On Presentism and History
by The Argument from History against presentism rests upon a fundamental misconception of Prior’s position, and Prior’s version of presentism emerges from the historical argument essentially unscathed.
Presentism is, most simply put, the belief that only the present exists, and that past and future states of affairs do not exist. A.N. Prior lays out his understanding of presentism clearly and succinctly in The Notion of the Present. One interesting challenge to this position, which I will refer to as the Argument from History, posits an apparent inconsistency in Prior’s presentist view. This paper will contend, however, that the Argument from History against presentism rests upon a fundamental misconception of Prior’s position, and that Prior’s version of presentism emerges from the historical argument essentially unscathed.
Prior’s view of the present parallels the notion he holds of that which is real. To Prior, to view the real world as “just a region of some larger universe which contains other regions as well” is deeply flawed. He points out that to speak of mythical entities existing in mythology, or of unreal entities existing in some non-real world, is not to speak literally. Instead, it is simply to make use of an unfortunately common metaphorical mode of communication which regrettably refers to some region that does not exist. Conversely, to speak of some real entity existing in the real world, is simply to state that this entity exists; no prefix, such as “in the real world”, is necessary to add any additional meaning to the statement. The redundancy of such a prefix is, to Prior, a clear indicator of the actual existence of the entity in question.
Prior believes prefixes such as “in the present” to be just as redundant as prefixes like “in the real world”. To state that I am nineteen years old in the present is nothing more than to state that I am nineteen years old. Conversely, Prior sees the prefixes that are necessary to talk of the past as an indicator that this event does not exist. To say that it has been (and no longer is) the case that I was three years old clearly implies that I am not three years old. Further, to Prior, this implies that my being three years old does not exist at all. To Prior, and to any presentist, there is no realm of reality in which one could find a three-year-old person who will grow up to be the author of this essay. It clearly does not exist in the present, which is, to Prior, the same as saying that it simply does not exist.
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