that in the particular case is responsible for the disposition. Some philosophers, daring to eat away at the Humean account, have countered that there exist ‘bare’ dispositions, dispositions that ‘go all the way down’ – that is to say disposition without a causal basis. They cite, for instance, (Stephen Mumford, 2006; G. Molnar, 1999), such

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notions as mass or spin or electrical charge. They rely here, however, on questionable extrapolations (Williams, 2009:7–19) from work in subatomic physics concerning fundamental particles, such as leptons and quarks.10 Still others maintain that there are no purely categorical properties at all. It is untenable, they say to suppose, as does Armstrong (1989), that the essence of a property can be isolated from the ways in which its instances are disposed to behave in given circumstances. But this would not necessarily entail that a dispositional property could not be reduced to the relevant microstructural one. Rather, it would mean that the disposition and its microstructural basis were inextricably interwoven in our understanding. This seems to be in line with common sense. We would surely know what someone meant if they said, looking at a fine glass goblet, ‘I can actually perceive its fragility’. He would, we might surmise, be responding, perhaps subliminally, and against the background of familiar experiences of glass shattering, to certain brute physical aspects of the material before him, although perhaps only a chemist could definitively identify it. Or consider this description of the sound emitted by a glass harmonium: ‘one has a clear sense that it proceeds from something on the edge of imminent fracture’: surely the oral equivalent of visually perceiving fragility in the previous example. One philosopher, Andreas Huttemann (2009:223–38), wishing to accord dispositional properties what he calls their place ‘in the physical description of the world’, grants that they can be reduced to microphysical ones, but refuses to conclude that this signifies their reduction to categorical ones. The argument, at first reminiscent of Armstrong, seems to be this. Fragility’s functional role is the role of a dispositional property to break, if suitably dropped, the micro-based property realises this role – it is, that is to say, in virtue of the micro-based property that breaking occurs. But this latter property can, Huttemann adds, only thus ‘occupy’ the disposition’s functional role if it is a disposition itself: there is in fact only one property here to which two different predicates refer. He has earlier claimed that dispositional properties are distinct from categorical ones, in that whereas the former only manifest themselves intermittently, the latter always manifest themselves. But in so far as a property is microphysical, its nature is – in any ordinary sense of the word – surely constantly manifest: that is what for physicalists renders it unsuspect, and suitable as a truth maker: we do not have to wait upon a breakage, or a dissolving, occurring. If Huttemann wishes to claim that the microphysical property which, at another level of description, is dispositional is, even at this microphysical level, only, as dispositions are, intermittently manifest, then it seems that he has dragged down its dispositional character from the one level, where it is appropriate, to this other where it is inappropriate, and contradictory. It seems in conclusion, and despite the noted difficulties, that there are at least viable arguments that physicalists can muster for claiming that dispositions can be reduced to their categorical microstructural bases.

(iii) Comparison of dispositional with past-tensed properties If the answer to whether dispositional properties can successfully be reduced to their micro-physical bases is a qualified ‘yes’, are past-tensed properties sufficiently like them to encourage the thought that such a reduction may be on the cards for them also?

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We are bound to wonder, however, in contemplating this question, what similarity is supposed to bind the conditional ‘would’, i.e. would break if dropped, with the past-tensed attribution, ‘was formerly’, i.e. in ‘was formally intact’, even if they can superficially both be contrasted with the is as it occurs in ‘is actually a thousand shards’. Obviously one may cite the Meinongian parallel. Presumably one driving idea of those who liken past-tensed properties to dispositional ones, and then class them all as hypothetical, is that the former, as posited by presentists, for whom the past does not exist, similarly make essential reference to, are grounded in, or ‘point beyond themselves’ to, non-existents. It is this dubious nature which hardly recommends them as truth makers, and which for many, like Armstrong, seems to cry out for reduction. But even this potentially promising route to similarity soon gets into difficulty.

(a) Directedness, intentionality and indeterminacy First, reflection on the idea of this ‘directedness’ appears to threaten the reductive programme itself as applied to dispositions such as fragility, which we have just cautiously, and with qualification, endorsed. For it leads some writers, for instance, Ullin Place (1996:91–120), precisely to oppose Armstrong’s claim that these dispositions are capable of reduction – indeed, it takes the whole emphasis off their conditionality as intrinsic to them. Rather they take this ostensible directedness to signify that these dispositions possess an irreducible intentionality which they claim is the mark of physical causal dispositions as well as of mental states. (They are keen, however, to distinguish intentionality, as a property of states and events themselves from intensionality, as merely a property of a locution or statement; Mumford, 1999:218). Even if we were prepared to endorse a view, which risks, despite dealing with certain difficulties of the conditionality account, our having to allow, as Mumford warns (217), that ‘inanimate objects have . . . purposes and perform actions’, there is in any case, and secondly, an obstacle to assimilation, under the general rubric of hypothetical properties, of dispositions, thus understood, to past-tensed properties. For among the ‘traditional characteristics of intentionality’ which Place, and also Martin and Pfeifer (1986) allude to is, importantly, indeterminacy. An object which need not, or does not yet, exist, they observe, is therefore indeterminate. (One recalls Anscombe’s example, although concerned with the mental, of how the parking space, which she is searching for, is, and if she never finds one, will remain, indeterminate.) However, where past-tensed properties are concerned, nonexistence does not entail indeterminacy, not at least for our realist presentists. On the contrary, for them, since they oppose, as we have noted, any kind of anti-realist relativism whereby our conception of the past progressively alters with that of the present, pasttensed properties are completely fixed and determinate – as fixed and determinate indeed as they would be for truth value link realists.

(b) Crisp: the distinction between dispositions and past-tensed properties Crisp (2007:125) has offered the following reason for not locating, nor for seeing any prospect of so doing, hypothetical qualities in general in the supervenience base. They

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do not, he claims, ‘carve nature at its joints’. He expounds this obscure and metaphorical notion by claiming that the sharing of fundamental properties – properties basic enough to constitute the supervenience base – ‘makes for sameness of intrinsic qualitative character’. He then argues, using past-tensed properties as his illustration, that hypothetical qualities cannot meet this requirement. He argues ‘two things aren’t similar with respect to intrinsic qualitative character by virtue of each [say] having been roamed by dinosaurs’. However persuasive this argument where past-tensed properties are concerned, if he is here (as he seems to be doing) treating past-tensed properties as only instances of a class of properties – hypothetical ones – which includes dispositional ones, such as fragility, it is unconvincing. Two glasses, say, precisely are similar with respect to intrinsic qualitative character by virtue of each being fragile. But this has surely something to do with the fact that they share the same micro-physical properties.11 This again suggests that a physicalist reduction is at hand here, where it is not with past-tensed properties. Crisp’s objection against hypothetical properties, including dispositions, being bona fide truth makers, seems therefore, if it is to be convincing, to have to be restricted to past-tensed properties. But there it does seem to carry some weight. Someone might still protest that, after all, there is a similarity between dispositional and past-tensed properties. You are suggesting, they will say, that when I declare that I can directly perceive a glass’s fragility, I am really responding – perhaps without realizing it, and obviously against a background of experiences of shattering glass – to the brute physical character of that specific material. Surely in the same way I can directly perceive the past – the long exposure to harsh sunlight, say, – in the fadedness of the curtains – or the fact that the earth was formerly roamed by dinosaurs – in the fossil record. But, we shall reply, where is the past-tensed property, exemplified by a presently existing object, in all this? The curtain’s fadedness is a present-tensed property, presently exemplified by the curtains. There seem only two alternatives available. The first would be to infer, as would truth value link realists, from the curtain’s fadedness to a real past occurrence, or state of affairs – the curtains having been for a long time exposed to harsh sunlight. This real past event would then constitute the truth conditions – or truth maker – for the statement that the curtains were formerly exposed to harsh sunlight. This option, even though it respects the idea that there must be a truth maker for any past-tensed statement, is of course ruled out for presentists simply because there exists no such past event, or state of affairs, to be the requisite ontological ground – the requisite truth maker. Nor could it be otherwise so long as they acknowledge the discontinuity of time’s passage. The second alternative would be to construct this particular past for the curtains – their long exposure to harsh sunlight – out of the present evidence of their fadedness. There is a parallel here with a certain way of treating dispositions, but it is not one involving the physical reduction we have just discussed. It is rather that put forward by Dummett’s anti-realists. Such evidence does not, on Dummett’s analysis, stand to pasttensed properties as, on a physicalist analysis, the microstructural properties of glass stand to its dispositional ones. Indeed if we try to find what is playing, in the dispositional case, the role that evidence plays on the anti-realist account of pasttensed statements, we shall have to change our focus. We shall have to focus not, so to

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speak, on the ‘forward’ relation from the dispositional property of glass to the behaviour which, in the relevant circumstances, will manifest the property – the shattering that may never occur because the glass is never dropped – but on the ‘backward’ relation from the relevant behaviour (the shattering of glass when dropped) to the dispositional property of fragility. This way round, the dispositional property, fragility, is a construction out of the behaviour, or put differently, this shattering of glass when dropped is just what its fragility consists in, no more, no less. This second option, in that it substitutes verification, for truth, conditions, or for truth makers, would be no more acceptable than the first option for presentists who, like Bigelow, insist that pasttensed properties be truth makers, and that they be properly past –directed, so that the past is not merely a concoction out of present evidence. Along with this substitution of verification, for truth, conditions would go another Dummettian feature that none of the presentists considered could accept: the indeterminacy of past-tensed statements for which there exists at present no evidence. This again has its parallel where dispositions are concerned. For Dummett (as was explained earlier) we do not continue, when there is no stimulus, and therefore no manifestation (say the glass goblets are always carefully packaged), to ascribe the disposition. For him, there is just no answer to the question whether the goblets, which are always protected and so never shatter, are, or are not, fragile. It would be mistaken to suppose that past-tensed properties – with which present things are, for the presentist Bigelow, ‘burdened’ – fail out of incompetence on their originator’s part, to be consistent with either a full-blown truth value link realism or with Dummettian anti-realism. It seems rather that their postulation is, as I suggested in chapter 3, a deliberate, brave, and far-sighted attempt to stake out a position which, despite what they might wish or hope, cannot be exactly realist, but which absolutely repudiates anti-realism. This position thus precariously and impossibly balanced between two conflicting theories appears necessary to presentists because only thus, if at all, can the past’s determinateness be preserved alongside an acknowledgement of the fleetingness of time and the dynamism of change – that constant process of creation and annihilation, which both eternalists and non-presentist tensed theorists, with their view that the past exists, finally turn their back on. The above debate over whether, as examples of irreducible hypothetical properties, past-tensed properties are ‘suspicious’ ontological posits, is valuable in bringing home the deeper, intractable, problems that inevitably attend such an attempt. Later, I shall consider whether their evidently paradoxical application of a realist methodology to a past that they acknowledge to be non-existent, although it is a feature of all the presentists we have investigated, is necessarily definitive of presentism. Could, I shall ask, a more hybrid methodology, even though there will be counter-intuitive costs, be acceptable even within a properly presentist framework. But these novel ideas will be introduced only as a consequence of a lengthy exploration of historical practice in Part III . First, I shall make good the claim that presentists are not any type of anti-realist – which many may in a vague and confused way still suppose – but are, as I indicated, poised uneasily, impossibly, yet for good reason, between the commitment to methodological realism, with its exigent demands as regards past-tensed statements, and the conviction that the past is unreal, or non-existent.

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3: Presentists, anti-realists: Russell’s ‘five minute hypothesis’ Truth value link realists, we argued in Chapter 3, are non-presentists. It by no means follows that presentists are to be identified with those opponents of truth value link realism: Dummett’s anti-realists. This may not seem immediately obvious. Surely, we shall be reminded, we ourselves characterized the latter position, in rejecting truth value link realism, as a ‘radical relativism of the present’, and as an ‘immurement in the present’. Of course, it will be admitted, there are dissimilarities. Dummett’s anti-realism is global: it applies across the board. But surely, the suggestion will continue, presentists, whatever their views in other areas, are anti-realists when it comes to the past. After all, they assert categorically that the past does not exist. If this observation is meant without more ado to get us to agree that they are therefore Dummettian anti-realists about the past, the reasoning is flawed. Dummett is committed to a highly specific theory about the meaning, and truth, of a statement according to which these are a function of its method of verification and not, as realists hold, of independently existing facts or properties. The presentists’ denial that the past exists cannot on its own commit them to any such specific semantic theory. Surely, our unconvinced inquirer will go on, it is precisely a feature of Dummett’s anti-realism that past-tensed statements can be true without having to be grounded in anything so suspicious as past facts or properties? Isn’t his semantic theory then particularly conducive to philosophers who wish, like presentists, to deny that there are such past facts or properties? Unlike the presentist analyses of past-tensed statements, however – and here I offer a brief recap of our findings in chapter 1 – Dummett’s redefinition of truth as justified assertibility is not motivated by a conviction that any particular type of entity does not exist, or that a particular type of statement does not carry the ontological commitment it seems to. His theory is not a generalization of a solution to such a deficiency in a particular area. He explicitly denies that he is primarily concerned ‘to show [of a given class of entities] that there aren’t really such entities . . . or that such entities are not part of the ultimate furniture of the universe’. He goes further: he declares that he is ‘opposed’ to ‘this point of view’. A negative existential claim is, as we saw (pp.  8–13), neither sufficient nor necessary for anti-realism in Dummett’s sense. It is not, for him, sufficient since, to take an example, if statements about character traits were to be reduced to those about physiological constitution, even should this reduction be motivated by the conviction that psychic entities as such did not exist, it could still remain realist. It is not necessary because an anti-realist analysis can be given even of present-tensed statements such as ‘It is raining now’ uttered by someone as she puts her hand out of the window, and so has direct experience of the raindrops falling all round. It does not matter, our inquirer might now urge, how Dummett came to formulate his theory. If, for him, the past does not exist independently of our methods of verification then surely it does not for him, any more than for presentists, exist simpliciter. This does not follow. The latter unqualified sceptical view could, for Dummett, only be arrived at – could only make sense – if the kind of logical gap was first countenanced, which Bertrand Russell (1921:159) exploits for this sceptical end in his famous remark about memory:

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It is not logically necessary to the existence of a memory-belief that the event remembered should have occurred, or even that the past should have existed at all. There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that ‘remembered’ a wholly unreal past . . . The occurrences which are called knowledge of the past are logically independent of the past; they are wholly analysable into present contents, which might theoretically be just what they are even if no past had existed.

Russell’s stricture only hits home against a theory – such as a realist one – which holds that the truth conditions for given types of statements, such as past-tensed ones, obtain, if they obtain, wholly independently of our direct observations and experiences, and that we can at best merely infer them from these observations and experiences. It is therefore logically possible that we have these same experiences yet the truth conditions for the relevant statements not obtain. It is logically possible, as Russell puts it, that ‘the world sprang into being five minutes ago, with a population that ‘remembered’ a wholly unreal past’. For Dummett on the other hand, the truth of a past-tensed statement such as ‘There were once dinosaurs’ is logically guaranteed given only that the conditions are satisfied for its justified assertion, namely that there is an extant fossil record. Thus there is not even the logical possibility that the evidence that we presently possess could be the same yet, either because there never were dinosaurs, although there were other creatures, or because no past entities exist, the truth value of the statement that ‘there were once dinosaurs’ could be different. Far then from Dummett’s claim that the past does not exist independently of our methods of verification entailing the claim that the past does not exist simpliciter, it is proof, so long as we engage in verificatory practices at all, against that claim. Our objector, having tried to collapse Dummett’s anti-realism into presentism, may now try the reverse procedure. If for presentists, past-tense statements are not grounded in past facts, surely it must follow that there are no facts of any kind, independently of our verificatory practices, for these statements to be grounded in. What option then have presentists, if they wish to maintain, as they do, that past-tensed statements are sometimes true, except to go down Dummett’s route? But presentists hold that pasttensed statements precisely are grounded in independently existing facts, only not, as Dummett’s realist opponents required, past facts, rather they are grounded in facts about the present, or rather past-tensed facts and properties. The disparity here between Dummett’s anti-realism and presentism is shown in their different responses to Russell’s sceptical challenge. As we saw, Dummett would refuse point blank to engage with it. He would dismiss it as incoherent because it presupposes that logical gap (which he associates with his realist opponents) between direct and inferential knowledge, between direct present experience and a merely inferred past. Presentists, however, invoke a non-epistemological version of Russell’s stricture (Crisp, 2007: 119–20, 125; Bourne, 2006a: 8–9, Rhoda, 2009: 45) as an objection which, they claim, their own view must answer, even though they have substituted present facts for the past ones of Dummett’s realist opponents. They must answer it, they tell us themselves, if they wish to continue to maintain that past-tensed statements can be true.

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Now the relevance to presentists of Russell’s challenge arises in the following way. According to their theory (or at least to that of those we have in this chapter concentrated upon), if a given past-tensed proposition (whether or not it is ever actually entertained by anyone) is to be true, it must have, in their terminology, a ‘truth maker’. A truth maker is an entity (property, relation, or state of affairs) whose existence ‘necessitates’, or ‘grounds’, the proposition’s truth, or provides it with, as many presentists now prefer to say, a ‘supervenience base’. But these presentists hold that only present things exist. Hence it follows that, for them, only present things can be truth makers of past-tensed propositions or, as they often prefer to say, can furnish the requisite ‘supervenience base’. As Crisp, recasting Russell’s stricture in the form of two questions, and turning them back on presentism, asks: ‘What present things are such that the proposition that they exist entails the proposition that dinosaurs existed? Isn’t it possible that things be just as they presently are and there have been no dinosaurs?’ Since the truth maker (or supervenience base) is in the present, the question posed by Russell’s stricture is not (as it was for realists about the past) how we can be certain that we have correctly inferred from our present experience to the existence of a relevant state of affairs in the past. Rather the question is: how can present existents (the only existents there are) make a past-tensed statement true? How indeed can they have any relevance for such a statement? Dummett’s anti-realists would see no problem at all with the first question, answering immediately ‘the fossil record’. As for the second, they would be no more prepared to take it seriously than they would Russell’s original, epistemologically oriented, argument. To regard, as presentists do, the first question as problematic and the second as even coherent, would, according to Dummett, presuppose that present existents could have relevance for – could necessitate – the truth of past-tensed statements in isolation from our taking them to do so, in isolation that is to say from our verificatory practices. But Dummett categorically rules this out. For him, ‘the fossil record’ only entails the truth of the past-tense statement ‘There were once dinosaurs’, and hence is a legitimate answer to the first question, because we take it thus as part and parcel of our verificatory practices, because in other words our verificatory practices legitimate this interpretation. He would see Crisp therefore, and like-minded presentists, as revealing, in their attitude to these questions, their allegiance to the idea, shared with Dummett’s realist opponents, that truth ought to correspond with a reality outside, and independent of, our practices, that it must depend in some unmediated way upon (as Bourne, another presentist puts it) ‘the contents of the world’. Those, like Rhoda who look for ‘present surrogates of past facts’ and then, adapting (2009:45) ‘Russell’s five minute hypothesis’, ask ‘[but] what is there about [such present states of affairs] that prevents them from popping into or out of existence independently of past facts or events’, he would convict of open contradiction. For Rhoda’s question makes it clear that presentists like him do not have confidence in these ‘present surrogates of past facts’ as sufficient on their own to determine the truth of a past-tense statement, but feel compelled to turn for support to the – non-existent – past facts for which they are surrogates. There is, we shall recall from a previous chapter, and as again noted a few pages back, a radical consequence of Dummett’s view that truth is a function of our means of verification. The statement, ‘There were once dinosaurs’, is true just so long as our present evidence allows us to justifiably assert it. Of course we are happy ordinarily to

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accept that our view of the past will change as our evidence changes. But this is because we continue to believe that there is a definite fact of the matter to which we are getting progressively closer as we refine our evidence. Dummett’s diametrically opposed position can be brought out by considering historical statements which are easily formulable but for which, precisely because they are trivial, there is evidence neither for nor against. Consider, for instance, ‘Caesar had a headache on his eighteenth birthday’. Since a truth value can only be assigned to this statement in connection with its means of verification, and since there is no means of verification, it cannot be assigned a truth value. It is thus radically indeterminate whether Caesar had a headache on his eighteenth birthday. But if there is no fact of the matter, the past must simply contain a gap here. As we shall see, presentists (as we have them so far) differ from Dummett’s anti-realists in requiring, despite denying the existence of past facts or states of affairs, that all statements about the past, whatever the evidence or lack of it, have a determinate truth value. ‘We want to say’, writes Bourne (to repeat our earlier quotation) ‘that it is either true or false that a certain brontosaurus had two plants for breakfast, regardless of whether there are any traces of this fact in the present’. Not only this, there are some (e.g. Bourne) who, as we have seen, seek, in a way which again – surprisingly – draws them nearer, as we saw, to Dummett’s realist opponents than to the anti-realists, to reinstate the truth value link itself, with its truth value equivalences between differently tensed statements uttered at relevantly different times.

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History

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Collingwood and Oakeshott: Is History Possible?

We have seen how the presentists, who assert not only that past-tensed statements can be true, but that they are made true by corresponding with independent facts, are faced with an apparently insoluble problem once their acknowledgement of the discontinuity involved in temporal passage – in time’s fleetingness – leads them to deny that any past facts exist. They are obliged to look for the requisite truth makers in the present but, shunning Dummett’s radical relativism of the present, characterize these truth makers as somehow, impossibly, having an irreducible past reference. This chapter, as a prelude to our presentist proposal of chapter 7, asks whether a philosophical scrutiny of the practice of historians can go any way to solving the presentist dilemma. The proposal will involve reassigning to actual works of history the role as truth makers for past tensed statements which presentists have sought – unsuccessfully, I argued – to assign to ersatz times. I therefore signal in advance one broad and two narrower objections to such a proposal, which might otherwise suggest that our procedure is already misguided. Even if we were satisfied that historians can, and do, incorporate an element of temporal discontinuity into their methodology, this would only have relevance, it will be said, for discussions, such as the presentists’, if we could show, which is doubtful, that the historical past is identical with the past more generally. Still, we might reply, our findings could afford crucial insights into the philosophers’ problem. A second difficulty is that the presentists’ dilemma is predicated on no less than the denial that the past exists. However, as W. H. Walsh (1967:88) states, ‘that there is no independent past’ is something ‘no working historian can be got to accept’, or again, as C. Behan McCullagh (1997:15–16) puts it: I know of no practising historian who will admit that they cannot discover anything true about the [real] past [as opposed to just something about historical texts] . . . For if they seriously doubted their capacity to uncover facts about the past, why would they continue to practice history? They may as well write historical fiction.

It might seem therefore that they are scarcely likely to have entertained even a suspicion that (in R. G. Collingwood’s words, EPH:101) ‘an event that has finished happening is just nothing at all’. This impression is strengthened, when glancing at an influential collection of papers, such as Philosophical Analysis and History (edited by William Dray, 1966), one finds only one brief reference (239) in the whole book to the problem

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of applying terms like ‘cause’ to ‘activities in the past, which [the historian] does not witness directly’. Nor is it only historians, and philosophers of history, on this side of the channel, who are, ostensibly, realists about the past. The situation is not appreciably different regarding the so-called postmodernists. With the exception of Roland Barthes (1981), who claims that history – for him an exclusively inter-textual discipline – produces a mere ‘reality effect’, and Jacques Derrida, who denounces as ‘a white mythology’ the idea that ‘language discloses a reality to which it refers’ (McCullagh, 1997:38), they recoil from anything radical. Thus Alun Munslow assures us (2007:7) that although its narrative structure is imposed by historians, ‘the past is there’ (if in a state of chaos). Consequently, while history (which possesses form and structure) is not to be found in the past, since ‘histories only happen when they are told’, the past ‘existed in the time of the past’ (as he rather oddly puts it). Against these findings we must set, among others, McCullagh’s observation (1997:43) that ‘even [historical] realists do not think of the past as existing, only that it did exist’, and his question: ‘given that all historical subjects have passed away, exactly what is there to be represented?’ Moreover, once we probe beneath the surface of their writings, we find these realist historians and philosophers of history, far from being oblivious to the fleetingness of their subject matter, struggling, if not always explicitly or even consciously, to impose a continuity between present and past, which their realism demands, but which they grudgingly concede to be constantly under threat. More important still is the fact that Michael Oakeshott and R. G. Collingwood – probably the two most important philosophers of history of the last century, who were also practising historians – were exercised by the question of whether the past exists. Oakeshott, in Experience and its Modes (EM) denied (107) its existence outright, calling it bluntly ‘a nonentity’, which ‘history had to be rescued from’, while embracing wholeheartedly the discontinuity of temporal passage. Collingwood, who asserted (EPH:136) that knowledge construed as ‘the apprehension of a really existing object is ruled out as absolutely inapplicable to history’, was challenged, given lingering realist sympathies, to explain, in his Idea of History (IH) how that which is ‘dead’, ‘inert’, could be made to live again in order to give us such knowledge. As he reminds us, this concern was not new; it was to be found in the Greeks, although they were more pessimistic than Collingwood himself. For them, because history was about the transitory, it simply could not constitute knowledge. Indeed Collingwood invokes this downgrading of history to explain Thucydides’ concentration on contemporary events – on recent battles and the like – which ‘impinged on sight and hearing’ in that he, or those he could crossquestion, had either participated in, or been an eye-witness to them. Thus we see Thucydides’ fondness for such immediate reports of real-life generals from the battle front as ‘ships lost, Mindarus dead, men starving’.1 A third difficulty arises once it becomes clear that it is the conception of history of Oakeshott and Collingwood, being among the few practising historians who have categorically denied, as do current presentists, that the past exists, which will be carried forward into our presentist proposal. However, these philosopher-historians adhered either wholly (Oakeshott) or partially (Collingwood) to a brand of historical nonrealism, or idealism, which led them to adopt, as regards the past, a coherentist theory of truth, not as do current presentists, that correspondence theory which, as we have

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seen, incurs paradox. Thus Oakeshott (EM:113) writes: ‘Truth is coherence in a world of ideas’ and ‘truth in history is never a matter of . . . correspondence of present facts with “what was” ’. They do not seek, therefore, as do the presentists, independent truth makers for their past-tensed statements, but regard the truth of these statements as relative to, or dependent upon, the presuppositions with which the historian starts out, and on the rest of his beliefs. Moreover they affirm, in a manner which could only seem repugnant to current presentists, that the process is two-way in that, if a given statement does not cohere with the remaining body of beliefs, the historian can secure coherence by changing these other beliefs rather than dismissing the statement as false. Having registered this sharp theoretical divergence, all we need point out here is that our presentist proposal, in being indebted to historical idealism, as well as retaining key elements of the realism characteristic of current presentism, will necessarily be hybrid. While this will obviously place the onus upon us of showing how these hybrid elements can be coherently combined, it need not, certainly in advance, rule out our proposal. We shall not include as part of our case for historical idealism a separate detailed exposition and critique of historical realists. This would be repetitive. I argued earlier, in the context of memory, that any realist for whom knowledge about the past is ultimately based upon a set of statements whose truth is taken as unassailable, in the sense that it can somehow be established by direct inspection that these statements correspond with an independently existing past, faces severe, if not insuperable, problems.2 Secondly, we have in Collingwood someone whose realist instincts, although largely responsible for his famous, if flawed, conception of history as the re-enactment of past thought by the historian, can be seen gradually to lose their grip under the force of opposing objections. It will be enough here broadly to situate realism in relation to idealism in the historical context. This is perhaps best done by associating them respectively with two different understandings of the term ‘history’ as commonly used. The realists mean by ‘history’ the sequences of events in the past that are the object of a historian’s study – ‘past facts’, as they would call them. Moreover, the general metaphysical theory to which they subscribe, as we have seen, represents these ‘past facts’ as belonging to only one – the more important – of two independent orders of things. Thus an objective order of facts is contrasted with a subjective, or mind dependent, order.3 If we turn on the other hand to the historical idealists, we find that when they talk of ‘history’, they are not primarily referring to the objects studied by historians at all, but to the historian’s own activity, or practice, in studying them. The more thoroughgoing idealists – for instance, Oakeshott – do not speak so much (as does Collingwood) of history as an activity, or practice, implying community, or a shared body of knowledge, but rather of the historian’s ‘experience’, of his ‘world of ideas’, of the ideas ‘present to his mind’. Oakeshott goes further. He refuses unequivocally to acknowledge the realists’ two separate orders of things. He reconstructs what is, for the realists, the more important – the objective order of facts, comprising both evidence and the past events themselves – as ‘a world of ideas’, and situates it in ‘the mind of the historian’. The disparate attitudes of historical realists and idealists to temporal discontinuity are intimately linked, through their adoption respectively of a correspondence, and a coherence, theory of truth, with these different metaphysical stances. For historical realists, this discontinuity manifests itself crucially in the existence of a gap between

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present evidence, chiefly types of written record – the main experiential data available – and a real, independent past which, however, can no longer be experienced. Historical knowledge is gained only when this ‘gulf of time’ (IH:293) is overcome. But that, in turn, requires the historian to make these written records bear upon each other in temporally ordered narrative sequences which somehow, even though he can never directly assess whether this is so, accurately mirror sequences of actual past events. While then, for realists, temporal discontinuity is ‘out in the world’ – certain objects of the historian’s study being present while others are past – and is problematic, historical idealists embrace it as a necessary and inevitable feature of the historian’s relation to his inquiry. The idealist historian is accordingly described as having an acute sense that, being in ‘process’ – a word incidentally used by both Oakeshott and Collingwood – his inquiry can never be ‘fixed’ once for all, nor ‘placed beyond the reach of doubt’ (Oakeshott, EM:40). Each time he approaches it anew, he sees its object in a new light, and as requiring transformation. It follows that what the historian sees cannot, for idealists, be divorced from his standpoint, his interests, on the given occasion or, put differently, that standpoint, those interests, cannot be erased, or bracketed, in order to obtain an objective view (in the realists’ sense) of the historical terrain.4 For idealists, it is no less than this felt dynamism that propels historical inquiry forward. With these differences in mind, it will be helpful before going further, to deal with two remarks that might be made on behalf of the historical realists. Someone may reason as follows. If idealism prevents the gap opening up in the first place between the historian as knowing subject, and his object of study – the latter somehow being included as an aspect of the former – perhaps realists, in postulating two orders of things, are ultimately responsible for their own failure to close that temporal gap between past and present. Perhaps some slight modification of their general presuppositions might yet salvage their account of history. No such conclusion follows. The gap between knowledge and the facts (or ‘reality’), characteristic of philosophical realism, and the specifically temporal gap between past and present, cannot be aligned in any simple way. The latter is not a subdivision of the former, nor does it follow from it more indirectly. Quite the contrary, for the realists both present evidence and past events, as the object of the historian’s study fall, as (in Bury’s words) ‘the facts’, on the same side of the general philosophical gap, whereas they are on opposite sides as the terms of the temporal gap. It is just plausible that one might manage to bring present evidence under a more capacious concept of past fact – taking perhaps the naïve view that such evidence is the past surviving into the present –and then set past facts, as the objects he studies, over and against the historian’s present inquiry. However, it would be unsatisfactory. For the discontinuity which interests us is peculiarly, exclusively, temporal, whereas it is merely an outcome here of the way we have chosen to construe our terms that ‘the facts’ and ‘inquiry’, which are asserted to be independent of each other, are past and present, respectively. Their independence is not a consequence of their temporality.5 It would also be misguided. Historical idealists would not wish slavishly to drag with them the realists’ problem with temporal passage, or rather the point of view to which it is shackled. Their aim is not simply to get the realists out of a hole so that they can continue in the same realist vein. Far from it, for Oakeshott ‘[that] correspondence [theory of truth]’ with which they are associated is a ‘dismal theory’.

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But it may be countered, again on the realists’ behalf, that the historical idealists’ way of dealing with temporal discontinuity is, unlike the realists’, a cheat. It banishes to the periphery of inquiry, where it can be largely ignored, what should be honestly dealt with for what it is: a plain and troublesome feature of the objects studied. But this would be to misunderstand the whole idealist enterprise, and to fail to grasp its revolutionary nature compared with historical realism. For the complaint retains the realists’ exclusive concentration on, so to speak, the facts ‘out there’ in the real, if past, world, as though they were independent of historical inquiry. For the idealists, however, these ‘facts’ only become what they are through historical inquiry. Consequently, if ‘facts’ – understood by the historical idealists to include evidence as well as past events – and inquiry are thus internally related, then if the inquiry is riven across with temporality, so too must be the facts. This reply, however, only provokes a renewed objection: how can the facts be riven across with temporality without leading to a radical relativism of the present, such as was earlier associated with Dummett, which would prejudice the construction of a coherent body of historical knowledge? So far I have done no more than hint at the way historical idealists turn upside down traditional historical realism – that ‘melancholy doctrine’, as Oakeshott calls it (EM:42). To answer the objection above, it will be necessary to expound their theory in more detail. I shall do so, in the second part of the chapter, through the work of Oakeshott as a thorough going exponent of the theory. Having seen how its key salient features ground a revolutionary conception of evidence which undermines the realists’ reliance on historical authorities, I shall not only argue that such a conception largely governs actual historical practice, and that it is the only viable conception, but also that the exact measure of relativism it imports into the discipline can be adequately coped with by its practitioners. Much of our preparatory discussion will focus on Collingwood’s progress toward idealism via his famous claim that history is ‘the re-enactment of past thought in the historian’s mind’, although we shall have reason to qualify the term ‘progress’ in so far as it suggests a linearity which is not always easy to detect in Collingwood’s theoretically heterogeneous account. We shall see how his basic, and never wholly abandoned, aim, as a realist, to abolish temporal discontinuity, and close the gap between present and past, receives a wholly novel implementation due to coexisting idealist sympathies. He not only places, in the foreground of historical inquiry, an act of thought – that of a given historical figure – and expressly distinguishes it (IH:297) from the realists’ ‘mere “event” or “situation”’, but makes the site of closure the historian’s mind. Even more ambitiously, this closure, for him, requires nothing less than that the historian rethink the identical thought of the historical figure, and not merely a copy. We shall also see that while, as a philosopher, Collingwood’s impetus toward idealism is somewhat unsteady, as a practising historian, he is committed to that position, consistently deploring, equally with Oakeshott, what he regards as the pernicious realist historical methodology in which ‘primary sources’ are elevated to the status of unassailable authorities, largely ‘sp[eaking] for themselves’, and where all value is held to lie in ‘the unbrokenness of the tradition’ (Collingwood, IH:235).6 Indeed, his appeal to the mind of the historian which, made absolute bedrock by thorough going idealists, finishes by rendering the very terms of the realists’ gap obsolete, if not unintelligible is, ironically, as much driven by his desire to reverse this

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methodological trend, and elevate the historian’s status from that of a ‘menial copyist’ (EM:100), as to solve the philosophical conundrum concerning time and the past.

1: Collingwood: ‘history as the re-enactment of past thought’ (i) Transitoriness: a special problem for history among the social sciences There are two objections which, if we cannot answer them, threaten to invalidate our inquiry regarding Collingwood before it has got underway. The first, and more fundamental, speaks to our key suggestion that he – uncommonly among practising historians – was struck, and exercised, by the peculiar transitoriness of history’s subject matter. Thus it may be denied, more fundamentally, that he makes any contribution at all to – that he is just not interested in – the question: how is historical knowledge possible given that the past events it studies no longer exist, and so cannot be observed? The less fundamental objection states that, while admittedly he addresses the question, he makes no idealist contribution to it. The first objection is implicit in the work of recent Collingwood scholars, such as Guiseppina D’Oro (2002:104, 124). Certainly, these commentators will allow, Collingwood is interested in the broader, unqualified, question: ‘how is historical knowledge possible?’ But that question is ambiguous between our more specific question and a totally different, albeit equally specific, one: ‘how is an account of human reality possible that differs from the kind of account that natural science provides of events?’ Moreover, the commentators want to say, it is the latter which he chiefly addresses. Disambiguated thus, the original categorical question ceases to have anything intrinsically to do with temporal discontinuity, while the term ‘history’ could be replaced quite indiscriminately by the name of any other social science, even one whose subject matter is not past at all, but present.7 It is indisputable that Collingwood to some extent conflates the two more specific readings of the original, categorical question. (I discuss the reasons below.) Even so, it is mistaken, in my view, to hold that he did not address the question understood in our more specific way: how is historical knowledge possible given that past events no longer exist, and so cannot be observed? I shall attempt to disentangle his answer to this question from his concern (attested by many other passages) with the imperialistic pretensions of natural science, and his desire that social science ‘escapes from pupillage to [it]’ (IH:15). Here, first, is a selection of quotations, mainly from the Idea of History, which show that for him, as much as for us, history raises epistemological problems precisely because it is distinctive, even among the social sciences, in treating of the past, of what no longer exists. ‘Historical thinking’, he writes (IH:2) ‘is a special kind of thinking concerned with a special kind of object . . . the past’. Again, he asks: ‘How do historians know? How do they come to apprehend the past’ (ibid:3). A little further on (5), he states: Historical thought has an object with peculiarities of its own. The past, consisting of particular events in space and time which are no longer happening . . . cannot be apprehended by mathematical thinking . . . nor by scientific thinking, because the truths which science discovers are known to be true by being found through observation and experiment exemplified in what we actually perceive, whereas the

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past has vanished, and our ideas about it can never be verified as we verify our scientific hypotheses . . . if [theories of scientific knowledge] offer themselves as complete accounts of knowledge they actually imply that historical knowledge is impossible.

Yet again (233): [The objects of] historical thought are events which have finished happening and conditions no longer in existence. Only when they are no longer perceptible do they become objects for historical thought . . . theories that take acquaintance as the essence of knowledge make history impossible.

On page 284, he states his question as ‘how the past is known’, and announces that the answer must not be vulnerable to the sceptical objection that really it shows not that the past is known, but only the present. Finally, from the Idea of History: ‘Historical fact has its objectivity precisely in being past’ (IH:222). Repeated assertions in one form or another of the claim that ‘the past does not exist’, or ‘in itself is nothing’, and explanations of how this poses special problems for the historian, who must ‘prove the possibility of history’ (289), occur elsewhere in his work. For instance, they are to be found in his Essays in the Philosophy of History (EPH:136–8). In ‘Outlines of a Philosophy of History’ (quoted by Nielsen, 1981:26–7), he reminds us of his insist[ence] that the past which is the object of historical thought, [is] not a mass of stuff existing somewhere though removed from our immediate vision by the passage of time, but consist[s] of events which because they have happened are not now happening and do not in any sense exist at all.

‘We cannot know the past,’ he continues, ‘because it is not there to be known,’ and illustrates his point with an example: The historian who writes a monograph on the battle of Marathon is not ‘apprehending a thing, namely the battle of Marathon that exists independently of the apprehending, and, as it were, stands there to be apprehended there is nothing there to apprehend; in the realistic sense of the term object, there is no object whatever for the historian to know.

