In his fascinating paper on non-persistent truths, Andrea Bonomi makes the case that the truth value of propositions may shift over time, and he takes issue with Gareth Evans’ criticism of such a view. Some of the linguistic evidence provided by Bonomi may strike philosophers as suspect, but I build a case for the legitimacy of such evidence under a principle that I call “alethic charity,” which governs folk truth attributions. I also speculate that some of Bonomi’s judgments may reflect the hidden presence of epistemic modality.
Many years ago, when I was a junior professor visiting Italy, I was introduced to the work of Andrea Bonomi. At the time I was very interested in the semantics of natural language, and I was also interested in metaphysics and the philosophy of time. It never occurred to me that I would run into a person with similar interests, and I certainly never expected to see the metaphysics of natural language project carried out with such acumen in both linguistics and in philosophy. Bonomi’s work was an inspiration to me then and it remains an inspiration to…
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