Philosophy and

Phenomenological Research
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
doi: 10.1111/phpr.12129
© 2014 Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LLC

Anti-Metaphysicalism, Necessity, and

Temporal Ontology1
MARK BALAGUER
California State University, Los Angeles

This paper argues for a certain kind of anti-metaphysicalism about the temporal ontology
debate, i.e., the debate between presentists and eternalists over the existence of past and
future objects. Three different kinds of anti-metaphysicalism are defined—namely, non-
factualism, physical-empiricism, and trivialism. The paper argues for the disjunction of
these three views. It is then argued that trivialism is false, so that either non-factualism or
physical-empiricism is true. Finally, the paper ends with a discussion of whether we
should endorse non-factualism or physical-empiricism. An initial reason is provided for
thinking that non-factualism might be true, but in the end, the paper leaves this question
open. The paper also argues against a certain kind of necessitarianism about the temporal
ontology debate; but this isn’t an extra job—the falsity of this necessitarian view falls out
of the other arguments as a sort of corollary.

1. Introduction
I will do three things in this paper. My main goal is to argue for a certain
sort of anti-metaphysicalism about the temporal-ontology debate, i.e., the
debate between presentists and eternalists over the existence of past and
future objects. There are numerous views of this debate that might reason-
ably be called anti-metaphysical. Here are three of them:

Non-factualism: There’s no fact of the matter whether past and future

objects exist—i.e., whether presentism or eternalism (or growing block
theory) is true.

Physical-Empiricism: There’s a fact of the matter as to whether past and

future objects exist, but it’s a perfectly ordinary physical-empirical fact;

1
I would like to thank the following people for helpful feedback on earlier versions of this
paper: Talia Bettcher, Ross Cameron, Matti Eklund, Eli Hirsch, Robert Jones, Uriah Krie-
gel, David Pitt, Josh Rasmussen, Mike Raven, Shel Smith, Wai-hung Wong, and Steve
Yablo. Also, versions of this paper were presented at the University of Leeds, the Cen-
tral European University, Chico State, and Cal State, L.A. I would like to thank the mem-
bers of those audiences for their comments and questions.

ANTI-METAPHYSICALISM, NECESSITY, AND TEMPORAL ONTOLOGY 1

 e.g., it’s of the same kind as the fact that there are tigers and the fact that
there are no 400-story buildings. Thus, it’s not a “metaphysical” fact in
any interesting sense of the term (if ‘metaphysical’ just means about the
world, then it is indeed a metaphysical fact, but then so is the fact that
there are no such things as 400-story buildings). Moreover, given that the
temporal-ontology question is an ordinary physical-empirical question—
along the lines of, say, ‘Are there any planets orbiting Alpha Centauri?’—
it cannot be settled by a priori philosophical arguments. It can only be
settled empirically. (We might not be able to settle the question at all, but
if it can be settled, then it can be settled only empirically.)

Trivialism: There’s a fact of the matter as to whether past and future

objects exist, but it’s an utterly trivial fact—along the lines of the fact that
all bachelors are unmarried, or the fact that there are no married bachelors.

In this paper, I will argue for the disjunction of these three views.
(Scholarly aside: I don’t know of anyone who has endorsed non-factual-
ism, but I have endorsed views of this kind in connection with other
metaphysical debates (e.g., I argue for a non-factualist view of the abstract-
object debate in my (1998), and I argue for a non-factualist view of the
composition debate in my (MSa)). I also don’t know of anyone who has
endorsed trivialism, but Hestevold and Carter discuss a view of this kind in
their (2002); also, trivialist views have been endorsed in connection with
other metaphysical debates by, e.g., Carnap (1950), Putnam (1994), Hirsch
(2002), and Thomasson (2007). Finally, while I don’t know of anyone who
has come out and endorsed physical-empiricism, I suspect that certain eter-
nalists would find it attractive. In particular, I think Quine (1950) and Put-
nam (1967) would probably endorse something like this view, and I
wouldn’t be surprised if Sider (2001) would as well, especially given his
extreme deflationism about modality (2011).)
The second thing I’ll do in this paper is discuss which of the above three
views we should endorse. In particular, I’ll quickly argue against trivialism,
and I’ll say a few words about whether we should endorse non-factualism
or physical-empiricism. I will indicate what this question turns on, and I
will offer an initial reason for thinking that non-factualism might be true,
but I won’t try to settle the matter in this paper.
Finally, my third aim in this paper is to argue against a certain kind of
necessitarianism about the temporal-ontology debate. But this won’t be an
extra job because the falsity of necessitarianism will follow from my other
arguments.
In section 2, I’ll take care of some preliminaries (I’ll characterize present-
ism and eternalism, define necessitarian and contingentist versions of these
views, and say a bit more about trivialism). In sections 3-5, I’ll argue for
my disjunctive version of anti-metaphysicalism. Finally, in section 6, I’ll

2 MARK BALAGUER
argue very quickly against trivialism, and I’ll discuss the question of
whether we should adopt non-factualism or physical-empiricism.

2. Preliminaries

2.1. Presentism and Eternalism

Presentism (or at any rate, classical presentism—for a relativistic version of
the view, see my (MSb)) is the view that only present objects exist (see, e.g.,
Prior (1970), Hinchliff (1996), Zimmerman (1998), and Markosian (2004)).
Past objects used to exist on this view, and future objects will exist, but since
they don’t exist right now, we can say that they don’t exist (full stop). Eternal-
ism, on the other hand, is the view that past, present, and future objects all
fully exist (see, e.g., Quine (1950), Smart (1963), Lewis (1986), Heller
(1984), and Sider (2001)). Past and future objects don’t exist at the present
time, on this view, but despite this, they still exist (tenselessly). To make sense
of this view, it’s helpful to note that according to eternalists, time is “like
space”, so that physical reality is a 4-dimensional spatiotemporal block, and
temporally distant objects like dinosaurs are analogous to spatially distant
objects like Mars. We’re all inclined to say that while Mars doesn’t exist at
my current location, it still fully exists. It just exists over there. Likewise,
according to eternalists, while dinosaurs don’t exist at my current spatiotem-
poral location, they still fully exist. They just exist in a different region of the
4-dimensional spatiotemporal manifold; or as eternalists might put it, they
exist back then. Presentists, on the other hand, would deny that physical real-
ity is temporally extended; they think that reality is 3-dimensional, not 4-
dimensional.
There is a third view that one might endorse here, namely, growing block
theory, which holds that past and present objects exist but future ones don’t.
I think this view is untenable, and to make things easy, I’ll assume that it’s
false. It’s important to note, however, that I don’t need this assumption at
all. I could easily rephrase my arguments so they didn’t rely on this
assumption by simply replacing the word ‘eternalism’ throughout the paper
with the word ‘anti-presentism’ and replacing all talk of past and future
objects with talk of non-present objects. Other than that, my arguments
could remain unaltered. But, again, to make things easy, I’ll assume that
growing block theory is false and eternalism is the only viable version of
anti-presentism.

2.2. Necessitarianism and Contingentism

Let factualism (about the temporal-ontology debate) be the view that there’s
a fact of the matter whether past and future objects exist—i.e., whether
presentism or eternalism is true. We can distinguish two different kinds of

ANTI-METAPHYSICALISM, NECESSITY, AND TEMPORAL ONTOLOGY 3

factualism—namely, necessitarianism and contingentism—and in this
section, I will define these two views.
Necessitarianism (about the temporal-ontology debate) is the view that
necessitarian presentism or necessitarian eternalism is true; and contingen-
tism is the view that contingentist presentism or contingentist eternalism is
true. All the real work, then, is done in defining necessitarian and conting-
entist versions of presentism and eternalism. This is easy to do for present-
ism: necessitarian presentism is the view that presentism (i.e., the view that
all objects are presently existing objects) is necessarily true; and contingen-
tist presentism is the view that presentism is contingently true. We can’t do
the same thing with eternalism, however, because it’s plausible to think that
there are certain very strange worlds (e.g., a completely empty world) where
eternalism is false for trivial reasons. So I don’t want to take necessitarian
eternalism to be the view that eternalism is absolutely necessary. I want to
take it to be a slightly weaker view. We can get at the view I’ve got in
mind by focusing on possible worlds of a certain kind that I’ll call
NH-worlds (short for “normal-history worlds”). We can define these worlds
as follows:

An NH-world is a world that has a history, or a “normal” history; i.e., it’s

a world in which there’s a historical progression of events (i.e., in which
there’s at least one event that occurs after some other event) and in which
physical objects exist at multiple times.

