Non-Persistent Truths? [Critical Note]

Napoli, Ernesto

I argue that the semantic route to the revisability of the future indicated by Bonomi disappoints the expectations. Bonomi makes a lot of a confessed peculiar use of ‘no longer’. The use is indeed peculiar, not to say out of the question. Any statement of “The F is no longer G” is about a change in a subject. Bonomi sets up a scenario in which there is a change of subject and the new subject does not have the property that the old subject had. A scenario in which a statement at t of “The F is G” is true and a statement at t’ of “The F is G” is not true. Ignoring that in the statement at t ‘The F’ designates one individual and in the statement at t’ ‘The F’ designates another individual Bonomi wants to make a statement at t’ of “The F is no longer G” into a revision of a statement at t of “The F is G”.

Andrea Bonomi’s “Non-persistent truths” is a grown-up version of his “Revisable truths” (2016). Like its ancestor, the present paper is for me both heartening and disheartening. For if on the one side Bonomi has no doubts as to the truth-value stability of statements concerning the past, on the other side he is pretty convinced, and well set to convince us, of the truth-value instability of statements concerning the future. I will try in the sequel to show how to get rid of the delusive latter sort of instability. Before that, let me note that to proclaim the truth-value stability both for statements about the past and statements about the future is not ipso facto to proclaim the symmetry of past and future. Between the past and the future there is the hell of a difference that there is between having died and never being born, between having been the case and not having been the case. On the past there are records, memories, traces. On the future none of the above but only forecasts, previsions, hypotheses, guesses. The point is that…

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