It is worth asking why the titles of all these works feature the word ‘history’ if he is really concerned with the social sciences in general, and not with history in particular. The more fundamental objection, namely that Collingwood does not address the question of how history can provide knowledge although its subject matter is nonexistent, is, it must surely seem, met by these persuasive quotations and considerations. What of the less fundamental objection, which doubted that he gave a specifically idealist answer? There is in fact a complex relation between the two objections. For, although the second objector can be appeased by reconstructing from Collingwood’s work the recognizably idealist response which he doubts is to be found there, it is first

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necessary to identify, and clear away as palpably inadequate, Collingwood’s realist response to the question which, far more obvious, prominent and indeed famous, obscures his idealist contribution. This realist solution, moreover, explains why it might have been thought in the first place that Collingwood confuses this question, pertaining exclusively to history, with that of how the autonomous status of the social sciences in general may be secured. For Collingwood’s enduring realist sympathies led him to interpret the former – let us call it the ‘history/past’ – question as a demand to close the gap between a once real, but no longer existing past – a past which, in Oakeshott’s notable phrase, is ‘fixed and finished’ – and a present, in which this past has left only ‘relics’ of itself.8 Now he attempts to achieve this closure, as a historian (IH:217), by shifting attention from natural events, which can, to human actions which (according to him) cannot – or at least whose inner aspect cannot – be scientifically observed. However, this is also the move he makes in seeking to demonstrate that the social sciences, as modes of inquiry, are independent of the natural ones. Doesn’t it follow, giving the lie to the quotations above, that there are not here two different answers to two different questions, but just one answer to one question – that concerning the autonomy of the social sciences? The more fundamental objection is thus vindicated after all. This does not follow. It follows at most that the answers share an umbilical cord in the idea of action. There remains a crucial, if subtle, distinction between Collingwood’s reason for holding that the subject matter of the social sciences, as opposed to the natural ones, cannot be scientifically observed, and his reason for holding this about the subject matter of history uniquely. The actions, which are, or should be, quite generally, the subject-matter of the social sciences, as humane disciplines, are not observable in so far as they are, crucially, expressions of mind, or thought. For mind, or thought, are only ‘the inside of an event’, and so cannot be observed even when their outward aspects are observable. That is to say, we can only observe an event’s ‘outside’ or, as Collingwood puts it (ibid:213), only what ‘belong[s] to it which can be described in terms of bodies and their movements’. By contrast, the actions, with which history is peculiarly concerned, cannot be observed, not only because they are the inner aspect of events but also, and significantly, because they are the inner aspect of events that, being past, finished, non-existent, cannot themselves be observed. These different reasons are reflected in a confusing threefold sense in which Collingwood construes the adjective ‘dead’ (or ‘not living’) depending on whether he is using it to qualify actions – which, for him, are animated, and can be re-animated, by thought – or natural events, or processes, which cannot be (217). (Biological life or death even where certain natural processes are concerned is irrelevant here.) Actions are ‘dead’ if, being past (and so, even in externals, unobservable) they require resurrection, re-animation, revival. For example, Brutus’s stabbing of Caesar on the Ides of March is ‘dead’ in this sense until the historian causes it to ‘survive and revive’ (303) by ‘penetrating beyond’ (214) the action’s outer shell – ‘the spilling of Caesar’s blood on the floor of the senate house’ – to ‘the inside’. ‘Look[ing] through’ this outer shell to ‘detect the thought which it expresses’, the historian ‘clothes with the flesh and blood of a thought . . . the dry bones’ of ‘external facts’. This thought, thus re-enacted in the historian’s own mind, ‘becomes something for which the past is not dead and gone’ (287, 303).

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Natural events, or processes, whether a piece of litmus paper having turned pink, or a plant having blossomed, are ‘dead’ in a different, and second, sense: simply, Collingwood implies, in being past, in being over and done. Because such natural events, even when they are in process, or taking place, are ‘mindless’ (and here we have a notion of ‘dead’ in a third sense), they cannot now, after these processes are over, be ‘resurrected’, and hence never counted as ‘dead’ in the first ‘mind relevant’ sense. He seems to be using the adjective in the second sense when he criticizes positivistic history for ignoring the status of its subject matter as intelligible human action, and treating it as mere ‘successive events lying in a dead past’ (215). He also seems to have in mind the second sense when he says of natural processes that their past ‘is a past superceded and dead’ (215) so that they are lost for ever on the ‘flood of time’ (228). Yet again he speaks of natural events, and processes, as that ‘in which the past dies, being replaced by the present’ (225). If he really wished to assimilate history to the social sciences, one would expect that being past would make no difference to whether such natural events were, or were not, ‘dead’. Put more radically, there really wouldn’t be a second sense of ‘dead’, for all that would be important would be the first and third senses. Thus natural events would already be ‘dead’ (in the third sense) even when present and observable, because lacking mind – not being ‘the outward expression of thought’ (217) – they never could be, when past, ‘dead’ in the first sense, that is to say capable of, but not yet rethought or re-animated. But as we can see, Collingwood precisely does reserve the second sense of ‘dead’ for them, and applies it only when they are past. Therefore, for him, just moving from present to past apparently makes a difference even for natural events, or processes: once we could observe them taking place, they were actual, and so not dead in the relevant sense of finished, past, over. Collingwood seems then to have in mind, with regard to natural events, that very creation and annihilation which peculiarly marks temporal fleetingness. The overcoming of this transience by its proper subject matter – thought and action – has everything therefore to do with history, but nothing intrinsically to do with the other social sciences. It cannot be denied, as I indicated, that he does sometimes confound the ‘history/ past’ question with the ‘social/natural science’ one, but only at the cost of inconsistency. For instance, he asserts that I engage in this peculiarly historical thinking, not only when I think about remote historical figures, such as Hammurabi or Solon (219), but even when trying to discover the thought of a friend, now, as expressed in a letter, or ‘of a stranger cross[ing] the road’. Yet clearly this cannot be historical thinking if, by his own definition, I only practise it in so far as I seek to resurrect, or revive, what is past. For, ex hypothesi, our friend, or the stranger (let us suppose we are watching him cross the road), is still there animating his actions himself. Just because the stranger’s action is not ‘dead’, in the sense of requiring revival, it is not, one must assume, even if we try to reconstruct for ourselves the thought behind it, a candidate for specifically historical thinking. For that, by Collingwood’s own account, is ‘the perpetuation of past acts in the present [218], and he tells us, as we saw, that it is only when events are no longer perceptible, that ‘they become objects of historical thought’.

(ii) The re-enactment of past thought: preliminary clarifications Collingwood resorts to the idea of history as the re-enactment of past thought because he interprets in a realist manner the challenge behind the question how we can have

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knowledge of what is now non-existent. His answer is thus designed to show how the ‘gap [‘gulf ’, 293; ‘lapse’, 287] of time’ between ‘my present thought and its past object is bridged’ (293). However, in proposing a solution – rethinking past thoughts – which, although prompted by this realist concern, places the required closure squarely in what, for idealists, is theoretically bedrock, namely the mind of the historian, he produces something wholly novel. His solution will not try to model historical on perceptual knowledge or hence, impossibly, take ‘acquaintance as [its] essence’ (233). Nor will it countenance any resort, on grounds that the historian cannot ‘enact an experience literally identical with that of the historical figure’, to the idea that the experience merely resembles the earlier one. The requisite bridge, Collingwood asserts, is not a way by which, as in the first case, ‘time itself could be cancelled’ (303), nor one which, as in the second, permits only ‘an . . . echo of the old activity, another of the same kind’ (293). In these remarks, I shall argue, despite (or possibly because of) his courageous innovations, Collingwood sets exacting and ultimately conflicting constraints upon how we are to understand historical rethinking in relation to the past act of thought. Time cannot be cancelled, he tells us, and therefore the past act of thought and the historian’s rethinking of it cannot be ‘literally identical’. Nevertheless, when the historian rethinks past thought, time ceases to make a difference (217–8; 284). How is this possible? It is possible, according to Collingwood because, first, as he understands ‘literally identical’ (my italics), this would exclude there being two differently dated enactments, or performances, of the act of thought, and so would entail ‘a (literally) timeless world’, but he insists, there are two differently dated enactments, or performances, one by the historical figure and one by the historian, each belonging within its own particular and unrepeatable context. Hence ‘time cannot be cancelled’. But secondly, despite there being two such performances, the historian re-enacts one and the same, act of thought as the historical figure. Hence ‘time ceases to make a difference’. To illustrate with one of Collingwood’s examples, the historian re-enacts now Archimedes’ discovery, while lying in his bath, of specific gravity, on a particular day around 250 BC . In delineating the immediate context of Archimedes’ discovery, Collingwood emphasizes its sheer happenstance. It is made up of ‘emotions . . . sensations, like the buoyancy of Archimedes’ body in the bath . . . [and of] other thoughts [and feelings] . . . being hungry and cold, [feeling] the chair hard beneath him, [being] bored with his lesson . . .’ (298). Moreover, Collingwood affirms, the act of thought is ‘certainly a part of [this] experience’ (297). Hence time is not cancelled. In order, however, for Archimedes’ act of thought, given its rootedness in the past, to be available to the historian to rethink now, it must, unlike the accompanying sensations, endure. This endurance is testimony both to the fact that time does count and does not count. It counts because ‘endurance’ necessarily takes time, and it does not count because the result is that one and the same act of thought is available for revival by the historian in his own mind. Now for Collingwood, precisely because the past thought has itself to endure in order to be available to the historian, this rethinking is a joint endeavour, a contribution being made by the past thought, as well as by the historian. As he puts it, reverting to the realists’ bridge metaphor (293, 304): ‘The gulf of time between the historian and his

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object must be bridged . . . at both ends.’ The object must be ‘of such a kind that it can revive itself in the historian’s mind; the historian’s mind must be such as to offer a home for that revival’. And yet again (294), ‘the gap between present and past [is] bridged not only by the power of present thought to think of the past, but also by the power of past thought to re-awaken itself in the present’. Still more explicitly, he writes: ‘One and the same act of thought [must be capable of] enduring through a lapse of time [if it is to] revive after a time when it has been in abeyance.’ Let us summarize the two major constraints governing Collingwood’s account thus far. Unless the original act of thought were irrevocably anchored in a particular time and place, the historian, in taking it as his object, would not be studying the past at all: the distinctive mark of his subject matter. He would not be studying history but merely timeless trends of thought. There would be no past, no history, to study. Were it supposed on the other hand that, because the original act of thought was thus temporally and spatially anchored, it couldn’t endure; the historian would only be entertaining a thought resembling Euclid’s. But then, Collingwood argues, he would be unable to check his imitation of Euclid’s act of thought against the original, and so his findings would fall short of knowledge.

(iii) Contribution of the past act of thought to re-enactment (a) The machinery of ‘two orders’ The question immediately at issue is how an act of thought, being rooted in only one of these, ‘endures’ through the interval between two differently dated performances so that we can talk of them as performances of one and the same act of thought. Must the act of thought not somehow exist in the interval? Of course were the two performances merely of different acts of thought with the same content, there would be no question of endurance, and so no temporal puzzle. But Collingwood, for the reasons we have seen, refuses to take this way out. His reply, in which there are already detectable idealistic leanings, at first seems radical for a realist. We cannot, he says (226–7), coherently speak of a past thought detached from the process of re-enactment, for that would be non-historical thought, whereas thought ‘only exists in being rethought’. He adds in a still more idealist vein: ‘History does not presuppose mind, it is the life of the mind.’ Essentially, however, his elucidation of the past act of thought’s continuation between two widely divergent dated performances goes by way of the realist orientated distinction which, we noted, he draws between thought, or historical process, and natural, or material, process. This distinction, although still counting as an internal/ external one, is for this purpose crucially drawn within the mind itself, rather than between the mind and the non-mental natural world. There is thus thought, and action, on one side, excluding their observable outward aspects, and on the other the mental and non-mental natural world. It follows that such natural events and processes, despite having ‘only outside and no inside’ (213), include not only the successive stages by which a piece of litmus paper dipped in acid turns pink, or by which the murdered Caesar’s blood spilled across the floor of the Senate House, but also the successive states of consciousness, or sensations, that make up an individual’s mental history.

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Now it is precisely the mental series, in being, as we saw, the immediate context of the act of thought which provides it – under its aspect of ‘thought as immediacy’ (297) – with its determinate temporal location. Although ‘time cannot be cancelled’ in any process, Collingwood explains, it only ‘makes a difference’ in a process in which ‘the past is superceded and dead’, or in which (225) ‘the past dies in being replaced by the present’. But that, on his view, applies only to natural events and processes. For these are composed of ‘successions of events’, in which a later event cannot succeed an earlier, without the earlier being displaced. It follows that, for him, only such processes, or the events of which they are composed (including the succession of states of consciousness which embed the act of thought), being ‘carried away for ever’ on the flow (293), possess a purely transitory character. By act of thought, on the other hand, and despite its apparent participation, under the aspect ‘thought as immediacy’, in the unrepeatable succession of mental states, he understands (287) a self-reflective activity – ‘an activity by which this succession . . . is somehow arrested so as to be apprehended in its general structure’. ‘The past in a historical process [can thus],’ he explains, ‘in so far as it is historically known survives in the present’ (225), and again (226): ‘the historical past is a living past [in so far as it is] kept alive by the act of historical thinking itself.’ He countenances therefore not one but two notions of change. There is ‘historical change’ which is a ‘change from one way of thinking to another’. But this does not herald ‘the death of the first, but its survival integrated in a new context involving the development and criticism of its own ideas’ (226). ‘The historical past,’ he writes (229) ‘includes in itself its own past.’ Then there is temporal fleetingness – that constant process of creation and annihilation to which (he claims) natural events, including immediate states of consciousness, are subject. Clearly, we shall only be able to make sense of his claim that past thought has a power to revive itself – if we can make sense of it at all – if we do not (as on his view positivists do) subsume historical, under natural processes as ‘successive events lying in a dead past’ (228). For then we shall assume that all change is destructive. Even so, we must not forget that the act of thought is anchored in the past, and so can be the subject matter of history thanks, paradoxically, to its determinate place (291), as ‘thought as immediacy’, in the fleeting series of states of consciousness composing a person’s mental life, whose own identity is given by their momentary position in the ongoing flow. We can now see just how complicated and extensive is the machinery of two ‘orders’, or ‘aspects’, of existence, one in time, the other ‘not in time at all’ (217), which Collingwood invokes in order to explain the past thought’s endurance through time, and thus its contribution to historical thinking. It must execute a precarious balancing act as it participates, under its dual aspect both, ‘as immediacy’, in the unrepeatable flow of natural events – for ‘thoughts are no doubt themselves events happening in time’ – and, as an act of thought, in the historical process which ‘stands outside time’ (287). Certainly Collingwood employs striking imagery to convey this dual participation of thought. He writes (304) ‘Through the framework [of natural processes associated with the bodily life of man] the tides of thought, his own and others’, flow crosswise, regardless of its structure, like sea-water through a stranded wreck’. Yet such figurative language does little to illuminate the relation involved. It leaves so far unanswered the question: how can the historian’s act of thought be ‘one and the same’ as Euclid’s, when

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the latter, under its aspect ‘thought as immediacy’, occurred, by Collingwood’s own reckoning, uniquely, and without possibility of repetition, on a particular date, over two thousand years ago? If the phrase ‘one and the same’ is taken, as it commonly is, to indicate numerical identity, what possible notion of numerical identity, if any, is available which would render valid or believable Collingwood’s pivotal claim?

(b) The thought/feeling and action/movement distinctions Before dealing with this sceptical question head-on, let us try to deflect it by exploring two adjacent pairs of terms either of which may seem potentially capable of embodying the requisite ‘timeless’/’time bound’ contrast, without incurring the problems raised by talk of thought itself having this dual aspect. First there is the pair: thought and feeling. Collingwood, as we saw, takes feelings, as immediate states of consciousness, passing fleetingly through the mental life, to belong exclusively to the context in which an individual performs an act of thought, rather than intrinsically to that thought. Thus Euclid’s ‘being in a good temper’ is as much merely a part of the context, in which he first thought that the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal, as is the fact that he ‘ha[d] a slave standing behind his right shoulder’ (298). Taking anger, Collingwood explains: when he thinks of having been angry, ‘the actual past anger is past and gone . . . the stream of experience has carried it away for ever; at most there appears something like it’ (293). This resemblance can only, for him, be the object of a belief, since the real thing is not there to compare it with. Consequently, ‘feelings pure and simple’ (287), cannot bridge the gap of time, and so cannot, as can thought, which has ‘the power to revive itself in the present’, be objects of historical knowledge. He deals in exactly the same way with the feelings of historical personages. Thus, drawing a sharp contrast with their past thoughts, he observes: ‘we shall never know how the flowers smelt in the garden of Epicurus, or how Nietzsche felt the wind in his hair as he walked on the mountains . . . [nor] relive the triumph of Archimedes or the bitterness of Marius’ (296), and so roundly dismisses them from the arena of history. But this method of isolating the repeatable act of thought from its unrepeatable context, with the surrounding feelings serving willy-nilly to tether it down to time and place, rests on a presupposition: that we can always disentangle thoughts, even acts of thought, as a kind of ‘core’, from the related feelings in which they are somehow embedded so that they can be re-enacted, without contradiction, at a different time, with a different, albeit equally unique, context. Of course we will agree that ‘no-one thinks that the historian of Hellenistic science ought to leap out of his bath and run about the town naked when he comes to Archimedes in writing his history’ (OPH:446). But we can still reject Collingwood’s presupposition, and the drastic consequences for history he draws from it, namely that (IH:304) ‘Of everything other than thought there can be no history’. We can also disagree that thoughts, or acts of thoughts, differ conceptually from feelings in the across the board way Collingwood asserts that they do. I shall not rehearse here the well-known arguments for the claim that feeling and thought are frequently logically inseparable. It is usually pointed out that the former typically have a cognitive content, which entails that, the moment that the belief on which they are based is shown to be false, they disintegrate. Only a few irrational states

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and phobias, moods, such as depression, and bodily sensations remain as exceptions. These are old arguments, and the battle is already won. Even Hume with whom the sharp compartmentalization of thought, as rational, and feeling as irrational, is most often associated, never clearly professed it. A couple of historical examples are pertinent, however. They show how impossible it can be to extract, in order that it may be re-enacted centuries later, a ‘core’ of thought – especially one possessing, as Collingwood occasionally stipulates (303) ‘universality’, ‘a significance valid for all men at all times’ – from its unique context of feelings. These examples also show how impossible it can be even to make the core/contextual distinction. Consider the thoughts of the tenant-in-chief of an eleventh century English king as he prepares to perform his service to his lord, and stand by him in battle. These thoughts are remote from anything that we can today imagine precisely because they are inextricably bound up with, even partially constituted by, fierce, but alien, sentiments of loyalty and fidelity, the latter in particular being hardly distinguishable from a kind of faith. Yet it is these sentiments, with their strong component of belief, which make the idea of disobedience unthinkable for the tenant-in-chief, and so explain his stalwart adherence to his duty. They are therefore, one would suppose, and despite what Collingwood is obliged to say, crucial to a historical understanding of his actions. Or consider the implacable Catholic opposition in 1139 AD to the crossbow, which at this time was replacing the long bow. Shooting a steel bolt as opposed to the willow arrow of the long bow was widely held to be unnatural, ungodly. The pope indeed forbad its use on Christians, permitting it only against infidels. Today it seems patently absurd that anyone could discriminate in this way between these two weapons. But again, analogously with our first example, this discrimination was partly constituted by a visceral and (from our point of view) quite alien revulsion at the dark and sinister forces with which the idea of the unnatural was associated, and which the shooting of steel bolts, unlike willow arrows, signified. It may be replied in defence of Collingwood that his own use of everyday examples is misleading. ‘Thought’ and ‘feeling’ are theoretical terms of art functioning within his overall philosophical system: while ‘thought’ is definitively that which possesses propositional content, ‘feelings’ are simply spatio-temporal individuals. I will refer to this consideration again later when I shall have occasion to show that his own appeal to common linguistic usage undermines this defence. The other, more famous Collingwoodian distinction that might serve as a basis for his ‘timeless’/’time-bound’ contrast, is the one between action, as enshrining the act of thought – the unobservable ‘inside’ of an event – and bodily movement, or (IH:213) ‘everything belonging to it which can be described in terms of bodies and their movements’ – the observable ‘outside’ of the same event. But this distinction has immediate difficulties both in general, and with particular respect to the practice of historians. Considering the distinction in general, scarcely anyone today would let pass unchallenged the claim that we actually perceive only the bare movements of bodies, which we must then decipher in order to recognize as intentional actions. Putting aside for a moment history, this is clearly unacceptable as an account of our ordinary experience. We immediately see a person walking towards us; we don’t first puzzle over the movements of a body before us, and then work out that they signify perambulation. Of course there are exceptional circumstances, as when emotional disorientation, and

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bewilderment, causes the spectator, and even agent, to dwell at the level of mechanical movements, which seem to be undirected by anyone. Perhaps unsurprisingly most of the examples are from novels. For example, Winnie Verloc’s stabbing of her husband (in Conrad’s The Secret Agent), is narrated first from the victim’s point of view thus: the carving knife had vanished without the slightest sound from the side of the dish . . . he saw partly on the ceiling and partly on the wall, the moving shadow of an arm with a clenched hand holding a carving knife. It flickered up and down. Its movements were leisurely . . . the knife was already planted in his breast.

Then it is narrated from Winnie’s point of view, who, unable to grasp that these movements – apparently of the knife on its own – were actually her actions, and that she wielded the carving knife, is unable to grasp their dire significance. Thus she is surprised when her hand comes upon ‘a flat object of bone which protruded a little beyond the edge of the sofa’ and finds that it is ‘the handle of a carving knife’. Likewise, ‘and almost in the manner of a corpse’, she watches and listens, vacantly and uncomprehendingly, as the dropping of Verloc’s blood on the floor, which she confounds with the ticking of the clock, first accelerates, and then becomes a steady flow. Consider now the claim that the historian, as he proceeds with his inquiry, ‘discovers’ first the ‘outside’ of an event – ‘everything that can be described in terms of bodies and their movements’ – before then penetrating to its ‘inside’ – the core of action. This is, if anything, even more implausible than the earlier general one. The historian, let us remember, is dealing with past events. He is not, as Collingwood constantly emphasizes, a bystander of these events. They are not taking place before him as they once took place before the eye-witness who originally recorded them. They are removed altogether from his view. In what sense, then, could they possibly possess an ‘outside’ which the historian might be supposed, even mistakenly, to ‘discover’ first? Yet Collingwood not only advances this dubious claim, but seeks unsteadily to illustrate it. Thus an example of an ‘external fact’ which is the first thing to confront the historian is (IH:213) ‘the spilling of [Caesar’s] blood on the floor of the senate-house’. Only afterwards does he discern behind it an intelligent action – Brutus’s stabbing. We may not even ‘edit’ the example by casting the historian as a kind of police detective who comes late upon the scene, and has to try to reconstruct the murderous act from its effects. For then he would find merely a pool of blood, whereas the historian is apparently confronted with its actually spilling. But had the detective inspector seen the actual spilling he would by that very token have seen the stabbing, and not bare physical movements that had to be reconstructed. Collingwood in any case does not stick consistently to this programme of austere reduction. His other example of ‘an external fact’ is ‘the passage of Caesar accompanied by certain men across a river called the Rubicon’. Despite his use of the verbal noun, and the hint thereby imparted of the grammatically passive voice, not only is a fully fledged intentional action here recounted, but one with, already, enormous meaning and significance, especially for those already versed in Roman history. Collingwood, it will be said, knows perfectly well that the historian has to work through documents and records, that he never confronts past events head-on. His

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distinction therefore must apply not, nonsensically, to the real-life events, which are past, but to their representation in these historical records. But that is absurd too: these documents obviously do not present the actions that are their subject matter as mere ‘bodies and [their] movements’, which it is then the historian’s task to reconstitute as actions. They already narrate fully fledged actions. Perhaps Collingwood’s distinction – as suggested by his talk of evidence as ‘the corpse of history’, or again (IH:305) as the ‘dry bones which may some day become history’ – is appropriately applied, not to a document’s content, but to the document itself as a physical object. The historian immediately sees, Collingwood may be implying, only ink marks on paper, or parchment, into which he must then breathe life and meaning – the life and meaning which is locked up in them, until the historian, by his act of comprehension, unlocks, releases, it. Just try, however, as Wittgenstein bid us, to see the words on this page as mere unintelligible marks on paper. Your failure to divest them of their meaning, as it leaps out at you irresistibly, in order then to reconstruct it, despatches conclusively the crude ‘genie in the bottle’ picture. Nor is Walsh’s attempt (1970:55) to paper over these cracks by speaking of the evidence which the historian consults as ‘a bare record of the physical doings’ of any help. For why, we may ask, is the record ‘bare’, or the ‘doings’ it narrates ‘physical’? Sometimes, of course, they are primarily physical, as when Lord Byron, recreating Leander’s feat, swam the Hellespont. But is Euclid’s exactly ‘physical’ when it comes into his mind, no doubt after long hours of study, that the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal? None of this is to say that the historian may not improve on his first reading of a document, just as he understands better Brutus’s action when, becoming more knowledgeable, he is able to place it in the wider context of Roman constitutional conflict. But this is a hardly controversial principle of historical practice, and can be assented to without importing Collingwood’s elaborate dual aspect framework.

(c) Counting acts of thought by reference to their content Collingwood has still therefore to reconcile two claims. These are first that Euclid’s act of thought and the historian’s, although enacted at widely disparate times, is one and the same act of thought, not two with the same content, and secondly that acts of thought inherit their spatio-temporal location from the unique context of time-bound feelings in which they are enacted.9 But we may now observe that these claims are only contradictory given two assumptions. The first is that the identity at issue is numerical. The second is that numerical identity, following Locke’s (1961:274) classic statement,10 is necessarily determined by spatio-temporal location. Some commentators have challenged the first, arguing that, for Collingwood, the identity at issue is not numerical. Others have sought to challenge the second. They have canvassed the view, which they attribute to Collingwood, that there are some items, such as acts of thought, which can, because numericity is here purely a function of content, be numerically identical without that’s implying that they are spatially and temporally continuous. Heikki Saari (1989:79–81), espousing the first option, argues that the manner in which Collingwood applies the phrase ‘one and the same’ to mental content entails that it cannot denote numerical identity since that notion pertains, for Collingwood, only

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to physical occurrences, not to ‘acts of thought (or other mental occurrences)’. Thus Saari writes: ‘[for Collingwood] we do not define the identity of acts of thought . . . in terms of numerical identity’ and again: ‘temporality [conceived here as one of the determinants of numerical identity] is irrelevant to the identity of an act of thought.’ It is this view which, according to Saari, explains Collingwood’s rejection (IH:286) of what he calls ‘the essence of [the copy theorists’] view’ that acts of thought are ‘numerically distinct and therefore numerable’. But this interpretation of Collingwood, in so far as it implies a blanket division between mental and physical occurrences, fails to acknowledge that the natural/thought distinction, so crucial to Collingwood, is drawn, as we noted earlier, within the mental. Certain mental processes, such as ‘immediate states of consciousness – among them, ‘thought as immediacy’ – are included, along with non-mental processes, on the natural side of the natural/thought dichotomy. Moreover, Collingwood precisely does employ such a numerical notion to discriminate among these immediate states of consciousness which, succeeding one another, constitute the inexorable, natural flow of an individual’s mental life. It is evidently their location in this ongoing flow, which makes it possible – at least in principle – to count them, permitting talk of a ‘mental series’. I say ‘in principle’ since Collingwood does not specify the actual duration of any one state of consciousness (though its ‘spatial’ location we may surmise is that of the person whose mental state it is). However, he calls each mental state ‘immediate’, as we have seen. Moreover, he describes this mental state (using, like Locke, ‘being’ as a synonym for ‘identity’) as having its ‘being in the flow’ which then ‘carrie[s it] away for ever’. Thus he seems to conceive it here as a simple spatio-temporal individual which is indeed, tautologically, as Locke requires, ‘the same with itself and no other’. This impression is further strengthened by his telling us (IH:286) that ‘its being is simply its occurrence in [that] flow’. We can conjecture therefore that he regards each state as existing only momentarily in the kaleidoscope of a person’s mental life, but that this is long enough for purposes of individuation. A second, and still more crucial, textual difficulty for the first interpretation arises out of the fact that the only alternative canvassed so far to numerical identity, determined by spatio-temporal considerations, is a qualitative one. Thus Saari (1989:81) invokes Norman Malcolm’s remark that ‘the contents of consciousness have only generic and not numerical identity’ to describe Collingwood’s position concerning the identity of acts of thought. But when Collingwood says that Euclid and the historian perform the same act of thought, he means, he insists, ‘one and the same’ (IH:287), or ‘one single’ (286), ‘act of thought’, not numerically two merely having the same content. But, we shall ask, if the relevant notion of identity is neither qualitative, nor numerical, what other notion is possible here which could underpin Collingwood’s insistence? Put again, we may think: yes, Euclid’s and the historian’s act of thought have the same content, but if, as Collingwood holds, there is only, numerically speaking, one act of thought, it cannot be because of that since qualitative identity is not a numerical notion; it can only be due to their having the same spatio-temporal location, and that is just what Collingwood so energetically denies. We turn then to the second option, and contemplate what may seem from the point of view of the mind-set just explored sheerly impossible. This is that, where acts of

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thought, as opposed to simple spatio-temporal individuals, are concerned, Collingwood propounds a notion of numerical identity, not only divorced from spatio-temporal considerations, but solely determined by the content of the act of thought. Of course the uniquely occurring set of circumstances in which Euclid’s act of thought has its genesis diverges sharply in spatio-temporal terms from that in which the historian’s has its genesis, but this does not exclude their acts of thought counting as numerically one because of having the same content. Collingwood’s uncompromising position, as now interpreted, can be clarified by contrasting it with a diametrically opposed one which was for a while propounded by Alan Donagan (1962). Consider again the historian re-enacting today the act of thought which Euclid performed over 2,000 years ago. Both Donagan and Collingwood could agree (though see below, pp. 170–171) that the application of the spatio-temporal, or ‘empirical’ (D’Oro, 2000:100), criterion which here uncontroversially governs numerical identity, determines that there are two performances of the act of thought ‘the base angles of an isosceles triangle are equal’. As regards the ‘conceptual’ criterion, typically regarded as governing qualitative identity, they would disagree. Collingwood would take it – as does common sense – to license talk of the act of thought having the same content – or object – across these performances since as he states (in a remark quoted by Saari, 1989:79), ‘the content of acts of thought is not dependent on the specific temporal context in which [the acts of thought are] performed’. It is just this last contention that Donagan (1962:220) opposes, arguing that because there are two performances, or performers, of an act of thought, ‘the content of their acts of thought [must themselves be] numerically different’. If Donagan were right, therefore, the empirical criterion would trump the conceptual criterion even in the qualitative domain, the propositional content itself being counted numerically by reference to the number of performances. But, for Collingwood, on our second interpretation – and here he too may seem to steer away from common sense – it is the exact opposite: Euclid’s and the historian’s act of thought, although performed at different times and places, having the same content, is counted numerically as one. For him, therefore, it is the conceptual criterion that trumps the empirical criterion even at the numerical level (or in the empirical domain itself). D’Oro is a commentator who, biting the bullet of a numerical identity divorced from spatio-temporal considerations and determined by sameness of content, attributes this position to Collingwood. She points to his claim that, despite the lack of spatiotemporal continuity, Euclid’s act of thought is ‘one and the same’ as the historian’s. She also points to his claim that, with acts of thought, being ‘one and the same’ follows from having the same propositional content (or ‘rational structure’). But she goes on to make explicit the connection between ‘one and the same’ and numerical identity which is (it might be said if we are splitting hairs) only implicit in his denial that Euclid’s and the historian’s act of thought count as two. For Collingwood, she declares: ‘Thoughts are numerically distinct only if they are qualitatively distinct’ (2000:98) and again: ‘if [they are] qualitatively identical [then they are] numerically indiscernible’ (ibid:92). Perhaps our splitter of hairs will insist: to deny that there are two acts of thought is not to assert that there is numerically one. Might Collingwood not really mean therefore, as an earlier interpreter suggested, that it just makes no sense to apply numerical

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predicates – one, two, three – to acts of thought? But Collingwood does not provide this cautionary clarification. In any case, D’Oro herself is cautious when attributing to Collingwood a notion of numericity which goes beyond, and does not merely inflate, qualitative identity, despite being derived from it. His claim, she stresses, is not that ‘thoughts are . . . numerable in th[e] way [feelings are]’. For him, she explains (2000:92, see also 100), ‘Feelings are numerable in the sense that there are as many feelings as there are experiences’, whereas act(s) of thought are ‘numerically indiscernible’ just in so far as their content is common. This second interpretation, in making clear, unlike proponents of the first interpretation, that Collingwood is not (any more than Donagan at the opposite extreme) propounding an innocuous, ‘horses for courses’, thesis according to which there are distinct conceptual, and empirical, criteria of identity, each valid, and only valid, in its own domain, captures the thrust and tenor of Collingwood’s text in a way that the first interpretation fails to. For Saari and other commentators, favouring the first interpretation, acknowledge Collingwood’s claim that the act of thought of the historian is ‘one and the same’ as Euclid’s. But this phrase, having for them no genuinely numerical sense, is simply, it would seem, an inflated way of saying ‘same content’, which they constantly fall back upon in expressing Collingwood’s position (see Saari, 1989:87, 88). But Collingwood’s use of ‘one and the same’, as his pointed ascription of it to acts of thought as opposed to objects of thought shows, is not mere verbal inflation. It is not, like ‘same content’, compatible with there being two acts of thought. Euclid’s act of thought, unlike its atemporal object, is precisely anchored in the past – ‘acts of thought certainly’, Collingwood affirms (IH:287), ‘happen at definite times’ – yet can ‘endure through [the] lapse of time’, which separates Euclid and the historian.11 Granting that this is what Collingwood intends to claim, how plausible is it that the historian’s and Euclid’s act of thought, despite their widely divergent spatio-temporal locations, can be numerically identical just because of their having the same content? Although the theoretical foundations of Collingwood’s defence must ultimately be sought in his philosophy of mind, as expounded in his Essay on Philosophical Method, his appeal, in the Idea of History (286–7), to common linguistic practice, backed by a reductio, is also crucial. As to the first source, D’Oro (2000:91) uses it instructively to situate his discussion of identity in relation to his two aspect account, and we may summarize what she says. As she understands it, the kernel of this account is his claim that ‘thought is conceptually distinct from the natural processes in which it is instantiated’. This is just to say, she explains, that thought and natural processes – or the spatio-temporally located individuals that compose them – have different criteria of identity. Concepts are identified by ‘the specific marks that make [them] up’ – their ‘intension’ – not by their instances, or the spatio-temporally located particulars, that fall under them – their ‘extension’. There can therefore be a distinction between concepts – in their respective intensions – while all the particulars that fall under the one, fall under the other. Collingwood, she points out, asks us to suppose that every action by which a man sought to do his duty also, as a matter of fact, increased the general happiness: in every case one and the same token action would fall under both the description ‘done from duty’ and the description ‘productive of the greatest happiness’. Yet, according to Collingwood, we can agree that the concepts ‘acting from duty’ and

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‘acting to promote the general happiness’ are different. Alternatively, different particulars (or different token acts) can fall under the same concept. These, we say, are balls, and knowing what a ball is, we count four by reference to their distinct locations. Again we say: all four balls are green. Thus they exhibit – and here the quotation is from the Idea of History – ‘[qualitative] identity in numerical difference’ (IH:285). Collingwood warns, however, against dogmatically importing this ‘ordinary’ pattern of ‘identity in difference’, appropriate as it is at the level of the particulars, which fall under concepts, to the level of concept and thought itself. ‘Acts of thought’, he states (285), again in the Idea of History, are not ‘different specimens of the same kind, different instances of the same universal, different members of the same class’, their propositional content alone determines their numerical identity, and he promises, in backing up this contention, a new model of ‘identity in difference’ to replace the usual ‘dogma’ where acts of thought are concerned.

(d) Collingwood’s appeal to common linguistic usage: the two orders again Seeking (IH:285–7) to persuade us therefore that we count acts of thought in terms only of their content, or qualitatively, and not in terms of their temporal and spatial co-ordinates, Collingwood, now appealing to common linguistic usage, asks us to consider a person who continues to think for five seconds together: ‘the angles are equal’. He then asks us whether we would say that this person is performing one act of thought sustained over five seconds, or several, qualitatively identical, acts of thought. Next, applying a reductio, he argues that if we go for the second answer, we will have no principle for saying whether he performs five, ten, twenty or more acts of thought over those five seconds. For ‘there is no more reason to correlate the unity of a single act of thought with the time-lapse of one second, or a quarter of a second, than with any other’. He asks us to agree therefore that the identity of a sustained act of thought is ‘the identity of a continuant’. He then seeks our agreement that such identity does not necessarily entail the ‘continuousness’ that was a feature of the first example. To illustrate this, he presents a variation on the first example. The person thinks ‘the angles are equal’ for five seconds, then allows his attention to wander for three seconds, then again thinks ‘the angles are equal’. Collingwood maintains that it is no more the case that there are two acts of thought here because a time elapsed between them, than in the earlier example where the person continued to think ‘the angles are equal’ for all five seconds. He offers this suasion: ‘When [as in the first example] an act is sustained over five seconds, the activity in the fifth second is just as much separated by a lapse of time from that in the first, as when the intervening seconds are occupied by an activity of a different kind or . . . none’. Even if we agree, as well we may, that, in Collingwood’s example, it is one and the same act (and not just object) of thought after, as before, the lapse of time and attention, this will not give him what he wants. For significantly, if we agree, it will not be because we are forced to do so by his reductio. Collingwood’s argumentative fork takes for granted a theoretical picture which, as I indicated earlier, we, either as ordinary language users, or as philosophers, are hardly likely to endorse. It features a stream of evanescent psychological states, against the background of which the acts of thought

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arise, and in which, under the aspect ‘thought as immediacy’ they participate. It comes, we shall recall, with Collingwood’s warning: acts of thought must at all costs be shown not to collapse back into this rushing experiential stream. Now the identity of each of the states of consciousness, or experiences, which compose the stream, is wholly given, we shall recall, by their location in this temporal series, and not through their belonging to a certain kind. This is precisely why, where they are concerned, and surely embarrassingly for Collingwood, the reductio bites. For we can legitimately ask by what decree the duration is determined of any one of these mental states before ‘the flow carries it into the past’, unrepeatable, ‘lost for ever’ (IH:286, 287). Collingwood, we may surmise, is gesturing here toward a ‘Heraclitean moment’: that interval of time, whatever it is, which the Greek pre-Socratic philosopher intends in his celebrated remark, ‘You cannot step twice into the same river’. But we are entitled to press the question: precisely how long is Heraclitus’s interval? Is it to be measured in minutes, or only seconds? And why should we stop there? Why not some fraction of a second, or fraction of that fraction? In fact, Collingwood’s reductio, turned irresistibly back upon his own picture not only raises questions about the coherence of the successions of immediate states of consciousness pictured, but reveals the chronic indeterminacy of the relation itself (is it one/one or one/many?) of the act of thought to ‘thought in its immediacy’ under which the former participates in the natural order. The message of the reductio, although not exactly the one Collingwood wishes to communicate, is that the act of thought can be preserved intact only once it is divorced from the underlying ‘two order’ picture, and rescued thereby from the supposed threat of deliquescing into the fleeting mental stream. Only then is the danger removed of our potentially ‘correlat[ing] the unity of a single act of thought with the time lapse of a second’. However, we then cannot help recognizing that, as ordinary language users, we individuate acts of thought somewhat flexibly, and not always exactly according to Collingwood’s stipulations. For we not only pay attention to the kind of entities they are that we are interested in individuating, but also to other aspects of context which, we have learnt, are salient to this determination. Take Collingwood’s illustration again. There is no sign here that the individual has, on the second occasion, to expend effort in summoning again the thought that ‘the angles are equal’, nor that he has any difficulty, either before or after the interval, in consciously retaining it for so long as he wishes. Together with the similarity of content, it is, it might be said, the absence of such features, which incline us to say here that there is a single act of thought on the two occasions. If the individual had had, on the second occasion, to struggle to re-evoke the thought, and then to hold it in his mind, if he puckered his brows with exasperation, and cursed as it slipped away, we would likely judge that, despite having the same object, there were here two acts of thought. There were not merely two performances of a single one. Collingwood can of course simply stipulate what we are to say here, but then the whole point of directing us to inspect common linguistic usage would be lost. We may admit that, as ordinary language users, we sometimes speak of a single act of thought, although its performance is characterized by a lapse of both time and attention. However, this admission does nothing to support, or advance, Collingwood’s posited distinction between acts of thought, on the one hand, and feelings or sensations on the other. As we shall recall, he demotes the latter, in sharp contrast to the former, as

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simple spatio-temporal individuals: mere moments in the empirical flow. As D’Oro (2000:92) puts his view here, contrasting it with that concerning acts of thought: ‘There are as many feelings as there are experiences.’ But this, as we can see, is no more true of feelings or sensations, once we likewise consult ordinary linguistic usage, and so, at Collingwood’s own bidding, refuse to construe them merely as theoretical terms of art, than a corresponding claim would be true of thoughts. Consider a throbbing headache over my right eye that I experience for five minutes, which then dissipates. After five more minutes, during which time I have been pain-free, I again experience a throbbing headache, again situated over my right eye. It is surely natural to say that one and the same headache has been plaguing me on and off for over ten minutes, not a numerically different one that just happens to be in the same place, and to throb in like manner. This is good practice from a medical point of view. For the fact that the headache is in the same place suggests that it probably has the same cause, and that this positioning is not merely accidental. Hence it is likely to be helpful for diagnostic purposes to identify it as one single headache that was for a short period in abeyance, and not two that happen to have the same phenomenological character.12 I return to the problem, already flagged, of the relation of acts of thought to their performance. It might be complained that what we earlier described as the ordinary way of individuating acts of thought deliberately confuses these two notions. But Collingwood never provides a clear criterion for counting different occurrences, or performances, of a single act of thought. It is natural to suppose that when an act of thought is, in Collingwood’s words, ‘sustained’ for a while – the person just keeping it before his mind for the whole of the period – there is only one performance. After all, we may reason, there is no need of another to bring it back into his mind since it is there continuously all the time. Yes, it is technically possible to divide the whole period into smaller intervals – seconds perhaps – but it would be odd, we will reason, to use these seconds to break up the period into a series of separate performances of the single act of thought. It is only when the person brings into his mind a second time the act of thought, after it has been ‘in abeyance’ – or, again as Collingwood puts it, ‘revives’ it – that we would naturally talk of two performances, or two occurrences, of the single act of thought. But this does not entirely cohere with Collingwood’s remarks here. He stated (IH:286), as we saw, that when ‘an act of thought is sustained over five seconds, the activity in the fifth is just as much separated by a lapse of time from that in the first as when the intervening seconds are occupied by an activity of a different kind . . . ’. Of course, he argues, the threatened reductio only takes hold, as regards acts of thought, if it is wrongly supposed that they are to be identified spatio-temporally, rather than by propositional content. However, performances of acts of thought are apparently, for him, identified in the former way, and so are, it would seem, vulnerable to his reductio, leaving him with a potentially infinite number corresponding to every act of thought. The underlying issue is whether performances of acts of thought belong to the level of Collingwood’s natural processes – events, happenings – where fractionation threatens, or to that of historical processes, where he locates acts of thought. Could he not appeal to the fact that performances, as much as acts of thought, are intentional? He might then perhaps argue that this provides them with coherence and unity enough to lift them on to the level of existence of acts of thought, so averting the threat of fractionation.