Let me make a few points about this definition. First, to say that a world is
an NH-world is not to say anything about whether presentism or eternalism
is true in that world. So the talk here of physical objects “existing at multi-
ple times” has to be read in a way that’s neutral between presentism and
eternalism. For instance, on the lingo I’m employing here, regardless of
whether presentism or eternalism is true, we can say that the actual world
is a world in which physical objects exist at different times—because, e.g.,
I exist now and Sputnik existed in 1957. And, more generally, we can say
that the actual world is (obviously) an NH-world—again, regardless of
whether presentism or eternalism is true. Another point worth making here
is that in order for a world to count as an NH-world, it doesn’t need to have
multiple objects existing at different times. Imagine, for instance, a world
that lasts for only ten seconds and that consists of nothing but David Lewis
hovering in empty space for five seconds and then bending his arm and
then hovering for another five seconds. I would count this as an NH-world,
and I assume that eternalists would say that eternalism could be true in such
a world (it could be true because at, say, the 5-second mark of a world like
this, it could be the case that past and future time slices of Lewis exist in a
tenseless, eternalistic way). So a world doesn’t have to be that normal to

4 MARK BALAGUER
count as an NH-world. In fact, the only worlds that aren’t NH-worlds are
worlds that are seriously abnormal in terms of their histories—e.g., worlds
in which there are no progressions of events, or in which there are no phys-
ical objects.
(The notion of an NH-world is, of course, not perfectly precise. But it’s
precise enough for our purposes here; it simply won’t matter in what fol-
lows if there’s some fuzziness about whether certain very strange possible
worlds count as NH-worlds.)
In any event, given the notion of an NH-world, we can define necessitar-
ian eternalism as the view that eternalism is true in all NH-worlds (includ-
ing the actual world); and we can define contingentist eternalism as the
view that (a) eternalism is true in the actual world, but (b) it isn’t true in all
NH-worlds (i.e., there are some presentistic NH-worlds).
Finally, given what I’m going to argue in section 4, we need to take note
of a certain fact about necessitarian eternalism, namely, that it entails that
sentences like the following are necessary:

(if-Dinosaur) If there used to be dinosaurs, then there are dinosaurs—in

particular, there are dinosaurs that exist in a tenseless, eternalistic sort of
way, in a past region of the 4-dimensional spatiotemporal block.

It’s important to note that when necessitarian eternalists say that (if-Dino-
saur) is necessary, what they mean is that it’s metaphysically necessary.
Now, usually, when philosophers say that a sentence is metaphysically nec-
essary, what they mean is that it’s true in all possible worlds. But in the
present case, we should read necessitarian eternalists as saying something a
bit stronger than this, namely, that (if-Dinosaur) is true at every moment in
every possible world.2

2.3. A Bit More Detail on Trivialism

Prima facie, the debate about past and future objects seems to be a debate
about ontology—about whether objects of a certain kind (namely, non-pres-
ent objects) really exist. But advocates of trivialism think this is confused;
they don’t think there’s a substantive ontological question here at all; they
think that the question of whether there are past and future objects is an
entirely trivial question that can be answered by simply getting clear on
what certain kinds of sentences mean, without ever doing any substantive
ontological inquiry. This view can be combined with both presentism and
eternalism. For instance, you might try to combine it with eternalism by
saying something like the following:

2
I’m assuming here—to make things easy—that there are such things as possible worlds;
I think this assumption can be discharged, but I won’t bother with this here.

ANTI-METAPHYSICALISM, NECESSITY, AND TEMPORAL ONTOLOGY 5

 Trivialist Eternalism: Eternalists are committed to the truth of sentences like
(E) If dinosaurs used to exist, then dinosaurs exist.

But this sentence is utterly trivial. To see why, consider the following sen-
tence:

(Dinosaur) Dinosaurs exist.

Read at face value, the logical form of this sentence is ($x)Dx. But that’s
not it’s deep logical form. What (Dinosaur) is saying is that dinosaurs exist
tenselessly, and given this, we should take (Dinosaur) to be synonymous
with the following: ‘Either dinosaurs used to exist, or they will exist, or
they do exist at the present time.’ But given this, (E) is trivially true. Indeed,
it’s analytic. And given this, it follows that eternalism is trivially true.

Alternatively, you might try to combine trivialism with presentism by

saying something like this:

Trivialist Presentism: Presentists are committed to the truth of sentences like

(P) If dinosaurs don’t exist at the present time, then dinosaurs don’t exist.

But this sentence is utterly trivial. To see why, notice that to say that some-
thing exists is to say that it exists now. Thus, the sentence (Dinosaur) is just
synonymous with ‘Dinosaurs exist at the present time.’ But given this, (P) is
entirely trivial. Indeed, it’s analytic. And given this, it follows that presentism
is trivially true.

You could also be a trivialist without taking sides by claiming that the debate
can be settled by figuring out what sentences like (Dinosaur) mean. In particu-
lar, you could say that if (Dinosaur) is synonymous with ‘Dinosaurs exist at
the present time’, then presentism is true, and if it’s synonymous with ‘Dino-
saurs did exist or do exist or will exist’, then eternalism is true.
I don’t think any of these trivialist views are tenable, and in section 6.1
I’ll say why. But for now, I want to move on.

3. The Argument
I’m now ready to formulate my argument for anti-metaphysicalism about
the temporal-ontology debate. In outline, the argument proceeds as follows:
(1) If non-factualism and trivialism (about the temporal ontology
debate) are both false, then contingentism is true.

(2) If contingentism is true, then physical-empiricism is true. Therefore,

(3) If non-factualism and trivialism are both false, then physical-

empiricism is true. But this is just equivalent to

6 MARK BALAGUER
 (4) Either non-factualism or trivialism or physical-empiricism is true.

Both of the inferences in this argument are clearly valid, so I just need to
argue for (1) and (2). I will do this in the next two sections.

4. The Argument for (1)—The Case Against Necessitarianism

My argument for (1) proceeds as follows:
(1a) If non-factualism and trivialism are both false, then the temporal-
ontology debate is a substantive debate, in particular, a substan-
tive ontological debate.

(1b) If the temporal-ontology debate is a substantive ontological

debate, then necessitarianism is false.

(1c) If non-factualism is false, then either necessitarianism or contin-

gentism is true. Therefore, from (1a)-(1c), it follows that

(1) If non-factualism and trivialism are both false, then contingentism

is true.

Once again, this argument is valid. Moreover, the only really controversial
premise here is (1b). (1c) is entirely trivial—if non-factualism is false, then
factualism is true, and so it follows that either necessitarianism or contingen-
tism is true. And (1a) is pretty obvious as well. If non-factualism is false, then
the temporal-ontology debate is a factual debate. Now, if trivialism were true,
then this debate wouldn’t be a substantive debate; but if trivialism is false—
and this is built into the antecedent of (1a)—then the temporal-ontology debate
is a substantive debate, and it’s presumably a substantive ontological debate,
i.e., a debate about whether objects of a certain kind (namely, past and future
objects) really exist. Thus, it seems to me that (1a) is pretty obviously true.
If this is right, then I just need to argue for premise (1b). I will do this
as follows: in section 4.2, I’ll argue that if the temporal-ontology debate is
a substantive ontological debate, then necessitarian eternalism is untenable;
and then in section 4.3, I’ll argue very quickly that a similar argument can
be used to undermine necessitarian presentism. But before I do any of this,
I want to argue for a background point.3

3
Most metaphysicians are necessitarians about the various debates they’re engaged in, so
in arguing against the necessitarian view of the temporal-ontology debate, I will be argu-
ing against a pretty orthodox view. But it’s not as if I’m alone here. For instance, the
necessitarian view of the abstract-object debate has been rejected by, e.g., Field (1989)
and myself (1998); and the necessitarian view of the composition debate has been
rejected by, e.g., Cameron (2007) and Miller (2010).

