The Growing Block and What was Once Present
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The Growing Block and What was Once Present Peter Tan1 Received: 9 July 2019 / Accepted: 8 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract According to the growing block ontology of time, there (tenselessly and unrestrictedly) exist past and present objects and events, but no future objects or events. The growing block is made attractive not just because of the attractiveness of its ontological basis for past-tensed truths, the past’s fixity, and future’s openness, but by underlying principles about the right way to fill in this sort of ontology. I shall argue that given these underlying views about the connection between truth and ontology, growing blockers incur an ontological commitment to an infinite number of temporal dimensions (“hypertime”). This commitment to hypertime generates a vicious explanatory regress. It also undermines the idea that the reality of the past is sufficient to explain why truths about the past are fixed. Both of these implications are highly unattractive; growing blockers would do well to clarify what other motivations they can offer for their view and how they can avoid these consequences.
1 Introduction According to the growing block ontology of time, there (tenselessly and unrestrictedly) exist past and present objects and events, but no future objects or events. Time passes as the block grows larger and larger; the present time is the freshest time on the block. Two common motivations for this ontology are as follows. First, the fact that its ontology includes the past and present but not the future seems to provide an explanation for why truths about the past and present are fixed, but propositions about the future are open. Second, the fact that the growing block includes past entities at all makes it preferable to presentism, according to which there only are present objects and events. As much contemporary literature has discussed (see Caplan
* Peter Tan [email protected] 1
Fordham University, New York, NY 10023, USA
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and Sanson 2011 for an overview), the presentist’s past-less ontology seems either unable to furnish “truthmakers” for true propositions about past events, or trapped into doing so in unintuitive or ad hoc ways.1 This paper argues that the growing block faces serious difficulties. Both of these above motivations for the view turn on underlying principles about the connection between truth and ontology: the idea that truth at the very least supervenes on what there is, and methodological principles about the “right way” to fill in the details about what there is. I shall argue that given these underlying views about the connection between truth and ontology, growing blockers incur an ontological commitment to an infinite number of temporal dimensions (“hypertime”). Indeed, surprisingly, I argue that they incur this commitment independent of any other reasons to be saddled by hypertime (e.g., accounting for the rate of temporal passage). I shall argue that this commitment to hypertime generates a vicious explanatory regres
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