Presentism and representation: saying it without words

Baron, Sam; Miller, Kristie; Tallant, Jonathan

Abstract

The Triviality Argument against presentism maintains that we should reject presentism because there is no way to define the view that is not either trivially true or obviously false. We suggest that this style of argument over-emphasises purely linguistic means of representing a philosophical thesis. We argue that there is no reason to suppose that all philosophical theses must be linguistically representable, and thus that the failure to linguistically represent presentism is no big deal. It certainly shouldn’t lead us to reject the view. We offer a more general moral for philosophy, and that is to look beyond purely linguistic methods of representing philosophical views and embrace a wider range of representational media.

Citation

Baron, S., Miller, K., & Tallant, J. (2023). Presentism and representation: saying it without words. Synthese, 201(2), Article 36. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03987-2

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Nov 20, 2022
• Online Publication Date: Jan 20, 2023
• Publication Date: 2023-02
• Deposit Date: Nov 21, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 21, 2024
• Journal: Synthese
• Print ISSN: 0039-7857
• Electronic ISSN: 1573-0964
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 201
• Issue: 2
• Article Number: 36
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03987-2
• Keywords: Presentism, Triviality argument, Representation
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/14028055
• Publisher URL: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-022-03987-2