ANTI-METAPHYSICALISM, NECESSITY, AND TEMPORAL ONTOLOGY 7

 4.1. The Non-Necessity of Genuine Existence Claims
I want to begin by arguing that no genuine existence claims—i.e., no sen-
tences of the form ‘($x)Fx’—are necessarily true. In other words, the claim
here is that no objects exist necessarily. Now, in connection with most
objects (e.g., donkeys and tables), this is pretty obvious. But, of course,
some philosophers think there are certain kinds of objects (e.g., numbers
and Gods) that do exist necessarily. It seems to me, however, that necessi-
tarian views of this kind are implausible, and in this section, I’ll say a few
words against them. I will be brief, though, because this issue is something
of an aside—I don’t really need the result that these necessitarian views are
false. Nonetheless, it will be helpful in what follows to have run through
the idea behind the argument against these views.
Let’s focus on the example of necessitarian platonism—i.e., the view that
platonism is metaphysically necessary, or more precisely, that abstract
objects like numbers exist in all possible worlds. I think we can undermine
this view by arguing for the following two claims:
(I) Necessitarian platonists need to provide some way of motivating
or explaining the idea that there aren’t any worlds without abstract
objects—i.e., that there aren’t any worlds where nominalism is
true.

(II) Necessitarian platonists have no way of providing the needed

argument or explanation.

One might try to argue for (I) by claiming that nominalism is epistemically
possible and that, given this, necessitarian platonists need to explain why
it’s not also metaphysically possible. But I’m not wild about this way of
arguing for (I). I’d rather do it by pointing out that nominalism seems easily
conceivable to us. In other words, prima facie, it seems easy to imagine
worlds where there are no abstract objects—where, say, there’s just a pile
of physical stuff. Now, of course, just because something seems conceivable
doesn’t mean it’s genuinely possible (indeed, it doesn’t even mean it’s
genuinely conceivable), but it seems fair to say that if something seems
easily conceivable to us, then this gives us at least a defeasible prima facie
reason to think it’s possible. Thus, since nominalism seems easily conceiv-
able, it seems to me that we couldn’t rationally endorse necessitarian plato-
nism—couldn’t rationally claim that nominalism isn’t a genuine
metaphysical possibility—unless we had some argument for this. If we have
no reason to think that nominalism isn’t genuinely possible, then it would
just be irrational to endorse necessitarian platonism. And this is why neces-
sitarian platonists need to provide some way of motivating or explaining the
alleged impossibility of nominalism.

8 MARK BALAGUER
 Now, I suppose you might try to resist (I) by claiming it’s just a brute
fact that there aren’t any nominalistic worlds. But this is pretty hard to
believe. Modal facts just don’t work that way. Imagine someone claiming
it’s a brute fact that there are no worlds without donkeys—that the donkey-
less worlds we think we can imagine just aren’t there. This would seem
insane to us, and if someone asked us to justify this attitude, all I think we
could do is throw up our hands and say that this just isn’t how things work
with modal facts. There can’t just be an unexplained hole in the space of
possibilities. And this is exactly what I want to say about the suggestion
that it’s a brute fact that there are no nominalistic worlds; if nominalism
isn’t a genuine possibility, there has to be some reason for this. Thus, if
platonists don’t have any story to tell about why there aren’t any nominalis-
tic worlds, then since we seem to be able to easily conceive of such worlds,
the idea that there aren’t such worlds seems as bizarre and unmotivated as
the idea that there aren’t any donkeyless worlds.
Let’s move on now to thesis (II), i.e., to the claim that platonists don’t
have any way of motivating or explaining the alleged impossibility of
nominalism. One thing that platonists might say here is that the reason
their view is metaphysically necessary is that it’s conceptually necessary,
or analytic. But this is extremely implausible; on the standard way of
thinking, existence claims can’t be analytic because we can’t define objects
into being, i.e., because it can’t be true solely in virtue of meaning that
some object really exists. Now, to this you might respond that there are
numerous a priori arguments for platonism in the literature and that if any
of these arguments are traceable to claims about our concepts, then we
would have reason to think that platonism is conceptually true. But the
fact that platonism is a straightforward existence claim gives us reason in
advance to think that no such argument could be sound—again, because it
can’t be true solely in virtue of meaning that some object really exists.
(Here is perhaps a more gentle way of making this point: There can’t be
any non-trivial analytic existence claims. There may be sentences with a
surface form of ‘There are some Fs’ that are analytic; but if there are, then
they are in some sense trivial; they wouldn’t be genuine existence
claims—i.e., they wouldn’t be saying that objects of some kind really exist
in the world—again, because no such sentence could be true solely in vir-
tue of meaning.)
Now, of course, there are arguments for necessitarian platonism that
don’t involve the idea that platonism is analytic, and if any of these argu-
ments are cogent, then necessitarian platonists would have the required
motivation for their view. But I don’t think any of these arguments are
cogent, and I think the reason they’re not cogent is that none of them
can reasonably be seen as giving us an explanation of why nominalistic
worlds aren’t genuinely possible. Now, I obviously can’t argue for this

ANTI-METAPHYSICALISM, NECESSITY, AND TEMPORAL ONTOLOGY 9

sweeping claim here, but I’d like to say a few words about how the story
goes in one case. Thus, consider the following argument for necessitarian
platonism:

For any possible world w, there’s a sentence of the form ‘There are n don-
keys’ that’s true at w. But from this it follows that there’s a sentence of the
form ‘The number of donkeys is n’ that’s true at w. But from this it follows
that there’s a sentence of the form ‘The number n exists’ that’s true at w.

This is supposed to be an argument for necessitarian platonism, but it

doesn’t even try to explain why nominalistic worlds aren’t genuinely possi-
ble. Prima facie, it seems that there are nominalistic worlds that contain 27
donkeys and no numbers; there doesn’t seem to be anything impossible
about this at all; but if there are worlds like this, then the claim that there
are 27 donkeys simply doesn’t entail that the number of donkeys is 27. This
follows only if we assume that the number 27 exists. So the above argument
is just question-begging, and the reason it’s question-begging is that it
doesn’t explain why nominalistic worlds aren’t genuinely possible; in partic-
ular, it doesn’t explain why there can’t be a world containing 27 donkeys
and no numbers.
Now, again, we can’t conclude that thesis (II) is true from the failure of
this one argument. If I were going to provide a really satisfying argument
here, I would need to explain what’s wrong with all of the arguments for
necessitarian platonism in the literature. I obviously can’t do that here, but,
fortunately, I don’t need to, because this whole discussion is something of
an aside—i.e., because I don’t really need the falsity of necessitarian plato-
nism. All I will say is that if I’m right that the various arguments for neces-
sitarian platonism fail to provide us with an explanation of why nominalism
isn’t a genuine possibility, then necessitarian platonism seems not just
unmotivated, but mysterious and implausible.4
Finally, similar points can be made about other existence claims. Prima
facie, it seems that there are worlds in which there are no Gods, no num-
bers, no donkeys, and so on. Moreover, I don’t think necessitarians (about
any of these kinds of objects) have any way of explaining why the apparent
possibilities here aren’t genuinely possible. If this is right—and, of course, I
haven’t argued the point here—then I think we have good reason to think
that no genuine existence claims are metaphysically necessary.

4
Notice that I haven’t committed here to the claim that nominalism is a genuine possibil-
ity. It seems to me that the debate over abstract objects might be factually empty, and if
it is, then neither platonism nor nominalism is genuinely possible. Thus, I’m claiming
here only that platonists can’t explain why nominalism isn’t a genuine possibility. I think
that non-factualists might be able to do this.

10 MARK BALAGUER
 4.2. Against Necessitarian Eternalism
Even if everything I just argued is true, it doesn’t undermine necessitarian
eternalism because that view doesn’t say that any existence claims are nec-
essary. But as we saw in section 2.2, it does entail the necessity of certain
conditional existence claims—i.e., claims of the form, ‘A > ($x)Fx’. In par-
ticular, necessitarian eternalism entails that sentences like the following are
necessarily true:

(if-Dinosaur) If there used to be dinosaurs, then there are dinosaurs—in

particular, there are dinosaurs that exist in a tenseless, eternalistic sort of
way, in a past region of the 4-dimensional spatiotemporal block.

