162,499 research outputs found

    Fine's Trilemma and the Reality of Tensed Facts

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    Fine (2005, 2006) has presented a ‘trilemma’ concerning the tense-realist idea that reality is constituted by tensed facts. According to Fine, there are only three ways out of the trilemma, consisting in what he takes to be the three main families of tense-realism: ‘presentism’, ‘(external) relativism’, and ‘fragmentalism’. Importantly, although Fine characterises tense-realism as the thesis that reality is constituted (at least in part) by tensed facts, he explicitly claims that tense realists are not committed to their fundamental existence. Recently, Correia and Rosenkranz (2011, 2012) have claimed that Fine’s tripartite map of tense realism is incomplete as it misses a fourth position they call ‘dynamic absolutism’. In this paper, I will argue that dynamic absolutists are committed to the irreducible existence of tensed facts and that, for this reason, they face a similar trilemma concerning the notion of fact-content. I will thus conclude that a generalised version of Fine’s trilemma, concerning both fact-constitution and fact-content, is indeed inescapable

    Fine’s McTaggart: Reloaded

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    In this paper I will present three arguments (based on the notions of constitution, metaphysical reality, and truth, respectively) with the aim of shedding some new light on the structure of Fine’s (2005, 2006) ‘McTaggartian’ arguments against the reality of tense. Along the way, I will also (i) draw a novel map of the main realist positions about tense, (ii) unearth a previously unnoticed but potentially interesting form of external relativism (which I will label ‘hyper-presentism’) and (iii) sketch a novel interpretation of Fine’s fragmentalism (which I contrast with Lipman’s 2015, 2016b, forthcoming)

    A Passage Theory of Time

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    This paper proposes a view of time that takes passage to be the most basic temporal notion, instead of the usual A-theoretic and B-theoretic notions, and explores how we should think of a world that exhibits such a genuine temporal passage. It will be argued that an objective passage of time can only be made sense of from an atemporal point of view and only when it is able to constitute a genuine change of objects across time. This requires that passage can flip one fact into a contrary fact, even though neither side of the temporal passage is privileged over the other. We can make sense of this if the world is inherently perspectival. Such an inherently perspectival world is characterized by fragmentalism, a view that has been introduced by Fine in his ‘Tense and Reality’ (2005). Unlike Fine's tense-theoretic fragmentalism though, the proposed view will be a fragmentalist view based in a primitive notion of passage

    Christ, The Center

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    Excerpt: One reason I appreciate the Quaker tradition so deeply is the way that Friends simplify all else in order to heighten the spiritual reality of the Present Christ. From the testimony of the Quaker patriarch (about one, even Christ Jesus, who speaks to our conditions) to the sacramental community (which upholds the promise that where two or three are gathered in his name, Christ is present in their midst), Friends seek to experience in the present tense what it means to live under the Power of the Resurrected Lord

    Exploring mood in neverver

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    In a preverbal position, all clauses in the Neverver language of Malakula Island (Vanuatu) are either unmarked, or carry the morpheme m- prefixed to the verb. In this paper, I explore the distribution of unmarked and mmarked clauses, examining a number of semantic and grammatical contexts. I seek to establish whether the choice of using an unmarked clause or an m-marked clause is driven by the temporal location of the situation expressed in the clause, or by the status of that situation in reality. In doing so, I aim to test my earlier analysis of Neverver as being a mood language. The results, however, are divided, with temporal location appearing to be more salient in some contexts, and reality status appearing to be more salient in others. Relying predominantly on evidence from a variety of subordinate clause types, I maintain that Neverver is indeed a mood language, although an interpretation of the same morphological category as grammatical tense is certainly plausible in some contexts

    Grammatical Attributes in the Language of Communication: Conceptualization of Time, Tense and Aspect in English

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    Time is a concept which is related to our perception of reality. A vast majority of languages have mechanisms which enable the speakers to express time. Many languages have grammatical means that   make it possible for users to express the time when an action or event occurs. Among these languages, most of them also express time with a verb, and more specifically, with various verbal tenses. The verbal tense, a grammatical category which differs significantly from one language to another, may also be considered a grammatical component of time. Verbal tense can provide us with a particular kind of insight into our perception of chronological time which is expressed with and within the tense of the verb. Tense is concerned about how events are located, perceived and referred to along the past-present-future timeline. Aspect is about the manner in which a verbal action is experienced or regarded.  In general linguistic approaches, tense and aspect are treated as complementary ways of encoding time. They relate the happening described by the verb to time in the past, present or future. However, tense differs from aspect in showing the time reference, while aspect shows how the action or state of the verb is envisaged or seen as happening or occurring. Time, tense and aspect are inter-related concepts; time is usually perceived in relation to tense and aspect.  In the current paper, it is the author’s conviction that knowledge in the distinction between the three concepts (time, tense, aspect) will enable English speakers to communicate better, grammatically. Keywords: Time, Tense, Aspect, Grammar, English, Communication. DOI: 10.7176/NMMC/92-03 Publication date:August 31st 2020

    The Invisible Thin Red Line

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    The aim of this paper is to argue that the adoption of an unrestricted principle of bivalence is compatible with a metaphysics that (i) denies that the future is real, (ii) adopts nomological indeterminism, and (iii) exploits a branching structure to provide a semantics for future contingent claims. To this end, we elaborate what we call Flow Fragmentalism, a view inspired by Kit Fine (2005)’s non-standard tense realism, according to which reality is divided up into maximally coherent collections of tensed facts. In this way, we show how to reconcile a genuinely A-theoretic branching-time model with the idea that there is a branch corresponding to the thin red line, that is, the branch that will turn out to be the actual future history of the world