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But Collingwood does not always speak of ‘performances’, or ‘enactments’, of acts of thought. He frequently describes them as ‘occurrences’ or ‘happenings’. He writes (IH:287), for instance, of ‘acts of thoughts . . . happen[ing] at different times’ and of ‘an act[of thought] happen[ing] twice’. If we try and put aside problems arising from his ‘two aspect’ theory, and ask as directly as we can what might be his criterion for counting performances, there are only two candidates. First, there is shift in context. Collingwood, we may take it, uses his example above, of the person who revives his original act of thought after a lapse of time and attention, to show how a single act of thought may be performed, or happen, twice. Yet he is emphatic that ‘there is no difference in this case’ – that is, after he has resumed the act of thought – ‘that was not already present’ before he let it slip from his mind. But then it follows that an act of thought can happen twice, although there is no change in context. It might be countered that, for Collingwood, the context changes with each moment that passes, ‘unrepeatable’ as Collingwood describes these moments. But then we are descending to the level of natural processes again, and fractionation once more looms. The second possible criterion for counting performances is simply their being performed by different individuals. Certainly for two individuals to perform the same act of thought counts, for Collingwood, as that single act of thought happening twice. He explicitly counts them thus (IH:303): ‘It is the act of thought itself, in its survival and revival at different times and in different persons: once in the historian’s own life, once in the life of the person whose history he is narrating’ (my italics). While it is, for Collingwood, sufficient for talk of there being two performances that a single act of thought occurs in ‘two different mental series’ (as he calls them), it is obviously not necessary. Beyond this, the matter remains largely obscure. Our conclusion is that Collingwood’s realist inspired attempt to show how the past act of thought, by enduring, contributes to the closure of the gap between past and present, and thus to making history possible, cannot be sustained. Despite certain innovations concerning the concept of numericity, as it applies to acts of thought, it remains difficult to see how a realist can construe an act of thought as past unless its occurrence at a particular time and place enters integrally into its identity, not merely into that of its concomitants. What this means in terms of his claim to have expounded a new model of ‘identity in difference’ more suitable to acts of thought is that no such model has been offered. For even if it were conceded that Euclid’s and the historian’s act of thought are, due to sameness of content, numerically identical, the ‘difference’ element in Collingwood’s phrase ‘identity in difference’ does not pertain, integrally, to the act of thought, but to the extrinsic circumstances of its genesis at different times and places. As he writes (IH:303) ‘[since] thought in its immediacy as the unique act of thought with its unique context in the life of an individual thinker, is not the object of historical knowledge’, but merely the ‘vehicle’, it ‘cannot be re-enacted’. But nor if mere sameness of content is to have the numerical significance which would unite the past to the present, can he afford, as he recognizes, to ‘consider [content thus] apart from the individual [acts of thought] that share it’. On the other hand, it is impossible to see how, if the widely divergent circumstances of their genesis did enter integrally into their respective identities, this would not break asunder that unity of Euclid’s with the

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historian’s act of thought, which Collingwood is at the same time so assiduously seeking to forge. Collingwood has, on our view, set himself an impossible task in seeking to show that the past act of thought has the power to re-awaken itself in the present. But this is only one of two necessary conditions that he cites for the thought’s re-enactment by the historian, and so for the closure of the temporal gap which, as a realist, he seeks to effect. The other is that ‘the historian’s mind must be such as to offer a home for [the past thought’s] revival’. It might seem that we need not even consider the latter since the attempt as a whole must, if we are right, have failed. We earlier observed, however, that it is only when Collingwood’s realist arguments have been cleared to one side that the idealist component of his position, which is often in conflict with them,13 can be fully exposed. Let us then disregard his realist objective, and simply concentrate on what he says about the historian’s contribution, namely how the historian must ‘join his own intellectual and critical forces with the past thought’, noting that in this way Collingwood introduces into historical inquiry that unmistakeable subjective element distinctive of idealism. This is further spelled out in such remarks as (IH:218): ‘To the historian the activities whose history he is studying are not spectacles to be watched, but experiences to be lived through in his own mind. They are objective, or known to him, only because they are subjective, or activities of his own’, and (288): ‘thought can never be a mere object’. In order to assess whether, and if so how, idealism’s appeal to ‘subjectiv[ity]’ might establish, where Collingwood’s realist arguments have failed to, the possibility, despite its fleeting subject matter, of history, we require a less fragmentary, more systematic, account of this rival position. Oakeshott, being a thorough-going and consistent idealist, provides an admirable example, and to this we now turn.

2: Historical idealism: a revolutionary conception of evidence? Historical idealism, it may plausibly be suggested, stands or falls, on its apparently revolutionary conception of historical evidence. This conception which, as we shall see, is shared by Collingwood, equally with Oakeshott, makes no reference to an independent past, and so is not damaged by the denial that such a past exists. It is also a conception which, emphasizing the historian’s critical autonomy, turns on its head the realist historians’ methodological reliance on authority and tradition. We begin by setting out three key, interrelated, features of the theory from which this conception can be deduced. I will then argue that, once we strip away certain theoretical exaggerations, and translate it into terms that working historians would recognize, we shall see, with the help of illustrations, that such a conception already largely underpins their method of inquiry, and hence that in practice historians themselves have no need of the notion of an independent past. In finally describing, and evaluating, Collingwood’s excavations, and researches, as a working archaeologist, at Hadrian’s Wall and at the pre-historical site known as ‘King Arthur’s Round Table’, I shall not only argue that his own idealistically informed method of ‘question and answer’ largely survives ‘in the field’, but also show how any tendency of idealism to rampant relativism can, in practice, be curbed.

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(i) Three key features, and the notion of evidence that they give rise to First, idealists hold that if there is to be anything at all, it must be a form of experience, ‘all experience whatever [being] present’ (Oakeshott, EM:110). As this writer declares (41) ‘reality is experience’, and again ‘there is nothing outside the totality of experience’, and again ‘a world is always a world of experience’, and yet again ‘history is experience’ (143), which ‘because it is experience, is present (111). From the relevant modal standpoint, history is, far from being ‘an island in the sea of experience’, ‘the totality of experience’. Admittedly there are other modal standpoints. There is, for instance, the scientific one – ‘a world of purely quantitative experience’ (172) – and there are other pasts, for instance (102–3), ‘the practical past, serving either politics or religion’, and ‘the remembered past’ which is ‘always personal’, and yet again the ‘fancied past’ – ‘the past which might have been’. When any one of them is adopted, it likewise constitutes the whole of reality from that standpoint. (Only philosophy, for Oakeshott, is experience itself, beyond all modes.) Thus ‘the historical past’, he writes, ‘is not a part of reality but the whole of reality from a certain standpoint’,and again,and still more uncompromisingly: ‘anything which is not a nonentity must belong to the historian’s world of experience’ (107). It follows that there can be no question of a historian’s thought, or ideas, being validated (47, 95) by appeal to some ‘outside world of existence’ on which an independent past reality – ‘the sum total of events that have happened’14 – has left a succession of traces. Evidence therefore is never, in a historical investigation (41–2), ‘a coercive given’. Nothing is ‘satisfactory’ just because it is given, no material is out there waiting to be recognized. The second feature of idealism concerns the character of experience. Idealists do not mean by ‘experience’ mere personal experience, mere arbitrary psychic states (EM:55, 68). ‘Experience,’ says Oakeshott, ‘always presents itself as a world.’ But ‘a world of experience’ – ‘a world of ideas’, of ‘thoughts’ – is a coherent, organized whole. The historian’s ‘world of experience’ is therefore a ‘systematic whole’, not a mere accumulation of data, not ‘a chaos masquerading as a world’ (94). Any bare addition would upset its coherence, its stability. Evidence, on this picture, cannot simply ‘announce itself ’ to the historian. It cannot enter his ‘world of experience’, already determinate, only waiting to be added to that world. It is only when he has achieved for such isolated data, such ‘atomic facts’,‘a place in a coherent world’ that they can become ‘more than an hypothesis or a fiction’. ‘The character of a new discovery’, writes Oakeshott again, ‘is not given or fixed but is determined by its place in the world of history as a whole’ (98). A ‘loose’ datum, or a string of recorded data, has to earn, or rather the historian has to earn for it, its place in that world.14 By being thus organized into a world it is transformed into an idea, or judgement, and becomes properly historical. It follows that there is nothing which is evidence that is not an ‘idea’, or ‘judgement’ of the historian, that does not involve a reorganization of his present consciousness. It also follows that anything can be evidence, provided only that the historian can show how, plausibly interpreted,15 it can render more coherent his existing picture. As Collingwood puts it (IH:280–1): ‘Everything in the world is potential evidence for any subject whatever . . . [for] anything is evidence which enables you to answer your question – the question you are asking now’.16

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Thirdly, historical thought is dynamical. The transformation of data is two-way. As Oakeshott puts it: ‘A new discovery cannot be appeased by being fitted into an old world but only by being allowed to transform the whole of that world’ (EM:98, my italics). Thus for a historian to postulate something as evidence is no less than to permit, or carry out, a reorganization of his present world of experience. He does this, says Oakeshott, in order that his present world of experience should become ‘more of a world’ (66, 99), better organized, more integrated. Since this greater integration is an open-ended goal, there is ‘No historical fact about which mistake is impossible’ (112), or again ‘in historical experience . . . there . . . [is] . . . nothing given which is immune from change’ (106–7), indeed: the given is (99) ‘given only in order that it may be superceded’. Agreeing (IH:248) that ‘In history no achievement is final’, Collingwood (inconsistently with the recalcitrant strains of realism in his position) points in explanation to the transitoriness of evidence itself which, he writes, ‘changes with every change in historical method and with every variation in the competence of historians’, adding that ‘the principles by which evidence is interpreted change too’. ‘Every new historian must [therefore]’, he concludes, ‘revise the question themselves – and since historical thought is a river into which none can step twice . . . even a single historian finds when he tries to reopen an old question that the question has changed’ (my italics).17 Turning then to practice, what so to speak ‘on the ground’ of historical inquiry would be inimical to this idealist treatment of evidence? It is, Collingwood (IH:234) states, the elevation of certain first hand memories to the status of authoritative statements. He writes: If an event . . . is to be historically known . . . someone must be acquainted with it; then he must remember it; then he must state his recollection of it in terms intelligible to another; and finally that other must accept the statement as true. History is thus the believing someone else when he says that he remembers something. The believer is the historian; the person believed is called his authority . . . this doctrine implies that historical truth . . . is accessible [to the historian] only because it exists ready made in the readymade statements, of the authorities . . . they are to him a sacred text, whose value depends wholly on the unbrokenness of the tradition . . . he must therefore on no account tamper with them . . . [nor] add to them . . . above all he must not contradict them.

Idealists wish to reverse this order of influence. Thus Collingwood calls for (236, 240) a ‘Copernican revolution in the theory of history’: historical truth will no longer consist, as realists would have it, in the historian’s beliefs conforming to the statements of ‘authorities’, but rather these authorities must submit to the historian.18 Now, although there are strictly both primary and secondary authorities,19 we may take it that only the former are under discussion here. For if the point of copying down the statements of authorities is to produce an unbroken continuity with the past (as on the realist view, here exemplified by ‘scissors and paste’ historians), it will only be primary authorities – those which have typically been created during the period under study – that are relevant. This immediately produces an insoluble dilemma for such

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realists. Precisely because secondary authorities, or their authors, have worked to remove errors in primary ones, secondary authorities are more likely to be reliable than primary ones. However, by their very intervention they have given up all hope of maintaining the unbroken continuity with the past so prized by realists – a hope perhaps forlornly surviving in the common saying that only primary authorities can give us an ‘inside view’. But surely it will be said that primary authorities are going to be vitally important to any historian, and not just to those with a realist axe to grind. They are there, readymade, at least in the sense that they are a permanent resource for the historian, a permanent background against which he researches and writes. Their graduation at this general level to the status of evidence for the period is not a personal ‘achievement’ of the historian, nor to be won afresh with each new inquiry. How could the Old English scholar therefore blithely disregard – as the idealists may seem to be suggesting that he should – the existence of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, or Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, while he formulates his question, only admitting it as of research interest, if at all, once his historical hypothesis is in place? We now see, however, in examining the treatment of such primary sources in F. M. Stenton’s classic work Anglo-Saxon England (1955), that this, even should we grant it, turns out to be very little of an admission, once we take into account precisely the unreliable, often obscure, nature of these sources (especially compared with secondary ones). Indeed historical practice at its best appears already to exemplify that reversal of the order of influence between historian and authority that Collingwood and the idealists call for.

An illustration: F. M. Stenton’s Anglo-Saxon England The reason for the unreliability and obscurity of the primary sources for the period covered by Stenton’s work is not hard to fathom. Anglo-Saxon authors frequently had wholly different aims from the scientific historian today. Gildas, the only primary source for the first half of the sixth century – a ‘foundational’ authority for that period – was a monk. His De Excidio Britanniae which recounts the sufferings of Britons is chiefly a compilation of scriptural quotations meant to bring their rulers to repentance for their sins. Naturally enough the giving of historical information was only incidental to this enterprise. ‘The purpose [of Gildas’s work]’, writes Stenton (1955:3–4), ‘compelled him to mention by name [only] those British kings whose flagrant sins invited commination . . . a king who sinned in moderation had no interest for Gildas’. Hence Gildas’s failure to mention King Arthur should not lead us to conclude that the latter had no historical existence but was merely legendary. Often a primary source reveals signs of being based on traditions, or fragments of traditions, which were originally preserved, not for their historical content, but by poets who thought to recite them in order to excite a barbarian audience (Stenton, 1955:21, 25). Not only might events of great significance be ignored – they were not judged the stuff of heroic verse – but names of persons, and places. could be inserted, omitted or changed to fit in with the mood of the moment or for the sake of alliteration. Lists of kings, royal genealogies and descriptions of battles, although later included as annals within chronicles, as highly respected as Alfred’s, were often originally produced

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by court scribes who had to please their masters. The war which Ceawlin, king of Wessex and successor to Aelle, is reported to have waged against the Britons in 584 is described as a Saxon victory. However, Ceawlin is said to have returned home in a fury. Historians have speculated that since victors are not usually angry, it was probably actually a defeat. Primary sources can be uneven and patchy because they incorporate historical information alongside stories and marvels more characteristic of ‘travellers’ tales’. Procopius of Caesaria’s history of Justinian’s wars against the Goths in Italy is a case in point. It includes a chapter on Britain whose possible sober veracity is compromised by a fabulous description of the ferrying of disembodied souls from Gaul to England. It is thus necessary (Stenton, 4–5) to establish such tales as an ‘afterthought’ if one is to rescue any genuine content the work might have. Finally, while the aims of an author may be recognizably historical, his conception of history may still be different. For instance, an event without a date, we are told, fell outside Bede’s conception of history. It is hardly surprising then that Stenton never appeals to authority as a shortcut to demonstrating a historical claim, or as an ‘open-and-shut’ case for its truth. But he goes much further: he constantly alludes to the pitfalls of trusting a primary authority. He issues (684), for instance, the sternest warning concerning Nemmius’ Historia Brittonum: ‘No section of this work,’ he writes, ‘should be used without extreme caution, and many reservations.’ He tells us (1955:13) of that ‘succession of scholars’ whose ‘obedience to Ptolemy’ has led them astray. They have mistakenly located the Angli in north central Germany rather than in Jutland. He castigates them further for their failure to see that Ptolemy’s passage is not only internally confused but conflicts both with geographical probability and English tradition. He notes (10) that recent scholarship suggests that Bede himself overstated the distinction between the various peoples of which the English nation was composed. If historians should not entirely disregard him on this matter, but should still give some credence to his statements here, it will only be circumspectly, after considering the three general reasons for doing so. His writings ‘satisfied a king of the Northumbrians in an age when kings were accustomed to listen to heroic verse covering all the nations of the Germanic world’; he was a cautious, careful and precise scholar; and thirdly he had eminent friends all over England, and was in communication with them.20 I have said nothing so far explicitly about the interpretation of primary authorities. It must be clear, though, that the frequent sheer obscurity of the statements of AngloSaxon authorities rules out of court any idea that their comprehension could be immediate, or automatic, in the ‘scissors and paste’ manner reviled by Collingwood. Nowhere perhaps is it more apparent that this will be a long-drawn-out affair, probably never finally settled, than over the identification of those archaic personal and place names, with which these texts abound. Is the ‘Fethan leag’ of the Chronicle, the ‘Fethelee’ mentioned in a twelfth-century document relating to Stoke Lyne in Oxfordshire? Is ‘Ageles threp’ ‘Aylesford’ (which depends on taking ‘threp’ to mean ‘ford’, itself requiring justification)? Is ‘Ypwines fleot’ ‘Ebbesfleet’? The identification of ‘Crecgon ford’ with Crayford’ hangs precariously by the thread of a hypothesis to the effect that all existing versions of the Chronicle can be traced back to an original in which the name was misspelt (Stenton, 1955:17).

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To give a somewhat more sustained example: a late tenth century translation from English to Latin of one of the sets of annals, which are incorporated within the Alfredian Chronicle, states (Stenton, 1955:24–5) that a chief, Cerdic, conquered Wessex in the year 500. It mentions three places in connection with this victory: Cerdices ora, Cerdices ford and Cerdices leaga. This has certainly not been taken at face value. Historians have proposed that ‘Cerdic’, being rare, if not unheard of, as a proper name, is a figment of the imagination of the original author, which he has made up from the three place-names. It has been retorted that if Cerdic had no historical existence he would not, given the seriousness with which the Germanic aristocracy took descent, be mentioned, as he is, in the West Saxon regal genealogy. Moreover it is implausible, it is said, to suppose that three independent place names, each containing the same highly singular proper name, were extant prior to the writing down of the relevant tradition. The counter-proposal is that it happened the other way about: Cerdic, and his victory, came first, and gave his name to the associated places. Still others have argued that ‘Cerdic’ is not so unusual after all but might be derived from the Old Welsh name ‘Ceretic’. But this would demand new hypotheses concerning the marriage customs of fifth century Saxon raiders, prompting a re-evaluation of the relations, as they are currently understood by historians, between Saxons and Britons. Even then it would not conclusively disprove Cerdic’s historical existence. Thus a historian proposing that ‘Cerdic’ is a version of the Old Welsh ‘Ceretic’ will, in view of the possible ramifications for current views concerning the relevant marriage customs, have to argue robustly for his proposal while endeavouring to save as much of the existing broader picture as he can. We return for a final illustration to Procopius’s History of Justinian’s wars against the Goths in Italy. We noted that Stenton (1955:6–7) seeks to rescue the chapter on Britain from being discredited by its inclusion of marvels. He does this, not just by persuading us that the marvels were an afterthought but by showing that the chapter, in its central part, contains a genuine knowledge of Germanic custom that could only have been acquired from a barbarian informant, thus ‘bringing north-western Europe [genuinely] for a moment within the view of Byzantine scholars’, and rendering many of the relevant statements potentially believable. Even such non-fantastic statements might still be just tall tales about a distant and seemingly exotic place with which Procopius hopes to regale his fellow countrymen. Stenton might have left it like that except for one particular statement made in the chapter to the effect that English peoples were migrating in great numbers from Britain to the Continent. This is of great interest to him since, if credible, it could imply that, as late as the first half of the sixth century, the English were still harried by, and under pressure, from the Britons. Stenton reasons thus: since ‘no Germanic race ever took to the sea without urgent reason’, the English must have had such a reason. But what could this have been other than that they had outgrown their original settlements, yet were somehow checked by hostile Britons from expanding into new ones. This in turn suggests – the very hypothesis for which Stenton goes on to seek confirmation – that the English conquest of Southern Britain was not as rapid, or as smooth, as some scholars, following Gildas as they have understood him, have supposed, but had been achieved in two hard won phases. There had been a period in the middle – the early sixth century – when the English, obliged to yield territory that they had previously conquered, and to withdraw to, and try to

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confine themselves in, their narrow first settlements, saw economic migration as a solution. Accepting that Procopius’s statement will only constitute evidence for this hypothesis, and not be dismissed outright, if it either agrees with, or is reinforced by, other authorities, either in its immediate content, or its supposed implications, or in other words if it fits in with the picture to which he already gives some credence, Stenton seeks to demonstrate that it does. The contemporary Gildas describes the situation in Britain at this time, although woeful in many respects, as by and large peaceful. This is compatible with the suggestion that the Britons had repossessed sufficient land to produce a stalemate, forcing the English back to an area which they had outgrown, and prompting migration. Not only this, Procopius’s remark itself is reinforced by an independent Germanic tradition of such a migration. This tradition comes down to us in different versions, the oldest being written down by a monk at Fulda just before 865. According to this tradition, the continental Saxons were descended from the Angli of Britain. The latter had crossed into Germany from Britain in order to find new territory for settlement. Not only is the place where they landed identified, as Cuxhaven (Haduloha), but the area of settlement, as well as the king who allowed them to settle there. This was Therderich, king of the Franks, and the explanation that he was then engaged in a war with the Thuringians enables quite precise dating of the migration. As Stenton remarks, this detailed account ‘read[s] like an illustration of Procopius’s statement’. Stenton is still cautious about simply accepting the Fulda tradition. There are reasons, he says, for doubting that it can be the whole story concerning the origins of the continental Saxons: their language, according to our knowledge of it, would have diverged too much from that which the Angli would have been speaking at the time of the migration. On the other hand, he grants that the tradition is consonant with evidence of place names – for instance, a canton in the district associated originally with the migrants was called Engelin. The general agreement between Fulda and Procopius about the date of the migration is also significant. Procopius’s and Fulda’s statements about the migration can thus be used to confirm each other, or as Stenton puts it (1955:8): ‘Coincidences like these raise at least a strong presumption that some migration of the kind described by Procopius actually took place’. This presumption is so strong in fact that, Stenton maintains, given their status as nearly contemporary with the events recounted, it would take an equally contemporaneous, but conflicting series of internally consistent traditions to overturn them. This contemporaneous status also mitigates the lack of any mention of such a migration by Bede, who was writing 200 years later, or in the Alfredian Chronicles of 300 years later. Backed up in all these ways, Procopius’s statement, Stenton writes, should warn us against assuming that ‘the war left the English in possession of the centre as well as the east and south east of Britain’. It thus becomes a lynch pin in his own larger hypothesis against a rapid conquest by the English (which some scholars have read into Gildas), and for the conquest being a two part affair. This in turn raises further questions (1955:27) about whether there were in the intervening years two Saxon settlements separated by a strip of territory still under British control. Again, then, we see how Procopius’s statement can only be countenanced as evidence if a place can be ‘achieved’ for it (to use Oakeshott’s words) within a body of

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currently more entrenched statements from other sources, particularly independent ones – a degree of entrenchment that Stenton does not in the circumstances choose to question.21 But we also see how these latter statements are not themselves ultimately immune from reappraisal, thus illustrating Oakeshott’s affirmation (1955:99) that the given is ‘given only in order that it may be superceded’. They may be made either more, or less, credible, by the new statement that the historian is looking to fit them in with. Nor is there any hard and fast line between the interpretation of a statement, and the drawing out of its implications. The statement which is a candidate for being counted as evidence must be evidence for something. It thus shows up in the first place, as Collingwood stipulates, only as a potential lynch pin of a larger proposed picture which constitutes the direction of the particular historical inquiry under way. Nowhere, importantly, does Stenton advert, independently of what the evidence shows, to a ‘real’ past, to Collingwood’s ‘sum total of events’.

(ii) ‘Everything in the world is potential evidence for any subject whatever’ (Collingwood, 1953:280) What, however, of Collingwood’s claim that absolutely anything can count as evidence? How is this compatible with the consultation of written authorities even if they are used in the judicious, and unslavish way exemplified by Stenton? Certainly it does not follow that because such a consultation is crucial to your investigation, that you may not go outside it.21 Archaeologists especially concern themselves largely with unwritten materials: artefacts of one kind or another, illustrating Collingwood’s claim that ‘the historian aims at discovering a past that no-one remembers or ever did remember for the reason that no-one ever knew it’. I will turn to archaeology shortly. I shall now show that even a hallowed written document can open up anew under the insightful interrogation of the historian so as to become a mine of information, often of a wholly unanticipated kind, only limited by his imagination, ingenuity and observational powers. This is particularly so where the document is prescriptive, announcing, say, new grants or privileges, rather than descriptive. A royal, or ducal, charter is a good example. Here the historian may learn about historical events, or states of affairs, contemporaneous with the document, not because they are deliberately recorded there, but because of other features of the document, which point to them – either on their own or in comparison with other similar documents, so that the document may be used as a ‘correlate’ for them (Vernon Dibble, 1963:210). The document may even be seen to be, through a proper understanding of these features, itself a symptom, or exemplification, of the state of affairs in question. It is not irrelevant to the document’s possession of such features that it is a physical object, even if these features have to be understood conventionally. Charles Haskins, in his Norman Institutions (1918, referenced by Dibble, 210–12), shows that the governmental institutions of Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy in the years 1089–96 and 1100–1105, were backward, disordered and demoralized, compared with those of his strong, able brother, William Rufus, who ruled in the period between the two dates, while Robert was on crusade. Haskins has at his disposal both detailed narratives, particularly that of Odericus, and also numerous ducal charters,

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from the relevant periods. He is cautious about simply accepting, without independent confirmation, Odericus’s account, in which Normandy under Robert, with its reliance on mercenaries, and its popular levies, is described as ‘a dreary tale of private war, murder and pillage, of perjury, disloyalty and revolt’ (Haskins, 84). For Odericus was a monk, living in a remote part, with little first-hand knowledge of governmental machinery. In order to penetrate beyond Odericus’s testimony, he turns his attention to the charters. He hypothesizes that we could expect crucial differences between the charters issued by Norman dukes, depending on the extent to which their associated organs of government are, or are not, in disarray. He carefully re-examines the charters, alert for relevant signs. He discovers that the number of surviving charters of Robert’s reign is small – no more than thirty-one – relative to the length of the reign, compared with other Norman dukes. He argues that this is a direct consequence, not so much of a lack of interest on the part of later ages in preserving them, but rather of their being scarcely prized at all in Robert’s own age, suggesting that there were no effective institutions that could make them worthwhile by enforcing them, especially over an extended period. Again none of these charters concerned general liberties or consisted in comprehensive enumerations of past grants, but are all specific and immediate. In line with his hypothesis, Haskins explains that where the relevant governmental institutions were weak and compromised, the best one could expect was only some immediate, or momentary, protection of one’s privileges. He also points out that all the surviving charters are genuine, unlike those recording privileges granted by the Conqueror, many of which proved to be forgeries. He takes this to show again that Robert’s charters counted for little at a time when the liberties and privileges could not be backed up by government enforcement, or where infringement of them would not be met by speedy official redress. Haskins notes, too, their lack of uniformity in size, style or method of authentication which suggests again no settled or official method for producing such documents. He passes on to such details as the handwriting –which was different in the seven preserved in the original – and the Seals – which were used only intermittently, and not in uniform fashion. He observes that there are nine variations on the title dux Normanorum and that Robert sometimes signs as dux sometimes as comes, while a meeting of the Curia is only mentioned once in all the surviving documents. He concludes that the variation in style precludes the existence of an effective chancery, and indicates that the duke’s charters were usually drawn up by the recipients. He uses these conclusions as independent evidence confirming the testimony of Odericus. It would seem clear then that the historian’s recognition of the authoritative status of a document does not preclude his approaching it with a novel hypothesis, and exhibiting certain of its features – perhaps never remarked before – as evidence for his new hypothesis in an unanticipated way. It does not follow from the fact that our examples of historical practice are consistent with idealist theory, in that they reveal the key methodological precepts governing the practice to be those to which we would expect a historian, who was also an idealist to conform, that historians typically embrace idealism.22 We suggested at the outset that by and large they would recoil from the view, integral to that theory, that the ‘real’ past – a past considered apart from any knowledge we may have of it – is a nonentity.

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The question remains whether, were they to see that in practice they have no use for such a notion, relying on it neither for explanatory nor justificatory purposes, they would feel obliged, or able, to jettison it. Given in particular his remarks in his essay ‘the limits of historical knowledge’, Collingwood would object, I think, to our question. He maintains (EPH:98) there that for ‘practised historians’, as opposed to theoreticians of a realist bent, historical thinking never did mean ‘discovering what really happened if what really happened is anything other than “what the evidence indicates” ’. Nor, for them, he claims is the successful historian the one who (97) ‘can reconstitute what really happened’. Rather, he is the one who ‘can show that his view of what happened is the one which the evidence accessible to all . . . when criticized up to the hilt, supports’. Historians are content, as Collingwood describes them, to ‘play the game with the pieces [they] have’.23 They are therefore undismayed by the familiar, and apparently damaging, criticism that the fragmentariness of historical sources (compared with the ‘sum total of events’ that really happened), and the accidental nature of their survival, renders history ‘peculiar, disastrous [and] doubtful.’24 It is, suggests Collingwood, the realist theoreticians,25 not ‘practising historians’, not ‘anybody who has first hand experience of historical research . . . in the sharpened form of historical controversy’, who will object that this ‘reduce[s] history to a game . . . deprive[s] its narratives of all objective value . . . [and] ‘degrade[s] them to a mere exercise in the interpretation of arbitrarily selected bodies of evidence . . . confessedly impotent to prove the truth’. The reply to such theorists is to undercut their objection by observing that in making it they use words, and concepts, which cannot have the meaning, in the context of historical practice, as it is actually carried on, that they are intended to convey. There is just, for instance, no sense of ‘objective value’, in this context, which a historical narrative may be said to possess only if it corresponds to a real past sequence of events. For this is to presuppose notions which have no place in practice. The only ‘narratives’ that can be said to have ‘objective value’, if that expression is given currency, are those which the present evidence supports when tested ‘to the hilt’.26

3: Collingwood’s ‘question and answer’ at Hadrian’s Wall I have so far only described the working methodology of historians, exhibiting its remarkable consistency, at least as regards remote and obscure periods, with the strictures of idealists, such as Collingwood and Oakeshott. I have not yet evaluated such a methodology. Below I propose to test it against a rival methodology, although not a methodology directly derived from a philosophical position, rather one informed by natural science. For this purpose, I shall turn to archaeology, where Collingwood is noted for two chief areas of excavation and interpretation. These are Hadrian’s Wall, and the associated structures – the turf wall, the Vallum and the forts – where his idealist inspired methodology almost certainly bore fruit, and the site known as King Arthur’s Round Table, on which we shall mainly concentrate, where he was shown to have badly misjudged the nature of the site. We shall argue that, although he was led astray by certain features on the ground, his idealist methodology was not responsible. We shall also try to show how some notion of progress in archaeological knowledge

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can be upheld, so evading a Dummettian radical relativism of the present, alongside the idealist insistence on infinite reviseability. Collingwood, drawing no relevant distinction between history and archaeology, wishes to institute his method of question and answer with regard to the latter also. In history, as we saw, it is held to replace that of the (somewhat mythical) ‘scissors and paste’ proponents who, according to Collingwood, just go the shelves, and take down all the books they can find on their chosen topic, and consult every authority, vainly pursuing their ideal of ‘completeness’. In archaeology, Collingwood’s method leads to ‘selective’ digging, that is to say digging – often small scale – in response to a hypothesis formulated beforehand, with discoveries made as work progresses, prompting further hypotheses. It replaces what Collingwood calls ‘blind’ digging, a method of digging originating in the nineteenth century with Pitt-Rivers, according to which one chooses a site, uncovers it systematically until it is all dug, and then moves on to another site. As regards Hadrian’s Wall, Collingwood’s method obviously bore fruit (see here particularly G. S. Couse, 1990, but also Collingwood himself, 1921, 1931). His reattribution of the stone wall – the Great Wall – to Hadrian, against J. Haverfield who had assigned it to the later Severus, and only the turf wall to Hadrian, still commands assent. This is also largely true of his conclusions concerning its purpose as a frontier marker with incidental military function. Here he argued that if, as he believed, the Wall was essentially a chain of signal-stations connected by an elevated sentry-walk, evidence should be found of a continuation of this chain westward along the Cumberland Coast, beyond the Wall’s end at Bownes, in order to provide surveillance of raiders from the North. Scrutinizing relevant publications, he learnt that the remains of four towers had indeed been discovered along the coast in 1880. In search of further confirmation, he duly led a four-day search for similar coastal remains, and found wall masonry. Subsequent field-work, in which Collingwood was not involved, discovered a whole system of regularly spaced Roman structures, further supporting Collingwood’s conclusions. Not only this, but he is held to have been correct in estimating the rough contemporaneity of the Wall, the turf wall, and the Vallum, and some of the forts. He was obliged to revise an earlier view regarding these, and also eventually to take on board the idea that the plans for the Wall underwent significant changes over the period of its construction. However, as we saw, his whole position, like Oakeshott’s, is underpinned by the conviction that no finding is ever absolute or unreviseable. Two observations, however, indicate certain limitations upon the idealist methodology in the field. Not only can vital information sometimes be gained by an accident of circumstance, such as rain forcing an excavator to move to higher ground (as it did F. G. Simpson working in 1927 on the ditch of the turf wall under Birdoswald fort, see Couse, 1990:64), but also such ‘evidence’ can sometimes drive interpretation rather than the other way about. For instance, it may enable one to choose between two competing, but so far equally appropriate, explanations, or again reveal an erstwhile failure to take seriously, or perhaps even to recognize, eminently sensible possibilities. The example of Hadrian’s Wall moreover indicates that the pure linearity of question and answer, as Collingwood describes it, is somewhat ideal with respect to an intensively worked over site, involving multiple constructions, often one on top of another, where the researcher, usually a member of a team, is bombarded at every stage of ongoing

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excavation, with a chaotic plenitude of information, both localized and general, of ever proliferating complexity. With these caveats, Collingwood’s essentially idealist methodology – his technique of ‘selective excavation’ and his logic of question and answer – can, by and large, be said to have survived the test of Hadrian’s Wall. It is arguable, or some have argued, that it does not survive the site known as King Arthur’s Round Table, which he undertook to excavate in 1937. The story (told with insight and sensitivity by Richard Bradley, 1994) is briefly this. The site consists of a low circular platform surrounded by a wide ditch and earthen bank characteristic of prehistoric henges. Collingwood conjectured that it was indeed of prehistoric origin, and that it had carried a wooden structure, being the wooden parallel of the prehistoric site at Arbor Low, much as Woodhenge is a parallel to Stonehenge. He posited that the position of upright posts, or stones, could be recognized in the ground because their sockets would have left characteristic traces. If his conjecture were right, he therefore argued, an ordered system of postholes should be found. His immediate aim in his first season of digging was to look for such postholes, and he employed a site foreman, a specialist in locating them, who had previously worked along Hadrian’s Wall. Many postholes, some of which were filled with sand and decayed wood, and others with what he took to be stone packing, were apparently found. Further digging, influenced by these discoveries, led Collingwood to identify three different periods characterized by different floors and structures. During the first, an elliptical wooden building with a roof, he suggested, was erected above a cremation trench, all of which had subsequently decayed. In a second period, the site was reused and stones replaced the timber posts. There was a second cremation, and a small hut was built. The site was further remodelled during a third period and again reused. The purpose of the site, he proposed, was as a monument to a dead ‘hero’. Collingwood unfortunately fell ill at the end of the first season and was eventually replaced by Gerhard Bersu. Now Bersu had none of the theoretical interests of Collingwood, but instead possessed a strong practical bent, and was knowledgeable about geography and highly sensitive to geological features. Acknowledging his unfamiliarity with the geology of this area, he deliberately chose to excavate beyond the confines of the earthwork. What he discovered was that the two major layers which Collingwood had identified, and which had led him to hypothesize the existence of different floors, continued outside the earthwork. (In fact they had already been recognized, during Collingwood’s excavations, under the bank.) Bersu brought in geologists who made it clear that both layers were of natural origin, one being a layer of boulder clay, and the other periglacial. The problem arose: how could the postholes have been sealed under these ancient deposits? Further investigation, prompted by the conjecture that they were not man made at all, revealed the existence of lairs and galleries branching off the vertical postholes in a variety of directions – the unmistakeable sign of burrowing animals: moles, mice, rabbits, badgers and foxes. In light of his findings, Bersu maintained that the site represented only one undateable prehistoric period, and was a sepulchral monument of some kind. Collingwood’s interpretation rapidly collapsed. Collingwood’s conclusions then were wide of the mark. But were they more than interim conclusions – suggestions, after one season of excavation, for a possible future

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direction of research? Let us agree that even if this was their status, as Collingwood would probably maintain (Helgeby, 1995:7), they were grossly misleading. However, it does not immediately follow (as the archaeologist, Ian Richmond thought, ibid:7) that this deficiency must have been due to a flawed methodology, namely that of ‘selective’ excavation, and question and answer. For perhaps the methodology was sound, but in excavating the King Arthur site, unlike Hadrian’s Wall, Collingwood failed to follow procedures properly. He might have failed at several points. At the theoretical level – in formulating his hypothesis – he might have neglected to read the extant literature, or drawn extravagant and unconvincing analogies with other sites, or made wild generalizations, or failed to have carried out a thorough surface inspection of the site. Alternatively he might have failed at the point of translation of theory into practice by making erroneous inferences as to what kind of things he could expect to find if his hypothesis were true. Finally, he could have failed at the purely practical level either by just not recognizing on the ground, even when he saw it, what he had postulated in theory, or by taking what he saw on the ground for what he had postulated, when it was nothing of the sort. On the other hand, if it is the methodology that is deficient, we shall still want to know how this deficiency is supposed to have manifested itself here in his excavation of the King Arthur site, when it did not at Hadrian’s Wall. No one so far as I know has doubted that he prepared himself well at the purely theoretical level. As Richard Bradley (1994:34) assures us: he was no mere fantasist. His hypothesis that the Cumbrian site had carried a wooden structure was plausibly suggested by features of earthworks at other sites in central southern England, which had apparently carried timber structures. He posited a convincing parallel; just as Woodhenge was to Stonehenge, so King’s Arthur’s Round Table was to Arbor Low (Helgeby, 1995:5). From this hypothesis, together with relevant generalizations, he drew, with what Bradley commends (1994:33) as an ‘impeccable’ logic, the inference that an ordered system of postholes ought to be found at the site, which would be recognizable on the ground because their sockets would have left characteristic traces. ‘He [thus] sought’, as Helgeby (1995:4) puts it ‘to bring his initial problem’ – which Helgeby later (5) praises as both ‘well-framed and specific’ – to ‘a focus at a particular point where it could be solved’. But, despite this astute preparation, despite his familiarity ‘with a . . . body of archaeological writings concerned with the recognition of sub soil features and the principles of stratification’ (Bradley, 1994:33), he went badly wrong on the ground. He mistook, with disastrous consequences, the burrows of small animals for the sockets of the supposed postholes. How could this have happened? A certain familiar criticism is repeatedly made in the literature even by writers – archaeologists, such as Bradley and Helgeby – who are sympathetic to Collingwood and his methodology. We find such general remarks (Bradley, 30) as that ‘[Collingwood] found almost exactly what he had expected to find’, and that ‘he was influenced by his reading before the project began’. More harshly, Bradley (33) describes him as ‘a victim of his own preconceptions’ and (32) ‘an intelligent observer [who] become[s] the prisoner of his own expectations’. Referring to aspects of this particular excavation, Bradley explains (30) that ‘because Collingwood had viewed them in plan they looked just like the postholes that he had expected to find’. Of his report on the first season, Bradley (28) states that ‘[h]is introduction to the project virtually pre-empted its

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conclusion’. Richmond, 1943 (quoted by Helgeby, 1995:2) alleges that ‘he drove the evidence too hard’. But what exactly is the import of these criticisms: are they directed at Collingwood or his idealist methodology? Are they even justified? Bradley’s last quoted criticism seems to me to read too much into the mere order of exposition of a report. As to Richmond’s remark, if we ignore Collingwood’s later speculations about floors and cremation trenches, and concentrate on his original postulation merely of a wooden structure, to which the post-holes – had they really been postholes – would have amply testified, we can hardly accuse him of pushing the evidence too far. We would also be wise to reject at least as a criticism Bradley’s assertion that ‘he was influenced by his reading before the project began’. For surely this is only proper practice. How otherwise would he have come to formulate the hypothesis which is the engine of his research? As Charles Salas (1987) writes (in Helgeby’s paraphrase, 1995:3) of course ‘you see what you are set up to see’, but ‘this [is] part of Collingwood’s overall achievement of providing connected and coherent history’. I would go further: it is not just Collingwoodians who need some kind of hypothesis, or at least preconception, some idea of what they might expect to find, given what is already known, before they start digging: any researcher does. Even the ‘rescue’ archaeologists, who were dominant in the 1970s, had to give an account, before excavation work could begin, of the character and potential value of a site that they wished to conserve, if they were to justify government funding. Bersu himself, we are told, took over many of the preconceptions of Collingwood when he began his research at King’s Arthur’s Round Table, even if he proceeded to overturn them. Thus Bradley states (1994:28) that it was Collingwood who ‘had set the agenda’ for work at the site, while Helgeby points out (1995:8) that both set out to test hypotheses by selective excavation of particular areas of the site. But surely Collingwood, because of his methodology, decided, in advance of going out into the field, how his digging was to be circumscribed in a way that Bersu did not? We know, for instance, that he abandoned excavation as soon as the loose gravel made it impossible for him to identify further postholes (Helgerby:5), while he would not have contemplated excavating well beyond the confines of the earthwork, as Bersu did. Does not all this suggest a certain inflexibility, a blinkeredness, engendered by his methodology? But refraining from digging outside the perimeter of a site is hardly peculiar to Collingwood’s ‘selective’ excavation. The systematic, or ‘blind’, diggers (as Collingwood called them), although they sought to dig the whole of a site, did not, as we noted, typically go outside it. Once they had dug it all, they proceeded to a new site, and comprehensively dug that also. Now Collingwood did, as we have seen, place special emphasis on the postholes that he believed he was uncovering, but this was only what his carefully prepared, and eminently sensible, protocol required. It hardly justifies his being called ‘a victim of his own preconceptions’ or ‘a prisoner of his expectations’. His problem was not that he focussed upon the postholes, but that he did not recognize them for what they were. Because he did not recognize them for what they were – animal burrows – he could not see that the ‘packing’ was not a result of human intention, but just the way the burrows had filled in naturally over time. As far as this failure of recognition on Collingwood’s part is concerned, I see no reason to suppose that it was a consequence of his methodology, or that he, astute as he was, was in any way a slave of that methodology.