In this section, I will undermine necessitarian eternalism by undermining

the view that sentences like (if-Dinosaur) are necessary. My argument pro-
ceeds as follows:
(A) If the temporal-ontology debate is a substantive ontological debate,
then necessitarian eternalists have no way of motivating or explain-
ing the alleged necessity of sentences like (if-Dinosaur). But

(B) If necessitarian eternalists have no way of motivating or explaining

the alleged necessity of sentences like (if-Dinosaur), then their view
is mysterious, unmotivated, and implausible. Therefore,

(C) If the temporal-ontology debate is a substantive ontological

debate, then necessitarian eternalism is mysterious, unmotivated,
and implausible.

This argument is valid, so I just need to argue for (A) and (B). I will start
with (B).

4.2.1. The Argument for (B)

The argument for (B) is based on the claim that it seems easy to imagine
a world where (if-Dinosaur) is false. In particular, it seems easy to
imagine a world where there used to be dinosaurs but they all died out
and they don’t exist at all anymore because presentism is true—i.e.,
because reality is a 3-dimensional manifold in which all objects are pres-
ently existing objects, and past and future objects don’t exist at all. Given
this, it seems fair to say that the falsity of (if-Dinosaur) seems easily con-
ceivable to us. Now, of course, it doesn’t follow from this that the falsity
of (if-Dinosaur) is genuinely possible; indeed, it doesn’t even follow that
it’s genuinely conceivable. But given that the falsity of (if-Dinosaur)
seems easily conceivable to us, it seems that we have at least a defeasible

ANTI-METAPHYSICALISM, NECESSITY, AND TEMPORAL ONTOLOGY 11

prima facie reason to think that the falsity of (if-Dinosaur) is possible.
And given this, it seems that necessitarian eternalists need to provide
some way of motivating or explaining the idea that this isn’t possible. If
we have no reason to think that the falsity of (if-Dinosaur) isn’t genuinely
possible, then it would simply be irrational to endorse necessitarian eter-
nalism. The view would be not just unmotivated, but mysterious and
implausible.
Now, I suppose you might try to resist (B) by claiming it’s just a brute
fact that (if-Dinosaur) is necessary. But as was the case with platonism,
this stance is untenable. Modal facts just don’t work this way. There can’t
just be an unexplained hole in the space of possibilities; it can’t be that
(if-Dinosaur) is necessary because it’s a brute fact about the space of pos-
sibilities that worlds where (if-Dinosaur) is false just aren’t there. If there
aren’t any worlds where (if-Dinosaur) is false, there has to be a reason
for this.
You might also try to resist (B) by saying that even if necessitarian eter-
nalists can’t explain why (if-Dinosaur) is necessary, if contingentists can’t
explain why it’s not necessary, then we’re in a stalemate. But I don’t think
this is right—I don’t think we would be in a stalemate in this scenario. For
the contingentist’s claim here is so weak, and the necessitarian’s claim is so
strong, that the burden of proof is on necessitarians. The contingentist is
making a mere possibility claim, and possibility claims are extremely weak.
When something seems prima facie possible, we need a reason to give this
up, not to accept it. Imagine someone asking us to motivate the view that
there are worlds with 400-story buildings, or to explain why there are such
worlds. All we could say in response to this, I think, is that there doesn’t
seem to be anything impossible about 400-story buildings and that absent a
reason to think they’re not possible, we should accept the idea that they
are. Likewise, if eternalists don’t have any reason for thinking that (if-Dino-
saur) is necessary, then the idea that it is necessary seems to be little more
than an unmotivated claim to the effect that certain apparently possible
worlds (namely, presentistic worlds in which dinosaurs used to exist and
then stopped existing) just aren’t there.
So it seems to me that (B) is true; if necessitarian eternalists can’t moti-
vate or explain the alleged necessity of sentences like (if-Dinosaur), then
their view is mysterious, unmotivated, and implausible.

4.2.2. The Argument for (A)

I turn now to premise (A)—i.e., to the claim that if the temporal-ontology
debate is a substantive ontological debate, then necessitarian eternalists have
no way of motivating or explaining the alleged necessity of sentences like
(if-Dinosaur). Now, as I pointed out above, (if-Dinosaur) is not an existence

12 MARK BALAGUER
claim; it’s a conditional existence claim. And I want to start by pointing out
that there are lots of conditional existence claims that are necessary. Con-
sider, e.g., the following two sentences:

(if-Bachelor) If there’s a bachelor, then there’s an unmarried thing.

(if-Water) If there’s a sample of water, then there’s a sample of H2O.

It’s pretty obvious that these sentences are necessary, and it’s equally obvi-
ous that we can explain why they’re necessary. We can do this by saying
something like the following:

The reason (if-Bachelor) is necessary is that its antecedent has an existen-

tial commitment, and the thing that needs to exist to make the antecedent
true (namely, a bachelor) is already itself a thing of the kind that needs to
exist to make the consequent true. This is simply because the concept
bachelor already contains the concept unmarried (or if you’d rather,
because bachelor analytically entails unmarried), and so anything that’s a
bachelor is automatically an unmarried thing. Similar points can be made
about (if-Water): this sentence is necessary because its antecedent has an
existential commitment, and the thing that needs to exist to make the ante-
cedent true (namely, a sample of water) is already itself an object of the
kind that needs to exist to make the consequent true. This is because water
just is H20 (because we use the term ‘water’ as a rigid designator of H20),
and so anything that’s a sample of water is automatically a sample of H20.

But necessitarian eternalists can’t explain the necessity of (if-Dinosaur) in

anything like this way. First of all, since (if-Dinosaur) isn’t analytic, it’s
clearly not analogous to (if-Bachelor). But more importantly, there’s an easy
way to see that (if-Dinosaur) isn’t analogous to (if-Bachelor) or (if-Water).
For (a) the antecedent of (if-Dinosaur)—i.e., the sentence ‘There used to be
dinosaurs’—doesn’t have any existential commitments, and (b) the fact that
the antecedents of (if-Bachelor) and (if-Water) have existential commitments
plays a crucial role in the explanation of why these sentences are necessary.
I suppose that necessitarian eternalists might respond here by saying that
the antecedent of (if-Dinosaur)—i.e., the sentence ‘There used to be dino-
saurs’—does have existential commitments. In particular, they might say that
this sentence commits to the existence of dinosaurs that exist in a past region
of spacetime. But unless they can say why this is true, this claim would be
unhelpful and question-begging. I’m asking for an explanation of why (if-
Dinosaur) is necessary. To say that the antecedent of (if-Dinosaur) commits
to the existence of a past dinosaur is just to say that it entails the consequent
of (if-Dinosaur). But if necessitarian eternalists just assert that the antecedent
of (if-Dinosaur) entails the consequent, that’s no explanation at all. We need

