Explain and discuss Leininger’s argument that the presentist can’t give a convincing account of what she calls the ‘change thesis’.
Submitted for PH373 (Philosophy of Time) Take Home Exam
Presentism is the philosophical position that only the present exists. Its advocates argue that it captures our intuitive sense that only the present is vivid and real, while the past is inaccessible and the future open. However, (Leininger, 2015) argues that this view cannot accommodate the so-called ‘change thesis’, that what is present changes over time. She claims that presentists cannot reconcile this dynamic aspect of time with its ontological commitment to the ‘present thesis’ – that only the present moment exists.
Leininger observes that the change thesis requires the existence of at least two distinct moments: temporal change, such as a transition from “x is red at time ” to “x is blue at time ”, requires that times and both exist. However, the present thesis holds that only one moment – the present – exists, leaving presentists unable to account for the transition between different moments in time. She therefore argues that without past and future moments to anchor change, presentism collapses into a static, “frozen” view of time, contradicting our experience of temporal flow.
Her paper anticipates presentist attempts to resolve this incompatibility, for instance through the use of surrogates as argued by (Bigelow, 1996). These are presently existing entities that serve as stand-ins for non-existent past moments; for example, the world might possess the property that it is “such that Socrates was snub-nosed”, providing a present-based truthmaker for the proposition that Socrates was snub-nosed. But she critiques this strategy using the One Instance Test (OIT), which asks whether surrogates for past moments could exist in a hypothetical world containing only the present moment. If surrogates can exist independently of past moments, then they fail to necessitate the existence of a past.
Leininger applies the OIT to three surrogate strategies and demonstrates their failures. Past-tensed properties could exist in a one-instant world without any causal or representational link to actual past events. Temporal distributional properties, which describe an object’s properties across time (for example, “being red then blue”), rely on non-existent past moments for their distribution, violating the presentist’s commitment to the present thesis. Similarly, ersatz times – abstract representations of past and future moments – fail to guarantee the actual existence of those moments, as their accuracy depends on unexplained, “miraculous” correlations with reality. She likewise dismisses the presentist response that it is a “brute fact”, not in need of explanation, that surrogates accurately reflect the past as being philosophically unsatisfactory, akin to accepting unexplained miracles.
This critique is supported by (McTaggart, 1908), who argues against the A-theory of time (of which presentism is a variant) that temporal passage involves a contradiction. He demonstrates that if events are to move from being future to present to past, they must possess mutually exclusive properties – of being past, present and future – simultaneously, which is incoherent if only one property (like presentness) applies at a time. Thus attempting to privilege one moment, the present, while also claiming that this privileged status shifts dynamically over time, leads to a contradiction.
Thus, Leininger’s critique persuasively demonstrates that presentism cannot convincingly reconcile the change thesis with the present thesis. The failure of surrogate strategies and the logical incoherence of temporal passage revealed by critiques like McTaggart’s undermine presentism’s ability to explain the dynamic nature of time.
Bibliography
Bigelow, J. (1996). Presentism and Properties. Philosophical Perspectives, 35-52.
Leininger, L. (2015). Presentism and the Myth of Passage. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 724-739.
McTaggart, J. E. (1908). The Unreality of Time. Mind, 457-474.
Result
Mark: 74% (Low First)
Feedback: Your first answer gives a very good account of what presentism is, and of Leininger's argument that it cannot explain what she calls the 'change thesis'. When you set out the three presentist responses that Leininger considers, as well as when you describe McTaggart's argument, there is a slight tendency to describe the claims rather than to explain them in your own words. Here it might have been good to pick out just one response and use it to illustrate the issues in detail. This might also have made McTaggart's point clearer. Because we are discussing issues about the nature of time itself, it is important to be careful about the use of temporal language, and it is not quite right to say that McTaggart claims that the A-theorist has to hold that events have mutually incompatible properties simultaneously. The point is rather that, given they are themselves events that happen at a particular time, they don't seem to be things that could have different properties at different times.
How to do even better in the future (generic across this and another answer):
This is very good. As indicated above, perhaps sometimes even more thought could go into trying to explain things in a way that even a complete novice to the relevant literature would understand. Another thing I would recommend is having a sentence at the beginning that states what you aim to argue for in your answer. This gives your answer a sense of direction.