The Stage View and Temporary Intrinsics
Theodore Sider · Analysis · 2000
Four-dimensionalism, as I’ll use the term, is the doctrine that reality is spread out in time as well as space.1 Just as objects that are located at multiple regions of space contain parts conned to those regions of space, so objects that are located at multiple regions of time contain parts — temporal parts — that are conned to those regions of time. (Or better: an object that occupies an extended spatiotemporal region R has parts conned to the various subregions of R; but I’ll ignore this complication henceforth.) Most who accept this ontology of perduring objects, as they are often called, identify the continuants of our everyday ontology with “space-time worms” — mereological sums of stages from different times. Elsewhere (1996) I have proposed a different version of four-dimensionalism, which identies continu-ants with the stages themselves, and which analyses de re temporal predication with a temporal version of modal counterpart theory (Lewis, 1968, 1971). On this view, a current assertion of ‘Clinton was indiscreet ’ is true iff the (current) referent of ‘Clinton ’ — a stage — has an indiscreet temporal counterpart in the