ANTI-METAPHYSICALISM, NECESSITY, AND TEMPORAL ONTOLOGY 13

to know why the existence of past objects is forced on us by the claim that
there used to be dinosaurs; i.e., we need to know why it couldn’t be the case
that the dinosaurs that used to exist simply stopped existing—or, in short,
why there aren’t any worlds where (if-Dinosaur) is false.
Now, to this, one might respond that if it’s question-begging for necessi-
tarian eternalists to claim that the antecedent of (if-Dinosaur) has existential
commitments, then it’s equally question-begging for contingentists to claim
that it doesn’t. But in the present context, this is irrelevant. All I’m trying
to argue here (i.e., in the present subsection) is that necessitarian eternalists
have no way of explaining why (if-Dinosaur) is necessary. If it turns out
that contingentists have no way of explaining why it’s not necessary, that
doesn’t change the fact that necessitarian eternalists have no way of explain-
ing why it is.
Given that (if-Dinosaur) isn’t analogous to (if-Bachelor) or (if-Water),
how else might necessitarian eternalists try to motivate or explain the alleged
necessity of (if-Dinosaur)? I will now consider three different ideas that they
might pursue here, and I will argue that none of these ideas will work.
First, someone who was attracted to Kit Fine’s (2005) way of thinking of
these issues might argue that (a) the presentist-eternalist debate is about the
essential nature of reality, so that if any of the standard arguments for eter-
nalism are correct, then they suggest that reality is essentially 4-dimen-
sional; and (b) if reality is essentially 4-dimensional, then eternalism is true
in all worlds (or at least all NH-worlds), and so (if-Dinosaur) is necessary.
But I think that even if (a) is true, (b) is false. If reality is essentially
4-dimensional, then it follows that the world couldn’t exist without eternal-
ism being true. But it doesn’t follow that there aren’t other worlds (or other
NH-worlds) where presentism is true. All that follows is that any world
where presentism is true isn’t the actual world. But so what? This is per-
fectly consistent with the existence of presentistic NH-worlds, and more
specifically, it’s consistent with the existence of worlds where (if-Dinosaur)
is false. Now, I suppose you might think that 4-dimensionality would be a
part of the essence of any reality (or at least any NH-world). But that
requires argument, and I can’t see how one might argue for it. It may be
that all eternalistic worlds are essentially 4-dimensional, but if there are any
presentistic NH-worlds, then they’re obviously not essentially 4-dimen-
sional. So it seems to me that to get from this way of thinking to the
desired result—i.e., the result that all NH-worlds are essentially 4-dimen-
sional—you would need to have independent motivation for the idea that
there are no presentistic NH-worlds. But, of course, that’s precisely what’s
at issue here.
Second, necessitarian eternalists might try to argue that 4-dimensionality
is part of the essence not of reality, but of ordinary concrete objects like
dinosaurs. For instance, one might argue as follows:

14 MARK BALAGUER
 Dinosaurs are essentially concrete objects—i.e., they’re essentially spatio-
temporal objects—and spatiotemporal objects are essentially 4-dimen-
sional. Therefore, if dinosaurs exist at all, then they’re 4-dimensional.

But this argument is flawed in the same way that the last one was. It relies
crucially on the claim that ordinary physical objects—i.e., concrete, spatio-
temporal objects like dinosaurs—are essentially 4-dimensional. But why
should we believe this? I’m happy to grant (for the sake of argument) that
if there are any eternalistic worlds with dinosaurs, then the dinosaurs in
those worlds are essentially 4-dimensional. But if there are any presentistic
worlds with dinosaurs, then the dinosaurs in those worlds are obviously not
essentially 4-dimensional. So to get the result that all dinosaurs are essen-
tially 4-dimensional, we would need to have some reason to believe that
there aren’t any presentistic worlds containing dinosaurs. But, again, that’s
precisely what’s at issue here.
Third and finally, necessitarian eternalists might try to claim that the
necessity of sentences like (if-Dinosaur) is analogous to the necessity of
mathematical sentences like

(Prime) 3 is prime.

What we say in response to this depends on whether we endorse a platonist

or an anti-platonist semantics for (Prime)—i.e., on whether we think the
truth of (Prime) requires the existence of abstract objects. Anti-platonist
semantic theories say that the truth of (Prime) doesn’t require the existence
of abstract objects, and the most plausible of these theories say that it
doesn’t require the existence of any objects at all. For instance, one view
here is that (Prime) is just a shorthand way of saying this:

(if-Prime) If the natural numbers existed, then 3 would be prime.

I think that anti-platonist views like this are implausible—I think it’s fairly
easy to argue that the right semantic theory for mathematical sentences is
the platonistic one5—but in the present context, this doesn’t matter. For if
the necessity of (Prime) boils down to the necessity of (if-Prime), then this
is completely unhelpful to necessitarian eternalists; for (if-Prime) is neces-
sary for essentially the same reason that (if-Bachelor) is—in a nutshell,
because it’s analytic—and as we’ve seen, (if-Dinosaur) isn’t necessary for

5
Of course, it doesn’t follow that I think that platonism is true, because the platonist
semantics is also consistent with fictionalism, the view that our mathematical theories
aren’t true because (a) they’re supposed to be about abstract objects, and (b) there are no
such things as abstract objects.

ANTI-METAPHYSICALISM, NECESSITY, AND TEMPORAL ONTOLOGY 15

anything like this reason. So if necessitarian eternalists are going to claim
that the necessity of (if-Dinosaur) is analogous to the necessity of (Prime),
they’re going to have to endorse a platonistic semantics; they’re going to
have to say that the necessity of (Prime) depends on the necessity of plato-
nism and that (if-Dinosaur) is necessary for the same reason (or something
like the reason) that platonism is. But I’ve already argued that the claim that
platonism is necessary is problematic. Thus, necessitarian eternalists can’t
make any progress here by hitching their wagon to the necessitarian plato-
nist train because necessitarian platonism is just as bad off—just as mysteri-
ous and unmotivated—as necessitarian eternalism is.
In sum, then, as long as we assume that the temporal-ontology debate is a
substantive ontological debate, I don’t see any way for necessitarian eternal-
ists to motivate or explain the alleged necessity of (if-Dinosaur). Moreover, I
think we can say something about why they can’t explain this. For if the
antecedent of (if-Dinosaur) doesn’t have any existential commitments, then
it’s hard to see how that sentence could be necessary. If all we’re told is that
there used to be dinosaurs, it doesn’t seem that we’re forced to say that any-
thing exists; in particular, we don’t seem forced to say that past objects exist;
the idea that such objects don’t exist seems at least possible (again, even if
the antecedent of (if-Dinosaur) is true, i.e., even if there used to be dino-
saurs), and it’s hard to see what necessitarian eternalists could say to moti-
vate the idea that this is in fact not possible. In short, given that the
antecedent of (if-Dinosaur) doesn’t have any existential commitments, the
idea that that sentence is necessary seems just as perplexing as the idea that
bare existentials like ‘There are donkeys’ and ‘There are abstract objects’ are
necessary. Eternalists just don’t seem to have any story to tell about why
there aren’t any worlds where (a) dinosaurs used to exist, and (b) they went
extinct, and (c) there is no 4th dimension (i.e., there are no past or future
objects), so that the dinosaurs that used to exist don’t exist at all anymore.

4.3. Against Necessitarian Presentism

I just argued for the following claim:

(C) If the temporal-ontology debate is a substantive ontological debate,

then necessitarian eternalism is mysterious, unmotivated, and implausible.

But we can motivate an analogous claim about necessitarian presentism in

essentially the same way. In particular, we can do this by arguing as follows:

(A*) If the temporal-ontology debate is a substantive ontological debate—

if the question at issue is whether objects of a certain kind (namely, past
and future objects) really exist—then necessitarian presentists have no way

16 MARK BALAGUER
 of motivating or explaining the idea that there are no worlds where the rel-
evant objects do exist, i.e., no worlds where eternalism is true.

(B*) If necessitarian presentists have no way of motivating or explaining

the idea that there are no worlds where eternalism is true, then their view
is mysterious, unmotivated, and implausible. Therefore,

(C*) If the temporal-ontology debate is a substantive ontological debate,

then necessitarian presentism is mysterious, unmotivated, and implausible.

I can’t develop this argument here, but it’s deeply analogous to the argu-
ment in (A)-(C). Indeed, the argument for (B*) is more or less identical to
the argument for (B). The argument for (A*) isn’t literally identical to the
argument for (A), but it’s deeply similar. In a nutshell, the argument would
proceed by undermining the various ways in which one might try to explain
the alleged impossibility of eternalistic worlds. For instance, I would argue
that we can’t say that past and future objects are impossible for anything
like the reasons that married bachelors and non-H2O water are impossible;
and I would respond to the idea that presentism is true in all NH-worlds
because NH-worlds involve change, and (as Hinchliff (1996) has argued)
change requires presentism. But, again, I can’t run through the details of
this argument here.
If I’m right that (C*) can be motivated in essentially the same way that (C)
can, then when we put these two claims together, we get the following result:

(C**) If the temporal-ontology debate is a substantive ontological debate,

then the necessitarian view of that debate is mysterious, unmotivated, and
implausible.

