Document Type

Thesis

Degree

Master of Arts

Major

Philosophy

Date of Defense

7-17-2015

Graduate Advisor

Jon McGinnis

Committee

Gualtiero Piccinini

Berit Brogaard

Abstract

The vogue position among many philosophers and physicists is that the perceptual appearance of tensed properties, e.g. was past, is present and will be future, involves a perceptual illusion at a certain level of complexity within our physical system. This position leads to the problem of tense, where the truth of judgments based upon tensed properties is called into question. After appraising several received solutions to the problem of tense, I argue that each is guilty of implicitly assuming a certain estimation of what counts as a truth-maker for tensed judgments. This estimation is reliant upon an entailment relation holding between linguistic representations and states of affairs in the world. Following John Heil, I reject the amicability of such an entailment relation holding in the act of truthmaking. Finally, building upon Heil’s own work in the study of truthmaking, I argue that tensed properties and the judgments that follow from their perception could be made true by the physical processes that bring about the appearance of these properties. In the competition of this task, I provide a new solution to the problem of tense.

OCLC Number

930704118

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