The puzzle of the changing past

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Analysis 75 (1):59-67 (2015)
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Abstract

If you utter sentence (1) ‘Obama was born in 1961’ now, you say something true about the past. Since the past will always be such that the year 1961 has the property of being a time in which Obama was born, it seems impossible that could ever be false in a future context of utterance. We shall consider the case of a sentence about the past exactly like (1), but which was true when uttered a few years ago and is no longer true now. On this basis, we shall conclude that the past has changed.

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Reprint years

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10.1093/analys/anu105

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Author Profiles

Luca Barlassina
University of Sheffield
Fabio Del Prete
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Citations of this work

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Necessitation and the Changing Past.Arthur Schipper - 2022 - Theoria 88 (5):997-1013.

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References found in this work

Demonstratives: An Essay on the Semantics, Logic, Metaphysics and Epistemology of Demonstratives and other Indexicals.David Kaplan - 1989 - In Joseph Almog, John Perry & Howard Wettstein (eds.), Themes From Kaplan. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 481-563.
Past, present and future.Arthur N. Prior - 1967 - Oxford,: Clarendon P..
The nature and structure of content.Jeffrey C. King - 2007 - New York: Oxford University Press.
A nonpragmatic vindication of probabilism.James M. Joyce - 1998 - Philosophy of Science 65 (4):575-603.

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