Now, I suppose you might respond to this by pointing out that it’s possible
to construct cases where A and B are both implausible but A-or-B is not
implausible. In other words, you might worry that even if necessitarian pres-
entism and necessitarian eternalism are both implausible, it doesn’t follow
that necessitarianism is implausible. But I think it can be argued that this
worry is misplaced, that arguments of the kind I’ve been giving against
necessitarian presentism and necessitarian eternalism do undermine necessi-
tarianism. Taken together, what these arguments suggest is that if the tem-
poral-ontology debate is a substantive ontological debate, then there should
be two different possibilities here; it should be that the relevant objects (i.e.,
past and future objects) could either exist or not exist; and so it should be
that contingentism is true.
But if (C**) is true, then this gives us an argument for premise (1b),
which just says that if the temporal-ontology debate is a substantive onto-
logical debate, then necessitarianism is false. Moreover, if we combine this

ANTI-METAPHYSICALISM, NECESSITY, AND TEMPORAL ONTOLOGY 17

with the above remarks about (1a) and (1c), we get an argument for premise
(1) of the main argument.
(Finally, if we combine (1b) with the argument against trivialism that I’ll
give in section 6.1, we get an important corollary—namely, that the necessi-
tarian view of the temporal-ontology debate is false.)

5. The Argument for (2)—From Contingentism to Physical-Empiricism

If contingentism about the temporal-ontology debate is true, then presentism
and eternalism are both possible. (Or to be more precise, the two relevant
possibilities here are eternalism and presentistic NH-worlds; for if com-
pletely empty worlds are possible, then presentism is in some sense trivially
possible.) In any event, what I want to argue now is that if there are indeed
two different possibilities here, then there are two different physical possi-
bilities. Or to put the point differently, I want to argue for the following:

(Physical) If presentism and eternalism don’t pick out two different physi-
cal possibilities—or two different ways that the physical world could be—
then they don’t pick out two different possibilities at all.

I’ll argue for this in a moment, but first, let me quickly note that when I
speak here of “physical possibilities,” I’m not speaking of things that are
physically possible (where something is physically possible iff it’s consistent
with the laws of nature, or something like that). Rather, I’m speaking of
physical states of affairs that are metaphysically possible. To appreciate the
difference between these two things, consider the following two possibilities:
(i) I weigh 10,000 pounds, and I’m still alive.

(ii) 3 is prime.

It may be that (i) is physically impossible (i.e., that it’s inconsistent with
the laws of nature), but whatever we say about this, it’s clear that (i) is a
physical possibility in the sense that I have in mind because it’s a physical
state of affairs that’s metaphysically possible. (ii), on the other hand, is
obviously physically possible in the sense that it’s not inconsistent with the
laws of nature, but it’s not a physical possibility in the sense that I have in
mind for the simple reason that the state of affairs of 3 being prime isn’t a
physical state of affairs at all.
Let me argue now for (Physical). The first point to note here is that pres-
entism and eternalism are competing theories of the nature of the physical
world. Eternalists say that the physical world is 4-dimensional, whereas
presentists say that it’s 3-dimensional; and eternalists say that past and
future objects really exist as parts of physical reality (in past and future

18 MARK BALAGUER
regions of the 4-dimensional manifold), whereas presentists say there are no
such things. This already suggests that (Physical) is true, but we can really
drive this point home by taking note of what we would have to say if we
rejected (Physical). We would have to say that there are two different possi-
ble worlds—call them PW and EW—such that (a) PW and EW are physi-
cally identical, and (b) presentism is true in PW and eternalism is true in
EW. This seems crazy to me. What could the difference between PW and
EW possibly amount to? Given that PW and EW are physically identical,
what could it even mean to say that reality is 3-dimensional in PW and
4-dimensional in EW? This just seems incoherent. In other words, it seems
to be an analytic truth that if reality is 3-dimensional in PW and 4-dimen-
sional in EW (i.e., if past and future objects exist in EW but not PW), then
there’s a physical difference between the two worlds. But if this is right,
then (Physical) is true.
(I suppose you might think that there are certain kinds of abstract objects
that can be thought of as past and future objects. E.g., you might think
there’s an abstract object that corresponds exactly to Socrates. But no such
object would really be Socrates; moreover, it wouldn’t count as a past
object, for it wouldn’t exist in a past region of a 4-dimensional spacetime
manifold. And finally, the belief in such objects couldn’t rightly be called
eternalism; it would be a kind of platonism. At best, you could think of this
view as a kind of ersatz eternalism, and you could think of the objects in
question as ersatz past objects. When I say that the debate between presen-
tists and eternalists is a debate about the nature of the physical world, I’m
not talking about this ersatz view; I’m talking about the view that the physi-
cal world is a 4-dimensional manifold and that objects like Socrates—the
original Socrates—exist in past regions of this manifold. Given this, I think
that (Physical) is more or less obvious.)
In any event, given that (Physical) is true, we can now argue for premise
(2), i.e., for the claim that if contingentism is true, then physical-empiricism
is true. If contingentism is true, then the question of whether presentism or
eternalism is true is a contingent question about the nature of the physical
world. In this scenario, there would be two different ways that the physical
world could be, and the question would be whether the actual world has the
one nature of the other. But given this, it’s hard to see how this question
could be answered by means of an a priori philosophical argument. Presum-
ably, it could be answered only empirically. If there are two different ways
that the physical world could be here—if it could either have or not have a
fourth dimension—then in order to figure out whether it actually does have a
fourth dimension, we would need to perform some test to see whether the
extra objects really exist, i.e., whether there really are past and future objects
and events that exist along a fourth dimension. Now, we might not know
how to settle this question empirically—indeed, it may be that we could

ANTI-METAPHYSICALISM, NECESSITY, AND TEMPORAL ONTOLOGY 19

never settle it empirically—but it wouldn’t follow from this that the question
was a philosophical one. For even if we can’t settle the question empirically,
it’s hard to see how we could settle it with an a priori argument; indeed, it’s
hard to see how we could make any progress at all on this question with an a
priori argument. Given contingentism, the question of whether presentism or
eternalism is true is of the same general kind as, say, the question of whether
Alpha Centauri has planets—it’s just an extremely difficult question about
the contingent nature of the physical world. Now, it seems pretty obvious
that a priori arguments are entirely powerless in connection with the question
about Alpha Centauri; we just can’t make any progress at all on that question
with a priori arguments. And it seems that if contingentism is true, then the
same goes for the temporal-ontology question; it seems that in this scenario,
a priori arguments can’t give us any good reason to favor presentism over
eternalism or vice versa. Therefore, once again, it seems that if contingentism
is true, then we could only settle the temporal-ontology question empirically;
we might not be able to settle it at all, but if we can, then we can settle it
only empirically. For if contingentism is true, there just doesn’t seem to be
any other way of settling it.
Now, to really motivate my position here, I would need to explain what’s
wrong with the various a priori arguments that philosophers have attempted
for presentism and eternalism. I think this can be done, but I obviously
can’t do it here. It’s important to note, however, that if contingentism is
true, then even if we haven’t run through all of these arguments to see
what’s wrong with them, we have good reason in advance to think that
something must be wrong with them. For if the question at issue is a contin-
gent question about the nature of the physical world, then it’s hard to see
how an a priori argument could work. The prospects for finding a good
a priori argument in the temporal-ontology case wouldn’t seem to be any
better than they are in the Alpha Centauri case.
Let me back this claim up by explaining how we can run an analogue of
the cross-time-relation argument in the Alpha Centauri case. Suppose that
Bea believes that Alpha Centauri has four planets, and suppose that she has
developed strong feelings for the third of these planets, which she has named
“Veruca”. Suppose, in particular, that Bea has sketches of Veruca on her
walls, that she dreams of vacationing there, and that she openly admits to
loving Veruca. Then, intuitively, it seems that the following sentence is true:

(V) Bea loves Veruca.

It also seems that this is true:

(H) Kripke admires Hume.

