Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

Evans claims that a sentence should always be considered correct or incorrect at the time of its utterance, to preserve what is called the “stability principle”. To introduce the debate, I refer to some remarks by Kamangar and Perry, who show how Frege could have treated future contingents in a way that would contrast Evans’ claim. I then discuss the more traditional contrast between Frege and Prior on different conceptions of propositions that lies at the core of Evans’ view, and I show how Dummett seems to find a compromise on the use of temporal operators as criticized by Evans. After these two introductory sections, I present the radical criticism of the stability principle made by Bonomi on the ground of an analysis of the speakers’ use of presupposition triggers like “no longer” and “know”. I claim that his analysis concerns more the epistemological limitations of speakers than a semantic justification of a metaphysical view on the indeterminacy of actions and events. From this point of view, his analysis might be a contribution to the semantics of belief updating. In the last section I present what seems to me to be the most relevant contribution of Bonomi’s paper: his multi-propositionalism grounded on the consideration of relations among three kinds of times, the time of the utterance, the time of evaluation, and the time of what is spoken about. It is a new contribution to multipropositionalism under the view of what is needed to take into account in different scenarios.

Radical Temporalism (RT), according to Evans, claims that an utterance of a sentence is “correct” when the sentence is true at time t, where time t may not be the time of the utterance. According to Evans’ stability principle, if an utterance is evaluated as correct at the time of the utterance, then it must be evaluated as correct in any moment after the time of the utterance. This sounds, at first sight, coherent with the Fregean view of the truth of a thought as “atemporal”. According to Frege, a thought, if true, is true independent of the time in which it is grasped; if true, it has always been true, and it always will be true. As Frege (1918) remarked…

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