T2. Presentism : Nomological Past and Ontological Actualization A Reconstructing Temporal Reference without Eternalism

This paper proposes a structuralist reformulation of presentism that resolves the classical tension between ontological parsimony and the semantic robustness of temporal discourse. Rather than postulating the ontological persistence of past entities, we develop a model in which past-tense propositions are grounded in the structural constraints of the present and the lawful dynamics that govern its evolution. Drawing on structural realism and constraint- based semantics, we define the past not as a domain of no-longer-existing objects, but as a family of nomologically admissible histories derived from the current configuration of the world. This allows for a robust theory of temporal reference without ontological inflation. We distinguish between ontological and nomological pasts, reformulate the truthmaker principle in modal-structural terms, and anchor the arrow of time in an epistemic asymmetry of law- ful reconstruction. The resulting framework reconciles presentism with relativistic physics, supports scientific retrodiction, and avoids the pitfalls of both deflationary semantics and er- satz metaphysics. Temporal truth is reconceived as structural invariance across dynamically constrained histories, yielding a tensed semantics compatible with both scientific realism and ontological actualism.