I do not buy the Wittgensteinian claim that all philosophical problems are problem of language and disappear once we analyse our use of words. But some philosophical problems are like that. And one of them, I suspect, is the so-called problem of tensed token truths. (In this blog post, I’ll rely on a presentation of the problem by my colleague Martin Lipman, though his analysis and solution are very different from mine.)
“Victor Gijsbers is writing about the problem of tensed token truths.” That’s true. At least, it’s true now that I write it, though quite soon it will no longer be true that I’m writing about this problem. This generates questions about such utterances. Should we say that my token utterance changes its truth value? Or should we say that my token utterance remains true, even when I am no longer writing? Or should we perhaps say that it only exists momentarily, or that it loses its status as an utterance as time goes by?
I take it that the (middle/later) Wittgensteinian approach to such questions starts with the suspicion that there are no general answers to these questions, and that everything depends on how we use language. So let’s investigate some actual cases.
Case 1. I cook dinner early in the evening while my wife is still away, and put half of it in the fridge for when she returns home later. Before leaving, I write on a piece of paper: “Dinner is in the fridge.”
When I write this sentence, is it in any way relevant whether there is, at that moment, dinner in the fridge? Clearly not. For this particular use of language, it would have been just as good if I had first written the note and then made dinner; and conversely it would have been bad if I had written the note while there was dinner in the fridge, and had then eaten my wife’s portion myself so that nothing would have been left when she eventually came home. The only thing that is relevant in terms of truth and falsity is whether there’s dinner in the fridge when my wife comes home. Before that, and after she has eaten, the words on the paper ar arguably not making a claim at all; they are not, at that moment, an utterance.
If we forget about the paper and my wife finds it still on the table the next evening, when I have forgotten to make dinner for her, she may be in a for disappointment when opening the fridge. It is then possible, because of the practice its part of, to say that the paper makes a false claim.
If we throw away the paper and someone at the waste paper recycling plant finds it, could they read it and say: “Nice! If what this paper says is true, I don’t need to cook tonight!” I suppose they could, but it would be quaint. Of course they can treat the random pieces of paper they find in the trash that way, and I suppose they can then be thought of as true-or-false utterances. Though it would not, arguably, be my utterance any longer, since this is a linguistic practice in which I was not making a move.
Case 2. I am moving and write ‘books’ on a box that I then fill with books. After the move, I unpack the box, and leave it outside the house where Jim sees it. The next day, I flatten it; in that state, Aisha sees it.
Although ‘books’ does not have the form of a sentence, it is arguably a truth-evaluable utterance. If during the move the box contains books, the utterance is true; if during the move the box contains kitchen appliances, the utterance is false. There’s no sense in which the utterance is false before I put in the books; clearly, I’m not yet making a claim at that point.
It’s not easy to say what’s going on when Jim looks at the box. Given that it still seems to be a box filled with goods, we could say that an utterance is being made and it is false. On the other hand, Jim being just a random passerby not involved in my practice of moving, it’s not clear that an utterance is being made at all. When Aisha comes along, and it is immediately clear that the box contains nothing, it certainly seems best to say that no statement is being made.
Case 3. I write the words “I am writing an article about the problem of tensed truths.” After an hour, I’ve finished and stop writing it, but the written words remain in existence. What’s their status?
Well, it depends. Given that I write those words at the beginning of an article about tensed truths, and that the reader encounters them at the beginning of that article when it is in its finished state, it’s clear to everyone that the statement describes a temporary state which is presumably no longer the case. To claim that the statement has become false would be to misunderstand the situation. It’s a true statement that we have to understand from the point of view of me when I was writing the article.
But suppose that I wrote those same words, at the same time, but now as my ‘status’ on a social media network. Then, arguably, they would become false as soon as I stopped writing, because the point of such a status is that I keep it updated as I change my activities. (Of course this depends on how well people do this in practice and what the expectations around it are.) Keeping these words in that place amounts to making a (continued) utterance that used to be true but is now false.
The practices here are of course enormously subtle. The same words, explicitly marked as ‘current status’, might not be false if they were found on what is clearly a forgotten and no longer maintained 1990’s GeoCities website full of animated gifs and horrible font colours. And they would certainly not be false if they were found on something like the Wayback Machine, which keeps static copies of web pages. On the Wayback Machine, they would no longer count as an utterance.
Conclusion. The question ‘how should we analyse tensed token truths’ sounds like a good philosophical question with rival answers, but doesn’t this feeling disappear when we make the context more concrete? Whether or not a statement keeps functioning as an utterance that is true or false depends on the practice that it is part of. Once we delve into the details, things seem to become clear; and of course the right thing to say is different in different cases. We simply do not need a general philosophical theory of tensed token truths.