20 MARK BALAGUER
The cross-time-relation argument proceeds from the intuitive truth of (H) to
the conclusion that Hume must exist (because this is required for the truth
of (H)) and, hence, that eternalism must be true. Now, I actually doubt that
this argument is a priori because I think (H) is an empirical claim, but the
more important point here is that we can argue just as easily from the intui-
tive truth of (V) to the conclusion that Veruca exists and, hence, that Alpha
Centauri has planets. Let’s call this the cross-planet argument.
The cross-planet argument is obviously a bad argument. The problem is
that if the truth of (V) really requires the existence of Veruca, then before
we could have good reason to believe that (V) is literally true, we would
need to have reason to believe that Veruca exists. In fact, this argument
just seems silly—we can’t argue for a substantive claim of astronomy by
analyzing some folk sentence that seems intuitively true. This isn’t even
the right kind of argument to use. But it seems to me that the very same
points can be made about the cross-time-relation argument: First of all, if
the truth of (H) really requires the existence of Hume, then before we
could have good reason to believe (H), we would need to have reason to
believe that Hume exists. Second, it seems bizarre and wrongheaded to try
to motivate a substantive theory about the structure of physical reality by
analyzing some folk sentence that seems intuitively true to us. As before,
it seems that this isn’t even the right kind of argument to use. What’s
needed, it seems, is an empirical reason for thinking that past and future
objects are really there.
Now, of course, this is just an example—there are other philosophical
arguments for presentism and eternalism in the literature, and to really jus-
tify my position, I would need to say what’s wrong with all of them. But,
again, I think we have good reason to think that if contingentism is true,
then a priori arguments just won’t work, and if this is right, then we have
good reason to think that there must be something wrong with the various a
priori arguments in the literature.
(By the way, I’m not claiming that all contingent questions are physi-
cal-empirical questions. You might think that the abstract-object question
is a contingent question (because you might think that platonism and
nominalism are both possible), but it wouldn’t follow from this that it
was a physical-empirical question. All I’m saying is that if the temporal-
ontology question is a contingent question, then it’s a physical-empirical
question. And, again, the reason is that it’s about the nature of the physi-
cal world.)
At any rate, we now have an argument for premise (2), i.e., for the claim
that if contingentism is true, then physical-empiricism is true. And if we
combine this with the above argument for (1), we arrive at the anti-meta-
physical conclusion that either non-factualism, physical-empiricism, or trivi-
alism is true.

ANTI-METAPHYSICALISM, NECESSITY, AND TEMPORAL ONTOLOGY 21

 6. Which of the Three Views Should We Endorse?

6.1. Against Trivialism

In this section, I will provide a quick argument against trivialist views of
the temporal-ontology debate, i.e., views of the kind described in section
2.3. These views rely heavily on analyses of sentences like

(Dinosaur) Dinosaurs exist.

Let’s say that a P-language is a language in which (Dinosaur) is synony-

mous with ‘Dinosaurs exist at the present time.’ And let’s say that an E-lan-
guage is a language in which (Dinosaur) is synonymous with ‘Either
dinosaurs did exist, or they will exist, or they do exist at the present time.’
Given this, we can say that trivialist presentists (of the kind described in
section 2.3) think that English is a P-language, and trivialist eternalists (of
the kind described in section 2.3) think that English is an E-language. Now,
as empirical theories of ordinary English, I don’t think either of these views
is very plausible, but this doesn’t really matter. The question I’m concerned
with here is whether the debate over past and future objects is a substantive
ontological debate. Thus, it doesn’t really matter what sentences like (Dino-
saur) mean in ordinary English. The more important question is what these
sentences mean in the language of serious metaphysicians who are debating
the existence of past and future objects. For instance, when eternalists like
Lewis and Sider are engaged in arguing for eternalism and they utter sen-
tences like (Dinosaur), what are they saying? Well, according to trivialist
eternalists, all they’re saying is that there either were, are, or will be dino-
saurs. In other words, they’re not saying anything metaphysically controver-
sial. But this seems wrong. They seem to be saying more than this. In
particular, they seem to be saying something like the following:

(O-Dinosaur) Dinosaurs exist somewhere in spacetime; in other words, either

(a) dinosaurs exist at the present time, or (b) reality is a 4-dimensional block
in which past and future objects are just as real as present ones, and dinosaurs
exist in either a past or a future region of the 4-dimensional block.

At any rate, this is what eternalists are trying to say, and it’s what they think
they’re saying. Of course, they could be confused about what they mean by
their own words, but that seems pretty hard to believe. Likewise, when pres-
entists like Markosian are engaged in arguing for presentism and they say
that (Dinosaur) is false, it seems that they’re doing more than just making
the trivial zoological point that dinosaurs don’t exist in the 21st Century. It
seems that they’re also saying that it’s not the case that dinosaurs exist in a
past or future region of a 4-dimensional spatiotemporal block. In other

22 MARK BALAGUER
words, they seem to be saying that (O-Dinosaur) is false. At any rate, this is
what they’re trying to say, and it’s what they think they’re saying.
Given all this, the first point I want to make against trivialist views of
the temporal-ontology debate is that they involve implausible interpretations
of the assertions of presentists and eternalists. When presentists and eternal-
ists are engaged in the temporal-ontology debate and they utter sentences
like (Dinosaur), or the negations of these sentences, they don’t seem to be
speaking a P-language or an E-language; on the contrary, they seem to be
speaking an O-language, where an O-language is a language in which
(Dinosaur) is essentially equivalent to (O-Dinosaur). But if these people are
speaking an O-language, then their assertions and denials of sentences like
(Dinosaur) aren’t trivial claims of zoology; on the contrary, they’re contro-
versial ontological claims about whether physical reality has a 4th dimen-
sion. And if this is true, then it would seem that trivialism is false.
You might object here by claiming that O-languages are hopelessly con-
fused, or imprecise, or some such thing; for you might think that talk of
dinosaurs existing in a past region of a 4-dimensional spatiotemporal block
is confused, or imprecise, or factually empty, or whatever. I’m actually par-
tial to this idea, but it doesn’t undermine the argument I’m giving here
against trivialism. For even if O-languages are confused (or imprecise or
whatever), it doesn’t follow that serious metaphysicians who are engaged in
the temporal-ontology debate aren’t speaking an O-language; for it could be
that their language is confused (or imprecise or whatever). (I’ll say more
about this possibility in section 6.2; we’ll see there that if the language of
presentists and eternalists is imprecise in a certain way—if sentences assert-
ing the truth of eternalism (or presentism) are so imprecise that they lack
truth conditions—then this gives us reason to endorse non-factualism.)
The second point I want to make against trivialist views of the temporal-
ontology debate is that (a) they’re based on analyses of the meanings of cer-
tain sentences, and (b) nothing metaphysically interesting follows from such
analyses—in particular, nothing follows about whether physical reality is
3-dimensional or 4-dimensional. Suppose, for instance, that trivialist eternal-
ists are right that the sentence (Dinosaur) is synonymous with ‘Dinosaurs
did exist, or do exist, or will exist’. If this were right, then (Dinosaur)
would be obviously true. But it wouldn’t follow that eternalism is obviously
true; indeed, it wouldn’t even follow that eternalism is true, because it
wouldn’t follow that reality is a 4-dimensional block in which past and
future objects really exist. Likewise, if trivialist presentists were right that
(Dinosaur) is synonymous with ‘Dinosaurs exist at the present time’, then
(Dinosaur) would be obviously false; but it wouldn’t follow that presentism
is true, because it wouldn’t follow that reality isn’t a 4-dimensional block.
So I don’t think that trivialist views of the temporal-ontology debate are
plausible. The semantic theories that these views are based on seem false, and

ANTI-METAPHYSICALISM, NECESSITY, AND TEMPORAL ONTOLOGY 23

what’s more, I don’t think there’s any plausible way to move from these
semantic theories to the conclusion that the temporal-ontology question—i.e.,
the question of whether physical reality has a 4th dimension—is trivial.
This argument against trivialism is admittedly pretty quick.6 But if it’s
right, then we get the result that either non-factualism or physical-empiri-
cism is true.

