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Fooling around with tenses. (English) Zbl 1223.83007

Summary: What, exactly, is the relation between statements about future contingents and statements concerning the spacelike? This question may be answered by transferring Thomasonian supervaluations for future tense statements to statements about the spacelike past, present and future, endorsing present contingents and past contingents. For this task, a language is described semantically which contains (frame-relative versions of) the usual quantifier-like tense operators, operators for (frame-relative) “somewhere”/“everywhere”, the operators “for every reference frame”/“for some reference frame” and three different “necessity” operators with their “possibility” counterparts. Technically, special attention is paid to interaction laws between the different kinds of operators. The “necessity” operators differ in the area on which alternatives must coincide in order to count as accessible. Supervaluations are discussed for past light-cone coincidence. Metaphysically, this approach points towards a distinction between two kinds of determinateness which were undistinguishable pre-relativistically: deictic determinateness (past light-cone) and narrative determinateness (frame-relative present-plus-past). An indeterministic solution to the problem of the “wings” is proposed which, without accepting a frame-independent spatially extended present, solves the problem of “massive coincidence” by carefully analysing the famous tunnel example as a story of decisions and by distinguishing between “whether” and “that”-clauses.

MSC:

83A05 Special relativity
00A79 Physics
00A30 Philosophy of mathematics
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