Time and Tense

Two of the main debates in philosophy of language concerning time and tense are the debate about the semantics of the tenses in the English language and the debate over whether propositions can be transiently true or false as opposed to always being eternally true or false. The latter quarrel is also known as the "temporalism–eternalism debate." Given standard semantics, the two debates are not logically independent, as we will see. Those who believe propositions are eternally true or false needn’t treat the tenses as operators. Their opponents, on the other hand, appear to be committed to an operator theory of the tenses, given a standard semantic framework. In this chapter I will focus primarily on these two debates.