Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

In the semantic literature on tenses, Priorean theorists endorse two related views that were originally advocated by A. N. Prior: (i) the view that tenses can be formally modeled as intensional operators; and (ii) the view that the kind of operators that are appropriate for this task are sentential operators such as the ones that are familiar from temporal logic. Anti-Priorean theorists reject assumptions (i) and (ii), typically in favor of referential/quantificational accounts of tense. In this talk I will consider an intermediate position, one that vindicates (i) but not (ii). On the account that I will propose, tenses are treated as temporal operators, but these operators do not act on sentential formulas. Rather, they act on a class of pre-predicative syntactic constituents (which I call radicals). I will motivate this account by comparing it with a theory that endorses both (i) and (ii). I will argue that the radical operator approach accounts for some English constructions in a more elegant way.