6.2. Non-Factualism vs. Physical-Empiricism

Which view should we endorse, non-factualism or contingentist physical-
empiricism? Well, one way to argue for the latter view would be to actually
produce an empirical argument for presentism or eternalism. For instance,
some people (e.g., Rietdijk 1966 and Putnam 1967) think that the special
theory of relativity (STR) is incompatible with presentism and, hence, that
all of the empirical arguments that support STR support eternalism as well.
I can’t get into this here, but I have argued elsewhere (MSb) that this argu-
ment doesn’t work. Thus, while I think it’s conceivable that someone might
someday produce a good empirical argument for presentism or eternalism, I
don’t think we have such an argument right now.
Now, of course, even if we don’t have a good empirical argument for
presentism or eternalism, physical-empiricism could still be true. But I have
some doubts about physical-empiricism, and I want to bring out an initial
reason for thinking that it might be false and that non-factualism might be
true. My objection to physical-empiricism is based on the fact that it entails
the following thesis:

(2-possibilities) Presentism and eternalism pick out two different physical

possibilities, or two different ways that the physical world could be. In
other words, there are robust physical possibilities in which presentism is
true, and there are robust physical possibilities in which eternalism is true.
(To be more precise, the two possibilities here are eternalism and presen-
tistic NH-worlds, but I won’t keep bothering to be this precise.)

My worry about physical-empiricism is very simple: it entails that (2-possi-

bilities) is true, and it’s not clear that this is right. I won’t try to argue that
(2-possibilities) is definitely false, but I want to argue that for all we know
right now, it might be false. And I’m going to start by arguing for the fol-
lowing claim:

(#) We don’t have a genuine physical picture of the two different possibili-
ties here; i.e., we don’t have a picture of the physical difference between
presentist worlds and eternalist worlds.

6
For other arguments against views of this kind, see, e.g., Sider (2006), Eklund (2008),
and Bennett (2009).

24 MARK BALAGUER
As a first step toward arriving at an argument for this claim, let’s imagine that
there are two different possible worlds, P-world and E-world, that have the
following two traits: first, P-world and E-world are historically identical (i.e.,
they have the same history, or the same progression of events); and second,
P-world is an evolving 3-dimensional block, so that at any moment in P-world
only present objects exist, whereas E-world is a 4-dimensional block, and all
of the various objects and events from the whole history of the word exist in
different temporal regions of that block. Question: Do we understand what
the difference between P-world and E-world really amounts to? It might seem
that we do. For we can say that unlike P-world, E-world is a 4-dimensional
block, and so on. But it’s not clear what this means. What does it mean to say
that dinosaurs exist in an eternalistic way, or that the Battle of Hastings is hap-
pening in an eternalistic way? No one thinks that the Battle of Hastings is
happening in 2014. And we all think that it did happen in 1066. Eternalists
want to say (in 2014) that 1066 exists in an eternalistic way; but again, it’s
not clear what this really means. It’s not clear what the physical world needs
to be like in order for it to be the case that 1066 exists in an eternalistic way.
One way to get at my worry here is to ask what presentists and eternalists
are really disagreeing about. They agree that (a) the Battle of Hastings
occurred in 1066, and (b) it’s not occurring right now, in 2014. So if their
dispute is factual, then they must be disagreeing about whether some further
fact obtains. Eternalists say that this further fact does obtain, and presentists
say that it doesn’t. But I don’t know what the alleged further fact is supposed
to be. It’s not just that I don’t know how to verify whether this fact obtains;
it’s that I don’t know what it’s supposed to be. I don’t know what worldly
condition is being specified such that if it obtains, then eternalism is true, and
if it doesn’t, then presentism is true. All we really have here are words; we’re
told, for instance, that in order for eternalism to be true, it needs to be the
case that “reality is a 4-dimensional block” and that “dinosaurs exist in an
eternalistic way.” But I don’t know what this amounts to. I don’t know what
the world needs to be like in order to count as a world in which physical real-
ity is 4-dimensional. I know what it means to say that dinosaurs used to
exist, but I don’t know what’s needed for it to also be the case—i.e., for
there to be a further fact that makes it the case—that dinosaurs exist in a past
region of spacetime. And I don’t think anyone else does either.
(By the way, I’m not suggesting here that we can’t construct mathemati-
cal models of presentist worlds and eternalist worlds. Indeed, I think it’s
obvious that we can; we can construct one model in which the physical
world is 3-dimensional and another in which it’s 4-dimensional. But the
problem is that we don’t know whether these two models pick out two dif-
ferent physical possibilities.)
So all of this leads me to think that (#) is true: we don’t have a genuine
physical picture of the two different possibilities here, i.e., of presentist

ANTI-METAPHYSICALISM, NECESSITY, AND TEMPORAL ONTOLOGY 25

worlds and eternalist worlds, and we don’t know what the world needs to
be like in order to count as a presentist world or an eternalist world. Now,
of course, it doesn’t follow from this that there aren’t two different physical
possibilities here. After all, we humans are conceptually and imaginatively
limited. But it seems to me that if (#) is true, then this ought to give us
pause. If we don’t have a genuine physical picture of the two different pos-
sibilities, then we ought to allow that it might be that there just aren’t two
different possibilities here; in other words, we ought to allow that it might
be that (2-possibilities) is false.
Now, it might seem that what I’m suggesting here is incompatible with
what I argued in section 4; for it might seem that I argued there that present-
ism and eternalism are both possible. But that’s not what I argued in section
4; what I argued was that if the temporal-ontology debate is a substantive
ontological debate, then there are two different possibilities here. But, of
course, this is perfectly compatible with the claim that there aren’t two differ-
ent possibilities here. Indeed, these two claims fit together perfectly to form
an argument for the thesis that the temporal-ontology debate is not a substan-
tive ontological debate. And, of course, if we combine this result with my
argument against trivialism, we get an argument for non-factualism.
Now, I suppose you might think that if (2-possibilities) is false, then
what this shows is that eternalism isn’t a genuine physical possibility and,
hence, that we ought to endorse presentism—indeed, necessitarian present-
ism. But I think this would be a mistake. If presentists and eternalists
haven’t succeeded in picking out two different ways the world could be,
then why should we assume that the one way the world can be with respect
to this dispute is a presentist way? Moreover, if we don’t know what the
world needs to be like in order to count as an eternalist world, then we pre-
sumably don’t know what it needs to be like to count as a presentist world
either. And given this, it’s hard to see why we should think that the falsity
of (2-possibilities) would fit better with presentism than eternalism.
If (2-possibilities) is false, the right conclusion to draw isn’t that present-
ism is true—it’s that non-factualism is true. For if (2-possibilities) is false,
then contingentism is false, and if we combine this with my earlier argu-
ment for the falsity of necessitarianism, we get the result that factualism is
false—and hence that non-factualism is true.
Another way to appreciate this point is to notice that if (2-possibilities) is
false (and if necessitarianism is also false), then presentism and eternalism
don’t have any truth conditions. Or to be more precise, the sentences that
assert the truth of these two theories don’t have possible-world-style truth con-
ditions. For if (2-possibilities) is false, then presentism and eternalism don’t
pick out two different possibilities, and so they don’t pick out two different
sets of possible worlds, and so they don’t have possible-world-style truth con-
ditions. But if presentism and eternalism don’t have possible-world-style truth

26 MARK BALAGUER
conditions, then they don’t have truth values, and if this is right, then non-
factualism is true, i.e., there’s no fact of the matter whether presentism or
eternalism is true.
So, again, if (2-possibilities) is false, then we should endorse non-factual-
ism. Moreover, it’s entirely obvious that if (2-possibilities) is true, then con-
tingentism is true, and as we’ve already seen, if contingentism is true, then
physical-empiricism is true. Thus, it seems to me that our question here—
the question of whether we should endorse physical-empiricism or non-
factualism—boils down to the question of whether (2-possibilities) is true;
i.e., it boils down to whether presentists and eternalists have succeeded in
picking out two different physical possibilities, or two different ways that
the physical world could be. I won’t take a stand here on this question, but,
again, given (#)—given that we don’t have a physical picture of the two
different possibilities—we ought to take non-factualism very seriously. On
the other hand, it certainly doesn’t follow from our inability to picture the
two possibilities that they don’t exist. After all, we can’t picture two differ-
ent physical possibilities in connection with sentences like ‘Electron e is in
a superposition state with respect to spin in direction d’, but it doesn’t fol-
low from this that there aren’t two different physical possibilities here.
In the end, I’m not sure how to decide whether (2-possibilities) is true,
but it seems to me that this is at least partially a question for physicists.
I say “partially” because it’s not really an empirical question. But insofar as
the question is whether presentism and eternalism pick out distinct physical
possibilities, it seems that if nothing else, the question should be answered
in consultation with physicists.

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