Ryan Wasserman’s Problem of Temporary Extrinsics argues that certain extrinsic predicates pose problems for perdurantists. I won’t run through the whole argument here, but I wanted to quibble about one point. At one stage of one of the dilemmas, the perdurantist is left saying there are philosophers at times, but no philosophers simpliciter. This is meant to be the worst thing ever to be left saying, because it implies that there are no philosophers.

Just how that last inference goes through is not entirely clear. Look again at the sentence “There are no philosophers”. One thing that springs out to me, especially when I put it in boldface, is the temporal operator in it. The sentence says that at the present moment, philosophers exist. And the purdurantist we’re discussing agrees with that. If you want to find a counterintuitive claim that the perdurantist accepts, you have to get rid of the tense markings.

Now I’m told that in some dialects of English, most notably AAVE, it is possible to get rid of the tense markings from surface structure. I’m no expert on AAVE, so I don’t want to make pronouncements about what is and isn’t well-formed in it. Instead, let’s just imagine a dialect, call it Brian-English, in which “Ryan philosopher” is a well-formed sentence. (Certainly there are plenty of languages in the world where the translation of “Ryan philosopher” is well-formed, and if I were designing a language I would probably want to allow it. So I don’t mean to be disparaging dialects, like Brian-English, in which “Ryan philosopher” is well-formed. In fact I suspect they will turn out to be much more useful than standard-English for studying the metaphysical interaction between tense and predication.)

Could the meaning of “Ryan philosopher” be that Ryan is a philosopher simpliciter, or does it too mean that Ryan is a philosopher at t, where t is the contextually provided time (usually the time of utterance)? I guess it would have to be the latter. I take it that when someone in 1980 looks at baby Ryan and says (in Brian-English) “Ryan not philosopher” they do not disagree with someone who looks at grown-up Ryan in 2003 and says “Ryan philosopher”. But if there is no tense marking in these sentences, if these were unadorned predications, the two speakers would be disagreeing. So even in dialects where the temporal marker is not explicit, it seems we have to tacitly recognise it. So there really isn’t a problem for perdurantists at this point.