Achille Varzi responds here to my rather intemperate criticisms of his Perdurantism, Universalism and Quantifiers. It looks like I misinterpreted his target, which makes it somewhat embarrassing that I was so impolite.

(First rule of blogging: it’s OK to be rude, it’s OK to be wrong, it’s not OK to be rude and wrong. Second rule of blogging: don’t be so rude that you’d regret if the target read the post. Of course, this means that it’s perfectly OK to say that Descartes was an over-rated pompous self-rightous grovelling little Frenchman, since it’s unlikely that old Rene will be reading TAR.)

Rather than dig myself into a deeper hole here, let me note that Josh Parsons has a paper taking a much more sympathetic line on Varzi’s criticisms. Josh thinks that perdurantists have a response to Varzi’s argument, but it is a rather complicated response, and I’m not sure many perdurantists would be happy with it.

I don’t really understand Josh’s response, so I won’t try launching into too many criticisms. But I will make two quick points.

First, I don’t really understand what Josh’s translation scheme would do with Some girls are older than others. I think it ends up as (Some x)(Some y)(x is a girly temporal part of a person and y is a girly temporal part of a person and x is older than y). But that’s false, since all temporal parts are ageless. I must be missing something here.

Second, I think Josh is conflating two possible positions here. (There’s a complicated backstory here, but I won’t go into it. If you think I’m quoting Josh out of context, well there’s a link to his paper above.)

It makes sense to say Some child will be a tenor, referring to those persons who are now children. So the noun child that figures in that statement is in some sense implicitly present-tensed. You might insist that child functions like tenor, in that it applies to whole persons, not just their child-like stages. But if you did, then you should think that it applies to whole persons in virtue of their being now a child, not in virtue of merely tenselessly having a child-like part. If it were the latter, then child would be equivalent, for all practical purposes, to person, which it plainly isn’t.

The final line doesn’t follow from what came before, as can be seen by noting that the following position is consistent.

(a) The kinds of things that are in the extension of child are whole persons, i.e. fusions of past, present and future temporal parts.
(b) The semantic value of child is a function from worlds and times to sets of persons, and the members of that set at w,t are the persons that are children in w at t, which is (usually) a proper subset of the class of persons at w at t.

What’s been run together in this paragraph (unless I’ve misinterpreted something else) are the views (i) that the extension of child includes persons not person-stages and (ii) that the extension of child is unchanging over times.

To be sure, the kind of view I’ve been defending may be thought to have a problem or two with the problem of temporary intrinsics. If you thought the problem of temporary intrinsics was a problem whose solution involved modifying the intuitive semantics for tensed utterances, then you probably won’t like the theory I’ve sketched here. I don’t, but that’s another story.

Achille Varzi responds here to my rather intemperate criticisms of his Perdurantism, Universalism and Quantifiers. It looks like I misinterpreted his target, which makes it somewhat embarrassing that I was so impolite.

(First rule of blogging: it’s OK to be rude, it’s OK to be wrong, it’s not OK to be rude and wrong. Second rule of blogging: don’t be so rude that you’d regret if the target read the post. Of course, this means that it’s perfectly OK to say that Descartes was an over-rated pompous self-rightous grovelling little Frenchman, since it’s unlikely that old Rene will be reading TAR.)

Rather than dig myself into a deeper hole here, let me note that Josh Parsons has a paper taking a much more sympathetic line on Varzi’s criticisms. Josh thinks that perdurantists have a response to Varzi’s argument, but it is a rather complicated response, and I’m not sure many perdurantists would be happy with it.

I don’t really understand Josh’s response, so I won’t try launching into too many criticisms. But I will make two quick points.

First, I don’t really understand what Josh’s translation scheme would do with Some girls are older than others. I think it ends up as (Some x)(Some y)(x is a girly temporal part of a person and y is a girly temporal part of a person and x is older than y). But that’s false, since all temporal parts are ageless. I must be missing something here.

Second, I think Josh is conflating two possible positions here. (There’s a complicated backstory here, but I won’t go into it. If you think I’m quoting Josh out of context, well there’s a link to his paper above.)

It makes sense to say Some child will be a tenor, referring to those persons who are now children. So the noun child that figures in that statement is in some sense implicitly present-tensed. You might insist that child functions like tenor, in that it applies to whole persons, not just their child-like stages. But if you did, then you should think that it applies to whole persons in virtue of their being now a child, not in virtue of merely tenselessly having a child-like part. If it were the latter, then child would be equivalent, for all practical purposes, to person, which it plainly isn’t.

The final line doesn’t follow from what came before, as can be seen by noting that the following position is consistent.

(a) The kinds of things that are in the extension of child are whole persons, i.e. fusions of past, present and future temporal parts.
(b) The semantic value of child is a function from worlds and times to sets of persons, and the members of that set at w,t are the persons that are children in w at t, which is (usually) a proper subset of the class of persons at w at t.

What’s been run together in this paragraph (unless I’ve misinterpreted something else) are the views (i) that the extension of child includes persons not person-stages and (ii) that the extension of child is unchanging over times.

To be sure, the kind of view I’ve been defending may be thought to have a problem or two with the problem of temporary intrinsics. If you thought the problem of temporary intrinsics was a problem whose solution involved modifying the intuitive semantics for tensed utterances, then you probably won’t like the theory I’ve sketched here. I don’t, but that’s another story.