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There is a compelling alternative explanation to which both Bradley and Helgeby advert, and which they are finally inclined to endorse. Prehistory was not Collingwood’s area of expertise as it was Bersu’s. The German archaeologist had much experience in open area, and settlement, excavation on the Continent (Helgeby, 1995:8). Collingwood’s specialism on the other hand was Roman Britain, and he was mainly familiar with its complexly constructed, and artfully designed, buildings. He was also well versed in its huge background of literature, to which he himself contributed, with his volume (1936) on Roman Britain in the Oxford History of England series. This divergence of concerns would on its own have led to divergent views concerning the relation between archaeology and natural science. For Bersu’s interest in prehistory was necessarily also an interest in natural phenomena over aeons, in geological structures and strata, as well as in the human agents, who were largely prey to their natural surroundings. He thus equipped himself with the relevant expertise. Collingwood, however, largely dealing with people who had gained a measure of control over nature, would have put less of a premium on understanding geological formations and such like. There is a further factor. Collingwood, as we saw, took prehistory, just as much as history, to crucially involve the rethinking of past thoughts. Now we argued that, despite the importance that has been accorded to this idea by Collingwoodian scholars, it faces insuperable difficulties, not least of intelligibility. We also observed that, philosophically, it represents his answer to the question how history (or archaeology) is possible, given its non-existent subject matter, when that question is understood, as realists understand it, as a challenge to close the gap between past and present. We maintained that this unsatisfactory realist strain in Collingwood’s work could be discarded without damaging the far more plausible idealism which he shares with Oakeshott. We went on to see how idealist theory entails a methodology for history (and for prehistory and archaeology) whereby a new discovery achieves the status of evidence only when the historian is able to interpret it in such a way that it coheres with (though it may also modify) the larger body of ideas to which he gives credence. But this methodology, as the appropriate one for prehistorians and archaeologists, as well as for historians, does not itself entail that their subject matter can only be human activity and its products. With prehistory in particular, there is a real risk of mistaking the effects of natural weathering, or of animal activity, for human agency. If, however, like Collingwood, one is wholly set upon identifying a relevant past thought and rethinking it, if one holds that that is the raison d’être of all these disciplines, one might even struggle to force features on the ground into the mould of products of human agency. One may well do this even when an alternative interpretation is staring one in the face. Nor is one likely to have equipped oneself with the kind of geological, geographical, or other expertise, which could temper this aspiration. This, I suggest, was exactly Collingwood’s plight at the prehistoric site called King Arthur’s Round Table. It is not, then, his idealist methodology that is to blame; it is the recalcitrant element of realism within that idealism which, although he had surely outgrown it, he could not bring himself to discard. I conclude that the idealist methodology itself survives the test of King Arthur’s Round Table, and even Collingwood’s own lamentable failure. It goes without saying that this failure does not justify banishing theory all together from archaeology. However, as Bradley (1994:32–3) reminds us, many archaeologists,

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in the wake of Bersu’s decisive overthrowing of Collingwood’s interpretation, have turned away from theory, holding that the aim of archaeology is documentation alone, not historical understanding. This development, Bradley notes, has been aided and abetted by the increasing dominance of often governmentally funded ‘rescue archaeology’ in which the past is seen as no more than (as he vividly puts it) ‘a resource like natural gas’. The very distinctive techniques of archaeology have been almost fetishized by some people as ends in themselves. As Bradley observes, though, these techniques cannot be wholly isolated from theory since they were developed in the first place because their inventor had an interpretation in mind which he wished to test. Before we leave King Arthur’s Round Table altogether there is one further point to deal with. It has been suggested – again by both Bradley (who calls it, 34, ‘a final irony’) and Helgeby – that, taking the long view, Collingwood’s work at this site was not quite such an unmitigated disaster after all. He had conjectured that wooden structures, later to be replaced by stone ones, had existed at northern sites, such as King Arthur’s Round Table. While he was wrong about this particular earthwork, his general approach was along the right lines. For we now know that the site at Balfarg in south eastern Scotland had contained such a timber circle, later replaced by a stone one. Helgeby points out (1995:9) that the stake holes since found at, among other sites, Pict’s Knowe, near Dumfries, show that Collingwood’s view was not as implausible as Bersu had claimed. The presence of rabbit holes at the latter site also reminds us that their discovery does not rule out the existence of wooden structures in close proximity. Helgeby, however, sounds a note of caution against trying to reinstate Collingwood’s account in light of this new information. Collingwood’s interpretation, he stresses, is no longer an option at King Arthur’s Round Table. This warning should reverberate, given the larger context of our discussion. It points to a qualification, or clarification, that seems to be required with respect to Oakeshott’s and Collingwood’s idealism. For both these philosophers, no historical (or archaeological) interpretation is exempt from revision, or even, conceivably, from being wholly overthrown. We earlier applauded this aspect of their theory as an acknowledgement, via its relocation in the dynamical relation of the historian to his inquiry, of the gap between past and present, that the realists had sought to close. But the outcome at King Arthur’s Round Table poses a problem for an outright rejection of historical interpretation as ever conclusive. Surely Helgeby is right: the identification, by Bersu, of features on the ground as rabbit holes, with the adjacent lairs and galleries, rules out of court, once and for all, any further attempt to interpret them as the sockets of wooden posts. Surely it would be laughable any longer even to entertain such an interpretation? But how can the theory of Collingwood and Oakeshott allow for such a finality? We may well doubt that Collingwood, for one, would be prepared to make this allowance when we recall his remark (quoted earlier) that ‘historical thought is a river into which none can step twice . . . even a single historian finds when he tries to reopen an old question that the question has changed’. I doubt, however, whether Collingwood quite believes this – that the terms themselves of a question change with every passing moment, or at least if he does, it fits ill with other remarks. For he, like Oakeshott, also stresses the prima facie answerability of new historical ‘evidence’ to the historian’s existing body of beliefs. Of course Collingwood sees this body of beliefs as

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an integral part of the historian’s own point of view at the time (IH:248–9), and this cannot be erased, or bracketed, in order to obtain an ‘objective’ view. However, the impression of relativism here is qualified by his adding that for the historian ‘to occupy’ this point of view is for him to have ‘his own place in the process [that he is studying]’. A similar more embracing continuity is suggested when, after stating that all history (EPH:138) is ‘an interim report’, he goes on to describe this report as one ‘on the progress made in the study of its subject down to the present’. I think what is clear from this is that Collingwood – if not Oakeshott – writes as a historian, participating in a common practice, or discipline, which provides a larger, and somewhat more stable background of inquiry against which his own limited inquiry is undertaken. The relativity of perspective, entailed by Collingwood’s claim that a historical inquiry is always undertaken from the historian’s own point of view, is thus not reducible to that series of isolated, ahistorical ‘nows’, which we have come through this book to associate with Dummett’s radical relativism of the present. For Dummett, as we amply saw, any conclusions reached now about the past are not answerable to conclusions reached earlier about it. They can neither be measured against nor compared with them. This is because for him, as we saw, the conditions of justified assertibility cannot be assumed to have remained stable during the interim. It is important, I believe, in the context of our wider discussion, to observe that Collingwood, unlike Dummett, is prepared to recognize some notion of progress, albeit one that is relative to his field of inquiry. For this recognition dispels the impression, given by idealists, of historians as always on a ceaseless merry-go-round of interpretation, unwilling to accept that any piece of research could point irrevocably in one direction. It dispels too the underlying idea that we can always, as researchers, start over again, turn back the clock, reverse everything, that time itself need not be taken seriously, despite all it brings inexorably in its train. We might finally ask why it has taken our archaeological, prehistorical, example, and not a historical one, to bring home the force of – metaphorically speaking – time’s arrow. Historical evidence mostly consists in texts – written documents, often narrative accounts, letters and such like. But authors can deceive and exaggerate. Not only this, but even when honest, their expression is often ambiguous and their meaning hard to fathom. The writing may be hard to decipher, we might have to get to grips with a foreign, perhaps dead, language. It is hardly surprising then that, when considering these documents, Collingwood is inclined to hold that there is no end to interpretation. As he writes (IH:243), If after convincing himself by a study of evidence already available that . . . Henry VII murdered the Princes in the Tower, [the historian] were to find an autograph document confessing to the fact, he would by no means have verified his conclusions; the new document so far from closing the inquiry, would only have complicated it by raising a new problem, the problem of its own authenticity.

But matters are quite different with archaeology and prehistory. There are no written texts, and so great is the contribution of nature, which cannot lie or dissemble, to the way prehistoric sites appear today, that sometimes, as at King Arthur’s Round Table,

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one is perhaps justified in holding that the world itself (here in the form of rabbit holes) has called a halt to our speculations. Archaeology and prehistory are, in this sense, more philosophically revelatory than history and, without undermining idealism, provide a salutary corrective to our discussion of it. We carry forward from this chapter to the final one, in which our presentist proposal will be expounded and defended, the assurance that history is possible but only in an idealist form (which largely conforms to historical practice). With some minor qualifications, we accept that the past, the construction of which is an ongoing project to which historians (and archaeologists) are committed, although placing, at any one time, certain prima facie constraints upon what can count as evidence at that time, is never ‘fixed or finished’ (Oakeshott, EM:106), but remains open to change – even radical transformation – in light of new evidence.

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The problem for which presentists seek an answer is, we saw as far back as chapter 5, this: the truth of a past-tensed statement, such as ‘dinosaurs roamed the earth ten million years ago’, requires some fact, or state of affairs, independent of that statement, to make it true. Yet only a past fact, or state of affairs – dinosaurs having actually roamed the earth ten million years ago – seems capable of fulfilling this role. Suppose one cited the existing fossil record. This is logically compatible, as Russell’s thought experiment shows (‘isn’t it possible that things be just as they presently are except that God created the world five minutes ago’), with a quite different past, or with the statement having no past referent at all. This possibility could be ruled out by stipulating, as Dummett does, that to say that dinosaurs roamed the earth ten million years ago is just to say, and only to say, that the fossil record exists. For presentists, however – who we might do better more generally to rechristen, in light of this feature, as ‘deep’ presentists – a statement is past-tensed precisely in being irreducibly past directed, even though, for them, only present things exist. The ‘past facts’, which make it true, must somehow be accommodated within the present, while preserving their identity as ‘past facts’. The ersatz presentists’ solution, which we saw in chapter 5 had grave drawbacks, was modelled on the ersatz possible worlds, proposed by modal actualists, in order to explain, without resort to Lewis’s myriad of isolated, concrete, non-actual worlds, modal truth. On these actualists’ view, possible worlds are actually existing abstract objects consisting in sets of non-modal propositions each standing for, and representing, a possible world. The modal statement ‘Possibly, there are flying pigs’ is true if, and only if, the non-modal proposition ‘Pigs fly’ is included in one of these sets. This latter proposition, however, being a member of a set of propositions which belongs, as an abstract object, to the actual world, where the possibility that pigs might fly is not realized, is false. Now the ersatz presentists propose, as their actually existing abstract objects, sets of present-tensed propositions, which they call ‘times’. Each set of propositions stands in for, and represents, a different ‘time’. The statement – ‘dinosaurs roamed the earth ten million years ago’ – is true if, and only if, it is the past-tensed equivalent of a member of one of these sets of present-tensed propositions. Standing in for the particular – in this case, prehistoric – ‘time’ to which our statement refers, the relevant set of propositions, which includes the crucial ‘Dinosaurs are roaming the earth’, ensures that ‘Dinosaurs roamed the earth ten million years ago’ has an existing truth maker. However, because this is a set of present-tensed propositions, each member of the set is false. For existing, as they do, in the present, they misrepresent the

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past time in question as actualized, when only the present is, or could be, so. Indeed these present-tensed propositions would only be true if the time at which the dinosaurs roamed the earth, ten million years ago, were the current time. In chapter 6, I turned to consider specifically historical truth. I first argued that Collingwood’s famous claim, that history is the rethinking of past thoughts, expresses, despite his idealist sympathies, his lingering desire, as a realist, to close the temporal gap between past and present. I also observed how he seeks to improve on the standard realist position by establishing an identity, rather than a mere correspondence, between the relevant items. Having, however, rejected Collingwood’s view as being (despite innovative) untenable, I went on to endorse that coherentism to which he also, albeit inconsistently, subscribed, and which is found in its most thorough-going form in the historical idealism of Michael Oakeshott. The question now arises: how, if at all, can we make the unpromisingly disparate findings of these two chapters bear on each other so as possibly to produce a more tenable solution to the presentists’ problem than any we have so far considered and found lacking? My proposal, as intimated earlier, is that we attempt to transfer from abstract times, on the ersatz account, to actual historical works, the role of truth makers for relevant past-tensed statements. There will seem to be from the outset a very big stumbling block, if not an insuperable barrier, to such a proposal. The coherentism which, it was argued, governs these works, is irreconcilable with that realist ideal of correspondence, underwritten by extensionalist semantics, implicit in the presentist demand for a truth maker for past events. No presentist seeks, of course, to locate this truth maker in a past, quite independent of the present, as the historical realists do, but places it instead squarely in the present. However, it is meant somehow to guarantee, as surely as any realist about the past could wish, the occurrence in the past of the relevant event. Indeed, for the presentists, it makes sense, just as it does for such traditional opponents of the coherentists, to say of an event that it would have happened, even if we could never have known about it. On the other side, the coherentist for his part will also feel uncomfortable with our proposal. This is not because he necessarily wishes to reject presentism in any form. On the contrary, Oakeshott, for one, believed that only present experience exists. Moreover, he would have had no more qualms than today’s presentist in accepting that a historian – say Stenton in Anglo-Saxon England (8) – could truly assert the past-tensed statement that ‘The barbarian penetration of Britain was checked around the year 501 by the battle of Mons Badonicus’. He would have done so, however – and here he diverges sharply from current presentists – not because he thought Stenton had established any correspondence, even one enshrined in the present, between the statement and an independent past, but because the historian had shown it to cohere with a larger body of interpretation. Historical understanding and practice, as well as its product – the historical past – is for Oakeshott just one of the myriad manifestations, or modifications, of present experience. Consequently just as the truth maker analysis applies, according to ersatz presentists, as much to their conception of the past (or of the past enshrined in the present) as to the (pure) present, so Oakeshott applies his coherentist principles as much to present experience as to that modification of it, the historical past. Holding thus to a single conception of truth across the board, and contradicting each other as to its nature, neither side, it would seem, is likely to look favourably on our proposal. We

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may be charged with ‘picking and mixing’ in an arbitrary and irresponsible way in that we first stipulate that past-tensed statements must have presently existing truth makers, as though we are bowing to the realist demand for correspondence, yet then purport to identify these truth makers with historical works, which are themselves – internally so to speak – governed by principles of coherence. Our reply takes the form of a challenge. Why, we shall ask, as presentists, who have openly acknowledged temporal discontinuity, should we have to endorse any uniformity of treatment across present and past, when there could hardly be a greater difference between them than (as any presentist, even an ersatzist in his equivocal way, must concede) that only one exists. No doubt some features of presentism, as currently understood, will have to go by the board. However, if they make the theory unworkable, as I have suggested that they do, and if we can demonstrate that the result is still plausibly a form of presentism, this should not overly worry us.

1: Can historical texts really replace ersatz times as truth makers? We should not suppose that this defiant stance unshackles us completely from ersatz presentism, on which our account is broadly modelled, and on which its pretention to be a form of presentism at least partially relies, or therefore from all its constraints. The question arises: do our substitute truth makers retain enough similarity with ersatz times, modelled as they are, on the ersatz possible worlds of modal actualists, to function plausibly in their place, while being sufficiently different to escape their deficiencies? Let us divide this question into two, for the sake of clarity and convenience. Let us call the first the ‘similarity’, and the second the ‘difference’ question. It is worth noting already that a further ‘similarity’/‘difference’ question will await us in the second half of the chapter. Having introduced the idea that the truth of a historical claim is relative to a given text, and exploiting here a certain parallel with literary fiction, we must show that historical works are sufficiently similar, despite the emphasis on temporal linearity, to ‘stories’ to share their narrative form, but sufficiently different to avoid being condemned as mere sanctioned pretence. In regard to the latter – we might call them the ‘story prefix doubts’ – we shall also reject any suggestion of an analogy between our proposal concerning the historical past, and modal fictionalism, a deflationist theory, which has, like modal actualism, been put forward as an alternative to Lewis’s modal realism. Our defence of temporal linearity as constructed by historians, rather than imposed from outside the discipline, will provide a bridge between the two halves of the chapter.

(i) Are they sufficiently similar? (a) Absence of a ‘realist, reductive, truth-making structure’ Starting with the ‘similarity’ question, from the first pair, we can observe at least a superficial resemblance between ersatz times and the actual works of history with which we propose to replace them as truth makers. They exist in the present, and are composed of sentences or propositions. Modal actualists (of the linguistic variety) often

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speak of their ersatz possible worlds as ‘books’ – sometimes ‘particularly complex’ ones – in which the relevant sentences ‘appear’ (Joseph Melia, 2003: 100–1), or as ‘novels’ (Richard Jeffrey, 1965:12.8, quoted by David Lewis, 1986:142) or ‘stories’. There is no reason to suppose that ersatz presentists may not also think of their ‘times’ in this way. Here, however, the resemblance apparently ends. Historians usually write directly in the past tense (unless using the historical present for dramatic effect). The set of propositions that constitute an ersatz time, by contrast, are, as we have seen, all present-tensed. They represent times other than the present, but as these times would be if they were present. Now this reduction of the past to the present tense is crucial to the role of the ersatz times as truth makers. For ‘Elizabeth I once ruled England’ is true just in so far as its present-tensed equivalent is included in the (presently existing) set of present-tensed propositions which represent the relevant (past) time. It is, moreover, required that these present-tensed propositions be false. For the statement ‘Elizabeth I once ruled England’ could not be true now if its present-tensed equivalent ‘Elizabeth I now rules England’ (which would be true if that time were present now) were not false now. But for historians, for whom, as we have understood them, the past is, as it were, a raft, or skein, of ever-evolving interpretations of evidence, governed by principles of coherence, no ‘times’ are locked, as abstract entities, into the actual present in the form they would have were their time present. Consequently there is an absence of any realist, reductive, truth-making structure (such as Bourne, 2006:40, 44–5, among many others regards as so essential). Must it follow that such historical works cannot plausibly be regarded as presently existing truth makers of past-tensed statements? Must such truth makers necessarily, even for realists (and it must be acknowledged that truth making is a realist notion), involve this whole structure? One thought which might surreptitiously be influencing a person tempted to give an affirmative answer to the last question is this: ersatz times are there in the present because they, and only they (not fictitious times, or times that only might have occurred) represent events that once really happened. (Perhaps the events are pictured in a vague, unconscious way as having left an imprint or residue.) Obviously this thought has only to see the light of day to disintegrate immediately. We have been told all along that there are not two logically independent things here. The ersatz times are identical with all the past there is, or ever was. Even ersatz presentists, however, sometimes talk as though they could shake off this leash of the present. Bourne admittedly (2006b:11, 14) includes among ersatz times those that constitute, or represent, times which might have been, as well as times which were. He then looks around for a way of distinguishing the latter, as the only times which could furnish truth makers for past-tensed statements, from the former. He suggests that only the latter belong to ‘what we would ordinarily call the actual course of history’. They thus belong to that unique series of ersatz times to which the present belongs, and bear to it an ersatz ‘earlier than’ relation, which mere possible times do not. But, as we saw in chapter 5, ‘actual’ is used improperly of a time, or series of times – an impropriety scarcely masked by appeal to ‘what we ordinarily’ think – if it is supposed to signify any more than that they exist abstractly in the present. But that description applies to all ersatz times, including possible ones. Bourne may help himself, if he likes, to an unanalysed notion of ‘the actual course of history’, but he cannot pretend that this provides a substantial explanation of the difference

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between the two kinds of ersatz times, rather than being emptily stipulative. We can see that ersatz presentism no more allows for a notion of ‘what really happened’, as distinct from what is abstractly represented in the present, than the historical coherentists can allow for such a notion distinct from their ‘what the evidence obliges us to believe’ (Oakeshott:107). The ability of ersatz times, and not historical texts, to provide a truth maker for past-tensed statements cannot therefore hang on the ability of ersatzists to drive a wedge which historical coherentists cannot.

(b) A literary precedent for transferring truth making to the historical text To see why this whole reductive truth-making structure may not be necessary, even for realists, a certain change of theoretical vision is required. Of most help is a proposal coming out of reflection upon a striking feature of literary fictional discourse. As John Bigelow declares (1996:37, 39), the statement ‘Othello loves Desdemona’ can be true, although neither character exists, that is to say, their non-existence does not ‘stop it from being true to say that Othello loves Desdemona’. The conclusion that one might first be inclined to draw is that perhaps something does not have to exist to be a truth maker. Nor is such a view without its adherents. Meinong famously addressed the dilemma of how we could state truly that an entity, say a unicorn, does not exist when, it would seem, if it does not exist, nothing can be predicated of it. He proposed that a distinction be drawn between ‘being’ and ‘existence’, from which it would follow that not everything that is must exist. Thus, he claimed, it would no longer be contradictory to state that there are non-existent objects such as unicorns. Moreover, just as, thanks to Meinong’s distinction, we could now say without fear of contradiction that unicorns have one horn, and also that they do not exist, so in the literary context we could say that Hamlet procrastinates over killing the king, and also that, being a fictional character, he does not exist. Both as general strategy, and as applied to literature, however, Meinong’s distinction has remained highly controversial. Peter van Inwagen (1983:74), writing of the general strategy, rejects it out of hand thus: ‘If someone puts forward, say, Meinong’s golden mountain as an example of something non-existent, one should reply as follows: there is no golden mountain, and therefore you cannot put it forward as an example of anything.’ Within the literary context, people question whether Meinong’s distinction does what it promises. They remain sceptical whether one can state unparadoxically that Sherlock Holmes is a detective – which statement seems naturally, despite Meinong, to entail in some sense Holmes’ existence – and that he does not exist. Nor does Terence Parsons’ (1975) recent development of Meinong’s position clear up this difficulty entirely. Emphasizing that the statement ‘Sherlock Holmes does not exist’ belongs to a different – ‘external’ – level of literary discourse from ‘Sherlock Holmes is a detective’, which belongs to an ‘internal’ mode of discourse, he seeks to erect a kind of fire screen between them so that they cannot come into direct conflict. He accordingly distinguishes what he calls ‘nuclear’ (internal), from ‘extra nuclear’ (external), properties, and stipulates that only the ‘nuclear’ properties – for instance, in the case of Sherlock Holmes, the property of being a detective – are possessed by the character in the story. They do not possess ‘extra nuclear’ properties, such as existence or non-existence. He has then to cope with the awkward fact that even fictional

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characters ‘exist’ within the story in so far as they must be distinguished from characters and entities – such as Macbeth’s dagger – which do not. His solution is to introduce a category of what he calls ‘watered down nuclear properties’, corresponding to the ‘extra nuclear’ properties of existence and non-existence, and to stipulate that even characters within the story can possess this ‘watered down’ variety of existence and non-existence. More crucially, one may doubt whether an entity can qualify as a truth maker at a given level of discourse merely because talk of its non-existence at that level is ruled out. For by that very token, as we have seen, talk of its existence is ruled out too, except in the obscure ‘watered down’ sense whose introduction has the air of a contrivance. Parsons, however, in emphasizing the ‘external’ level of literary discourse, draws attention to what has remained in the background so far: that fiction, and its characters, are the creation of authors. We have so far taken for granted (with the ersatz presentists) this narrow-focused requirement: for every true fictional sentence, in which a predicate is ascribed to a subject, there must exist an object and property corresponding to them, which are the sentence’s truth makers.1 Once we begin to question this requirement, not only because it obliges us to endorse dubious existents as truth makers, but because we have become sensitive to the wider context of literary creation, it may begin to dawn on us that we have perhaps been looking for our truth makers in the wrong place. Bigelow (1996:39) provides the clue to where we should have been looking. Othello loves Desdemona, he suggests, only seems to have a truth maker, which does not exist, so long as one fails to realize that it is not really about Othello and Desdemona at all, but about something else, namely ‘Shakespeare’s play or what Shakespeare said’. In this way, Bigelow rescues the existence requirement for truth makers by shifting that role from Othello and Desdemona, who (for him) do not exist, to Shakespeare’s play, which unlike its dramatis personae, does exist. At the same time, we can see that, on this plausible view, Shakespeare only had to write his play to render the sentence ‘Othello loves Desdemona’ true; there is no need to establish a world independently – even a sub-world of fictional existents – to which these characters might belong. Now it is our intention to hold somewhat analogously that a historical statement, say, ‘Elizabeth I was red-headed’, is true, not about the non-existent Elizabeth, or her non-existent attributes, but about the existing historical work in which the statement figures either explicitly, or by implication. To the question, then, posed earlier: must not the truth makers of past-tensed statements necessarily involve the whole realist, reductive, truth-making structure exemplified by ersatz presentism, we reply ‘No’. We do so on grounds that in radically shifting the location of the truth maker we are not reliant on such a structure.

(c) The realist backlash, and Lewis’s competing view about fictional truth laid bare But we shall be immediately reproved by those – ersatz presentists among them – who throw back in our face the realist, reductive truth-making structure. ‘You are seeking’, they will say, ‘to substitute historical works for ersatz times, but the latter are truth makers for past-tensed statements precisely because, existing in the present, they represent, or stand in for, basic element by basic element, the instantaneous world-states of the relevant past times. That is the whole point of the realist, reductive, truth-making structure as it

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underlies ersatz presentism. You have ridden roughshod over it. Yet still, you say, you want to reap the benefits of ersatz presentism.’ Now no one can doubt that this states correctly how ersatz times as a matter of fact function as truth makers according to ersatz presentists. But a stronger claim is implicit in this objection: no alternative to the realist, reductive truth-making structure, exemplified by ersatz presentism, can be countenanced, given that any talk of truth making already presupposes a realist framework. We have already agreed that this is to concede too much. After all, Bigelow is a realist. However, he is prepared to contemplate the relocation of the truth maker of fictional statements from the constituents of the statement – the (non-existent) objects and properties to which they refer – to the existing work of fiction. Now of course the relocation strategy would be superfluous for those, like the ersatz presentists, who adopt the realist, reductive, truthmaking structure. But that cannot be the objection. Perhaps, then, the problem is that no one who posits the realist, reductive, truth-making structure could consistently countenance, even as an alternative, the relocation strategy. Consequently we cannot ourselves do this, and still claim an essential kinship with ersatz presentism. The question then arises: what is the source of this supposed incompatibility? Certainly some would reject the conviction, underlying the relocation strategy, that fictional statements have truth makers at all, as just plain wrong. However, absolutely no support for such a rejection will, as we shall see, be forthcoming from those who propose the realist, reductive truth-making structure for past-tensed statements, on whose behalf the objection is being brought. If ersatzist presentism then is incompatible with our proposed relocation of the truth makers of past-tensed statements to the work of history, it will not be because these presentists find fault with it on grounds that it makes past-tensed statements too much like fictional ones, and that such statements don’t have truth makers. Quite contrarily, I shall now suggest, it is precisely a view concerning what makes fictional statements true, in particular their assimilation in key respects to non-fictional modal statements, that results in the relocation model of fictional truth not being available for ersatz presentists to use in respect of past-tensed statements. This view, I shall argue, originates with Lewis. In so far as this view might, implicitly at least, be attributed to ersatz presentists, it would seem merely to be something they have inherited from the modal actualists on whose theory they model theirs. The modal actualists, of course, in offering an alternative to Lewis – in transferring, as we saw, the multitude of Lewisian concrete possible worlds to our one actual world as abstract objects – were keen to show that they could do everything that he could do, without his ontological outlay. It does not follow, however, that all aspects of Lewis’s theory are worth finding equivalents for, and I shall suggest that Lewis’s view concerning fictional statements – a sort of extravagance, as I see it, on Lewis’s part – is not one of them. Consequently, I shall suggest that, in so far as this view is an obstacle to the relocation of the truth makers of past-tensed statements to works of history, we can put it aside, without relinquishing the kinship of our proposal with ersatz presentism. What then is this obstructive view? The key fact here is that Lewis (1978) seeks to apply his possible worlds semantics to fiction. Thus, for him, a work of fiction, such as Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, describes a set of concrete possible worlds – more particularly that set, including all and only those worlds where the fiction is told, as he puts it, ‘as known fact rather than fiction’. (This is necessary in order for him

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to exclude the actual world). Aware that there are many fictional truths which remain implicit in a text, such as that Sherlock Holmes has two eyes (and not, say, three with one in the back of his head), he refines (42) his analysis as follows (I adapt it to take account of our example): ‘A sentence such as Sherlock Holmes has two eyes is true, in the Sherlock Holmes stories, if, and only if some world where the story is told as known fact, and the sentence is true, differs less from our actual world on balance than does any world where the story is told as known fact, and the sentence is not true’. Discontented with this analysis in that ‘its account of the background of a given fiction is insensitive to questions of the context in which the fiction originates’ (Proudfoot, 2006:17), he refines it still further so as to be sensitive to the ‘collective belief worlds of the community of origin’ of the fiction. Now the fictional worlds to which Lewis refers, being, for him, concrete, are, just like any other possible worlds, replete with flesh and blood entities, whether these be the flying pigs, pink swans or talking donkeys, of our earlier scenarios or, as here, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, or their otherworldly counterparts. It is no wonder then that he is not satisfied with maintaining merely that (37): ‘We can truly say that Sherlock Holmes lived in Baker Street and that he liked to show off his mental powers’. For Lewis answers the sceptical question: ‘ How can “Sherlock Holmes lives in Baker Street” be true when Holmes does not exist?’, not, as does Bigelow, by agreeing that he does not exist, and shifting the truth maker to the Sherlock Holmes stories, but by asserting that Holmes does exist. Thus his remark that ‘Holmes, unlike super heroes from other planets [or] hobbits . . . is just a person . . . a person of flesh and blood, a being in the very same category as Nixon’ is not just a manner of speaking, mere rhetoric: It is meant quite literally. We can put it this way. Whereas, for Bigelow, the story prefixes ‘According to the Sherlock Holmes stories’, or ‘according to Shakespeare’s play’, have a certain intact integrity of their own, Lewis, with his possible worlds semantics, dissolves them, or renders them transparent, as it were. He ‘looks right through’ them, so to speak, at the possible worlds, and their flesh and blood denizens, which, according to him, the stories describe. Indeed, it is only the concrete existence of these worlds, and their inhabitants that, for him, can make the sentences of the fiction true. It is in this way – by analysing the story prefixes as, in his terminology, ‘quantifiers over possible worlds’ – that he effectively saws off the branch on which the alternative relocation model of fictional truth could have been situated, implicitly ruling out a proposal like ours concerning historical truths. But I am unclear, as I intimated above, how much Lewis gains by extravagantly seeking to extend his possible worlds theory to fiction, thereby destroying the integrity of the story prefixes. My uncertainty only increases in light of the many difficulties and anomalies with which he is then obliged to deal. Among these, to mention a couple, there is the fact that works of fiction may contain impossibilities while being no less bona fide fictions for that. Again such works necessarily leave many details radically undetermined so that it does not make sense to ask, for instance, whether it is true or false that Lady Macbeth has two children. This lack of determinacy threatens to open up those truth value gaps which cannot be tolerated in an extensionalist and atomistic programme such as Lewis’s. Once we interpret modal actualism, and ersatz presentism, in such a way that they do not inherit, even rendered abstractly, this almost imperialistic, yet essentially ‘add-on’, expansionism, which would implicitly rule

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out the relocation strategy, we can adopt that strategy without sacrificing our connection with ersatzism.

(ii) Are historical texts sufficiently different from ersatz times? There are two kinds of criticism of ersatz times that we considered in chapter 5. There is the kind which is inherited – suitably adapted – from the modal actualists, and originally brought by Lewis against his actualist opponents. Let us call these the ‘Lewisian’ objections. There is another kind altogether – I call them the ‘radical presentist’ oneswhich are brought directly against ersatz presentists from within the presentist camp by those, like us, who accept that temporal discontinuity which more revisionist presentists seek to mitigate.