    The Category of Tense as a Universal Concept (Linguistic Overview)

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    The article considers the category of tense as a universal phenomenon from the point of view of linguistics. The tense category belongs to the number of universal concepts that play a crucial role in modern science, in all its disciplinary complexes: both natural, social and humanitarian. Not a single sphere of human activity is complete without contact with the reality of time. Everything that moves, changes, lives, acts, and thinks is spread through time in one form or another. But despite the obviousness of time as an objective phenomenon has given to us in sensations, which is undoubtedly confirmed by our individual experience, the conceptual understanding of time both in the history of philosophy and science gives rise to many different, sometimes opposite approaches and results. Analysis of the tense category is one of the most actively developed topics in Russian and foreign science. The problem of time interpretation has attracted researchers for its inexhaustibility and versatility. It will never lose its relevance since the concept of time, along with the concepts of space and motion, is one of the essential categories of the knowledge theory. The interpretation of time is inextricably linked with the most fundamental ideas of a person about reality — with the interpretation of being, the meaning of life, all human activity — both cognitive and practical

    Investigating the Role of Epistemic Models in Iraqi EFL Learners' Inaccurate Use of the English Present Tense Forms

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    لتحري سبب الصعوبة التي يواجهها الطلبة العراقيين من متعلمي اللغة الإنجليزية لغة أجنبية في استخدام صيغ المضارع باللغة الإنجليزية والكشف عما يجعل أخطاءهم متكررة ومتشابهة ، تناولت البحث النماذج المعرفية المحتملة التي قد تكمن وراء أشكال الزمن الصرفي وتسبغ عليها معاني محددة. وتناول سؤالين ذوا صلة بالعلاقة بين الزمان والزمن الصرفي وما إذا كان الأخير يمثل دلالة زمنية في حد ذاته. وللإجابة عن هذه التساؤلات جمعت عينة من إجابات الطلبة متعلمي اللغة الإنجليزية على الأسئلة المتعلقة بالزمن الصرفي من أوراق الاختبار الأكاديمية خاصتهم وتحليلها نوعيا. وأظهر التحليل أن التباين بين النموذجين المعرفيين الإنجليزي والعربي يقود متحدثي كل لغة إلى تفسير المشاهد ذات الصلة بالزمن الصرفي  بشكل مختلف.  فصيغة المضارع باللغة الانجليزية ,على سبيل المثال ، تحدد موقع الحدث على خط زمني يتكون من نطاقات زمنية تقع على مسافات مختلفة من لحظة التكلم  وبالاعتماد على إمكانية الولوج المادي أو الافتراضي لحدث ما في لحظة التكلم تصنّف حالة واقعة. وهذا يناقض مفهوم  الزمن المضارع في العربية الذي يسند طور الحدوث والتجدد للحدث (وليس الحدث بكليته) إلى عامل الفعل وأن واقعية الحدث تعد غير متحققة بغض النظر عن دلالة الوقت. ومن ثم فإن ميول الطلبة إلى فرض النماذج المعرفية خاصتهم على بنية الزمن الصرفي في الإنجليزية ينتج عنه أخطاء متكررة يعزى تشابهها إلى تلك النماذج التي تمثل المخزون المعرفي المشترك للطلبة في مجتمعهم الثقافي والذي  لايتوافق مع اللغة الإنجليزية.To investigate the source of difficulty faced by Iraqi EFL learners in using English present tense forms and uncover what makes their errors frequent and similar, this paper addressed the potential epistemic models which may underlie tense forms and impose specific meanings on them. It also tackled a couple of questions relevant to the relation between time and tense and whether the latter is a time signal per se. To answer these queries, a set of EFL learners' responses to tense related questions was collected from their academic test sheets and analyzed qualitatively. The analysis showed that disparity between the English and Arabic epistemic models leads the natives of each language to construe the tense related sceneries differently. The English present tense, for example, locates an event on a timeline which consists of temporal areas at different distance from the moment of speaking. This tense also shows its reality status depending on physical or virtual accessibility of that event at time of speaking. This contrasts with the Arabic concept of present tense which attributes the evolutionary phase of an event (rather than the event itself) to some agent causer[1] and the status of that phase is prototypically valued as unfulfilled reality regardless of time reference. Consequently, the learners' tendency to impose their native epistemic models on the English tense causes frequent errors whose similarity is stimulated by those models which represent the learners' shared epistemic knowledge in their cultural community and thus they do not fit the  English tense system.       [1]*An agent causer is the doer of an action or the performer of an activity. An agent corresponds to the logical subject of a verb. &nbsp

    The actual future is open

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    Open futurism is the indeterministic position according to which the future is 'open,' i.e., there is now no fact of the matter as to what future contingent events will actually obtain. Many open futurists hold a branching conception of time, in which a variety of possible futures exist. This paper introduces two challenges to (branching-time) open futurism, which are similar in spirit to a challenge posed by Kit Fine to (standard) tense realism. The paper argues that, to address the new challenges, open futurists must (i) adopt an objective, non-perspectival notion of actuality and (ii) subscribe to an A-theoretic, dynamic conception of reality. Moreover, given a natural understanding of "actual future," (iii) open futurism is naturally coupled with the view that a unique, objectively actual future exists, contrary to a common assumption in the current debate. The paper also contends that recognising the existence of a unique actual future helps open futurists to avoid potential misconceptions
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