Advanced Temporalising

There is a widespread assumption that B-theorists (according to whom there is nothing metaphysically special about the present moment in virtue of which it is present) should interpret tense operators such as ‘it was the case that’ and ‘it will be the case that’ as implicit quantifier-restrictors – so that, for example, an utterance at the present instant n of the sentence ‘It was the case that there are dinosaurs’ is true just in case there are dinosaurs located at some instant t earlier than n. However, it is easy to show that this interpretation of the tense operators creates serious problems for B-theorists when combined with certain other natural B-theoretic commitments. In this paper, I argue that the best way for B-theorists to avoid these problems is to treat the tense operators as redundant when the sentences in their scope are qualitative – roughly, not about any particular individual.