(a) Lewisian objections: ‘Completeness’, ‘Plenitude’, etc. As to the first – or ‘Lewisian’ – type, we concentrated, in the earlier chapter, on the implausibilities (summed up in Lewis’s question: ‘in what sense am I and my surroundings a set of sentences?’) of requiring that the present is simultaneously a set of propositions (like other times) and (unlike them) a concretely realized, world. Not least of the problems here, in so far as this requirement could be countenanced, was that there seemed to be competing candidates for the role of truth maker, one concrete, one abstract, for present-tensed statements, such as ‘David Cameron is tall’, and no clear method of resolving the issue. The requirement was seen, however, to be a consequence of the distinction all ersatzists, whether modal or temporal, are forced to draw between two senses in which an entity can exist – as actual, and as actualized. We may therefore dismiss it as relevant to our proposal which neither posits, nor depends on, such a distinction. Two other criticisms, also originating with Lewis, are worth investigating a little further despite the detour into extensionalism involved, if only to show why they are not relevant, despite its connection with ersatz presentism, to our own proposal. They are known as the ‘completeness’ (already alluded to in our brief mention of Lewis’s modal realist account of fiction) and ‘plenitude’ objections, and are key in Lewis’s debate with modal actualists, in particular with the linguistic variety from whom ersatz presentists derive their idea of identifying times with sets of propositions. Lewis broaches the objections after he has sought to assess to what extent the modal actualists are likely to be successful in devising what he calls (1986:142) ‘the world-making language’. This is a language in which to frame their descriptions of a world, even a possible world, and which would be adequate to that task. Granting that its representational properties derive from the stipulated meanings of its words and sentences, that language cannot, Lewis claims, be plain English – at least unmodified. For, as he points out, its sentences are notoriously riven with ambiguity and relativity, and so cannot be relied on to have determinate truth values, independently of the context of utterance. On the other hand, a suitably stripped down language, being logically impoverished, will need to be enriched. Lewis does not himself, as he emphasizes, have to meet these requirements because, for him, possible worlds are not abstract descriptions standing in for concrete

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worlds, which must therefore be shown to be adequate to their representative task. They are (Lycan, 1979:287) those ‘blooming, buzzing worlds’ themselves, that are just there, concretely there, determinate down to their last detail, and requiring no help from Lewis to be so. They are ‘maximal spatiotemporal sums’ (Melia, 2003:100), replete with real physical talking donkeys and flying pigs, and ‘flesh and blood’ (Lycan, ibid) individuals. Nevertheless Lewis allows that such a world-making language may conceivably be constructed, and hence does not take the ersatzists to task on this count. Supposing that they can devise such a language, we come to Lewis’s ‘completeness’ objection. Now since Lewis’s worlds possibly exist, the set of sentences that would be true, to use Lewis’s technical terminology, ‘at each world’, cannot be allowed to imply any contradiction (Lewis, 1986:151). Furthermore, because the Lewisian worlds are fully determinate, ‘as determinate as you could wish’, the set of sentences true ‘at’ a world must be, as Lewis puts it, ‘maximally consistent’. As he explains, the set must be such that the addition of any other sentence of the world-making language would destroy its consistency. Otherwise, the set would render the world incompletely, perhaps running together two possibilities that would be distinguished if we invoked a larger consistent set, or leaving implicit what the language has the resources to render explicitly. Thus ‘a set of sentences is consistent’, according to Lewis, ‘if and only if those sentences, as interpreted, could all be true together’. He italicizes the ‘could’ in this remark since, according to him, its presence, betokening the fact that the concept of modality has not been reduced, but left in its primitive form, is a stumbling block for ersatzists. These theorists are a target because they share both Lewis’s extensionalist and atomistic views, and his related aspiration to render modal statements in non-modal terms so that these might come within the framework of ordinary predicate logic, and be assigned straightforward truth values. If modality remains intact at the end of their endeavours, then it may well seem that the success of these endeavours is highly questionable. Naturally enough, the actualists seek to respond. Their response, however, need not concern us here. Our task is to estimate to what extent, if at all, Lewis’s critique impacts, via modal actualism, upon ersatz presentism, and whether, if it does, our own proposal still escapes unscathed. Now the ersatz presentists, who model ‘times’ on the actualists’ ersatz possible worlds, and share their extensionalist and atomistic views, with the entailed conception of truth as involving correspondence between language and world, of course attempt a certain kind of reduction. It is, however, the reduction of pasttensed statements to their present-tensed equivalents. This is crucial, as we have seen, to their identification as belonging to the sets of (present-tensed) statements which correspond to, or stand in for, the relevant instantaneous world-states, and which are true ‘at’ the relevant time. It is thus crucial to the articulation of that realist, reductive, truth-making structure we discussed earlier. But there is no further reliance upon an unreduced past tense in the way that the modal actualists evidently in the end, if Lewis is right, have to rely on that primitive modality which they sought to strip down. There are, as we shall see, reasons coming from our more radical presentist perspective for criticizing the ersatzists’ reduction of the past tense even this far, but they are not relevant to Lewis’s critique. Now if the ersatz presentists, who share his extensionalist views, are not touched by Lewis’s criticism here, nor is our proposal, although for wholly different reasons. These

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reasons are connected with the fact that the historical works which we wish to substitute for ersatz times do not, as our previous chapter showed, represent at all, nor construct, worlds or times out of more basic representative elements. For we saw no reason to extend those extensionalist principles integral to Lewisian realism from what we have called the ‘pure’ present to the past, that is to say, to our presentist conception of the past as enshrined in the present. Lewis speaks of a ‘completeness’ requirement. A measure of the distance between his theoretical framework, and that which on our view informs historical practice, concerns the meaning of ‘completeness’ itself. There are two senses of ‘completeness’ germane to such practice. In one of these it is indeed a goal of historians. However, it then has a diametrically opposed sense to Lewis’s. Lewis’s ‘completeness’ is ‘a sum total’ – here I borrow a phrase from Collingwood (EPH, 1965:99–100) – an aggregation – and the entities, or facts, or propositions, that constitute this ‘sum total’, or aggregation, are to be exhaustively rendered so that not one of them is left out. The equivalent requirement where the past is concerned would be that the historian should render, in Collingwood’s quantitative sounding phrase, ‘the whole past’, ‘everything that has happened’.2 But that would drive a wedge between ‘what really happened’ and ‘what the evidence dictates’ which, on our account, cannot be drawn. The only sense in which ‘completeness’ is a goal for historians, on our coherentist view, is that conveyed when the historian is described as fashioning, through a process of successive interpretations of their evidence, a past which has validity in so far as it hangs together as a seamless whole. It is thus the very opposite of a collection of random, or isolated, elements.3 Moreover, given this conception of ‘completeness’, no isolated historical sentence, picked at random, can be assessed for truth, or even fully understood, independently of its place in a wider interpretation, or prospective interpretation. The force of the complaint that trivial historical statements – say about what Caesar had for breakfast on a fateful day – concerning which no evidence exists, are left impossibly indeterminate, is then undermined. The sense in which ‘completeness’ ought never to be a goal of historians, on the coherentist view here endorsed, is as ‘finality’, unreviseability. As we have seen, any interpretation, or web of interpretations, although it is to some extent answerable to the historian’s existing body of beliefs, can never be absolutely conclusive, but must remain responsive to new discoveries. This openness, this dynamism, as a function of the relation between the historian and his inquiry, is what enables historical practice to recognize temporal discontinuity, as we argued it must do. Let us turn then to Lewis’s ‘plenitude’ or ‘abundance’ objection – again made primarily against the modal actualists. According to the corresponding requirement (1986:86), there must exist a separate world, that is to say a maximally consistent set of sentences, to represent, or stand in for, each single, imaginable, possibility. Thus just as the ‘completeness’ requirement sought to exclude the existence of truth value gaps within any given world, so the new requirement seeks to exclude ‘gaps in logical space’ between worlds (86–7), and thereby any possibilities which lack worlds to represent them. Since, however, Lewis argues, there are infinitely many ways in which the world might have been, there will have to be infinitely many sets of descriptions to take account of this content. This objection is peculiar to the rendering of possibility, and has no apparent counterpart in rendering solely the past, that is to say, those events, and only

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those events, which did happen, which are all that concern us. The ersatz presentists, however, not only share the extensionalist presuppositions of Lewis and his actualist opponents, but also construe their past times, or the instantaneous world-states with which they are identified, as only a subset of all possible times that could have existed. Indeed, we have looked at their attempts to then draw a boundary round ‘our actual history’. Hence whatever problems that Lewis’s argument here makes for modal actualists are handed on to the ersatz presentists, but leave our proposal again unscathed.

(b) ‘Radical presentist’ objections I now turn to the second part of the ‘difference’ question, namely what I have called the ‘Radical Presentist’ objections. These, as I stated, are brought against ersatz presentism from within the presentist camp itself by those, like ourselves, who accept temporal discontinuity, and do not, like the ersatzists, attempt to overcome it. Is our proposal sufficiently different from ersatz presentism to escape these objections? Now we saw earlier that ersatz presentism stands to eternalism much as modal actualists stand to modal realists, with the ‘actual’ world being replaced by the present. Just as the actualists are parasitic upon modal realism to the extent that they, rather than rejecting Lewis’s plurality of concrete worlds, import them, just as they are, only converted into abstract entities, into the actual world, so ersatz presentists are parasitic on eternalism in that they also do not reject the myriad of concrete times but import them, converting them to abstract form, into the present. Not only this, but in order for the ersatz time series to be, as they put it, ‘structurally similar to a real time series’, they import from eternalism an ersatz form of their earlier/later relation. These times are then ordered among themselves by the ersatz earlier/later relation in terms primarily of how much ‘earlier’ each is than the present time. There is of course no similar linear ordering of possible worlds since, as E.J. Lowe (1986:114–17) pithily puts it, where possible worlds are concerned ‘you can cut [them] any way you like’. It is by this fixed linear ordering that the ersatz presentists claim to be able to restore the truth value link. But as I argued, the proposition that ‘Socrates taught Plato’ is not, as the ersatzists assume, made true merely by the existence of a proposition that states that this is the case for some time in the past. Socrates must really have taught Plato. It is not enough that an ersatz representation of Socrates taught an ersatz representation of Plato. But there is nothing in the ersatzists’ theory to ensure that these present-tensed propositions, which supposedly constitute past truths, were ever present, that is to say, actualized. I shall only add here that far from restoring it, their whole account is obliged to presuppose the truth value link. For the truth of, say, ‘The Battle of Waterloo took place on 18 June 1815’, depends, for them, upon, first, this past-tensed statement being the truth value equivalent of the present-tensed statement ‘The Battle of Waterloo is taking place now’, and secondly, upon its belonging with other present-tensed statements to a set constituting the relevant ersatz past time. Our own account does not, of course, attempt to restore the truth value link, but neither does it rely on it in the first place. The sentences that make up a historical text are usually in the past tense, and their truth is a function of the way the interpretation of which the statement is a part, or which the interpretation implies, hangs together as a whole.

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The other difficulty that presentists may find with ersatz presentism is that, as we noted earlier, an instantaneous world-state may not seem to allow enough time for the meaningful interactions of ordinary experience. Not only Collingwood, whom we quoted earlier, but John Passmore (1987:70) holds that ordinary events, including historical ones are not mere ‘infinitely thin temporal slices, but complex sets of interrelationships’. Passmore suggests correctly that this conception is connected with a particular kind of metaphysics: neo-Humean atomism. But, as we have seen, the ersatz presentists take over this metaphysics from the eternalists and the actualists, and share it indirectly with Lewis. With their inclusion of the present in their series of abstract times, it is impossible for them to avoid giving the impression of the present as just one instantaneous world-state among others. But the present, any presentist ought to protest, is neither a series of points, nor even a region, nor, as Prior (1970:245–7) observed, can it be squeezed into a region. It is not one time slice among others, as the eternalists’ hold. The ersatz presentists’ admission that the present alone is, as they put it, actualized should have been a warning to them here, as should have been the fact that it is virtually definitive of presentism that all the parts of an entity exist at the single time: the present. Now on our proposal the temporal order of events, as narrated in their works, is constructed by historians themselves. It is not imposed from outside the discipline by philosophers. In this way our proposal differs sharply from ersatz presentism, with its adoption of the eternalists’ temporal framework, only converted into abstract form. Our proposal will thus, provided we can adequately support our claim, escape the above criticism levelled against the ersatzists by more radical presentists.

(c) Texts, authored and unauthored; story prefixes, transparent and opaque In the next section we shall seek to make good this claim both positively by describing how archaeologists actually construct temporal sequences of events, and negatively by refuting the view of historical realists that temporal linearity is just a given of ordinary experience in its moment by moment progression into the past. Here, however, we briefly pause to pinpoint the nature and extent of the divergence already apparent between our proposal and ersatz presentism, despite the common reliance on a truth maker, ensuring the requisite analogy. Perhaps the most striking feature of both modal actualism and ersatz presentism is that they both posit (as their truth makers) descriptions without a describer. These descriptions can in some sense be ‘read’, but they have no author. Our truth makers – historical texts – are texts precisely because, like literary texts, someone wrote them down, and did so on a particular occasion. Once one thinks about it, it seems odd indeed that the ersatzists should countenance the idea of sentences which no author wrote down, or inscriptions without an inscriber, and which are not therefore human artefacts at all. Of course, this is intentional on their part. For their sets of descriptions are not an interposed ‘layer’ between a potential viewer and possible worlds, or times; they are the possible worlds, or times, themselves construed as collections of more basic elements. They exist timelessly in an almost Platonic way, as features of the universe. They are just there to be discovered as, on some views, are numbers or the form of the proposition. It is this permanency, this stability, this

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independence of any viewer, that fits them, according to their proponents, for the role of truth makers. However, when we deny that ‘The victor of Agincourt was Henry V’ is about Agincourt or Henry V, and assert that it is about the historical text, or texts, in which the statement can be found, or which imply the statement, we precisely relocate the statement’s truth makers. We do so in such a way that the text is no longer a mere transparency through which to view its constituent parts, as are ersatz possible worlds, or times. No more would we wish to treat the historical text as transparent than would we, with literary fiction, wish to dissolve, as Lewis attempts to, the story prefixes ‘According to the Sherlock Holmes stories’ or ‘in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet’. We can usefully contrast ersatz presentism and our proposal in a second way, by situating them in relation to the historical realism that we rejected in chapter 6. Historical realism obviously conceives of the historical text as a separate entity from the events that are described in it. The descriptions that it contains are claimed to be true in so far as they correspond to a real past out there. The text is then, as it were, a mere mirror, or reflector, which our glance does not linger upon, but immediately, restlessly, passes beyond, or through, to what is reflected therein. Where, then, there are two items for the historical realist – text and past reality – there is only one for both ourselves and the ersatz presentists. But we differ over its identity. The ersatzists suppress the text as separate from past reality (and this is so even though past times are sets of descriptions), while our proposal suppresses past reality as separate from the (interpretative) text. There is yet a third way of clarifying the relation between historical realism, ersatz presentism and our proposal. Both the first and the third (unlike ersatz presentism) acknowledge, as just noted, that the descriptions with which they are concerned have authors. For the historical realists, however, it is vital that the author erases himself as far as possible, leaving an unobstructed view, or – in the familiar phrase – ‘letting the past speak for itself ’. Paradoxically then historical realists posit as an ideal end, which in the nature of things cannot be reached precisely because they are dealing with an authored text, that transparency which is the very condition of ersatz times being merely the sum of their own constituent elements. Our proposal, on the other hand, requires, crucially, that the text be scrutinized in, and for, itself as a narrative text.

(iii) How historians arrange events in the order of time (a) The myth of the ‘ideal chronicler’ The directive ‘to let the past speak’ goes in fact to the heart of the traditional realists’ account of how ‘the order of time’ enters history. Now the notion of chronicle is key here, or what is sometimes called ‘plain’, as distinct from ‘significant’ narrative. The chronicler, the traditionalists say, records events which actually occur, in the order in which they occur. Still more crucially, he does so as they occur. However, they will grant, he may be copying down an earlier chronicle which was compiled on the spot, but has now disappeared, leaving him the sole source for the period. Chronicles are typically applauded, on this view, as ‘bare recitals of the facts’ in that their author, or compiler, does not intrude with his own judgements, or speculations or surmises. He lays plainly before us, ‘without interpretation or analysis’, the events ‘in the order of

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time’. On this view, the ground is thus prepared for the narrative historian. Accepting the temporal framework handed down to him by the chronicler, to whom in turn it was ‘given’ – once and for all – with the course of events itself, he adds an interpretation. Essentially, then, the time line around which a historical narrative is woven is imposed from outside the discipline. Not only is this view of chronicle incoherent on its own terms, but the stipulated division of labour between chronicler, handing down temporal order, and the narrative historian, contributing a story, is a travesty of the working method of historians. Consider the only background picture that can, confused and fanciful as it is, sustain this view. It is, as Arthur Danto (1968:146–7), in ‘a metaphysical excursus’, observes, of events processing, with their exact ‘contemporaries’, in a steady and orderly flow into the past. The coeval events fall into classes, or sets, which apart from their increasing ‘pastness’, are otherwise immutable. No event that did not enter pasthood with the other members of a given set – no ‘new contemporary’ (as Danto puts it) – can subsequently join it, nor can any event, once a member, cease to be so. The ‘regularity’ at which these successive bands of events with their ‘co-incident termini’ enter the past, he suggests, entails that each band is of uniform duration, that being the duration of a single event in a single band, which is also the duration of every other event in any band. But what could this common duration be? Danto (146) offers the thought that ‘new recruits to pastness enter moment by moment’ just as he surmises once past, their ‘pastness’ ‘momentarily increases’. Alternatively, it might be speculated that realists would look to philosophers to technically define the notion of an event, stipulating perhaps, along with this definition, an event’s proper duration. Russell (cited by Danto, 302) once declared that ‘no event lasts for more than a few seconds at most’. However, by ‘event’ he meant ‘a component of an object having physical structure’. But one has only to contemplate this kind of answer to see that it is untenable where the chronicler is concerned. Events of which the chronicler is to make an exhaustive inventory have to last long enough for him to identify them in the ordinary sense, they have to be events, that is to say, which could be the subject matter of history. Even if we go back to Danto’s suggestion of ‘moments’ – an informal, non-technical notion – a very small proportion of such events – flashes of lightning and the like – are strictly momentary. (Intentional actions of course, planning an attack, say, may have no very precise temporal boundaries at all.) Those that do have precise boundaries, will in any case typically vary in length. Perhaps this difficulty could be circumvented by having the chronicler stipulate longer periods, or bands, of time, such that any events, occurring within them, despite having different durations, are treated as contemporaneous. We could now put the question to our realists like this: how long does the window of history stay open for each slew of events to make its appearance, enabling the chronicler to record them, before they enter pasthood? But this question effectively contradicts the requirement that there be no input by the chronicler. For rather than mechanically, and mindlessly, registering events, one by one, in the order in which they happen, we are supposing that he imposes a certain temporal arrangement upon them. By that very token we have also compromised the alleged distinction between chronicler and narrative historian. For a glance at history, cutting short this fruitless speculation, shows not only that narrative historians do arrange events in time blocks, each with its own collection of ‘contemporaneous’

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events, but that they have no standard duration. It all depends on the subject matter, and the kind of story being told. Moreover, the duration may be elastic even within a work.

(b) Choosing a time frame to suit one’s narrative: Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War A good example of the way a historian chooses his own time frame to suit his subject matter is to be found in Thucydides’ the Peloponnesian War (PW). Thucydides states (PW:5, 20) that were he to narrate his History in accordance with the time frame afforded by ‘the names of magistrates in the various states, or of those who have held some honoured position’, and which are ‘used to date events in the past’, his accuracy would be compromised. For he explains: ‘A particular event may take place at the beginning or the middle or at any time during their periods of office.’ However, it was not only that he wished to narrate events in shorter time intervals than those corresponding to the periods of office of magistrates. The dating system, based on these periods of office – as also would have been a dating system based on months – was local to particular cities, and Thucydides could not rely on his readers being able to make the correct substitutions. There was a further crucial point: he wanted a time frame more suitable to his subject matter – military campaigning with its characteristic periods of activity and lulls. Since campaigning typically – unless ‘a want of water’, or disease, or some such prevented it – took place in summer, with armies largely inactive in winter, he chose ‘to reckon in summers and winters’, fixing only the beginning of the War in Epidamnus’s quarrel with Corcyra. To interpret this framework as crucially half-yearly, in so far as it still suggests a rigid imposition of a chronology from outside, with no thought to the rhythms of his subject matter, would be misleading. For Thucydides, it is because he is writing about military activity, and that this exhibits a summer–winter pattern, that settles the half-yearly narrative structure, not the other way around. This becomes even clearer when it is observed that Thucydides takes ‘summer’ to include spring and autumn, with that decision, in turn, being dictated by the fact that campaigning can begin as early as spring, and continue into autumn. Thus both these seasons are treated as ‘summer’, while ‘winter’ is, practically, just that short period when there is a cessation of military operations. Thucydidean ‘summers’ and ‘winters’ are adjustable in a further sense. For even when the summer is understood, inclusively, to cover spring and autumn, it can still, for him, end later, or begin earlier, in some years than in others. Thus it may be required that, in certain years, summer be expanded at one, or both ends, to include the tail-end of a campaign, or the early start of another. This elasticity is striking. It is cited by those who reject the claim that Thucydides implicitly (there is no explicit evidence) obeyed the astronomical calendar of Euktemon, which, fixing spring by the evening rise of the star Arcturus, gave a rigid seasonal year. Benjamin Merritt, among them (1964), states that ‘Thucydides showed utter disregard for the calendar of Euktemon, preferring to use his own judgement about when one season ended and another began’. Merritt compellingly argues that the events of the winter, narrated in Book VIII 39, 1 to 60, which bring that season to a close, cannot be compressed into eighty days. However, only this amount of time could be allowed if the measurement were determined by the calendar of Euktemon. He concludes that ‘it is

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merely a figment of modern imagination that Thucydides should be saddled with the fallacious structure of this calendar, or any other astronomical dates’.4 We conclude that any supposed water tight distinction between chronicler and historian is unsustainable, and that ‘the ideal chronicler’ is a myth.

(c) The less than radical truth behind Williams’ claim that Thucydides invented linear time Seemingly more in line with our general approach (though finally, as we shall see, also antithetical to it) is Bernard Williams’ claim (2002:162) that linear time was invented by historians at a particular stage of social and intellectual evolution in the Western hemisphere. In short, before the advent of the ancient Greek historian, Thucydides, in the fifth century BC , people did without linear time (169). Accordingly Williams equates historical time with linear time. Now this claim, if not less bold and sweeping than it might at first appear, is certainly more ambiguous. Linear time, at least on a restricted definition under which it differs in scope from historical time, turns out not wholly to be an invention of Thucydides. Historical time is, on Williams’ view, an extension by Thucydides to the remote past of a mode of assessment in terms of truth and falsity, already informally practised with claims about, say, what the woman next door did yesterday, and in which linear time was nascent. Thucydides, he claims, effectively supplied a new metaphysics of time, an underlying theoretical structure, in the context of which a tensed statement, about the immediate or remote past, could be understood, and assessed for veracity. Events in the remote past could now – that is to say, after Thucydides, since his immediate predecessor, Herodotus, had, according to Williams, only the vaguest intimations of such linearity – be determinately located in relation to present ones, the temporal distance between them being divided into equal intervals which could, as Williams puts it, be ‘indefinitely iterated’. From then on, it followed that whatever day one took as an example – supposing one was measuring in days – there were days after that day, and again days before it (154). This conception of time is, Williams implies, a tensed one, even though he talks of it as having ‘a rigid and determinate structure’, or as being an ordered ‘series’ in which events stand to each other in apparently fixed relations of simultaneity, precedence, or succession. For he says (163) that we do not only think in terms of ‘the past’ but of ‘our past . . . what is past relative to us, or to now’, and that the change from a ‘local’ to an ‘objective’ view does not involve ‘a timeless conception of before and after’. His notion of the present is, however, far from the moving platform of the presentist. To understand past events in this new, determinately located way – ‘myth’, he says, ‘is not a time or place’ – is to see that what is distantly past to us was someone else’s present, and that our present will be someone else’s remote past. It thus follows – to take our own example – from the fact that it can be truly asserted now, on 11 August 2013, that Mark and Sophie are having breakfast with Monique this morning in Monique’s garden in Brenguis, that it will be equally true on 11 August 2213, that Mark and Sophie were having breakfast with Monique that morning two hundred years ago in her garden in Brenguis. The truth value link is therefore, for Williams, a crucial consequence of the adoption of linear, or historical, time, originating with Thucydides. Once the truth value link is in

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place, one can no longer with impunity, claims Williams (167), just ‘make things up’ even about the remotest past. It is no longer appropriate – it is culpable deception – to take as one’s sole criterion, in describing events of that distant time, whether one’s audience is enjoying the story. One has a responsibility to one’s hearers to speak in ‘the mode of truth’, even about those remote events, unless one clearly signals – perhaps by prefacing one’s remarks with ‘once upon a time’ – that one is speaking merely in ‘the mode of myth’. There are, in the first place, textual and other difficulties with his interpretation. It is doubtful, for instance, whether the key (and cryptic) quotations from Herodotus and Thucydides (quoted by Williams, 155 and 161) concerning Minos, a quasi-mythical figure said to have lived in the remote past, and to have ruled the seas, are sufficiently dissimilar to bear out Williams’ contention that an intellectual water-shed lay between them. As Williams admits, it is Thucydides who unquestioningly accepts this quasimythical figure as a reality, not Herodotus, who only says he ‘may’ have lived, leading commentators to suggest that it was Herodotus who was the more accurate here. Williams’ point therefore has to be about something subtler: that Herodotus’s use of ‘may’ indicates that he did not recognise the appropriateness, as Thucydides apparently did, of assessing statements about Minos as true or false at all. But of course there is another possibility: that he did recognize this, but thought that paucity of evidence ruled out any definitive claim. Nor are Williams’ other quotations from Thucydides decisive when the text as a whole is brought into view. Thucydides certainly criticises ‘the prose chroniclers’ for wishing to entertain, rather than to tell the truth. However, it is just not the case that he drew a sharp distinction between what we would now call ‘hard evidence’ and myth or poetry. On the contrary, he cites Homer’s text as evidence of such ‘hard’ facts as actual numbers of ships, only warning that they could be slightly exaggerated as Homer is a poet, quotes at length from the latter’s Hymn to Apollo, and treats Hellen, the mythological ancestor of the Hellenes, as a genuine historical figure. When he points out that people are inclined to accept stories in an uncritical way, so that they ought not to just be believed, he is usually not merely referring to their views about the remote past but also about contemporary history. More troubling from our point of view, although on an entirely different level, is that, while we may proscribe simply ‘making things up’ (as Williams puts it, 162) even about the remote past, such a proscription is a long way short of holding to the realist thesis that there is always ‘a fact of the matter’. It is a long way short, as our two previous chapters show, of holding that the truth about Minos, say, is just a question, as Williams contends, of ‘whether there was, or was not, a real person at that time corresponding to the Minos of whom the tales were told’. (He himself begins to unravel this simple answer when he concedes that that person may not go under the same name.) Moreover, unless we are already convinced historical realists, Williams’ liberal use of ‘real’, when talking of the past – he speaks of ‘a real event’,‘a real person’,‘real happenings’ – is far less explanatory than he seems to think. Yet there are in his chapter the materials out of which to fashion a less starkly realist answer. The ‘objective’ conception would find favour with Collingwood in that, as Williams remarks (167), it is no longer (as Collingwood’s despised ‘scissors and paste’ historians held) a good enough reason for telling someone something, even about the remote past, that ‘someone else has told it before’. Williams

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acknowledges the constraint that evidence places upon what it makes sense to say about the past. Yet the implication of his remarks is that a rigid and determinate temporal framework must be in place before such ‘evidence’ can be meaningfully interpreted, and this obviously rules out for him the coherentist idea that it is in interpreting evidence that the historian arranges events into temporal sequences. I said earlier that, despite a superficial resemblance, Williams’ claim about Thucydides’ invention of linear time is finally antithetical to our position, even though we claim that historians construct the temporal sequences in which events unfold. The difference can be summed up thus. Linear time, for Williams, is an overarching structure which allows us, because of its division of longer time periods into equal, shorter, ‘indefinitely iterable’, intervals, to extrapolate both backward to the remote past and forward to the present. It is thus in effect a rigid and determinate grid along which any event that ever occurred can be plotted, fixing once and for all its temporal relations to every other event, either occurring, or which has occurred. But for us, as radical presentists, there is nothing of which the present is a member on the same level as the past, and so there can be no allinclusive temporal structure spanning them both. For us, there is a hiatus, not a continuity, between present and past. Everything for us begins and ends with the present. But we also reject that underlying realism about the past that renders it, in Oakeshott’s critical phrase, ‘fixed and finished’, and which, we sought to show, is detectable in Williams’ appeal to linear time. For us, on the contrary, as for Oakeshott, the order of events in time is primarily a construction of the historian, in interpreting the evidence presently at hand. He cannot of course construct it as he likes, on whim, this order is not up to him, he must obey the evidence. Since evidence changes, interpretations are always – at least in principle, since they may be so deeply entrenched as to mimic the realists’ truths, and mask the historian’s contribution – provisional. Accordingly, events, arranged in the order of time, are subject to reconfiguration.5 The example above of Thucydides’ spring/autumn alternations illustrates, it will be said, how a historian chooses a time frame for his narration which is appropriate to his subject matter. But it has not yet been shown that, or how, he constructs sequential time out of present evidence. Nor, it will be cautioned, can we here claim Oakeshott as a precursor of our view. For he seeks to show, quite contrarily, how the historian, starting with (EM:90–1) ‘a mere series of what is successive’ – ‘the time series’ – turns it into ‘a world of what is co-existent’, or of ‘co-existent facts’. For ‘history’, he declares, ‘is concerned with what is co-existent’. It can be argued, however, that Oakeshott does not sufficiently distinguish two notions of ‘co-existence’. These are the co-existence of different pieces of evidence in that they are all present in time, and the co-existence of the different elements integrated into the whole of a particular historical interpretation. Also, we shall not assume, as Oakeshott does, that a temporal sequence is necessarily ‘a mere tissue of [unconnected] conjunctions’, and hence antithetical to the idea of historical interpretation as composed of mutually interrelated elements. We need to take a period, such as Stone Age Britain or Predynastic Egypt, so remote from our own as not to be covered by an agreed universal dating system, and where there are no even locally dated documents – inscriptions, coins and such like. For then its chronology cannot be treated, for the purposes of a given inquiry, as settled (relative to that inquiry) as often happens with the historical investigation of more recent periods, where it is other aspects which

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are felt to be contentious (see Collingwood IH:242–5). Then, and only then, can the contribution of the narrative historian, at rock bottom level, be laid bare.

(d) Methods of determining linear succession: ‘archaeological horizons’ Our example of the construction of linear time comes from archaeology, and features the use of stratigraphy – a method borrowed from geology6 – to construct a chronology of ‘archaeological horizons’. Each ‘horizon’ affords (it is said) a view of ‘how it would have been at that time’, where ‘that time’ is defined by the given horizon’s relations of precedence, or succession, to others in the sequence. The question arises how the archaeologist constructs this succession of ‘horizons’. He must first construct a single one. His focus is, very generally, land use as revealed in discrete traces left on, or below, the ground. These may be deposits, such as the back fill of earth, structures, such as walls, or ‘cuts’, such as are made through earlier deposits. He will seek to bring together whatever is contemporaneous, or nearly so, where ‘contemporaneous’ is interdefined with that of ‘archaeological horizon’. This is not, however, an empty exercise in definition, since strict principles govern his practice. Where he is dealing with artefacts he will try to identify similarities of design style, following the principle that convergence in this respect indicates convergence in date of origin. This practice, known as ‘contextual seriation’, is originally due to the Egyptologist, Sir Flinders Petrie, who has been said, through his assemblages of ancient pottery, to have penetrated into pre-dynastic times in Egypt (Greene, 1995:107). The establishment of stratigraphic relationships, however, is also governed by principles clearly originating in geology. According to the principle of ‘superimposition’, where different ‘archaeological horizons’ relate to the same terrain, so that deposits or other traces form vertical layers in the earth, one on top of another, the upper layers belong to a later ‘horizon’ than lower ones. There is also the principle of ‘original horizontality’: ‘any archaeological layer deposited in an unconsolidated form will tend towards a horizontal deposition’. The principle of ‘lateral continuity’ states that ‘any archaeological deposit, as originally laid down, will be bonded by the edge of the basin of the deposition, or will thin down to a feather edge’. It follows that if any edge of the deposit is exposed in a vertical plane, a part of the original extent must have been removed by excavation or erosion. A principle of action, for the archaeologist, follows in turn from this: he must either seek the continuity of the deposit, or explain its absence. It is worth finally noting that an ‘archaeological horizon’ has structure, and is not a mere random assortment of the apparently contemporaneous. Thus the archaeologist begins by taking as a ‘unit’, or ‘context for interpretation’, say, a single excavated grave, together with a body, and the back-filled earth on top of the body. He then proceeds to bring together this sub-group with other sub-groups, such as a whole series of graves perhaps, to form a ‘phase’. Only when he has put together several such ‘phases’ – which also provide a programme for future ‘stratigraphic’ excavation, or digging-in ‘phase’ – has he composed an ‘archaeological horizon’, while only a break in ‘contexts’ denotes the horizon’s end. It may be objected against the above methods of determining linear succession not only that they can lead to errors, but more crucially, that they are relative, not absolute, and so lack an absolute method’s precision. These objections are often brought against

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contextual, and frequency, seriation, the latter taking into account, in order to reconstruct a chronological sequence, the abundance, and frequency, of a design style, and not merely, like the former, its presence or absence. Now both methods require the creation of a typology, and errors clearly may creep in at this preliminary stage. But it would be far too hasty to conclude that because such mistakes occur, relative dating must be inferior to, or less systematic than, an ‘absolute’ method, in particular that by reference to the rate of decay of radioactive isotopes (‘radio-carbon dating’). Indeed many instances of relative dating by seriation and the like have been subsequently corroborated by radio-carbon dating. Schmidt (2003:56) observes that the dates for four samples taken from layers 3 and 4 of his excavation at Anau, ‘clustered around’ 3500BC , for the six from layers 14–18, 3600BC , and for those from 19–20, 4300 BC , thus supporting ‘the stratigraphic evidence for two occupational hiatuses between layers 4 and 5 and between layers 18 and 19’. It is also noteworthy that the selection of samples is guided by the systematic framework of chronological ‘layers’ already in place, just as appeal has again to be made to this stratigraphic sequence in order to interpret ‘bare’ laboratory results, and display their archaeological significance.7 Nor should this be surprising. Unless one is a historical realist, one will accept that the accuracy of any such method of dating, even a so-called ‘absolute’ one is ultimately a function of corroboration. Not even radio-carbon dating, a historical coherentist will point out, is a way of gaining privileged access to an order of events which, although past and gone, is somehow mysteriously, miraculously, fixed for ever, independent of our methods of investigation. I have sought to show, in the above, how temporal linearity is best understood as ultimately, or originally, a construction by archaeologists and historians themselves. In building this insight into my proposal, I aim to escape both the problems that arise for ersatz presentists from their dependence, in positing an ersatz-B series, on eternalism. and also the absurdity of the naïve view that the order of time is just a given of ordinary experience, and hence imposed on historians from outside.

2: The history/fiction controversies (i) Is history sufficiently like fiction to count as a narrative form? A new, but related, difficulty now assails us. Surely, it will be commented, success in constructing temporal sequences of events can only be self-defeating for the historian who is a coherentist of the stamp of Oakeshott or Collingwood. Oakeshott for instance, repeatedly declares that history can have nothing to do with ‘a mere series of what is successive’ (1978: 91), ‘a series of successive events’ (1978: 92, 99), ‘a tissue of mere conjunctions’ (96) or of ‘isolated facts’, or with a ‘miscellaneous assortment of facts’ (97). Yet what else is it for the archaeologist in our example to describe a sequence of ‘archaeological horizons’ where each further ‘horizon’ marks a break with the previous one than, as Oakeshott vividly puts it (94), ‘merely to lay side by side . . . rigid particles of past events’. How can such linear sequences be accommodated within a theory which stresses that any historical interpretation must constitute a meaningful and intelligible

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whole. One thing that this objector seems to have forgotten is the admission which he himself makes in voicing his puzzle: that the temporal series in question is constructed by the historian. For this shows that one vital requirement stipulated by Oakeshott, and Collingwood (IH 240–50), has been met: that history may not begin with the collection of isolated data. The ‘facts’ of temporal sequence, described by the archaeologist are not merely given. Nor indeed are they just made up by the historian. They are already, as Oakeshott requires, inferences or judgements of the historian, on which he has expended much mental effort. Moreover, in so far as he has only the present to go on, he is in this sense, as Oakeshott demands, concerned, and only concerned, with what is ‘co-existent’. Perhaps it is too exigent to require that these inferred facts be automatically integrated, just, that is to say, in virtue of their being themselves inferences, into the whole that is a historical interpretation. This answer will not seem adequate to those for whom the attraction of coherentism – and of our proposal – is its construal of history, through the idea that a historical interpretation is an integrated whole, as a form of narrative, and who, taking literary fiction as the model, argue that the ‘whole’ in question is essentially that of a story. (‘History,’ says W.B. Gallie (1964:66), ‘is a species of the genus story.’) In dealing with their objection, we move into the second half of our chapter, which concerns what we may call the history/fiction controversies. Again, as we shall see, and as we indicated earlier, we have a ‘similarity’ question – which we deal with immediately below – and a ‘difference’, question. Is history, in our view, sufficiently like literary fiction to count as a narrative form, yet sufficiently different to escape dismissal as a sanctioned pretence? The ‘difference’ question, which I referred to at the outset as ‘story prefix doubts’ exploits, as I also indicated, an apparent, damaging parallel between our proposal concerning the historical past and modal fictionalism which, we noted, is a further theoretical alternative, aside from actualism, to Lewisian realism, in respect of modality.

(a) Aristotle’s Poetics and the tension between history’s linearity and dramatic unity A story, those addressing the ‘similarity’ question will say (for instance, L.O. Mink, 1974:114), citing no less an authority than the Poetics of Aristotle, imposes its own temporal structure – that of beginning, middle and end – and thus possesses an internal completeness. Events occurring in mere linear succession, by contrast, stand to each other in no such relationship controlled by an author. They simply go on and on indefinitely, so that the most exhaustive inventory of them can never be complete, and must just be arbitrarily cut off somewhere. The objectors will conclude: such a linear series can be no more relevant to history as a form of narrative than to fiction, or putting their objection in the form of a sceptical question, they will ask: how can history, given its linear content be sufficiently similar to fiction to count as narrative? There are, however, misconceptions, assumptions, and exaggerations here. It is a misconception to sharply contrast, where we are talking about archaeological horizons, mere linear succession with ‘stories’. For it is hard to deny that, in constructing their ‘horizons’, archaeologists are already dependent, and increasingly consciously,8 on stories – stories concerning burial, and such like – in grouping together their ‘contexts for interpretation’

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into larger units. It is on the other hand an assumption that literary fiction is the paradigm example of narrative form. More radically, it is an assumption that there is a paradigm in this area at all rather than just a set of loosely related forms all going under the umbrella term ‘narrative’. I shall not pursue these lines of inquiry now since displaying the exaggerations will be more effective. It is in fact an exaggeration to assert that fictional plots must be so tight that ‘the work’s time’ (to use a phrase of Paul Ricoeur, 1990:39) excludes the time that characterizes events in the world. The claim, as I have just intimated, is often thought to have gained its most powerful, as well as original, expression in Aristotle’s Poetics, although he was largely concerned with theatre – in particular tragedy – where the events are not told but enacted. Aristotle certainly opposes (23:1–3) that spurious, or borrowed, or straggling, unity of ‘a single period, and all that happened within that period to one person, or many, little connected as the events may be with one another’, characteristic of ‘historical composition’, to the dramatic unity of the ‘single action’,‘whole and complete’, of which tragedy is an ‘imitation’. For him, such wholeness and completeness is achieved most crucially by stipulating limits on the ‘magnitude’ of the action. The observance of these limits tightens the links between the events that the plot makes contiguous to the point where their course becomes necessary, in the sense of inexorable. It involves cutting out all vacuous events – events which do not drive the action to its conclusion, episodes succeeding each other ‘without probable or necessary succession’ (9:9) – while only allowing to remain those of which it is true that (8) ‘if any one of them is displaced or removed the whole would be disjointed or disturbed’. As Aristotle explains: ‘For a thing whose presence or absence makes no difference is not an organic part of a whole’. The action must be long enough for the characteristic reversal (from good to bad fortune, or vice versa), recognition, and suffering to be implemented, or enacted. At the same time, the events which lead up to this unravelling, this denouement, must themselves compose an inflexible and invariant order, one into which, as we might put it, they are irrevocably locked. To take a striking example. In Oedipus Rex, the messenger returns (and must return) at the precise moment that the plot requires, that is to say ‘no sooner and no later’ (Else, 1957:293). Nor is it only structurally that he contrasts tragedy, as a poetic art, with history. The latter, he states (9:2–3), is about ‘what may happen’, or ‘how a person of a certain type would act’ and hence concerns the universal, whereas the former, being about what happened, concerns the particular. He declares therefore that poetry is a higher thing. Only a selective reading of the text, however, could lead writers to conclude, as many have done (see Paul Ricoeur, 1990:38, who does not fully endorse the opinion), that for Aristotle, ‘the inventing of poetic order is pursued to the exclusion of every temporal characteristic’. First, Aristotle heavily qualifies his suggestion that history, being about what has happened, cannot also, like tragedy, be about what may possibly happen. In the continuation (9.6) of the passage just quoted, he points out that ‘what has happened is manifestly possible: otherwise it would not have happened’. Again (9:9), he asserts that if a poet ‘chances to take a historical subject, he is none the less a poet: for there is no reason why some events that have happened should not conform to the laws of the probable and the possible’. Secondly, and throwing doubt upon the crucial claim that, for Aristotle, poetic works and history have incompatible temporal structures, is his account of epic. For, like history, epic consists in a variety of episodes (9:9–10), a

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‘multiplicity of plots’ (18:4), often taken from real life – the Trojan War, for example – affording it a certain temporal linearity. His declaration (18:4) that nothing with an epic structure can properly be made into a tragedy may seem to emphasize the break with tragedy. Nevertheless, although sometimes one gets the feeling that he personally prefers tragedy to the diluted plots of epics, he stresses that epic is a poetic art of some grandeur. He intimates that although epic is as much a poetic art as tragedy, it is, with its episodic structure leaning toward linearity, in some ways, as a narrative form, closer to history. Aristotle, as I have indicated, does not dismiss all differences between a poetic art, such as epic, and history. He praises Homer (23:3, 24:3) for not taking as his subject, as would a historian, a whole period, such as ‘the whole Trojan War’, even ‘though that war had a beginning and an end’. He commends him for detaching ‘a single portion’, and imposing upon it, through his own artistry, his own beginning and end. Yet Aristotle points out approvingly that Homer borrows as episodes, many events from the general story of the war – the Catalogue of the ships and such like – thus ‘diversifying’ his poem. He cautions, it is true, that a too great diversity of incidents, uncontrolled by the plot, can defeat the poet’s purpose which is to ‘bring . . . the beginning and the end within a single view’. The difference between epic and history, as both narrative forms, seems, on this showing, to be one of degree rather than kind, and not one in any case which compromises the temporal linearity of history, even when it is considered as narrative.

