Achille Varzi, Perdurantism, Universalism and Quantifiers

The other day Kai von Fintel mentioned Geoff Pullum’s wonderful book The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, a collection of Pullum’s TOPIC…COMMENT columns from NLLT. So naturally I went back and reread all the columns. I think my colleagues thought I was sadistically laughing over the grades I was giving the logic students, when in fact I was just rereading the saga of the Campaign for Typographical Freedom, and the fables about the syntactician who worked on his theory while his colleague tried hitting on cute graduate students. Good times.

Several of the columns are about features that journals should have but often do not. One of the more radical suggestions is that journals should print the names of referees who recommend accepting papers. One of the merits of that is that when you the reader disagree with a decision to publish a paper, you know who to blame.

Varzi’s trying to show that the combination of perdurantism (temporal parts everywhere) and universalism about fusions leads to odd semantic results. Now you might suspect this is not going to be a very plausible argument, because neither perdurantism nor universalism are semantic theories, so it is somewhat hard to see how they could lead to any semantic results, let alone odd ones. And you’d be right, but that would be getting ahead of ourselves. The problems arise because (2) is meant to be analysed as (4).

(2) x was/is/will be P
(4) There is a past/present/future time such that the t-part of x exists and is P

(4) leads to problems because of objects such as the current temporal part of Pavarotti and the past temporal parts of a turnip. By (4) this is a tenor. By (4) again it was a turnip. So some tenor was a turnip. But no tenor was a turnip. So perdurantism+universalism (PU for short) is false.

The problem is that, as far as I can tell from a quick survey of the world, no PU theorist accepts (4). Most PU theorists think that being a tenor is a property of fusions of temporal parts, worms as we call them, not of single temporal parts, or stages. It is the fusion of Pavarotti’s temporal parts that is a tenor, not any one of his temporal parts.

There’s a response to this line of reasoning (or something like it), where Varzi says that it would be very complex to make every predicate ‘maximal’ in the way that we have to do on this view. Maybe it would be complex, but if you consider the alternative I think you’ll agree that English made the right choice in making all of its predicates maximal in this way.

What about those perdurantists (Sider, Hawley, perhaps etc.) who think that properties like being a tenor are properties of individual temporal parts. They might accept the middle third of (4), the part about ‘present’. Most PU theorists won’t accept even that, but Sider and Hawley do. But they don’t accept the bits about the past and the future. They believe something like (4′) analyses x was P.

(4′) There is a past temporal counterpart of x that is (or perhaps was) P

Since no turnip part is a past temporal counterpart of Pavarotti, we still don’t get that some tenors were turnips. So the argument here is only telling against the conjunction of PU with a semantic theory that no PU theorist accepts.

UPDATE: When I first wrote this last night it was a little more intemperate in parts, perhaps even impolite. This was probably uncalled for, especially given the relative quality of some of my published work. For some reason papers that confuse metaphysics and semantics, or even seem to possibly instantiate such a confusion, seem to generate reactions in your humble blogger that are normally only caused by John Ashcroft. So in the cold light of day, and after a few friendly suggestions from friends, editors, DHS officers and doctors, I’ve toned it down a little, and what you see is the edited version.