Cane, Christabel; (2025) A Route Back to Temporary Intrinsics for Relational Accounts of Persistence. KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy 10.1515/krt-2025-0022. (In press).

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Abstract

‘Relativizer’ relationalism posits temporary properties as relations that obtain between the object that instantiates them and the times at which they are instantiated. A tomato, for example, that ripens from green to orange over the course of a working week bears the greenness relation to Monday, and the orangeness relation to Friday. David Lewis (Lewis, David. 1986. On the Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Blackwell and Lewis, David. 1988. “Rearrangement of Particles: Reply to Lowe.” Analysis 48: 65–72) takes ‘relativizer’ relationalism to imply that all temporary properties are extrinsic, given that the times through which an object persists are distinct from and external to such objects. If Monday and Friday are independent of our ripening tomato, its colour properties do not come down solely to the way that the tomato is, given that they are at least partially dependent upon these times. A great deal of work has been done in the name of defending relationalism. Many of these responses involve a modification of the ‘relativizer’ view, developing more sophisticated relationalist accounts. This paper will clarify, motivate and defend naïve ‘relativizer’ relationalism. I begin this task with an examination of the view and Lewis’ critique of it within an explicitly relativistic framework. I argue that vestigial Newtonian background assumptions of ‘absolute’ space and time lend force to the problem, and, concomitantly, put relationalism at an unfair disadvantage. If temporary properties are cast as relations that obtain between objects and ‘absolute’ times, then it seems dubious that these properties are intrinsic. However, if we understand these properties to be relations that an object bears to the spacetime region it occupies, a natural solution presents itself. I suggest that ‘relativizer’ relationalists endorse the identity view of supersubstantivalism, which identifies an object with the spacetime region it occupies. This allows these relationalists to recast temporary intrinsics as reflexive relations. Drawing on Rosen’s, (Rosen, Gideon. 2010. “Metaphysical Dependence: Grounding and Reduction.” In Modality: Metaphysics, Logic, and Epistemology, edited by B. Hale, and A. Hoffmann, 109–36. Oxford: Oxford University Press and Francescotti’s (Francescotti, Robert. 1999. “How to Define Intrinsic Properties.” Noûs 33 (4): 590–609) and Francescotti, Robert. 2014. “Intrinsic/Extrinsic: A Relational Account Defended.” In Companion to Intrinsic Properties, 175–98. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter) work on intrinsics, I present the case for thinking that these special relations count as bona fide intrinsic properties.

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