(b) Periodization and Mink’s claim that ‘history has a beginning, a middle, and an end’ ‘The struggle against the linear representation of time’, which Ricoeur (1990:30) identifies as a ‘major tendency of modern theory of narrative, in historiography and the philosophy of history, as well as narratology’, cannot then plausibly be traced to Aristotle, unless one puts an artificial emphasis on tragedy to the exclusion of epic and history. Let us leave Aristotle, and consider a recent proponent – Louis Mink (1970:541–58) – of the view that history, because it is a form of narrative, necessarily entails the exclusion of temporal succession. Mink would not disagree with Aristotle’s specifications for tragedy, rather he would disagree with his view of history as having, like epic, an altogether looser structure consisting in episodes largely following the temporal order in which they occurred. For Mink, on the contrary, history also ‘has a beginning, a middle and an end’. Now it is hardly controversial that history’s claim to be a form of narrative is connected with the fact that the historian necessarily views the past with hindsight, and so can impose a pattern upon, or give a collective significance to, events, which could not have been apparent to participants. A typical example of such ‘periodization’ is the Hundred Years War. It is illuminating and convenient to thus unify the relevant series of conflicts because as they proceeded something of vital military, and social, importance took place. The feudal armies, dominated by aristocratic cavalry were gradually, due to the ascendancy of the English long bow, supplanted by standing armies, in which the peasantry figured far more prominently. Historians fix the War’s beginning in the confiscation by Philip VI of France, in 1337, of lands in Gascony belonging to Edward

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III , and its end in the English defeat at Castillon of 1453. Thus, under the description ‘the Hundred Years War’, its beginning, as Mink (1974:120) requires, already anticipates its end. There is also a sense in which, as Mink puts it, ‘events though occurring in the order of time can be surveyed, as it were, in a single glance’, or are (123) as ‘a totality grasped together’, or (echoing Aristotle at Poetics 23:3) ‘embraced in a single view’. We may even allow his claim that ‘the description . . . under which [such events] are known [is] governed by a story to which it belongs, and according to which its outcome is not open’. But we shall surely draw the line at such claims as that (120) ‘the necessity of the backwards reference cancels out the contingency of the forward reference’. Again, we can agree that not knowing the relevant unifying description, no one in 1337 could conceivably have regarded Philip’s confiscation of the lands in Gascony as the start of the Hundred Years War, nor therefore recognized its end as foreshadowed in its beginning, nor perhaps, during the periods of truce, thought they were in a war at all. But it is surely a conflation of this merely conceptual unity with dramatic unity to conclude, as Mink does (120), that ‘in the understanding of narrative, thought of temporal succession as such vanishes’, or yet again that ‘history, as a narrative form, cannot tolerate temporal linearity’.9 (That is not to say that a historian may not exploit dramatically, as does Carlyle to great effect, the fact that he knows the tragic outcome of actions and events that historical agents, such as Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette, tragically do not.) Perhaps those, like Mink, who seek to expunge temporal linearity from history do so because they see it as signifying that exhaustive copying down of a pre-existing reality – of all events, as they actually happen, in the order in which they happen, in ‘the order of time’ – which Danto criticized in his discussion of the ‘ideal chronicler’. We have sought to show, however, that temporal linearity, like everything else concerning the historical past, is ultimately (however much a universal chronology is taken for granted) a construction by historians, which is potentially open to challenge by present evidence. It is because Danto, although he ridicules the concept of the ideal chronicler, cannot completely expunge the associated realism, that he sees periodization as affording the possibility only of a retrospective re-alignment of the past (Danto, 1968:168). But it is only re-alignment in relation to earlier historians’ alignments of the past. It is not re-alignment in relation to some pre-existing reality, already neatly dissected into narratively disconnected time segments, and carrying its own chronology. Once we recognize this, it is perfectly possible for us to endorse, without falling into a realist trap, Aristotle’s point that the Trojan War had a beginning and end, quite independently of that which Homer, in shaping a single poetic action, subsequently imposed upon it. Ricoeur takes a more extreme view in opposition to Mink than I would wish to. He disagrees with Mink that ‘time is not of the essence of narrative’. For Ricoeur, ‘The world unfolded by every narrative work is always a temporal world’ (1990:84–5). Hence he makes no distinction in this respect between history and narrative fiction, warning that ‘The narrative quality [even] of history [would] disappears . . . [were we to loosen] the temporal tie’ (161). I, however, have argued that temporal linearity is essential to history in a way that it is not to fiction. For whereas for the historian, on our account, the order of succession of events in the past is that order which his present evidence compels him

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to construct, there are no such constraints on an author of fiction. He can place his imagined events in any order he likes, compatibly with telling a story and taking his readers along with him. Thus there remains, for us, a crucial distinction between history and fiction in this respect even when considering their overall similarity as narrative forms. Ricoeur, in putting such a stress, where all types of narrative are concerned, upon temporal linearity, with its associated contingency, is eager, for reasons which it would take too long to go into here, to combat a poetics which ‘ . . . lock[s] itself up within the closure of the text’ (1990:48). Indeed he wishes to absolve Aristotle of such a conception of tragedy. But there was never any risk for us of such an ‘airless hermeneutics’ of history, given that perpetual openness to new evidence, which marks, for coherentist historians, that vital discontinuity between past and present.

(c) Barthes, Carlyle and the dramatic subversion of linear time That historical time is, contrary to what for example Bernard Williams claims in simply identifying it with linear time, as much a function of narrative technique as of the coherentist methodology applied to history, and therefore possesses a narrative richness, not possessed by mere order in time should be stressed. If one does not keep this constantly in mind, one is liable again to fall into the realists’ hands and, even when paying lip service to coherentism, represent it as a mere mirror, devoid of interest in itself, held up to past events. In fact, compatibly with conveying temporal linearity at some level, there are many important choices for the historian to make as a narrator. He might decide, as does Carlyle in Past and Present (1977), to dramatically subvert it. To show how this can be done we need to avail ourselves of Roland Barthes’ distinction (in ‘The Discourse of History’, 1981:7–20) between ‘the time of uttering’, or ‘paper-time’ and ‘the time of the matter of utterance’. Their very co-existence allows, he points out, for play, or ‘friction’, between these ‘two times’. As he observes, there is no required proportionality between the amount of text a historian may devote to describing an event, and the amount of time it took for the event to unfold. Again, he might quite properly devote fifty pages to recounting, and elaborating upon, one brief incident, and yet dispose of the next two hundred years in a single sentence. As Barthes comments (2) he can speed up or slow down time at will, though the more ‘the pressure of uttering makes itself felt, the slower the history becomes’. This denial of what Barthes calls ‘isochrony’ has attracted sarcastic comments from non-continental historians. David M. Leeson (2009:110), for instance, in ‘Barthes and the act of uttering in historical discourse’ (110–11), impatiently remarks that obviously history is not a ‘scale model of the past’ nor ‘the historian . . . a model builder’. Yet Barthes’ apparently ‘obvious’ point makes us sensitive to the way in which for the historian to keep stepping aside from the temporal linearity he is ultimately committed to – ‘the linearity, as Barthes puts it, of ‘[history’s] material form’ – for him to tarry a while in the path, or retrace his steps, can enrich and illuminate the historical text. Barthes speaks, still more significantly for us, of these ‘movements of the discourse’ as they veer away from the movements of ‘the matter of the discourse’, only to join up with them again, as enabling the historian to ‘amplify the depth of time’. His example of ‘this zig-zag or saw-toothed history’ is Herodotus, ‘who turns back to the ancestors of a newcomer, and then returns to his point of departure to

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proceed a little further – and then starts the whole process all over again with the next newcomer’. Carlyle, as I hinted earlier, provides, in Past and Present (1977), another example of that subversion of mere linear time, which simultaneously deepens, in Barthes’ sense, what we might surely call historical time. (He also shows thereby the superiority of a narrative historian to a chronicler.) This is well brought out in P. Kerry’s ‘History as layered space’ (2010), where the temporal structure of Past and Present, Book II , entitled ‘The Ancient Monk’, is exposed and analysed. The ostensible subject matter of that book is the election of a new Abbot, Hugo, at the Monastery of St Edmundsbury, and his subsequent reign as set down in the notebooks of one of the monks, Jocelin, from which Carlyle builds his historical account. Carlyle starts his own narrative in 1200, describing daily life and work around that time in the monastery. He then leaps forward across ‘the chasm of seven centuries’ (39) to the present day (for him, nineteenth century Bury St Edmunds) and mourns, and wonders at, the fact that all that remains of the once thriving abbey are mere ‘vast, grim, venerable, ruins’, its internal spaces laid out as a botanical garden for paying visitors. He then plunges back, passed that already ‘deep-buried Time’ with which he had begun, another three centuries before Jocelin had even become a novice at the abbey, to the story of how this great institution came to be established in the first place. He traverses time again, coming forward (40) to give Jocelin’s date for when the election took place. It was, Jocelin says, ‘the year after the Flemings were defeated at Fornham St Genevieve’ (which is later given by Carlyle as 1173). However, Carlyle does not, as the reader might expect, treat this reference to the battle as merely a way of politically situating the key event, to be essentially passed over, looked through, treated tangentially, as he hastens on to narrate the election that took place the following year. On the contrary, he steps to one side, deliberately breaks the temporal flow, and details the quarrel in prior years between the Earl of Leicester and Henry II which led up to the battle. He has then to manoeuvre himself back from this earlier time to the election. But he does not do this in straight linear fashion, but via suggestive analogies and spatial associations. Thus, he writes (41) that just as the Battle of Fornham is obscure now – the battlefield on which so many men died, situated as it was on the right bank of the River Lark, is sunk beneath the pleasure ground of ‘His Grace of Newcastle’ – so the Abbey is reduced to a few ruins with a botanical garden open to the public running through them. It is then the similarity of the fates, as ‘inarticulate wrecks’, of the battlefield and the abbey, which he bemusedly laments, and which carries him forward again from the battle to take up the story of the abbey, and its election of Abbot Hugo. He therefore does not reach the point in the narrative that he wishes to reach by any crude, or shallow, filling in of the temporal sequence of events between the two dates.

(ii) Is history sufficiently different from fiction not to be dismissed as a ‘sanctioned pretence’? I turn finally to the ‘difference’ question of the second pair: is history, on our proposal, sufficiently different from fiction to rule out its being likewise sanctioned pretence, make-believe, fantasy. Actually in earlier maintaining that history is sufficiently similar to fiction for our purposes, we have already brought out certain crucial differences.

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Thus we have seen that, although historians may narrate incidents in any order they like, they are bound, despite their narrative autonomy, by their evidence to construct certain sequences of events, and not others. Thus although historians can (going further than Carlyle in Past and Present) even choose (as some playwrights have done, e.g. Harold Pinter in Betrayal) to present a historical course of events backwards, they still, we have argued, lack the sheer creative freedom of a fictional author or playwright. They cannot ‘make up’ the incidents which they recount, nor embrace impossibilities, and such like. The objector will reformulate his charge. Admittedly, he will say, even on your approach, history differs from fiction in certain respects, but there is still ‘an elephant in the room’, and you have so far failed to acknowledge it. Your whole point is that historical statements are true relative to the works of history in which they figure, or ‘according to those works’. But isn’t fictional truth precisely truth within the scope of a story prefix? ‘Sherlock Holmes is a detective’ is true, people will explain, merely ‘according to the Sherlock Holmes stories’. Since no Sherlock Holmes exists to make it a factual truth, this is at best a sanctioned pretence. What have you said to prevent it being the case, on your proposal, that there is, say, no Edgar of Wessex to make it a factual truth that ‘Edgar of Wessex set in motion the monastic revival of the tenth century’. Indeed doesn’t your resort to the story prefix entail that it too is a sanctioned pretence?

(a) Modal fictionalism: truth within the scope of a (silent) story prefix Now there are philosophers who, concerned with salvaging truth with respect to a content that they acknowledge not to exist, and introducing the story prefix to this end, would not themselves, unlike us, be averse to talk of sanctioned pretence here. Such talk is appropriate because, although they have foresworn realism about the relevant content – this is why they introduce the story prefix – they retain realism’s characteristic, reductive, truth – making structure, as though the content did exist. Let us call them (mere) ‘methodological’ realists, allowing that this can be compatible with deflationism. Thus they can go through the motions of conferring truth upon it in the standard realist manner. A good example is Gideon Rosen in his ‘Modal Fictionalism’ (1990). Extolling the benefits of Lewis’s modal realism, in providing ‘truth conditions for modal claims in a systematic way’, Rosen devises his own modal fictionalism as a substitute for that theory – as indeed ‘parasitic’ (337) upon it – while denying the existence of the very possibilia which, for Lewis, would have been indispensable. The ‘trick’, Rosen tells us (330), citing a literary fictional analogy, is to be able to ‘say’ that these possibilia exist, while ‘not believing in’ them, and it is precisely in order to pull this trick off that he invokes his story prefix ‘According to Lewis’s plurality of worlds hypothesis’. He points out (331) that ‘quantification within the scope of the story prefix is not existentially committing’. We can have views about the contents of such fictions while not believing that what they say is true or that the objects they claim to describe exist. Rosen’s basic idea is derived from literary fiction. He observes (331) that, in conversational contexts, the following two claims (I adopt Rosen’s numbering) have the same meaning: (3) ‘There is a brilliant detective at 221b Baker Street’,

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and (4) ‘In the Holmes’ stories, there is a brilliant detective at 221b Baker Street’.

They do so, he explains, because, in these contexts, (3) is elliptical for (4), and is not therefore ‘a straightforward existential claim’. We shall agree, he takes it, that (4) is ‘perfectly true’, and hence, he concludes, we must agree that so are utterances of (3), when the context can be counted upon to supply the silent prefix ‘In the Holmes stories . . .’ . He goes on to argue that this silent prefix, indicating that ‘quantification is not existentially committing’, allows us ‘legitimately to say in one breath’ that, (3), ‘There is a brilliant detective at 221b Baker Street’ and ‘in the next’ the seemingly contradictory: ‘but really I don’t believe there is any such detective’. Now it is significant that Rosen hints at contradiction here, even if it is only to dismiss it as a misunderstanding of (3) which, he claims, is easily cleared up by spelling out, as Rosen has done, the ‘silent’ story prefix. This acknowledgement indicates, however, that (3) has, willy-nilly, a life of its own, as potentially of existential import, which can be expected to give anyone a moment’s pause when they contemplate its meaning, even in literary discussions. By the same token it also makes clear that were this import – sometimes called its ‘literal meaning’ – taken seriously, and so not reined in by context, the very claim, earlier vaunted as true, would have to be dismissed as false. Otherwise it would be impossible to bring it into line with Rosen’s avowed disclaimer: ‘but really I don’t believe there is any such detective’. This curious, flickering, ‘double life’ of (3) is, as we shall now see, crucial for Rosen’s treatment of modality. He asks us to consider the claim (my numbering): (5), ‘There is a world where blue swans exist’.

Rosen is a deflationist. He therefore does not, as Lewis does, believe in such a world. But he wants to ‘cash in on it’ (Brock, 1993:148). He wants to be able ‘legitimately to say’ – that is, without incurring a contradiction – what Lewis says, and believes: ‘There is a world where blue swans exist’, yet without believing in that world himself. He invokes the analogy with literary fiction, asserting that this claim (5), and the following further claim: (6), ‘According to Lewis’s plurality of worlds hypothesis, there is a world where blue swans exist’,

are related to each other in the same way as the literary fictional claims, (3) and (4). Just like (3) and (4), they have, he tells us, the same meaning, and for the same reason. (5) is elliptical for (6) so that if (6) is true – and no one doubts that Lewis postulates a plurality of worlds – so is (5). But (6) has no existential import, so neither has (5). Therefore Rosen concludes that he can ‘legitimately say’: ‘There is a world where blue swans exist”, or ‘can [at least] talk as if there were such things’ (332), without believing in blue swan worlds. The observation that we made with respect to the literary context is pertinent again. The suspicion, entertained even for a fleeting moment, of a contradiction which needs clearing up, bears witness to the tendency of (5) to get off the leash of (6), and appear to have existential implications, unless the story prefix is

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reinserted. It would seem that it is this very chameleon semantic quality of (5) which Rosen is capitalizing upon here. For how else can he legitimately pretend to existences he doesn’t believe in, namely Lewis’s worlds, unless by countenancing momentarily – any longer and he would be drawn into a falsehood – the potential existential import of (5), before the story prefix is reinserted, and (5), deflated, and so saved from falsehood, is merged with the true claim (6). We can put our objection more pointedly still, by asking how anyone can be said legitimately to state (3), as distinct from (4), that is as carrying the existential import that we are afterwards obliged to deny, if this legitimacy derives paradoxically from (3)’s identity with (4), which has no existential import, and which therefore contradicts our first understanding of (3). We find ourselves as a result, not with (3), but with (4), or with a (3) which is only true because, as (4), it is empty of existential import. It is as though we had used a stepping stone which, when we looked back, we saw had not really been there – we just had the impression that it was – and so we had manoeuvred through thin air. Rosen does not, we conclude, avoid the ‘double-think’ – of ‘asserting the existence of worlds at one moment while denying it at another’, which he warns (327) is a ‘great risk’. We have not yet, however, reached the crux of Rosen’s argument. His manoeuvres are ultimately directed, as we noted, at carrying through Lewis’s reductive programme for modal claims without the benefit of the realist’s ontological commitment. For Lewis, (7) ‘There might have been blue swans’

is objectively true (Rosen, 332) if and only if (8) ‘there is a world where blue swans exist’ – the Lewisian equivalent of Rosen’s (5).

For Rosen, however, the modal claim: (7) ‘There might have been blue swans’

is ‘objectively true’ (Nolan, 2000:80) if and only if (6) ‘According to Lewis’s plurality of worlds hypothesis, there is a world where blue swans exist’.

Now, as we saw, Rosen has just drawn on an analogy with literary fiction to justify inserting the story prefix into (5), namely into the claim that ‘There is a world where blue swans exist’, and so defusing its existential force, and turning it into (6). This, however, goes nowhere to justifying the proposed modal analysis itself, still less to establishing that it effects a reduction of the modal phrase ‘there might have been’ to the non-modal: ‘there is’. Nor is the literary context of any further help, since it does not involve, or provide for, any similar reduction. Thus, in the modal context, we have three claims in play, namely: (5) ‘There is a world where blue swans exist’,

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(6) ‘According to Lewis’s plurality of worlds hypothesis, there is a world where blue swans exist’,

and (7) ‘There might have been blue swans’ (the modal claim to be analysed).

However, in the literary fictional context we had only two, namely the equivalents of (5) and (6): (3) ‘There is a brilliant detective at 221b Baker Street’,

and (4) ‘In the Holmes’ stories, there is a brilliant detective at 221b Baker Street’.

There is nothing equivalent in the literary context to the modal claim, (7), and so nothing that could plausibly require a non-modal analysis in terms of the two claims – (3) and (4) – or therefore serve as a precedent for that of (7) in terms of (5) and (6). Still more perplexing, given that the raison d’être of Lewis’s analysis of (7), the modal claim, is to reduce it to non-modal terms, Rosen describes (344) the story prefix as ‘an intuitively understood but undefined primitive expression’, and concedes that it may turn out to be irreducibly modal. How then can Rosen claim to be reproducing even in letter Lewis’s reductive procedure? A defence of Rosen may be offered. Surely his analysis does represent a reduction of the modal claim, ‘there might have been blue swans’, in that the content of the fiction, ‘there is a world where blue swans exist’, which figures in the analysis, is nonmodal (in form), even if the prefix is modally irreducible. It will be further explained: Rosen’s reduction should not be thought of as latching on to (6), where the prefix is spelt out, but only on to (5), where it is ‘silent’. It surely follows, it will be concluded, that he can legitimately appropriate Lewis’s justification as his own. Now it is quite unclear whether ultimately it is feasible to break up in this simple way the prefixed claim into two parts, and take just the part wanted. However, the suggestion does help us to see why Rosen continues to entertain, under the rubric, ‘content of the fiction’, claim (5), ‘There is a world where blue swans exist’. The prefix, ‘According to Lewis’s plurality of worlds hypothesis’, being silent, (5) can, as we observed earlier, give the semblance of detachment from (6), and so can fleetingly carry that existential import, which upfront Rosen denies it. Consequently, in Rosen’s simulation of Lewis’s modal reduction, this claim, (5), can function in place of (8), ‘there is a world where blue swans exist’, as Lewis understands it, because its existential import remains thus ambiguous – both flickeringly there, and simulated. (5) must of course not get entirely off the leash of (6), for then it will be (8), and that Rosen flatly rejects as a falsehood. This is all beneath the surface, however, as must be the question whether a whole theory can plausibly rest on such a fragile equivocation. On the surface, Rosen would have us believe, all is calm and unruffled. As he remarks, the modal fictionalist ‘often sound[s] just like the modal realist’ (332), and ‘indeed if the prefix is allowed to go silent the two theories [his and modal realism] will be verbally indiscernible’.

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Whether the aim of merely ‘sounding’ like a modal realist – provided, that is to say, the interrogator does not probe too deeply – is a sufficiently ambitious one, even if it is achieved, to enable Rosen to salvage a notion of modal truth is a moot point. I am doubtful myself whether Rosen ever really rises above the ‘double-think [ing]’ which he is the first to admit is a danger here. (He writes, 327: ‘There is a great risk of doublethink in such circumstances: asserting the existence of worlds at one moment while denying it at another’.) Furthermore if Rosen does not avert this risk, even to speak of a sanctioned pretence in the modal context may seem over – optimistic. His success or failure, however, need not detain us further. All that remains is to pinpoint that underlying theoretical commitment which, given Rosen’s denial of concrete possibilia, explains why his modal fictionalism has the shape it has, and to distance ourselves from it. What is this commitment? It is a commitment to ‘the whole realist, reductive, truth-making structure’ as we called it, when we discussed it earlier. The contrariness of Rosen, and the source of his difficulty, is that, despite not believing in the relevant truth making entities, he shares with Lewis, and with modal ersatzists, who do, their account of how truth gets conferred upon any content in which these entities or, for Rosen, non-entities, figure. We may recall that modal realists, and ersatzists, assess such content for truth by breaking it down into basic configurations of elements which can be matched up to real, concrete configurations of individuals, and properties, in the actual world (ersatzists), or in other worlds (Lewis). It is as if Rosen goes almost all the way with Lewis, such is the former’s ‘parasitism’, even so far as to provide the semantic ‘hooks’, as we might call them, on to which the relevant truth making entities might be latched. But then since, for him, none of these entities, so essential to his preferred truth making structure, exist (he is merely we said a ‘methodological’ realist), he suddenly withdraws. He presents us instead with that series of elaborate subterfuges – or near subterfuges – which we have described. He is veritably a realist manqué. Turning back to our own approach, it presents, as regards historical statements, a sharp contrast with Rosen’s theory as pertaining to modal claims. Neither on our approach, nor his, do the relevant entities exist. However, we, following suggestions of Bigelow with regard to literary fictional statements, relocated our truth makers from the non-existent individuals, properties and relations figuring in historical statements, to the presently existing historical texts themselves. We counselled that such texts should not be construed as mere ‘transparencies’ through which to look supposedly in order to discern a real independent past. On the contrary, we insisted that the text be investigated in, and for, itself, and as in this sense possessing a certain opacity. (It is incidentally worth noting that our arguments involved us indirectly in resisting Lewis’s attempt to apply his possible worlds’ semantics to the story prefix, and thereby to dissolve it into the concrete flora and fauna of possible worlds – something which should also perhaps concern Rosen who, although taking so much from Lewis, yet hopes to leave the story prefix, so crucial to his modal fictionalism, intact.) I return then to our earlier objector and, addressing him directly, challenge him thus: ‘If, even now after we have explained what a sanctioned pretence might look like in an adjacent area, and distanced our approach from it, you repeat the allegation against us, the onus is upon you to persuade us that your reaction is not, deep down, a stubborn, forlorn, irrational, realist cri de coeur against the very idea that the past does not exist.’

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(iii) ‘Realism about the present, coherentism about the past’: the remainder of our proposal explained and defended Our presentist approach, considered as a whole, could be summed up in the form of a slogan: ‘realism about the present, coherentism about the past’. Thus we proposed substituting for the abstract times of the ersatzists, presently existing historical texts – collections of writings in which the relevant historical claims are inscribed, or by which they are entailed – as truth makers for these very claims. However, those who produced these texts, we argued, were governed, in drawing conclusions from their evidence, by principles of coherence, ensuring that the claims in question hung together as parts of a larger picture. There was no requirement either that there really exist entities corresponding to this historical content, or that there be a pretence that they exist in the way that modal fictionalists pretend that Lewis’s possibilia exist (though, as we shall see in a moment, we are not quite finished with these latter theorists). There appear to be two problems outstanding. The first concerns the type of entity a ‘text’ – or ‘theory’ or ‘story’ – is, and whether, given its special dependence on its author it is ontologically robust enough for a realist to accept as a truth maker. Thus it might be complained that, unless thought of as just the gross printed pages, a text is not an ‘independent physical object’ in the way that, say, a table made by a carpenter is. The second, and even more critical problem, concerns the integration, or lack of it, of the realist and non-realist components of our approach themselves. It will seem to many that we have posited two disparate methods, having their sources respectively in each of these two components, for testing the truth of the very same claims. A somewhat appalled sceptic will therefore pose to us the following question. How can you say, in one breath, that the presently existing text is the realist truth maker of these claims and, in the next, that these same claims figure in the text only because they hang together as part of a larger interpretation, or are true by coherentist principles? Surely, she will conclude, one of these methods of establishing their truth must be jettisoned as redundant, unless you want your approach, chaotically, to collapse in upon itself.10

(a) Texts, theories: robust enough to be realist truth makers? Modal fictionalism again Above we drew attention to the fact that a text, or theory, is dependent on its author. This poses a peculiar, and acute, problem for modal fictionalists. Theories, stories, fictions, they point out, only come into being, together with their content, thanks to their author, who writes them down at a particular date. Hence, quite conceivably, either they may never have existed, or if they did, they only existed after a certain date. Yet modal fictionalists simultaneously maintain that modal truths, unlike fictional truths, are not in this way contingent upon ‘the ordinary history’ of a mere story, but if true at all, are timelessly so.11 Now, as thus articulated, the difficulty scarcely grazes us since historical truths are not, for us, timeless, but emphatically provisional. However, modal fictionalists such as Daniel Nolan and Seahwa Kim, in attempting to mitigate the contingent existence of the modal fiction, float certain ideas, which can help us in dealing with the ‘robustness’ question. Daniel Nolan writes:12

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As we know, fictions, theories, etc. are artificial: we make them up, and they do not exist before we make them up . . . it is not the case that Conan Doyle found out about the Sherlock Holmes stories by remembering a shadow of the Form of the Detective Story, or some such: before Doyle, there were no Sherlock Holmes stories, and after him there were. The modal fiction is a fiction like the others . . . So it seems that if people like Leibniz, Saul Kripke and David Lewis had not existed, and nobody else had thought up a theory of possible worlds either, then absolutely nothing would have been possible. (2002:82, see also Richard Woodward, 2011:541)

One way, broached here, to construe theories, texts and stories is as abstract Platonic-like objects (as are the abstract times and possible worlds of the ersatzists). Thus construed, they would be so ontologically independent of any author, that even if there were no one who had as yet written them down – if, in other words, there existed no concrete instances of them, they could still exist as abstract entities, ‘only waiting for someone to select [them]’ (Kim, 2005:125). Now Nolan (as well as Kim) surely correctly rejects this account of stories, theories and texts as timeless, and necessary, as merely ‘selected’ by their author. They do so because it flies in the face of our ordinary conception of them. On that conception, Nolan stresses, they just do possess an existence contingent upon their author’s own contingent existence, and upon his (contingent) decision to bring them into existence. Nolan’s suggestion is, however, from our point of view by no means irrelevant to our own problem in trying to say what kind of an object a text is such that, although not a physical object, it is robust enough to function as a realist truth maker. For it introduces the idea of texts as abstract objects. Of course Nolan takes it here that being abstract entails being timeless and necessary – indeed it is only thus that it can be put forward as a possible solution to the fictionalists’ contingency problem. Writers have, however, challenged the view that being abstract entails being either timeless or necessary. Kim, for instance, suggests that we do actually conceive of some abstract things as neither timeless nor necessary. She cites the notion of a set of concrete things, which we accept does not exist all the time or necessarily. Still more helpful in this regard is Amie Thomasson’s work, which advances this suggestion, and our own proposal.

(b) Texts, as actually existing abstract cultural creations, transferred to historical domain Thomasson (see particularly 2003:138–57) is an avowed realist (154) who is primarily concerned to defend the existence of fictional characters as ‘contingent members of the actual world’. Now of course we do not wish to follow her in this, nor analogously with respect to historical personages, since for us neither type of entity exists. However, she generalizes her argument (140) to cover stories, theories and texts, and here we can usefully borrow certain aspects of her view. All such entities, she admits, are ontologically dependent on their author in the sense that the non-existence of the former implies the non-existence of the latter (342). Not only this, but had the former – granting him now existence – not chosen to tell his story, or write his

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text, or postulate his theory, the latter would still not have existed. Nevertheless, she maintains that these entities (again, she is primarily discussing fictional characters, but we may read ‘texts’) are, as what she calls ‘abstract cultural creations’, or ‘humanly created abstract artefacts’ (Livingston and Sauchelli, 2011:342), ‘a proper subset of the general category of abstract objects or types’, with an appropriate metaphysical status. The whole point for her is that the author of a literary work does not create his characters, and tell his stories, in a vacuum. He does so against the background of a long established public literary practice, with roles for authors, critics and wellinformed readers (141–2), and which involves ‘competent participants . . . [engaging in] critical discourse about literature’. Moreover, it is, she claims (151), to the concepts of stories, or fictional characters, as enshrined in this practice to which we must look if we wish to determine the existence, survival and identity conditions of such entities. The entities, which she brings under the one umbrella, are, however, as we noted, a mixed bag. Where a text, as such, is concerned, a person might in some sense point to it, in that although she is pointing at, say, a bound copy, we shall know what she means when she says at the same time ‘in that text there . . .’ Obviously with fictional characters, one cannot really say, pointing to a copy of the Speckled Band, or even opening it at the page where this event is described, ‘there goes that detective walking along Baker Street again’. Her claim therefore (155), that to be a realist about fictional characters does not require that ‘the term be given its reference by direct reference to independent denizens of reality’, has perhaps more relevance where ‘fictional character’ is at issue, than with the broader notion, in which we are interested, of a text. Not only this, but she suggests that the survival conditions for fictional characters depend, among other things, on whether there is still extant a copy of the relevant novel, which seems to imply that, although characters cannot be physically pointed at, they are themselves dependent for their existence, not only on their authors, but on the existence of at least one concrete copy of the story in which they figure, and which they are not identical with. The concepts of ‘text’ and ‘copy’ seem, by contrast, to be more intimately related, even though one is abstract and the other concrete. We would do well then, in attempting to show how historical texts can be bona fide truth makers, even for realists, to hold on to Thomasson’s appeal to the context of practice, in which notions like text, story, theory, flourish, while ignoring its raison d’être of salvaging fictional characters as ‘actually existing’ (150). It might be queried though: if you accept her defence of the ontological, and metaphysical status, of a text, are you not thereby committed to accepting it for fictional characters, and hence analogously for historical personalities and events, to which you deny existence. I do not think so. As we have just noted, for her (148) ‘Our literary practices . . . definitively establish the existence conditions for fictional characters’. In other words, these conditions are ultimately fixed by consensus among competent participants in these practices. Emma Woodhouse, they will agree, is an actually existing fictional character just provided ‘Jane Austen wrote a work of fiction pretending to refer to and describe a young woman named ‘Emma Woodhouse’ (not referring back to an extant individual)’. However, whether there exists in history the personage we know as Queen Elizabeth I is not similarly a matter of ascertaining

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whether the author of the history has performed a peculiar – one almost wants to say ritual-practice of this sort. On the contrary the question for him is a matter of interpreting the evidence. In other ways, however, Thomasson’s account, transferred to the historical domain, and to historical texts, may seem to work better than in the literary domain for which it was expressly devised. Two criticisms have been brought against it in its original setting. It has been denied that literary practices do form a coherent system. As Paisley Livingston and Andrea Sauchelli write (2011:343–4), ‘. . . in a domain where experimentation and innovation are endemic, there is no stable consensus among the (competent) practitioners, whose heterogeneous activities and attitudes involve different and even contradictory standards.’ More cautiously, they state that ‘even if there is a demonstrable convergence on certain types of claim among reasonable wellinformed readers, the question what makes this convergence competent, reasonable and justifiable remains’. They find the answer that it is ‘self-grounding’ unconvincing. History, by contrast, would score well on both these points. It is an intellectual discipline par excellence, with recognized norms, and methods of research. It provides a coherent context of practice, in which works of history, whose conditions of identity may be seen as given by the practice, can constitute just those robust, abstract, cultural objects that can function as the requisite truth makers. (Incidentally, this answers the question of which texts should be treated thus, namely just those endorsed by the practice, and so expressing, by and large, current practice.) This does not mean, we hasten to add, that innovation is impossible for the historian himself, as opposed to the casually interested layman who can rely on a relatively settled body of knowledge over large tracts of what one might call the popular past. On the contrary, we have endorsed Collingwood’s view that every time a historian comes to research anew a chosen area, although he will necessarily leave settled assumptions in place in other areas, he can take nothing at all, in this area, for granted, if he is to advance his subject. It is worth noting that philosophy would score much less well where the corresponding notion of a theory is concerned. For the idea of consensus is antithetical to philosophy concerning its methods, or what it takes to validate a concept, or its conclusions. This is not because philosophers are artists, or literary flaneurs, but because they are essentially disputatious, dealing with inherently contentious, and contested issues. It would, for instance, be just ludicrous to suppose that there could ever be an established public practice among the relevant practitioners where it was simply agreed that Lewis’s theory would be taken as true, and his concrete possibilia as existents. Perhaps this was always the trouble for modal fictionalists when they sought to give that theory – seeming more like the isolated creation of a single, beleaguered, almost heroic individual than the product of a consensual practice – such a key role, without themselves believing in it. (To say nothing of the fact that of course Lewis did believe his theory.) Nor is it clear that there could be ‘laymen’ in this area – the equivalent of the novel reader, or the historical enthusiast, who avidly gobbles down the latest biography of his favourite historical personality. Indeed it is doubtful whether the attempt to make philosophy popular and readable will ever work so long as it retains its essential, rigorous, argumentative texture.

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(c) Rejection of a realist reduction that ‘goes all the way down’ and appeal to different levels of discourse I turn finally to the doubt as to whether there is enough integration of the realist and coherentist components in our approach to prevent rampant redundancy where methods of assessing the truth of relevant claims are concerned, or to make that approach therefore much more than an inordinate muddle. The key to my response lies in two ideas, one of which we are already familiar with, and the other which is new in this context. One is just a reiteration of our rejection of what I have identified as the ‘whole reductionist truth-making structure’, but tying this rejection now to a particular aspect of it, namely, that reduction here goes all the way down. The second introduces into the historical domain two independent levels or modes of discourse. Let us then first consider more precisely the meaning and significance for our approach of our rejection of the realist, reductive, truth-making structure in so far as it, as I put it, goes all the way down. Actually it is little more than a matter of extrapolating from remarks that we made earlier. For the objector who brings a redundancy charge against us makes a major assumption which we have already challenged. He assumes, as more hard-line realists assume (consider, if you like, Lewis himself where literary fiction is concerned) that we cannot – must not, may not – terminate our search for the truth maker of a historical, or literary fictional, statement just when we can point to the appropriate historical text, or story. The latter, this objector will maintain, is no more than a somewhat deceptive ‘way-stage’. We must, so to speak, look right through it, in order to discern whether there exists in the past, or in possible worlds, a real configuration of objects corresponding to that configuration of elements into which the statement can be analysed. For this critic, then, it is not only that there is a single terminus of any attempt to assess the truth value of such a statement. It is also that that terminus is not the text or story (this is the significance of Lewis’s dissolving of the story prefix), but the real world, whether consisting in past events or concrete possibilia. Moreover, there is one, and only one, method of ascertaining truth: the realist, reductive truth-making structure; it is all that could either be needed, or tolerated. It will, however, be recalled that we relocated our truth makers from (for us) nonexistent past objects to presently existing historical works. We were influenced by Bigelow who, in an analogous manner, suggested Shakespeare’s play, and not the (for him) non-existent fictional characters as the truth maker of ‘Romeo loves Juliet’. To recognize historical texts as the truth makers is also, we saw, to treat them as opaque, in the sense that they are not mere vehicles for discerning the real truth makers, but to be studied and considered in themselves as texts. Now in proposing that a statement such as ‘Edgar of Wessex set in motion the monastic revival of the tenth century’ be analysed as, ‘According to the relevant texts (Stenton’s Anglo-Saxon England perhaps), Edgar of Wessex set in motion the monastic revival of the tenth century’, we are admittedly reformist. This should not be surprising: a radical presentism such as ours is hardly a common view. The analyses of modal claims, given by Lewis, or again the ersatz actualists, or yet again the modal fictionalists, are likewise reformist since none of them would pretend, I think, that people ordinarily take themselves to be consenting to any of these analyses when they observe e.g. ‘there might have been blue swans’. Once we

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introduce, however, our notion of there being two modes of discourse with respect to history, another way of construing our appeal to historical texts is available to us (though not to the modal theorists). This is to take this appeal as indicating the kind of discussion we would be engaging in, were we to penetrate to the second mode of discourse concerning historical texts. For the idea that a work, or text, can support more than one level of discourse, consider only literary fictional discussions where it is a commonplace. Thus audiences and critics can acknowledge, in one mode of discourse, that, say, Hamlet is just a character in Shakespeare’s play while, in another, they can ponder deeply his motives (as John Middleton Murray does in Shakespeare, 1948:235–70), as they might those of an actual person. Middleton Murray, for instance, discusses whether his fatal procrastination is due to cowardice, terror, or excessive reflection, or whether there is an ambiguity in him which makes it ultimately impossible to plumb his depths. A second example of this mode of discourse comes from V.S. Pritchett (The Living Novel, 1946). Writing about George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Adam Bede, he bids the reader look right past the author, and ‘see Rosamund (in Middlemarch) passing without conscience to love affairs with [Lydgate’s] friends’ (93), as we might witness the doings of a friend. He intimates that sometimes not even an act of attention is required on our part, for the dog, in Adam Bede, simply comes and ‘rests his head on our boot’ (85). Again, engaged in this level of discourse, we can quite legitimately, as Pritchett does, psycho-analyse Dorothea and Casaubon (in Middlemarch), as we might people we know, bringing to this examination concepts foreign to the author, such as that of Freud’s ego, and superego (89). We can declare ourselves ‘moved’ by characters that the author has made ‘unlikeable’. Sometimes it is the author whom Pritchett represents as ‘observing and savouring’ certain actions of her characters, as if they belonged, even for her, to actual acquaintances (94). She can even, suggests Pritchett, morally ‘fail’ her characters by her own shortcomings – for instance, her ‘Victorian high-mindedness’ (92), or her inability to ‘admit natural [sexual] passions in a virtuous character’, as she ‘fails’ Hetty in Adam Bede, and in ‘the lies [Eliot] told about [Adam and Dinah’s]’s marriage’ (83). The literary context provides us only with examples proper to that context, of the shift from the one level of discourse to the other, and we should expect such a shift to be of a quite different nature in the historical domain. At one level, history is replete with incident, and characters also, and many readers, will find it stimulating enough to enter into the past worlds and minds thereby opened up to them, wondering perhaps at how like they are to ours, or how different, without inquiring much into the question of how the historian came by these details, or the exact metaphysical status of his subject matter. That another level of discourse is available, and the kind of content it has, should be apparent from the previous chapter. It consists at least in part of a spelling out, or appreciation, of how the author of the given historical work has reached his conclusions on the basis of his evidence, at the same time as being responsive to the larger picture into which these conclusions must fit, if they are not finally to be discarded. But there are many other facets to conversation at this second level. One in particular is highly relevant here. It is a discussion of how historians, having constructed (or merely borrowed) a linear time-line can, using their narrative skills and artistry, give it depth, by playing upon the difference between

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(in Barthes’ words) the ‘time of uttering’ and the ‘time of the matter of utterance’. Carlyle, in Past and Present, we shall note, on one page, magnifies the distance between the two ‘times’, and then, on another, virtually eliminates it. Thus he remarks how ‘dim, as through a long vista of Seven Centuries . . . looks that monk-life’ (60), and again how difficult it is ‘to get across the chasm of Seven Centuries’, and he speaks of that ‘deepburied Time’. Elsewhere, however, he asks us to ‘peep direct into the bosom of the Twelfth Century’ (56). Then, we shall observe, the past itself, up close, becomes spacious – ‘cavernous’ to use Carlyle’s owns adjective – and we ‘hear the wild fowl scream in these ancient silences’ (37). These effects are still further amplified when Carlyle turns the tables on the readers, bidding them behold here ‘[ancient] eyes . . . regard[ing] you’ (105), so that eddying time suddenly, momentarily, seems to engulf them too, and with a frisson they appreciate their own transience. We need not naively suppose that real people from the past are pressing their faces up against the windows of history in order to meet the objection (made perhaps by a Dummettian anti-realist) that, if truth is ultimately a matter of evidence, this whole circuitous route through historical texts could be curtailed. Only if historians were merely those ‘dryasdust’ informants, whom Carlyle (62) derides as settling for a prosaic recital of dates and ‘dead’ evidence, could such an objection be even entertained, let alone endorsed. Our talk of the peculiar depth, and resonance, which historians are, according to our approach, capable of imparting to the past through their narratives, is reminiscent of another version of presentism, namely the ‘past-tensed’ presentism of Bigelow, and other realists. For them, the point of invoking ‘past-tensed’ properties is to preserve, despite the non-existence of the past, the irreducible past-directness of past-tensed statements. We applauded their aims. Indeed we described Bigelow with approval as a ‘deep’ presentist. We saw, however, that it was ultimately impossible to sustain their kind of view. On our approach, the requisite ‘depth’ can, we suggested, be achieved within a purely presentist framework, by substituting presently existing historical texts for the times of the ersatzists, and explaining the creation of depth as a feature of the text itself. In doing so, we jettisoned with regard to the past (though not the present) the realist methodology, and replaced it with, at least where history is concerned, a form of coherentism.

