Since at least Frege (1918) and Prior (1957, 1967, 1968) there have been two competing views on the nature of the proposition expressed by a sentence utterance. One takes the proposition as never changing its truth value in time, whereas the other considers the proposition as capable of changing its truth value in time. These two standpoints are nowadays often labelled as eternalist and temporalist, respectively (see, e.g., Jokic and Smith 2003). Bonomi dwells on this dispute in his intriguing and rewarding “Non-Persistent Truths” (Bonomi 2023), on which I shall comment here. Following his terminology (2023: 149), let us call floating the propositions of the Fregean-eternalist conception, and anchored the propositions of the Priorean-temporalist conception. Bonomi argues that both views are right in a sense, because there are linguistic data suggesting that a sentence utterance can be understood either way, depending on the context, i.e., as either expressing an anchored proposition, or a floating proposition. I believe this is his main point, which we may call the two-levels thesis, since Bonomi (2023: 149) speaks of two levels of analysis; the first level yields floating propositions, and the second anchored propositions. Bonomi also insists extensively on…
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