Tense and Interperspectival Content

Is tense, as some contend, merely a feature of language (linguistic tense) or is it used to express some perspectival feature of the world? Many have argued that a proper analysis of linguistic tense would say that the tense operators in natural language express nonperspectival features of the world—that past and future linguistic tense are just used to express static universal relations between events or times. Tensers and detensers are split on precisely this point: tensers take tense to express an irreducible and real perspectival feature of the world, and detensers think it is a superficial property of language or thought that refers to aperspectival contents. In this chapter tense is among several examples of perspectival content. It is argued that perspectival contents, or interperspectival contents, are expressed in different ways from different perspectival positions.