Resolving the Puzzle of the Changing Past

TY - JOUR

T1 - Resolving the Puzzle of the Changing Past

AU - Geddes, Alexander

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

PY - 2023/3/4

Y1 - 2023/3/4

N2 - Barlassina and Del Prete argue that the past can change, on the basis that there is no other explanation for the truth values of certain claims involving the past-tense predicate ‘won the Tour de France in 2000’. To establish this, they argue that no contextualist account of this predicate will be able to explain these truth values. I show that their argument straightforwardly fails. Not only does a tweak to the contextualist account they consider suffice to explain these truth values, there is in fact an even simpler and more plausible non-contextualist account that can do the same work. Put simply: there is no puzzle of the changing past.

AB - Barlassina and Del Prete argue that the past can change, on the basis that there is no other explanation for the truth values of certain claims involving the past-tense predicate ‘won the Tour de France in 2000’. To establish this, they argue that no contextualist account of this predicate will be able to explain these truth values. I show that their argument straightforwardly fails. Not only does a tweak to the contextualist account they consider suffice to explain these truth values, there is in fact an even simpler and more plausible non-contextualist account that can do the same work. Put simply: there is no puzzle of the changing past.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85149634443&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1080/0020174X.2023.2182357

DO - 10.1080/0020174X.2023.2182357

M3 - Article

SN - 0020-174X

JO - Inquiry

JF - Inquiry

ER -