A Presentist's Refutation of Mellor's McTaggart

Abstract

For twenty years, D. H. Mellor has promoted an influential defence of a view of time he first called the ‘tenseless’ view, but now associates with what he calls the ‘B-theory.’ It is his defence of this view, not the view itself, which is generally taken to be novel. It is organized around a forcefully presented attack on rival views which he claims to be a development of McTaggart's celebrated argument that the ‘A-series’ is contradictory. I will call this attack ‘Mellor's McTaggart.’ Although it has received much critical attention, it has not been well understood. For one thing, it has changed over the years in a way that is little appreciated. Whereas Mellor's (1981) original version amounts to a dilemma each horn of which contains a single strand of argument, later statements (1986, 1998) of the first horn contain a second strand of argument unannounced. I shall be concerned to disentangle these strands. I shall also show them to have been largely anticipated by Gareth Evans (1979). However, my main aim is not the clarification of Mellor's McTaggart, but its refutation. I shall show that there is a rival to Mellor's view of time against which the first horn of the dilemma begs the question both as originally presented, and as supplemented. This rival is a ‘Priorean’ version of the ‘presentist’ doctrine that only what is present exists. Although Prior himself gave McTaggart's own argument short shrift, in refuting Mellor's development of it I do not merely resurrect Prior's moves. Mellor's McTaggart introduces specifically semantic considerations. It focuses not as McTaggart did on presentness and futurity etc., but on the truth-values of tokens of propositions in which presentness and futurity etc. are (said to be) ascribed. Consequently, its refutation requires an answer, from the perspective of a presentist metaphysics, to a question which came to the fore only after Prior's death. The question is this: How should semantic theory be developed in the light of the need for a theory of linguistic understanding? Though Evans (1979) flirted with the issue of how this question should be answered from a presentist perspective, the answer he articulates is wrong. I shall do no more than sketch the correct answer. That is all a refutation of Mellor's McTaggart requires.

Against Non‐Ludovician Time

“…Presentism is thought by some to be unique among A‐theories in avoiding the A‐series paradox, since events only exist whilst they are present (cf. Le Poidevin, , Ch.2, , Ch.8; Percival, ). That is, merely past events are those events that did obtain, but no longer do, and merely future events are those events that will obtain, but do not yet.…”

Can Sinners Really Change? Understanding Personal Salvation in the Block Universe

“…The Growing Block, for example, is committed to the existence of the past that grows as ever more present moments are added (Broad 1923; Tooley 1997; Correia and Rosenkranz 2003; Braddon‐Mitchell 2004; Forest 2004; Merricks 2006; Forbes 2015; Deng 2017; Correia and Rosenkranz 2018; Miller 2018; Perović 2019). Presentism, on the other hand, holds that only the present moment exists; the past is gone, and the future is not yet here; only and all existing things are present things (Bigelow 1996; Zimmerman 1998; Hinchliff 2000; Percival 2002; Crisp 2003; Zimmerman, 2004, part 1; Bourne 2006; Fine 2006; Zimmerman 2008; Tamm and Olivier 2019; Emery 2020; Tallant and Ingram 2020). Alternatively, the Moving Spotlight view accepts the existence of all moments in time, but contains the additional postulate that an objective present moment moves through these moments picking out metaphysically privileged nows like a spotlight moving across a field (Skow 2009, 2015; Cameron 2015).…”

Presentism and the Asymmetry of Time

“…Kellor, 20044. Prior, 1967 Parsons, 2002 Priest, 1986Mellor, 1981 0 0 0 Evans, 1979Percival, 20026. Bourne, 2006 7.…”