Advanced Temporalizing

Abstract

There is a widespread assumption that B-theorists—according to whom there is no fundamental distinction between present and non-present times—should interpret tense operators such as ‘It was the case that’ and ‘It will be the case five minutes hence that’ as implicit quantifier-restrictors, so that (for example) an utterance at the present time n of the sentence ‘It was the case that there are dinosaurs’ is true just in case there are dinosaurs located at some time t earlier than n. However, it is easy to show that this interpretation of the tense operators causes problems for B-theorists when combined with certain other natural B-theoretic commitments. In this paper, I argue that a good way for B-theorists to avoid these problems is to treat the tense operators as redundant when the sentences in their scope are qualitative—that is, not about any particular individual(s).