Conclusion There are many questions left unsolved and loose ends that it may not be possible to tie up. As we saw, in substituting historical texts for ersatz times we did not pretend, as the ersatzists do, to be able to account for every conceivable past-tensed claim, however trivial, having a determinate truth value. We argued, following Oakeshott and Collingwood, that the realist ideal of completeness is flawed. The historian is not the ideal chronicler, whom Danto rejected, and who will judge himself at the end of his task to have failed if he has not written down everything that has ever occurred. Ersatz presentism also aims to systematize and homogenize the past in a manner that we cannot match. It would be preposterous to suggest that my claims as to what I did yesterday, or last year, or about my mother’s early life, or my friend’s summer holiday in

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France, have no truth value since no historian has reached the relevant conclusions from evidence, or enshrined my, and my friends’ and relatives’ doings in a historical work. Nor did I even reach these conclusions myself on the basis of evidence – I am not a historian – but directly from memory and testimony. So the sources whereby the past is constituted for us seem heterogeneous, and we should not concentrate to the exclusion of all else upon the intellectual contribution of historians. Proust above all other writers shows that the ‘recovery’ of the past can be a matter of the physical senses (and that even though historians exclude these senses as an appropriate source of historical knowledge). In the preface to Contra Sainte-Beuve, written in 1909, Proust describes as the turning point in his life the moment when his servant, Celine, served him dry toast, the taste of which restored his childhood in Auteuil, and as Painter puts it foreshadowed ‘the whole vast structure of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu’. We saw at the beginning of our book that it is certainly also sometimes a matter of the emotions. Nevertheless I believe, and this is the thrust of my last chapter, that the historians’ contribution is by far the most influential and systematic. I am not convinced that the past of our memories would have its characteristic dimensionality – its apparent depth and spaciousness – if it were not in the first place for narrative historians. Moreover, there are some grounds – I wish to be cautious – for supposing, on the basis of work by anthropologists (see, for instance, Everett, 2008:132–4), that the absence of history in a culture, the failure to acknowledge any events for which there is no living witness, and a defective, by our standards, past tense – one which has no pluperfect – may be related. The price we have paid is no less than the sacrifice of the truth value link, which many presentists, for instance, the ersatzists, have sought – vainly we argued – to rescue. So important indeed did the truth value link seem to us at the outset of this book that we devoted the first two chapters to it. We have not therefore called the presentism of our final position radical without good cause.

Notes 1. The Realist/Anti-Realist Wars 1 2

3

4

5 6

7

8

9

Shakespeare, William: Antony and Cleopatra, Act 5, Scene 2. Confusedly, Jenkins holds, simultaneously with this radical view, to the far less radical view (1991:15) that the past exists, however obscurely, in its own right, being more than history, and something of which ‘historians can only recover fragments’. There is uncertainty about how far Dummett embraced the anti-realism about the past which he so powerfully argues for in ‘The Reality of the Past’. Green (2001:132) suggests that ‘he tended to remain agnostic . . . preferring simply to set down the strengths and weaknesses of realism and anti-realism about the past’. He sometimes described his working style in this way himself. Approaching issues in this open spirit of exploration, his attitude, even to anti-realism generally, naturally evolved over the years. Acknowledging this, however, does not seem to entail that his manifestly committed stance in the above paper was a mere debating position. Contemporary presentists seek, as assiduously as traditional realists, to identify the facts or properties, without which, for them, past-tensed statements could not be true. They differ only in that they represent the property of, say, having once been six years old, as belonging to me now – ‘the Child is father of the Man’, they might agree, if Wordsworth meant that the child I was only exists in relation to the adult I am. Likewise they represent the property of having had ten million years ago dinosaurs roaming over its surface, as belonging to the earth now. Traditional realists, by contrast, require that these properties exist in the past. There are admittedly some presentists who, unconvinced by their own strategy, and judging themselves unable to cite those properties that could ground such evident truths, feel obliged to relegate them to the status of pseudo-truths or even falsehoods. See Botros, Sophie (2006) for extended discussion of these issues. Dummett’s remark that the dispute between realists and anti-realists over ethics cannot be cast as one about the existence of a realm of entities is puzzling. Moral intuitionists posited the existence of non-natural, moral, properties, somehow inhering in the fabric of reality: a position opposed, among others, by emotivists. Dummett explains that nominalists (the anti-realists in this instance) were not, like him, ‘necessarily committed to a different view of the kind of truth possessed by statements containing general terms from that of the realists’, that is to say, one according to which the truth of a statement can only consist in the criteria used to justify it. More precisely (see Miller, 2003:490–1; 2006:985), a statement is said to be justifiable when either we have evidence for it, or know a procedure the correct implementation of which will, after finite many steps, put us in possession of that evidence. There is some doubt (see Loux, 2003:635) over whether Dummett wishes to reject the notion of truth as irrevocably realist, and replace it with an alternative analysis, or whether he holds that there is here ‘a single pre-philosophical notion’, with competing analyses I agree with Loux that Dummett’s considered view is more in line with the second reading. For a more sustained analysis, see D. Prawitz (1987:150–6).

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10 It is, moreover, difficult in light of this difference in the character of his project from that of traditionalists to hold him to account, as some have done, for failing to ‘do justice to the variety and richness of anti-realist/realist disputes’ (Hale, 1997:295). 11 For ‘statements about the physical world’ to count as ‘disputed’, I take it, Dummett must have in mind some philosophically contentious interpretation of them, such as that perhaps proposed by ‘indirect realists’ (see Jackson, 1977) who claim that we are only ever directly aware of our own sense data yet hold that, although the existence of physical things cannot be validly deduced from facts about these sense data, their existence can be inferred non-demonstratively. According to these theorists, even the above statements will have inaccessible truth conditions, and so will count from the perspective of the realist/anti-realist debate as problematic. 12 There seem to me to be two unclarities. First, what does Dummett hold to be the relation between these defining features of realism: are they logically related, or independent of each other and, whatever the answer, is he right? Secondly, if they are independent, what does Dummett take to be their order of priority in defining realism, and again is he right? Sometimes (1982:85) he speaks as though there were two propositions here, thus: ‘Realism requires us to hold both that, for statements of the given class, we have a notion of truth under which each statement is determinately either true or false, and also that an understanding of those statements consists in a knowledge of the conditions under which they are true.’ This remark, if I have understood it correctly, is apparently consistent with either bivalence or (potential) recognition transcendence being the more crucial test of realism. John McDowell (1976: and see Weiss, 2002:59) argues that not only may the notion of truth as (what he calls) ‘epistemically unconstrained’ be pulled apart from that of truth as bivalent, but that only the former is the decisive test of realism, since realists may plausibly reject a totally unrestricted bivalence. Dummett stresses, however (e.g. 1978:155) – almost as though the (potentially) recognition transcendent notion is merely subsumed – that ‘the acceptance of the law of excluded middle for statements of a given class [is] a crucial test for whether or not someone takes a realist view of statements of that class’. If his idea, as the context suggests, is that only when realists are forced to insist on bivalence where anti-realists would reject it (as when there is no evidence either for or against a statement), can the dispute between them get going, this does not seem correct. Recognition transcendence on its own can force such a confrontation because it allows for a potential contradiction between evidence (where there is some) and truth conditions. 13 Miller (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2014) ‘note[s] that the precise relationship between the characterization in terms of bivalence and in terms of potentially recognition transcendent truth is a delicate matter’, and does not essay the matter further. Although my intuitions grow foggy here I suggest that it might conceivably be argued that it does not follow from the fact (if it were one) that a statement may be true or false even if we can never verify it, that reality is such that every meaningful statement is determinately either true or false. 14 Again Dummett’s use of the term ‘reductive’ does not seem always clear or consistent. Sometimes (1982:71–2) he seems happy to apply it to those classes of statement which express the respective justificatory conditions for mathematical, past tensed and material object, statements where he stresses that there is an ‘overlap of vocabulary’. However, he does so only with the proviso that the adjective ‘reductive’ must be distinguished from the noun ‘reductionism’, the latter stronger notion, only being appropriate where there is a thorough-going elimination, or ‘translation’, of the

Notes

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16

17 18

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problematic terms, traditionally prompted by the denial that the entities to which the terms refer exist. It is presumably with this weaker sense of ‘reductive’ in mind that Weiss (2002:53) writes of Dummett’s ‘reduction of mathematical truth to provability’ (my italics). But Dummett sometimes seems to want to deny that such a weak thesis is even properly called ‘reductive’, saying that (1978:157) ‘there is no reductive class for mathematical statements’. We can make his remarks consistent if we take it that here, although he merely uses the term ‘reductive’ he has in mind fully fledged reductionism where the statement of the reductive class is intelligible independently of that in the disputed class. If this seems farfetched on grounds that courage can be called for even in the most trivial daily round, one might recall Charlotte Bronte’s Lucy Snowe in Villette. Had the circumstances not conspired to ‘goad, drive, sting, force’ her on to a more adventurous and dangerous path Lucy admits that she would have gladly ‘escaped occasional great agonies by submitting to a whole life of privation and small pains’ and so by implication, never have had occasion either to act or to fail to act courageously. It is worth noting that a consequence of the failure of bivalence is that it is impossible to formulate, on the Dummettian anti-realist side, any equivalent for a certain state of affairs on the realist side which, if one could describe it, would allow one to point up the contrast. For presentists, we can say, certain facts and properties existing in the present make a given past-tensed statement true (or false) independently of any knowledge that we might possess. But if, returning to the behaviourist analysis, we try to conceive of a parallel situation where, rather than the person (as in the scenario) never having occasion to behave courageously, she behaves courageously but – or so we try to say, still trying to hold on to his framework – no one knows about it, we just cannot do so: our position has already collapsed back into realism. It might be suggested that, although no one else knows about it, the agent herself does. But, then, even were we, bizarrely, to countenance an agent having to have evidence of her own behaviour, at the time that it was occurring, before she could properly consent at that time to the truth of the claim that she was so acting, it would no longer constitute the desired case since it would be true by Dummett’s own lights. (Perhaps a question could properly be raised by the agent as to whether her behaviour counted specifically as courageous, and maybe she could coherently ask for evidence of that.) See note 11 again for the qualification on the use of ‘disputed’ here. Though she is specifically discussing colour, see K. Green (2001:11): ‘Dummett . . . denies that we have, in the case of colour predicates, two clearly distinguishable classes of statement. Our ordinary use of colour vocabulary is inextricably bound up with a proto-theory of the behaviour of light and of the propensities of surfaces to look differently under different light conditions. We understand that there are different kinds of surface which react differently to light, and that much of this has to do with the reflection and absorption of light . . . the idea that perception is the result of the causal action of an object is part of common sense. So Dummett adopts a form of realism about colours, but wants to insist that this kind of debate rests on confusing reductionism with anti-realism.’ It can be objected that we are still speaking from a position of knowledge that it did rain that day, only hypothesizing that all the relevant evidence has since been erased. Consequently, it would seem even a Dummettian anti-realist would have to agree with realists that, although the statement is now unverifiable, it has a determinate truth value. As Bernard Weiss (2002:72) puts it, although illustrating the point differently, we are ‘envisaging a certain possibility from a position of knowledge, it does not speak to

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22

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24 25

26 27

28

Notes the crux of the difficulty, which concerns what we are entitled to assume in a position of ignorance’. Historical statements, whose triviality is such that it is hardly conceivable that we should ever turn up evidence either for or against them, e.g. ‘Magenta was Charlemagne’s favourite colour’ (Loux, 2002:269), ‘Julius Caesar sneezed fifteen times on his 19th birthday’ (Miller, 2003:491) alone seem to preserve ignorance. Housman, A.E., ‘When First My Way To Fair I Took’. Moving away from past-tensed statements, and those attributing psychological character, it has been suggested that the phenomenon of ‘vagueness’ in which people are reluctant to assert that a coloured patch is, say, red rather than brown, or a particular man is bald rather than not bald, should cause Dummett to hesitate before taking the endorsement of a wholly unrestricted bivalence as definitive of realism. Surely, it is pressed, the phenomenon cannot just be ignored, and since the attempt to explain this reluctance as due, not to the statements lacking a truth value, but to the truth value not being known, is, these objectors claim, unconvincing, even realists, cannot reasonably endorse a wholly unrestricted bivalence. See also Hale, (1997:274). He stresses that ‘correspondence’ here is still only a platitude, in his sense, and does not signify a ‘substantial’ notion of truth. That, he writes, would be ‘seriously dyadic’, and would depend on other local features of the given discourse. Truth as correspondence may be appropriate in the empirical domain, yet not in mathematics. Alluding to Wright’s view, see Terence Horgan (1996:894) ‘truth in any discourse is super-assertibility’ and Philip Pettit (ibid:887): ‘super-assertibility is always available to interpret the platitudes’. These issues are, it must be acknowledged, tricky and complicated; for an overview, one can do no better than turn to Bob Hale’s lucid, penetrating and invaluable ‘Realism and its Oppositions’ (1997). See Jim Edwards (1994:62). Wright proposes a second reply not canvassed by Dummett – double-indexing. I do not find it convincing, but the argumentation is convoluted, and would take up more space to reproduce, and critique, than can be apportioned here. See, however, Gallois, Andre (1997) and Weiss, Bernhard (1996). See his notes of 1935/6, quoted by David G. Stern (1991) in ‘Models of Memory: Wittgenstein and Cognitive Science’, Philosophical Psychology, pp. 203–18. See among others: Koriat, Asher and Goldsmith, Morris (1996), Of Memory, Reminiscence and Writing on the Verge, Bloomington, IN : Indiana University Press; Bernecker, Sven (2008), The Metaphysics of Memory, Berlin: Springer, chp.10. Dummett, (1982:109).

2. Projection, Analogy and Meaning 1 2 3 4

For an explicit statement of this reliance, see Dummett (1978:226). For a helpful survey of these alternative positions, see Loux (2003:637–9). See Dummett for a more detailed treatment of this issue (1978:217, 224) or Loux (2003:638). I shall not pause in the text to discuss Dummett’s so-called ‘manifestation’ and ‘acquisition’ arguments as this would be tangential to my treatment of the realists’ defence here. In any case, certain of the inadequacies and unclarities in Dummett’s rendering of the Wittgensteinian views on which these arguments are based, and which tend just to get reproduced in the voluminous and complicated literature, both realist and anti-realist, that has grown up around the arguments, will gradually emerge

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over the course of the present chapter. It is worth pointing out that, although orthodox, it is misleading to speak of two arguments here (among many examples of this orthodoxy, see Hale, 1997:275 and Loux, 2003:640–1, although Loux later suggests that the acquisition, may be supplementary to the manifestation, argument) and even more misleading to devote separate assessments to them, as does Miller (2006; 2003). The supposed ‘two’ arguments have in fact a single umbilical cord: Wittgenstein’s rejection of logically private mental content as unintelligible: the conclusion of his ‘private language argument’. In that powerful argument (1958:I, 257–70), he seeks to demonstrate that I cannot make a sign, S, mean some inner sensation of mine, merely by concentrating upon it in a private act of attention, and that ‘outward criteria’ are required (see below, note 11, for the full argument, also notes 12 and 13). He accordingly insists that the acquisition of language must necessarily take place in a public context, where our teachers can tell from our overt responses and actions whether we understand what they say, and a standard of correctness, absent in our purely private attempts to confer meaning, is thus established and communicated. ‘Let us remember’, he writes (1958, 1:269), ‘that there are certain criteria in a man’s behaviour for the fact that he does not understand a word, that it means nothing to him, [and again] criteria for his understanding the word right’. Dummett’s remarks specifically concerning manifestation seem curiously unsupported until we link them with these Wittgensteinian conclusions about the necessity of an interpersonal context for the acquisition of language, which themselves follow from the private language argument. Why should it be, for instance, unless the question is begged, that as Dummett writes (1978:216) ‘The meaning of a statement consists solely in its role as an instrument of communication between individuals’ and why exactly cannot ‘an individual . . . communicate what he cannot be observed to communicate’? It is clear that as long as one dwells exclusively on manifestation, in isolation from acquisition, the crucial explanatory shift will not take place from the idea of individuals communicating meanings they have already privately given to words via some inward act of concentration, to the logically prior issue of how in the first place they can make words mean anything at all privately. Someone may object: doesn’t Dummett link the two issues when he says (just before the remarks quoted) ‘The meaning of such a statement cannot be or contain as an ingredient anything which is not manifest in the use made of it, lying solely in the mind of the individual who apprehends the meaning’ (my italics)? Perhaps it is carelessly expressed but, as I read this remark, it still fails to convey explicitly Wittgenstein’s view that there can be no logically private apprehension of meaning. Rather, it suggests merely that such private meanings must be made public if communication is to succeed, and that this is where the impasse lies. This impression is reinforced by Dummett’s further claim that ‘If one individual associated with a mathematical symbol, or formula, some mental content, where the association did not lie in the use he made of the symbol or formula, then he could not convey the content by means of the symbol or formula for his audience would be unaware of the association and would have no means of becoming aware of it’. Here it seems that Dummett is allowing the possibility of a purely private association of symbols with mental content, maintaining only that such private meanings cannot be conveyed to an audience. This in turn has led commentators to speak, less of the unintelligibility (though Loux is an exception), than of ‘the incommunicability of purely private mental content’ (Raatikainen, 2010:3). As will be seen, in the text adjacent to this note I have expressed the anti-realist position briefly but with full Wittgensteinian force.

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Notes

See Loux (2003:652): ‘Dummett . . . suggests a strategy the realist might invoke in dealing with the problem [of the past]’, and also Wright (1987:87–8) who points out that having floated the idea in very broad terms, does not ‘further consider . . . [it]’. 6 The adverb ‘harmlessly’ is used twice by McDowell, and is surely indicative in this context of the way the realists, as portrayed here, bend over backwards to assuage their anti-realist opponents. 7 Whether McDowell is responsible for the analogy with mental states, is not entirely clear. Wright (1987:89) alludes to his having drawn attention to it, but suggests that ‘a kind of truth value link realism is implicit in that lay-philosophical conception of the content of ascriptions of sensation to others which Wittgenstein challenged in the Philosophical Investigations’ 8 Kirkham (1989:210) argues that it is unintelligible to talk of a statement being justified simpliciter on grounds that it must be justified as something or other, e.g. as, say, ‘fair and reasonable’. Loux (2003:651) mentions Vision’s point (1988) that what makes something ‘evidence’ for a statement is precisely that it points toward the statement’s possible truth – a concept that must then be understandable independently of that of evidence. Of course our objection here is not to the role which antirealists’ ascribe to justifiability in its relation to truth, however, that may be criticized, but to the idea of realists somehow condoning such a usage. 9 But McDowell curiously does not seem to appreciate, or if so he does not immediately register the implications of this for realists which we discuss below in the text. 10 Alluding to the analogy drawn by McDowell on behalf of truth value link realists between present tensed observational, and first person sensation, statements, as both constituting types of statement from which such projections are made to more problematic ones, Wright speaks of ‘circumstances of the appropriate kind’ being ‘wholly embraced within the language learner’s consciousness’ (1987:89), as though the two kinds of statement could be treated on a par. 11 See particularly, 1958 I:258 (as usual in the form of an exchange with his opponent): ‘Let us imagine the following case. I want to keep a diary about the recurrence of a certain sensation. To this end I associate it with the sign “S” and write the sign in a calendar for every day on which I have the sensation – I will remark first that a definition of the sign cannot be formulated – But still I can give myself a kind of ostensive definition – How? Can I point to the sensation? Not in the ordinary sense. But I speak or write down the sensation and at the same time I concentrate my attention on the sensation, and so, as it were point to it inwardly – But what is this ceremony for? For that is all it seems to be! A definition surely serves to establish the meaning of a sign – Well this is done precisely by concentrating of my attention for in this way I impress on myself the connexion between the sign and the sensation – But “I impress it upon myself ” can only mean: this process brings it about that I remember the connexion right in the future. But in the present case I have no criterion of correctness. One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And here that only means we can’t talk about “right”.’ 12 In discussing private language, Wittgenstein (1958) switches confusingly back and forth between concepts like ‘pain’ and colour concepts, such as red, blue, green. For instance, paragraph I:271 concerns pain, but I:273 is about ‘red’, while he returns to pain again in paragraph I:281. There are of course aspects to the learning of colour terms which, his opponents would agree, are absent as regards sensations. With the former, samples are available publicly and can be pointed out to the learner. But no similar samples are publicly available where pain is concerned, and so no ostensive

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definition is possible, unless in parody. Wittgenstein contrasts the two situations thus in paragraph I:275: Look at the blue of the sky and say to yourself “How blue the sky is!” – When you do it spontaneously . . . the idea never crosses your mind that this impression of colour belongs only to you – . . . And you have no hesitation in exclaiming that to someone else. And if you point at anything . . . you point at the sky. I’m saying: you have not the feeling of pointing-into-yourself, which often accompanies ‘naming the sensation’ when one is thinking about ‘private language’.

13

14 15

16

But at paragraph 1:276, he puts into the mouth of his interlocutor the following objection: ‘But don’t we at least mean something quite definite when we look at a colour and name our colour-impression? It is as if we detached the colour-impression from the object, like a membrane . . . [which belongs to me alone]’. Wittgenstein seems in the latter paragraph to be suggesting that, in the end, because his opponents assimilate colours to colour-impressions – essentially a form of mental image – which each individual can privately conjure up, and which constitute for him the meanings of relevant colour words, the private language argument applies as much here as with sensations. However, the fact that he puts the expression ‘private language’ in inverted commas when referring to it in the context of the learning of colour concepts suggests that he thinks its paradigmatic target concerns the learning of sensation terms, such as pain. Certainly his private language argument is most fully, and forcefully, expounded in the latter context. Wittgenstein argues that the private linguist will not know under what aspect he is calling his sample ‘green’. ‘Ask yourself,’ he writes (I:73) ‘what shape must the sample of the colour green be? Should it be rectangular? Or would it then be a sample of a green rectangle? So should it be irregular in shape? And what is to prevent us then regarding it . . . only as a sample of irregularity in shape?’ The classic statement of the Argument from Analogy for Other Minds is by Bertrand Russell (1948:501–5). There is a tendency for some writers on Dummett’s attack on realism to conflate – perhaps carelessly – the ideas of ‘inaccessibility’ and ‘undecidability’. However, while all past-tensed statements, on Dummett’s understanding of realism, have ‘inaccessible’ truth conditions, only some of these statements are ‘undecidable’ in that there is neither evidence for or against them. I have speculated whether the association of both ideas with a third, ‘undetectability’, has aided this confusion. There is not space to provide a treatment of those other defenders of realism – Anthony Appiah, Bob Hale Colin McGinn and others – who do not accept the Wittgensteinian assumptions. Hale (1997:279–80) maintains against Dummett’s anti-realists that we learn the meanings of very few sentences ‘at the coal face’, by direct contact, one by one, with the circumstances that are their truth conditions. More usually we do so by learning (Loux, 2003:650) those ‘modes of composition or combination’ for sentences which then enable us to tie together the various constituent elements, whose meaning we have independently acquired. Colin McGinn (1980:33) does not deny that the mastery of language is a dispositional capacity. He does deny that realist truth conditions can be exhaustively manifested in, or reduced to, ‘dispositions to respond to evidential promptings’, and offers in their place a ‘set of interrelated dispositions to interpret the speech of others . . . and to produce speech of one’s own according to a correct theory of sense and force for the language’. Appiah

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(1986:80), also with reference to the manifestation argument, suggests that speakers can be held to understand the statement, say, that it rained on the earth one million years ago just in so far as ‘they use “rain” properly in sentences about present rain, that they can count to a million, know how long a year is, and display a grasp of the past tense in relation to the recent past’. However, this seems to beg the very issue that the truth value link realists sought to explain by way of their projection strategy, namely how using ‘rain’ correctly merely in sentences about present rain can ensure that one understands the past-tensed statement that e.g. ‘it rained on the earth one million years ago’. 17 McGinn observes (1980:36–7) that Dummett ‘places the theory of meaning in a position prior to metaphysics. We are to come at traditional metaphysical questions concerning realism and anti-realism by asking what notion of truth can give an adequate account of linguistic use; metaphysical disputes about whether a given class of sentences admits of a realist interpretation turn into a general question as to the relation between meaning and use’. But his is, I would suggest, by no means so uncompromising a rejection of metaphysics as Wittgenstein’s, if only because Dummett allows a question, such as whether the past exists or does not exist, to have both sense and point, which Wittgenstein would have denied. Admittedly Dummett understands it as asking whether the past exists, or does not exist, independently of our methods of verification, but even this would have been a step too far for Wittgenstein. 18 I have not considered here what we might call the ‘sliding forward’ option.

3. Tense Theory 1 2

3

4 5

I use ‘tense theory’ to refer quite generally to theories about time, irrespective of whether they are ‘tensed’ ones, in affirming time’s reality or ‘tenseless’ in denying it. Sider does not dispense with ‘spacetime worms’. Not only does he declare (1996:433) that ‘at one level’ he ‘believes in’ them, although he cautions that they are not ‘typically what we call persons, [candles etc]’, he also appeals to them to offset certain unpalatable consequences of stage theory (see below in text, and also note 3). He proposes in fact what he calls ‘a partial retreat’ (1996:448), explaining that, although in the course of unreflective, everyday life, we treat the single short-lived stage as the person, philosophers, adopting the ‘tenseless perspective’, may substitute the spacetime worm and in this way avoid the proliferation of persons. He thereby, however, risks what he had earlier advertised as an important advantage of stage theory, namely that it allows us to salvage the seeming common sense intuition that the spatio-temporal coincidence of two or more objects is impossible. It would therefore have provided an effective response to David Wiggins’ contention, using his statue and lump of bronze example, that Leibniz’s Principle of the Indiscernibility of Identicals forces us to repudiate this intuition. (See chapter 4 below for more on Wiggins’ argument.) While ordinary material objects – distinct person stages, candle-stages and so on – never coincide, spatio-temporal worms sometimes do. We shall have much more to say later in the book about Lewis’s modal realism. Larger methodological questions hover, as both Sider and Haslanger intimate, concerning what ought to be the constraints on such an inquiry. If, in order to avoid the contradictions that our commonsense intuitions evidently lead to here, an account is offered of say, a candle altering shape, which differs radically from anything we would ordinarily mean by stating that this change has occurred, is this innovation

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justified by the fact that the statement, cleared of contradiction, can now be made to come out ‘true’, or ‘quasi-true’? Haslanger (2003:326–7, 335–6) suggests that perhaps we should look to our considered judgements concerning ontology – judgements into which there has already been a philosophical input – rather than to our philosophically untutored intuitions, as arbiters. But how can we be sure that these judgements – no matter how incontrovertible they seem at the time – are not really expressions of current philosophical fashion which will have been rejected within a decade or so, and which for this very reason ought to be tempered by ordinary intuition? There is a related issue: whether it is legitimate to deal with our hesitancy about going along with highly counter-intuitive analyses of temporal properties, such as Sider’s, by asking ourselves, as he bids us do (1996:447), ‘what looks best from the perspective of a global cost-benefit analysis, free to employ non-standard analysis of temporal predication’. Lewis called this perspective, which introduces into philosophical argument the rather base-sounding notion of ‘trade-offs’ – and which, in my opinion, should be entertained cautiously, even sceptically – the perspective of ‘total theory’. A quick note, or reminder about terminology. ‘Eternalism’ is, as we have seen, the view that past and future objects exist, as well as present ones. ‘Four dimensionalism’ is sometimes reserved for the view that objects have temporal, as well as spatial parts. Thus Sider states (1996:433) ‘The metaphysical view shared by [the] ‘stage view’ and the ‘worm view’ may be called ‘four dimensionalism’ and may be stated roughly as the doctrine that temporally extended things divide into temporal parts’ I suggest that Haslanger (2003:315–16) is confronting the difficulty of doing exactly this when she writes: Suppose I put a new 7-inch taper on the table before dinner, and light it. At the end of dinner when I blow it out, it is only 5 inches long. We know that a single object cannot have incompatible properties, and being 7 inches long and being 5 inches long are incompatible . . . But of course the candle didn’t shrink instantaneously from 7 inches long to 5 inches long: during the soup course it was 6.5 inches long; during the main course it was 6 inches long; during dessert it was 5.5 inches long . . .

8

See also Michael J. Rea (2000:255–6), who, in arguing that ‘the supposition that intrinsic change occurs involves a contradiction’, does not mention Leibniz, but again relies on the tenseless copula thus: Philip is drunk in the evening, sober the next morning. In order to understand this scenario as a case involving genuine change, we need somehow to be able to say that one and the same person is drunk in the evening and sober in the morning. But there is prima facie reason for thinking that we can’t say this. Let the name ‘Philip-drunk’ refer to Philip when he is drunk; let the name ‘Philip-sober’ refer to Philip when he is sober. We then have: (1) Philip-drunk is drunk (2) Philip-sober is sober. But ‘Philip-drunk’ and ‘Philip-sober’ are supposed to be just alternative names for Philip; and, indeed, it appears that, in order for Philip to have changed, it would have to be the case that Philip-drunk=Philip-sober = Philip. Thus it apparently follows that (3) Philip is both drunk and sober.

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Notes But (obviously) being drunk and being sober are mutually incompatible properties. The problem of temporary intrinsics is generated by the following tacit assumption: (A) For any x and y, if x is, was, or will be y, then x is y’.

9

10 11 12

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This Principle, which is typically regarded as uncontroversial, is due to Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716). It is sometimes given as ‘If two things are identical they share all properties’, and formalized thus: x=y→(∀F)(Fx↔Fy). Sider (2000:82) states that ‘changing things contravene [this principle] by instantiating incompatible properties’. But I am not sure that that gets it quite right. Suppose x is per impossibile both red and green: somehow it has incompatible properties. Leibniz’s Principle says that if x=y, then y must have all the properties that x has. All that is required is that y not differ in any of its properties from x. Surely then here the Principle would be satisfied just provided that y is also both red and green (no matter that these are incompatible). Of course I am not saying that Leibniz licenses something’s having incompatible properties, only that this Principle has a different remit. On another issue, this Principle – that of the Indiscernibility of Identicals – is often taken together with another Principle, namely the Principle of the Identity of indiscernibles – If two things share all properties they are identical – formally (∀F)(Fx↔Fy)→ x=y as Leibniz’s Law. The latter Principle is unlike the former highly controversial. In what follows, I shall follow David Wiggins (and Sider) in referring to just the first of these Principles as Leibniz’s Law, even though this is frowned upon by some, see Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy in its article on Leibniz, whose author wishes to use the nomenclature to cover both Principles. Obviously the two questions cannot really be teased apart. I shall later introduce a presentist proposal of my own which will differ in radical ways from the standard account, but this clarification will suffice thus far. Dummett may protest that this is somewhat unfair in that he wishes, as we saw, in rejecting a merely crude verificationism, to acknowledge that our memories are always of the past – an idea which cannot, he stresses, be eliminated in offering relevant justificatory conditions for past-tensed statements. The picture – which smacks more of folklore or creation myth than science or philosophy – is of the universe starting out as a single slice with, as time passes, more slices being progressively added to form a block There is a constant procession of events from the edge of the block – a kind of ‘hyperplane’ – where they were present, to become part of the objective past. See Forrest (2004), Braddon-Mitchell (2004). Our decision to use the equivalences, originally posited by Smart as holding between tensed and tenseless language, for our comparison with the equivalences underwritten by the truth value link, may seem to need explanation, since Smart’s early theory is generally regarded as superceded by the ‘new tenseless theory of time’. Smart’s account is clear, simple and internally consistent, whereas the same cannot be said for the later theory. Quentin Smith (1987:374) alleges that, as expounded by its author, D.H. Mellor (1981), it is ‘self-contradictory’. L. Nathan Oaklander (1991:28) admits the appearance of contradiction, and the lack of clarity, but seeks to downplay the first by distinguishing sentence tokens from types. Defenders of the theory, again, interpret it in divergent and conflicting ways. Some (e.g. Le Poidevin, 1998:28) take it to hold that, while the meaning of a tensed statement cannot be rendered tenselessly, its truth conditions can be, with the implication that tenseless truth conditions cannot give the statement meaning. Others, quite contrarily, maintain that, while the tensed statement cannot be translated into a tenseless one, or possess the same meaning as the tenseless

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ones which represent its truth conditions, these tenseless truth conditions can furnish the tensed statement with meaning. These conflicting interpretations affect what the aims of the theory are taken to be. According to the former, the theory would permit some genuinely transient temporal properties. According to the latter, the theory, although conceding that tensed statements cannot have tenseless translations, would countenance no such properties. The theory, on this interpretation, would seem more of a cosmetic operation, with the underlying situation being what it was with the ‘old’ theory, the aim being to ensure that (in Oaklander’s phrase) ‘time is timeless’. In view of these considerations, I prefer to use Smart’s more perspicuous, forthright, account. 15 See Robin Le Poidevin’s discussion (1998: particularly 28–36). But it might seem that to speak of a ‘tensed token reflexive analysis’ is confused, given that token reflexivity was introduced expressly as a method of erasing tense. 16 Note, however, Dummett’s qualification of this description.

4. Caught in a Timeless Leibnizian Net 1 2

3

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Compare Wiggins (2004:31, note 13) ‘An event does not persist in the way in which a continuant does – that is through time, gaining and losing new parts.’ Again compare Wiggins (ibid.3) ‘This emphasis on the practical does not mean . . . that, for the benefit of his deluded subjects, the theorist is to find a way to see a world that might as well be one of pure flux in which nothing really persists through change as if that world offered us objects that persist through change’ (my italics). I here consulted in particular Duffy, Michael (2004) ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’: A Modern Masterpiece’, section entitled: ‘Ask the Conservator’, published by the Museum of Modern Art on their Official Web-Site. Ruskin, for instance, remarked of Turner’s watercolours that they were never as good when a month old as when they were originally painted. This is an extreme view, if serious, and Ruskin did not conclude from it, as no sane person would, that the month old watercolour was no longer properly the same work of art. Wiggins speculates as to whether in the special case something approximating to ‘a Scotist theory of individual natures’ holds, he writes (136): The instantiators of the thing-kind would have to be like this: to understand what this one or that one is, to understand what it is and which one it is, would be to understand countless particular details as so central to the instantiator’s identity that . . . its existence depends on virtually all of them . . . Particular objects of this thing-kind being essentially conceived so particularly, could scarcely be envisaged at all as lacking very many of the particular properties thus designated as theirs.

