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Full Idea
The property 'being such as to have been a child' is suspicious because it points beyond its instances in the sense that a thing's presently having that property tells us nothing about the present intrinsic nature of the thing.
Gist of Idea
The present property 'having been F' says nothing about a thing's intrinsic nature
Source
Ross P. Cameron (Truthmaking for Presentists [2011], 2)
Book Ref
'Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Vol.6', ed/tr. Zimmerman,D/Bennett,K [OUP 2011], p.59
A Reaction
This is his objection to what he calls the 'Lucretian' strategy, which tries to make history into a property of present reality. That is implausible, I think, because there is no test for the property, apart from knowledge of the past. Reality is tensed?
| 14399 | Presentism says only the present exists, so there is nothing for tensed truths to supervene on [Lewis] |
| 14023 | The Truthmaker thesis spells trouble for presentists [Crisp,TM] |
| 13991 | Presentism has the problem that if Socrates ceases to exist, so do propositions about him [Markosian] |
| 18923 | The present property 'having been F' says nothing about a thing's intrinsic nature [Cameron] |
| 18926 | One temporal distibution property grounds our present and past truths [Cameron] |
| 18929 | We don't want present truthmakers for the past, if they are about to cease to exist! [Cameron] |