ALL THE WORLD'S A FRAGMENT. FRAGMENTALISM, TIME, AND MODALITY.

This thesis is devoted to fragmentalism, a non-standard tense realism introduced by Kit Fine (Modality and Tense: Philosophical Papers. Oxford: OUP, pp. 261-320, 2005). In the first three chapters, I will show how to develop a fragmentalist version of presentism – which I will call fragmentalist presentism – in order to face some of the problems usually ascribed to standard presentism. In particular, the goal of the fist chapter is to search for a way to reconcile the correspondence theory of truth (CTT), i.e., the thesis that truth supervenes on facts, with a presentist metaphysics. According to what we might call unrestricted CTT, the truth of past- and future-tensed sentences supervenes – respectively – on past and future facts. Since the standard presentist denies the existence of past and future entities (and facts concerning them that do not obtain in the present), she seems to lack the resources to accept both past- and future-tensed true sentences and unrestricted CTT. I will argue that by endorsing fragmentalist presentism one can uphold past- and future-tensed truths together with unrestricted CTT. In the second chapter, I argue that the adoption of an unrestricted principle of bivalence is compatible with a metaphysics that (i) denies that the future is real, (ii) adopts nomological indeterminism, and (iii) exploits a branching structure to provide a semantics for future contingent claims. To this end, I will show how to reconcile – within Fine’s non-standard tense realism – a genuinely A-theoretic branching-time model with the idea that there is a branch corresponding to the thin red line, that is, the branch that will turn out to be the actual future history of the world. Many four-dimensionalists think of continuants as mereological sums of stages from different times. These sums would perdure, that is, they would persist by having different stages. This view is generally taken to be incompatible with presentism: if there is no time except the present, then nothing can be a sum of such stages. The aim of the third chapter is to show that fragmentalist presentism provides us with the tools to embrace both a presentist metaphysics and (a non-standard version of) perdurantism. In the last chapter, I will extend the fragmentalist approach to modality, by analysing the modal analogue of fragmentalist presentism. The simplest quantified modal logic is generally regarded as incompatible with actualism, the view that everything there is is actual. It is usually held that whoever wants to preserve the former while embracing the latter is somehow bound to enrich the inventory of the world with entities able to play the role traditionally ascribed to possibilia: abstract individualities or contingently non-concrete entities. I will hold that there is another way to reconcile actualism and the simplest quantified modal logic (a way that commits us to accept neither abstract individualities nor contingently non-concrete entities), by exploiting what we might call fragmentalist actualism.