6 7

For a useful introduction to physical chemistry, see Atkins, Peter (2014), Physical Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford. It is worthwhile noting that, according to Hide Ishiguro (1972:17–18), Leibniz’s Law, as usually understood, from Frege to Quine – if A and B are identical then everything that is true of A is true of B – is not one that Leibniz himself ever expressed. He did express a related principle which she calls the salve veritate principle, namely ‘those terms of which one can be substituted for the other without affecting truth are

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identical’: Eadem sunt, quorum unum alteri substitui potest salva veritate . . .’ (Couturat, OFI p.259). On another issue, while we have taken the claim that a thing is identical with itself to be absolutely fundamental, there have been dissenting voices. Hume’s attitude to it is well known, but less well known is Wittgenstein’s who dismisses it thus, in the Philosophical Investigations I:216: ‘ “A thing is identical with itself ” – There is no finer example of a useless proposition, which yet is connected with a certain play of imagination. It is as if in imagination we put a thing into its own shape and saw that it fitted’. 8 Haslanger (2003:330–1) goes on to suggest how it may be possible to give an account of intrinsic properties which does not entail that they are all monadic. On the other hand this turns out to be something of a self-defeating, or short-sighted, manoeuvre, given that she immediately expresses doubt as to whether those that are relational, viz to times, could be thought to change at all. Observing that they precisely do not change in themselves, she asks sceptically ‘Does the fact that I am both taller than my son and shorter than my father indicate any sense in which I’ve changed?’ 9 My loose variation on an example of Wiggins, discussed further below. 10 I have adapted this argument from a common one to be found in the literature. 11 This is only provided that the things in question belong to different basic or individuative kinds. 12 There has grown up a huge literature around Wiggins’ argument for the claim that two entities of different types can co-exist in the same place at the same time. Those who oppose the claim – the ‘monists’ – may be either ‘extreme’ or ‘moderate’. According to the latter, in a scenario (I quote Harold Noonan, 2013 himself a moderate monist) in which ‘God creates ex nihilo (at t1) a bronze statue and later (at t10) annihilates it, destroying both statue and bronze of which it is composed’, the statue and piece of bronze are, contra Wiggins, identical. It is only if God radically reshapes the bronze, so that the statue ceases to exist while the piece of bronze survives that, despite their ‘same origin temporary co-incidence’, there are two things. Defenders of Wiggins’ position – the ‘pluralists’ – include Kit Fine, who has developed ‘new Leibniz Law arguments’ for the pluralist position. Although the detail of these exchanges need not concern us here, their main thrust is as follows. The ‘monists’ who, as Noonan observes (2013:105), are fundamentally committed to supervenience, to the intuition that ‘there cannot be two purely material objects which, in all actual, relational and nonrelational, past, present and future respects are microphysically indistinguishable’, seek to show that the apparent differences in properties is a ‘linguistic illusion’, due to a difference in the way the single object is described. They complain that pluralists assume, in pointing to a contradiction between, say, (1) ‘The statue is badly made’ and (2) ‘The lump of alloy is not badly made’, that the predicate ‘badly made’ has the same meaning across the two sentential contexts, when in fact these contexts are opaque, and involve a ‘predicational’ (if not a ‘referential’) ‘shift’. In accordance with this opacity, the monists suggest a reinterpretation of (1) and (2) along the following lines. (1) the statue is badly made by aesthetic standards – the standards by which one judges statues and (2) the lump of alloy is badly made by material standards, or as a piece of alloy. More generally, the referent of the subject term is held to be ‘badly made’, ‘relative to the respect it invokes’, namely the respect suggested by the subject term, be this ‘statue’ or ‘piece of alloy’. Noonan (1991) has coined the term ‘Abelardian’ to describe such predicates. Fine (2003) who, although a pluralist, explores his opponents’ position in great and subtle depth, including making the above suggestions on their behalf, goes on, however, to show how the upholding of opacity in the contexts stipulated puts an

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intolerable strain on the functioning of language. Some (see Bryan Frances, 2006) have replied that it is not necessary to show that the relevant sentential contexts are opaque. To someone who claims that the statue is aesthetically valuable, but the lump of bronze is not, it can be replied, say these writers, that this special lump of bronze is aesthetically valuable, while consistently holding that almost all other lumps of bronze are not. 13 It is worth noting that D. Robinson (1985:315) observes that identity is not a tensed relation, and refers to Lewis’s claim that ‘tensed identity is not a kind of identity’.

5. Presentism and Modality 1

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The key exponent of the neo-Humean view is David Lewis, who states (1986 ix): ‘ “Humean Supervenience” is named in honour of that great denier of necessary connections. It is the doctrine that all there is to the world is a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact just one little thing then another’ – on which everything else, if it needs adding, supervenes. Thus according to Lewis, if ‘there possibly, or might, exist pink swans’ is true, there really do exist, quite concretely, such swans, and they really do have the property of being pink, in at least one possible, non-actual, world, even though, since that world is spatially and temporally isolated from ours, we shall never have causal acquaintance with them (see note 8 below). Sider (2003:5–6) is illuminatingly restrained in his preliminary general remarks here about modal reductionism (and by implication about tense reduction). Listing some of the common reasons adduced in favour of this stance, he also comments on how ‘easy it is to get into a frame of mind . . . not unlike Hume’s [over] causality’ which refuses to take modal (or tensed) notions as ‘rock bottom’. He gives the impression that the reductionist stance is something perhaps more ‘given way to’ than always the result of argument. Not only this, but he states that primitivism – ‘the view that modality is unanalysable – is ‘an important and legitimate alternative to reductionism’. There seems to be at least a hint here that perhaps the Humean ‘mind-set’, which is almost the default mind-set, for so many writers in this area today, might profitably be reassessed. This line of thought may prompt a related question, namely whether, if one adheres to the irreducibility of modal, or temporal, notions – of so-called ‘hypothetical’ properties’, for instance – one may permissibly include them, even admitting that Hume would not approve, in the supervenience base. Clearly the presentist, Bigelow, thinks that this is permissible. Moreover, this eclecticism is entertained by Thomas Crisp (2007:125), an ersatz presentist, who, having noted the lack of argument for dismissing hypothetical properties as disreputable, states that it will not do just to insist that ‘we can just see that . . . these properties are inappropriate ontological posits’, adding ‘Every ontology has its primitives: ontologies that postulate e.g. primitive tense, are not so far any worse off than other ontologies’. Perhaps one’s answer will depend on whether, like Lewis, one construes the supervenience base in exclusively materialist, or physicalist, terms, which would seem to exclude such phenomena as properties which ‘point beyond themselves’. On the other hand, such a ‘Humean’ supervenience base, even if ultimately constituted by Lewis’s ‘local matters of particular fact’, merely contingently connected, would veer sharply away from anything recognizable by Hume himself, whose ‘fundamental properties’ were not ‘out there’, but (as has been succinctly put) ‘kinds of impression instantiated in the sensorium’. Despite Sider’s and

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Notes Crisp’s caution, both nevertheless go on to maintain that unreduced hypothetical properties must be rejected: indeed this is the substance of the objection to pasttensed properties which we discuss at some length below in the text. I do not think ‘actual’ is the correct adjective here since, in so far as ‘the state of the world’ Rhoda speaks of is itself a representation, a proposition or set of propositions, it is already actual. I have therefore in order to endorse his claim indicated that ‘actualized’ would be preferable. I have avoided so far in this book alluding to John Ellis McTaggart’s famous, and currently much cited, argument (in ‘The Unreality of Time’, 1908) to demonstrate the unreality of time. I have found it confusing and unhelpful, and I believe that everything that needs to be said can be said without invoking his cumbersome ‘A-series’, ‘B-series’ and ‘C-series’. I slightly relent here since Crisp describes his own ersatz series of times, which stand to each other in an ersatz ‘earlier than’, or ‘later than’. relation, and which therefore mimic the eternalists’ sequence of times, as an ‘ersatz B-series’. Moreover, this is entirely in keeping with current orthodoxy in discussions of time and tense, where reference is made to the ‘B-series’, just as it stands, and often without any explanatory reference to McTaggart’s argument. I offer, however, this brief explication. McTaggart holds that time, as it really is, contains only the distinctions of the B-series, which is a series of unchanging temporal positions, ordered by the transitive, asymmetrical relation ‘earlier than’ or ‘later than’. The ‘A-series’ is a series of times which, by contrast, do change: what is now present, was once future and will be past. Obviously the B-series is recognizable in our terms as a ‘tenseless’ series, while the A-series as a ‘tensed’ one. Consider in this regard Collingwood’s remark (PHW:203) that: ‘for any event whatever falls not at a time but in a time: there is a time which it takes, and at an instant there are no events’. The subtle contrast between these two types of analysis is helpfully brought out by Fabrizio Mondatori and Adam Morton (1979:236). Discussing dispositional statements, they write that ‘when . . . [these statements] are true . . . [they] are true by virtue of actual facts about actual individuals; their truth is not determined . . . by facts about any exotic metaphysical apparatus [viz. Lewis’s possible worlds]’. Although they cite Lewis himself as stressing, in some of his remarks, the reliance of such statements on these actual facts, they complain, in a footnote, that nevertheless ‘Lewis has developed a model for the metaphysics we dislike. [For] he claims [in ‘Anselm and actuality’, 1970] that ‘insofar as we understand modal reasoning at all, we understand it as disguised reasoning about possible beings’. Mondatori and Morton themselves, shunning Lewisian modal realism offer, nonetheless, a realist analysis of modal statements, but a highly unusual one in which they claim that modal statements are in some sense irreducible, yet also about actual facts. Lewis (1986:108–15) agrees that since other possible worlds, and their denizens, are spatio-temporally isolated from our actual world, we can never have causal contact with them. But the objection will be raised: but these worlds are concrete, and their denizens ‘flesh and blood’, and hence knowledge of them requires such contact, so how can we have any knowledge of them at all? Lewis’s reply, which he describes as a mere ‘defensive operation’, is to suggest that the objectors are misled by a false analogy: that non-actual worlds are like remote or hidden parts of our actual world. But this, if it is at all persuasive, only raises the question: how do we know about them? He suggests that modal knowledge is, among other things, ‘a consequence of the principles of recombination’ and does not have to rely on causal acquaintance with particular

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objects any more than does mathematical knowledge, which also depends on reasoning from general principles. But one senses that Lewis himself, who says he will be content with a ‘stand-off ’, is, surely justifiably, not entirely satisfied with this as an explanation of how we acquire the requisite knowledge of what are after all, on his analysis, fully concrete worlds. 9 Dispositional properties have traditionally, as we note in the text, been defined in terms of their intimate relation with subjunctive conditionals, resulting in the well-known conditional analysis: glass is fragile if, were it to be dropped, it would break. Categorical properties, on the other hand have been held to bear no such special relation to subjunctive conditionals. They are, it is often said, about actual, not counterfactual, behaviour. But counter-examples have been cited in respect of both accounts. Thus (Martin, 1994:1–8) has pointed out that some dispositions are ‘finkish’ in that conditions for an object’s acquiring, or losing, dispositions might be the same as the disposition’s stimulus conditions. Thus consider an electric wire which is live in that if touched by a conductor it will conduct electricity. Now imagine a dead wire being connected to an electric fink, a device which senses when the wire is about to be touched by a conductor, and at that precise moment invariably renders the wire live. But then, being dead, its ‘liveness’ is due, not to anything intrinsic to its own constitution, but purely to the device. We might again imagine the device also operating a reverse cycle, so that it removes the property of being live from a naturally live wire just when, and only when, it is touched by a conductor. Counter-examples to the view that categorical properties do not entail subjunctive conditionals have been offered by Hugh Mellor (1974) with his claim that it can be said of something with the categorical property of triangularity that were its corners correctly counted, the result would be three. Many ways have been suggested of getting round Martin’s counterexamples, such as requiring that the hypothetical property be intrinsic and not merely extrinsic, or adding the somewhat vague proviso ‘if [the object] were to retain the property for a sufficient time’, none of which are entirely trouble free. Mellor’s contention has been challenged, by among other strategies, envisaging a reverse fink such that a sorcerer could change the shape of the triangular object just when it was about to be counted. Again the replies here are also contentious. 10 Williams remarks that there is no wonder that what scientists appear to have discovered are dispositions, since there is no way of investigating fundamental sub-atomic particles except through their dispositions. But it does not follow that they possess no categorical properties on which these dispositions supervene. 11 Perhaps, however, this is more true of dispositions in particular than of certain other modal notions. In this respect, consider Mondatori and Morton’s (1979:248) observation that what they call ‘modal properties’, where they somewhat artificially restrict this expression to such attributions as ‘being a possible [x, e.g.] winner of the Petropolis Interzonal’ depend in a much more complicated way on the presence, or absence, of physical properties and conditions of actual objects than do ordinary dispositional properties. Thus, they go on, ‘What is responsible for the fact that one person might win a chess tournament can be very different from what is responsible for another person’s being able to win. Ljubojevic might have won because of his sparkling imagination, while Portische might have won because of his prudence and meticulousness . . . yet if we say of each person that he might have won we are in a clear sense saying the same thing of each of them, and thus, in a somewhat less clear sense, ascribing the same property to each of them’.

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6. Collingwood and Oakeshott: Is History Possible? 1

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Mindarus was a Spartan admiral who commanded the Peloponnesian fleet in 411 and 410 BC during the Peloponnesian War. He was eventually defeated at the Battle of Cyzicus. His name was immortalized in this dispatch, intercepted by the Athenians, from Spartan survivors. It is considered an outstanding example of Laconic concision. See also Simon Hornblower, 1997, A Commentary on Thucydides Volume 1: Books i–iii: 23, 32. In light of the problems raised in chapter 1 for realists concerning unstable memory as a source of knowledge about the past, the possibility might be explored of on-the-spot testimony by eyewitnesses, fulfilling this function, supposing it could be recorded and collated, as well as trusted. But it is unclear that it can ever be more than a source of direct, in the sense of non-inferential, knowledge which thus falls short of entailing anything like the direct access associated with perception, and which the witness herself enjoys. Being past for the person who later reads the testimony, the event is gone. If it is gone, it is impossible to establish that it is, has remained, correspondent with the report. The only alternative – unacceptable to realists – is that the report is guarantor of its own truth. The requirement of trust on the part of the recipient of testimony if it is to count as direct knowledge, even in the minimal non-inferential sense, also raises difficulties in the context of history. Thucydides prided himself on the fact that he accepted nothing at face value but only what he could be certain of by inference from relevant premises. The idea that the historical context might be among those specialized cases where trust is in order requires a historical methodology in which primary sources are elevated to the status of unassailable authorities – and so just to be trusted – something unacceptable certainly to both Collingwood and Oakeshott. The general distinction here appears in many well-known and overlapping guises. It is the distinction between ‘knowledge and reality’, between ‘consciousness and the world’, or yet again between ‘subject, or knowing subject, and object’. Accordingly the idealists criticize the realist historian’s view of what it is to undertake a new inquiry as one in which the historian is thought of as coming out of a sort of intellectual retirement, or hibernation, in which his mind has become quite blank of historical ideas. He selects as it were ‘cold’ a new problem from a (for both Collingwood and Oakeshott mythical) ‘totality of historical problems’, and to which he brings a mind ‘virgin to every suggestion of evidence’. In Collingwood’s metaphor (1999:230), it is as if he has suddenly to run from a starting position rather than approaching his task already running. Nor should this be understood in a way that a realist – at least a pessimistic one – could accept. Such a realist could grant that where the ‘facts’ referred to are past events, since they are gone, and the historian cannot therefore experience them directly, all he can do indeed is make judgements about them. But the term ‘fact’ is ambiguous in that it can refer either to the past event ‘out there’, or to the judgement made about it, and the realist understands it in the latter way. He will clarify: obviously past events themselves aren’t judgements, that would be nonsensical. But the idealists really do mean, in sharp contrast, that past events themselves are judgements, and not that such judgements are merely about these events. The pessimistic realist will in any case draw the line even at the claim, disambiguated to suit him, that the ‘facts’ are judgements if these ‘facts’ are taken to include the evidence itself which is the basis for the inferences about past events. He will object: such evidence is ‘hard’ precisely

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because, in sharp contrast to what is past, it is present, and so directly available to perception, and not a matter of judgement. However, both Collingwood and Oakeshott repeatedly stress that they do include under the rubric of ‘the facts’ that are ‘made’, or ‘achieved’, historical evidence itself. 6 Oakeshott, taking this debased conception to be embodied in Bury’s remark about Gibbon that ‘while he put things in the light demanded by his thesis . . .[he] related his facts accurately’, dismisses the remark accordingly. 7 It is worth noticing that this reading acknowledges the timeliness of Collingwood’s work in the 1930s, as a response to the powerful positivistic developments, associated with Russell and Ayer, then taking place in philosophy. Whether this argues in favour of the interpretation depends on whether it is thought that Collingwood was essentially a creature of his times or (as I think) could look beyond them. 8 Oakeshott himself, being a thorough-going idealist, and author of the phrase ‘fixed and finished’, is in no doubt about the absurdity of the realists’ view of the past, which he describes (in full, EM 106) as of ‘a complete and virgin world stretched out behind the present, fixed, finished and awaiting only discovery’ and again (146) as ‘an extension of our present world, a newly discovered tract in experience’ (111). With this picture in mind, the realist historian may thus think (106) that even ‘if he slips, the past does not fall’. 9 Could breaking the relation be defended by claiming, in repudiation of our remarks above, that actually Collingwood holds that (D’Oro, 2000:100) ‘the distinction between present and past is irrelevant to thought’. Surely not. For while Collingwood would agree that this distinction is irrelevant to the object of thought, he precisely denies that that (the object of thought) is the subject-matter of history. Only the past act of thought has this status. D’Oro’s claim ignores such remarks, as that the re-enacted thought is ‘a past thought living in the present’ (Autobiography:113), and that ‘the re-enactment of the past in the present is the past itself’ (his italics, unpublished manuscript, 1928, Saari, 1989:80). 10 ‘When we demand whether anything be the same or no, it refers always to something that existed at such a time in such a place, which it was certain at that instant was the same with itself and no other’. 11 It is admittedly not always easy to apply in practice the extreme thesis, now being attributed to him since, faced with an actual historical example, a certain fogginess tends to intervene, and this extreme thesis gradually but irresistibly slips back, in our minds. into the innocuous one. But this can be explained. It is hard, given that Collingwood uses the terms ‘act of thought’ and ‘thought’ interchangeably, to keep the (somewhat contrived) idea of an ‘act of thought’ distinct, as he requires, from ‘object of thought’. It is perhaps especially difficult because the act of thought, for Collingwood, gets its identity precisely from its object, even though that identity, unlike the identity of its object, has a significance at the numerical level. It is consequently tempting to apply, straightforwardly, the empirical criterion to determine number of performances, and the conceptual criterion to determine the qualitative identity of the act of thought, as though the latter were no more mired in time than its object. 12 Suppose it is objected that it is possible to say that there are two headaches here that happen to share certain features. Our reply must be a question. Are you intimating that it is not possible to say that the person in Collingwood’s example, who begins to think again, after two seconds in which he has been thinking of something else, that the angles are equal, is performing two acts of thought, with the same content? If it is retorted: ah yes but you admitted that you had to tweak Collingwood’s example to

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14 15 16

Notes make this talk acceptable, we must ask whether some kind of tweaking must not go on in the headache case also. Despite his failure to close the realists’ gap between past and present, and even when he is propounding idealist principles inconsistent with the realist stance, Collingwood never entirely relinquishes the latter stance. Thus, although he cedes an important place to the mind of the historian, he continues to resist granting it, as do idealists, a theoretically bedrock status. Far from claiming, as does Oakeshott (EM:93–4), that ‘there is no history independent of [the historian’s] experience’, he continues to acknowledge, as we saw, two performances, or enactments, of one single act of thought. ‘That act of thought,’ he writes (IH:303), is enacted ‘at different times and in different persons: once in the historian’s own life, once in the life of the person whose history he is narrating’. In such remarks, then, he acknowledges the existence of times, other than, and independent of, the present, and makes reference to the thought of persons, other than the historian’s. Not only this, but he holds on to his distinction between historical and natural, change, with the latter remaining as a residue of dead past, beyond the historian’s powers to resurrect. For Oakeshott, on the other hand (EM:143) there is no such giveaway ‘slack’, nothing that could fall outside the historian’s ken in a kind of no-man’s land. It is his commitment to this fully fledged, coherent idealism which recommends Oakeshott’s version as the one which, in its large essentials, we shall take forward. Collingwood (EPH:100). ‘Evidence’ says Collingwood (PH:220) ‘becomes evidence only in so far as it is interpreted’. Collingwood (EPH:100). However, the issue is controversial. C. A. Coady (1992:244–5), a realist, holds that there can be material (he is not sure, and changes his mind, as to whether it should be called ‘evidence’) relevant to solving a historical problem, even in the absence of any hypothesis. He suggests that treating ‘the notion of evidence . . . as inquiry-relative [so that] . . . there would simply be no evidence, [say] that Smith [had] lived in Dugong Avenue, unless someone had raised, directly or indirectly a question about where Smith [had] lived’, is misguided. ‘[Let us suppose], he continues, that there already were [prior to the raising of the question] sightings of Smith entering and leaving the house in Dugong Avenue, listings in telephone directories, electoral rolls etc’, surely this, he implies, constituted evidence even before an investigator actually appealed to it as such. We might agree that these sightings etc. do constitute evidence, but only for the hypothesis that the investigator has now proposed, that Smith had lived on Dugong Avenue. Coady, in other words, has not shown that his use of the word ‘evidence’ does not gain its sense, and appropriateness, from the idea of the hypothesis, already broached, which it will subsequently be used to confirm or disconfirm. To avoid this response, Coady rephrases: ‘the evidence which had come into existence with the question had already existed under another title’ (my italics). But by what right does he presume an identity here, or even a one to one correspondence? There is surely no obligation to read the ‘sightings’ in a certain way which will constitute them later as evidence for a particular hypothesis. If they are read in any way at all that will depend on how they fit into an existing set of assumptions and ideas. If, for instance, an investigator already entertains the hypothesis that Smith was at the time having an affair with someone living in the house, and it was noted that he not only went into the house with a surreptitious air at night, but that his name is not listed in the relevant telephone book or electoral roll, these sightings will be entertained as evidence of the affair, and not of his having lived there himself.

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17 Remarkably, given his leanings toward realism, he refers explicitly to the Heraclitean moment, with which, he suggests, every historian must contend. ‘Every new historian’, he writes, ‘must revise the question themselves – and since historical thought is a river into which none can step twice . . . even a single historian finds when he tries to reopen an old question that the question has changed’ (my italics). 18 Who precisely is Collingwood himself castigating when (IH:264) he excoriates their treatment of authoritative statements as, effectively, pre-digested gobbets to be swallowed and regurgitated, and writes of ‘the transhipment of readymade information from one mind to another’? Might it not be said that he is merely talking about certain realist philosophers of history who theorize about the subject in complete disregard of what historians do, or is he talking about actual historical practice? If the latter, is he referring to former or to current practice? If it is current practice, then is it that of a minority, who perhaps, even by Collingwood’s time, would have been criticized for their obsolete or antiquated working method, or the majority? The truth is that he is inconsistent even within the Idea of History. Although he associates what he calls the deplorable method of ‘scissors and paste’ history with realism, as a philosophical theory of history, he also maintains that it is well known to practising historians. In his potted history of the development of historical method, he asserts that it was the only method practised by historians up to the seventeenth century. At that time, he writes, the seeds of a new, critical, method were sown. However, although this method allowed a measure of autonomy to the historian, it remained essentially ‘scissors and paste’. This more sophisticated scissors and paste, he tells us, was still extant into the nineteenth century. But he suggests (259) that it had ‘in principle been superceded, though perhaps not consciously so’. In accordance with this view, he sometimes speaks of ‘scissors and paste’ as no longer (in the mid-twentieth century) extant. Unfortunately, and confusingly, he does not always use the past tense when referring to it. He sometimes (264) uses the present tense as if it were still being practised, if (as he puts it) on its last legs. Perhaps, it will be suggested, he wishes to distinguish between the amateur – the common man – who still accepts ‘scissors and paste’ as the method of history, and the professional historian who no longer does so. Is it not in this vein that he writes (234) of it as ‘the common-sense theory . . . the theory which most people believe, or imagine themselves to believe, when first they reflect on the matter’? He goes on, moreover, to point out that once the ‘scissors and paste’ method is spelled out, its failings become obvious, and suggests that any current historian will see, on reflection, that his practice diverges to some extent from the old method. However, almost contradictorily, he adds: ‘But I am not sure whether we historians always realize the consequences of what we are doing. In general when we reflect on our own work, we seem to accept . . . the common sense theory,’ while rationalizing away, or understating, our practical divergences from it. Even more clearly, he states (258): ‘until lately [scissors and paste] was the only kind of history in existence, and a great deal of the history people are still reading today, and even a good deal of what people are still writing, belongs to this type.’ 19 Actually the distinction is not entirely easy to draw. Primary authorities for an event are sometimes claimed to consist purely of the statements of eye-witnesses, possibly in a compilation made by someone who took them down verbatim. The trouble is that this would rule out Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War as a primary authority in that we have it from him that he exercised judgement, discretion, and selectivity, in recounting eye-witness testimony. It is usually pointed out, however, that Thucydides was writing at the time of the War, and this gives his work the status of a primary source. (He did

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of course himself take part in some of the battles.) But even this is not a sufficiently broad definition. Where a historical period is distant from our own, and there is a dearth of sources, a primary authority might be one merely written down in the same century in which an event took place, and depending on reports of people who were not themselves eye-witnesses. If we were dealing with a period much closer to ours then such a document would be likely to be considered a secondary authority. Sometimes one and the same work may be a primary source for one century and yet, technically at least, a secondary source for another. The Alfredian Chronicle, for instance (F. M. Stenton, 1955:20), is a primary authority for the tenth century, but may be considered secondary for the eighth and before. It is held, on account of its use, among other things, of Old English phrases pointing to a Latin original, to incorporate annals from the earlier period. Since it is still comparatively near in time to the events it describes – compared that is with works written down in the centuries between Alfred and our own – it is treated more like a primary source, although not one of the status of Gildas, who was virtually contemporary with the events that he describes. 20 This is not to say that Stenton never pronounces Bede’s authority ‘conclusive’ on a particular point, see Stenton, 1955:19. 21 Compare Collingwood (IH:244): Suetonius tells me that Nero at one time intended to evacuate Britain. I reject this statement, not because any better authority flatly contradicts it, for of course none does but because my reconstruction of Nero’s policy based on Tacitus will not allow me to think that Suetonius is right. And if I am told that this is merely to say I prefer Tacitus to Suetonius, I confess that I do: but I do so just because I find myself able to incorporate what Tacitus tells me into a coherent and continuous picture of my own, and cannot do this for Suetonius. 22 It may be felt rash to generalize about historical practice from a single example, namely Stenton’s, especially when the period covered is uncommonly obscure. I shall suggest, in the next chapter, that it is precisely when a period is obscure, and therefore when claims about it remain controversial, that its study exhibits historical method to its fullest extent. I will content myself here by noting that Collingwood makes a similar point (EPH:97) when he says that the characteristic features of the method ‘sink into the background and may be altogether lost sight of ’ where consensus reigns, and distinguishes historical research proper, which concerns essentially contentious subject matter, from ‘reading history-books, and memorising their contents’, or even ‘teaching history’. 23 Oakeshott (EM:108) is of one mind with Collingwood here, he explains: ‘the historical past does not lie behind present evidence, it is the world which present evidence creates in the present . . . Apart from his present world of ideas, [the historian] can know nothing of “what really happened”; any correspondence he can establish . . . must necessarily be confined within his present world . . . to pursue what “really happened” as distinct from “what the evidence obliges us to believe” is to pursue a phantom’. 24 This scepticism, suggests Collingwood (EPH:94–5), can only get a grip on the realists’ assumption that there is ‘a sum total of [past] events’ out there, to which ‘the sources of history’ are our only guide, but which, since we must ‘take or leave [them]’ effectively present ‘a solid barrier to thought, a wall of “data” against which all we can do is to build lean-to sheds of inference, not knowing what strains it is capable of bearing’.

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25 Such ‘theoreticians’, says Collingwood (EPH:101), absurdly countenance a ‘limbo, where events, which have finished happening, still go on’. It is ‘a world where Galileo’s weight is still falling, where the smoke of Nero’s Rome still fills the intelligible air, and where interglacial man is still laboriously learning to chip flints’. 26 Oakeshott was far more pessimistic about the possibility of history. However, his pessimism has multiple and confused roots. Sometimes the problem appears to lie with historians themselves who (108) are prey to realist fantasies so that (108) they believe in two worlds, when there is just one – the world of our present experience – and fail to recognize that ‘the historical past is the world present evidence creates in the present’. At other times, he points to an irresolvable conflict between history’s genus as (present) experience ‘through and through’ and its differentia, which introduce into it the notion of the past: a dead past independent of experience. Both claims, in so far as they are clear, can be challenged. As to the psychological claim, the question arises how the alleged realist fantasies are supposed to sit with the historians’ idealist methodology. Perhaps Oakeshott’s point is only that this methodology is what ought to be history’s, what, that is to say, can be ‘read off ’ from its status as experience, but from which its differentia cause it unavoidably to deviate. However, some of his remarks suggest that actual historical practice, at least at its best or most ‘reflective’ (92) is idealist, and consciously so, in its methodology. Certainly he never seriously expounds a realist methodology corresponding to the fantasy, although such is perhaps implicit in his denial that historical authorities can be ‘external guarantors of truth’. But if historians, despite their ineradicable realist fantasies, pursue, even deliberately, an idealist methodology, we seem to have before us the spectacle of historians at war with their own methodology – a methodology which, as idealism requires, is one of ‘creation and construction’ (93) not of discovery. Indeed Oakeshott assures us (94) that ‘even if it were possible to find a world of merely exhumed events, it would not be a world satisfactory to the historian’. Are we to posit some kind of split personality for the historian? Is it perhaps that he ‘lives a lie’, openly following the idealist methodology while all the time, secretly cherishing the illusion that there is an ‘objective’ past, a ‘past and buried course of events’? Or is it that like a somnambulist, he is unaware of what he is actually doing, as he steadily prosecutes his idealist inquiry? Not only do these suggestions seem improbable, but Collingwood, who successfully practised history and archaeology, despite his idealist method and convictions, disproves the contention that historians cannot get by without realist illusions. Oakeshott often suggests that the problem lies in history itself. Now history, as he conceives it, is experience, or a ‘world of experience’, and so, like any other form of experience, it aims (70, 81) at that coherence, and completeness which is proper to itself, and ‘make[s] its material as well as determin[ing] its method’ (90). It belongs, therefore (101), with every other such mode, and indeed along with philosophy itself, to the right genus: experience, present experience. Yet for all that it is not ‘reality’. Oakeshott reserves this title for that experience which actually succeeds in becoming ‘complete’ and ‘satisfactory’, in becoming a ‘concrete whole’, and which is therefore ‘satisfactory from . . . the standpoint of the totality of experience’. For him, history can never succeed in this. It is (70), unlike philosophy, a mere ‘arrest’ of experience, a limitation on, a ‘disruption’ of, the concrete whole of experience, ‘a backwater’. The problem, Oakeshott explains, lies (106) in its differentia: in the postulates and presuppositions that define it as the particular form, or modification, of experience that it is, and distinguish it from other such modifications. It is in its differentia that

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Notes history makes reference to the past. Now, as we saw, there are other pasts, associated with other modes of experience, such as the past of practical experience (103). The historical past differs from the practical past, Oakeshott tells us, in that whereas the latter is the past relative to our present purposes and interests, the former, ‘the past for history’ – is the past for its own sake, ‘the past for the sake of the past’. He concludes that the past which is the subject matter of history, and which (146) ‘cannot be dismissed from history without dismissing history itself ’ is a ‘dead past’, a past ‘detached from evidence’, ‘immune from change’. He likewise complains that ‘the world of historical fact appears to lie in the past’ and that ‘historical reality is a past reality’, when ‘no fact, truth or reality [being present experience through and through] is, or can be, past’, when indeed ‘the past must be the present before it can be historical’ (his italics). Consequently (146) ‘to suppose this world of history actually to lie in the past involves us in a radical contradiction’ of its form with ‘the nature of its content’. I think what must be apparent is that Oakeshott is precisely here falling into the trap that, we suggested above, picking up suggestions of Collingwood, that realists do when they continue to talk of events ‘actually lying in the past’ (to use Oakeshott’s own phrase) although they have been shown that, in historical practice, this has, and can have, no currency independent of ‘whatever our evidence indicates happened’. This is puzzling, and ironic, given that Oakeshott is a thorough going historical idealist who, equally with Collingwood, declares (108, 109) that there can properly be no concept of ‘what really happened’ distinct from ‘what the evidence obliges us to believe’. We might have expected him therefore to take the same (essentially ‘Wittgensteinian’) route, and throw back in the face of the realists the incoherence of their protests. That he unaccountably fails to do this, we suggest, is the reason behind his sensationalist claims that history (147) is ‘defective from end to end’, and (147–9) that it must be ‘abandoned’, ‘superceded’, ‘destroyed’.

7. A Realist Present and a Coherentist Past 1

2

When critics of the past-tensed facts, or properties, propounded by some presentists complain of their lack of ‘structure’, they mean that no configurations of presently existing objects can be found which, by paralleling the configurations of elements into which past-tensed statements might be analysed, could confer truth on these statements. It should be noted that some critics, such as Bourne (2006b:2) take past-tensed facts to play the role of truth makers directly, rather than via concrete particulars (see Bourne, 2006b:2). But this does not, they maintain, obviate the need to break down these facts into their constituents, and say what they are. Thus Bourne asks (2006a:45–6) what the constituents are of the fact which makes true ‘Socrates taught Plato’, and answers: ‘Not Socrates or Plato – they don’t exist. We are simply not told what the constituents of these facts are or how they are structured.’ He considers this particularly embarrassing for Prior, who is the chief object of his critique here, ‘For given his doctrine that propositions are themselves “logical constructions” out of the objects they are about (Prior, 1971: Ch.1), how is it possible,’ Bourne asks (2006a:45–6), ‘for the proposition that Socrates taught Plato to be true?’ Collingwood (EPH:93–5) puts down to this, for him, misguided desire for complete knowledge, that is for knowing everything that happened, the historian’s unappeasable anxiety at only ever having ‘an inconsiderable fraction of [the evidence he] might have

Notes

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4

5

6

7

8

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had, if fate had been kinder; if the library of Alexandria had survived, if the humanists had been luckier or better supported in their search for manuscripts’, etc. Oakeshott’s scathing attack on the pursuit of ‘merely encyclopaedic’ knowledge, as not worthy of the philosopher, only of the ‘savant’ comes early in his book. ‘It is only,’ he writes (1978:1), ‘in the childhood of thought, when knowledge appears undifferentiated and each fresh piece of information seems significant just because it is fresh, that universal knowledge can appear to satisfy the philosophical passion.’ Another reason has been suggested for Thucydides’ narrowing his focus to concentrate on the individual summers and winters of the War, with their limited horizons, rather than opting for a longer view, or prematurely forcing an interpretation. It is suggested that he wished to heighten a sense of fragmentation and immediacy, thereby giving the impression that he himself was struggling to make sense of events, as they happened, in the order of happening. If so, it might be concluded, ironically, that which the historical realists put down to the tireless, mechanical activity of a copier at the scene is only to be achieved as an effect of art. There is a further important feature of the difference between Williams and us concerning our recognition of a historical work as a narrative text. It is not that Williams neglects the status of a historical work, such as Thucydides’, as the ‘product of art’ (153). On the contrary he is so sensitive to it that he is prepared to speak of the ancient historian’s ‘austere objectivity’ as ‘an effect’ of his art. He alludes to the historian’s ‘tragic vision’, and applies Yeat’s phrase ‘cold and passionate as the dawn’ to him. Indeed he does not shrink from calling historical works ‘stories’, or ‘fictions’, so long as it is made clear that they are fictions ‘with the special character of history’, and not mere rhetoric. However, he associates Thucydides’ history, in its dimension as art, with its being structured in terms of key contrasts – reason and fortune, or an individual’s vaunting ambitions and dashed hopes – rather than with the emergence of the idea of temporal linearity. Williams evidently does not think that any light can be thrown on the latter by a scrutiny of the work as a narrative text. For us historical time is, as we shall see, as much a function of narrative technique – capable of subverting the temporal order which the historian has constructed – as of the coherentist methodology applied to history. This method is formalized in E.C. Harris’s seminal work of 1989, Principles of Stratigraphic Excavation. Greene (1995:67, quoting Barker, quoting Harris) writes ‘Stratification can be defined as any number of relatable deposits of archaeological strata . . . which are the successive operations of either nature or humankind’ and again that ‘stratigraphy’ is ‘the study of archaeological strata . . . with a view to arranging them in a chronological sequence’. Greene counsels (120) ‘Archaeologists must know exactly what is being dated, and in the case of samples from excavations their precise stratigraphic relationship to the site’, again (101) ‘[absolute methods] are most valuable when objects or samples to be dated come from properly recorded, stratified contexts on excavations.’ And yet again (129): ‘[stratigraphy] has not been replaced . . . the definition of sequences by means of stratigraphic excavation remains the basis for observation at sites. They may now (Thorpe, 1998; Chadwick, 1997), even ‘record’ on their stratigraphic matrices, perhaps allocating them numbers, ‘ghost’ contexts surmising that one burial has recut and removed an earlier primary burial, redepositing bones from the original with the second in the recut pit, although there is little trace of the earlier burial. Thus increasingly archaeologists are replacing the idea of a ‘fixed archaeological record’ with that of an ‘archaeological text’ which must be interpreted and reinterpreted with each

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new generation of excavators (Chadwick, 1997). In so doing, they emphasize that the relationship between the archaeologist, even as he is actually digging – or as it is said (Hodder, 2003) even ‘at the trowel’s edge’ – and the material he studies is an essentially ‘dialectical’ or ‘reflexive’ one. 9 See also Mink (1974:120–1) ‘historians commonly say that they think less and less of chronology as they learn more and more of their field’, and ‘to comprehend temporal succession means to think of it in both directions at once, and then time is no longer the river which bears us along, but the river in aerial view, upstream and downstream seen in a single survey’. 10 Compare the attack brought by Thomas Baldwin (1998:71–5) against what he calls the ‘arbitrariness’ or ‘fetishism’ of modal fictionalism. Rosen commends Lewis’s plurality of worlds’ hypothesis, Baldwin complains, as crucial to his own [modal] analysis, while considering it ‘entirely false’. Why then should he prefer it to any other false theory, or even the truth? Baldwin finds in Rosen’s article a partial answer which suggests that Lewis’s hypothesis captures ‘certain principles of the imagination which guide us when we construct possible states of affairs’, and points the way to a brand of ‘non-cognitive deflationism’. Baldwin asks why, if this latter strategy is available, Rosen bothers to introduce the operator, ‘According to [Lewis’s Possible Worlds’ Hypothesis’ at all, so that he is effectively ‘running two different deflationist strategies’ whose relation to each other is obscure, and one of which is certainly redundant. 11 Defenders of modal fictionalism typically set up their problem by contrasting modal claims with those made in literary fictions. Thus Seahwa Kim (2005:117) points out that, since Conan Doyle only wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories in 1887, prior to that date, claims about their content (for instance, that there was an intelligent detective, called Sherlock Holmes, living at 221B Baker street) would not have been true. But Lewis wrote down his possible worlds story (the ‘pw story’) in 1986. It should follow, in like manner that, before 1986, no claims about the content of Lewis’s story, for instance, that, according to this content, a flying horse world exists (‘P’), would have been true. But given the fictionalist analysis of modal claims, neither could ‘Possibly, there are flying horses’ (‘P’) have been true before that date. Yet, says Kim, unlike claims concerning the content of the Sherlock Holmes stories, which we can all agree are only true after 1887, the claim that ‘Possibly there are flying horses’, if true, was as true before 1986, when it was false that ‘according to Lewis’s possible worlds story, there is a non-actual flying horse world’, as after 1986. She cites ordinary intuition in support of her view: ‘We know that in (say) 1523’ – and so ‘long before the story pw was written’ – ‘it was the case that there might have been a flying horse’. Moreover, she says (119), ‘we can easily think of a world at which there is a flying horse, but there is no pw story [and never will be], so that [contrary to the fictionalists modal analysis] it is true that possibly there are flying horses, but not true [and never will be] that according to pw, there is a world at which there is a flying horse.’ 12 Nolan’s assimilation of philosophical theories, such as Lewis’s ‘plurality of worlds’, or Leibniz’s monadology, to literary fictions, such as the Sherlock Holmes stories, on grounds that they are all ‘made up’, is questionable. Not only, one would surmise, are the thought processes quite different in philosophical argument and literary creation, but Lewis and Leibniz patently believed in their theories, and only proposed them because they sincerely held them to be true. This is absolutely not the case with Conan Doyle, nor would he be writing literary fiction if it were. Of course, modal fictionalists themselves do not believe in Lewis’s possibilia – it is this scepticism, after all, which fuels their theory – and so the fact that Lewis genuinely believed in these concrete

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possible entities is irrelevant to them. But that is their problem, not Lewis’s, nor Leibniz’s, nor ours when it comes to history. (It is noteworthy that Nolan himself seems to have had a vague apprehension that something was amiss here. For where he had at first claimed of both ‘[literary] fictions and theories’ that ‘we make them up’, a little further on, when talking just of philosophical theories, he changes his wording to the slightly less contentious ‘thought up’.)

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