Speaker Series: Dilip Ninan, “Assertion and the Passage of Time”

Title: “Assertion and the Passage of Time”

Abstract: There is an important and overlooked asymmetry between the way we talk about the past and the future. More specifically, there appear to be cases in which one is in position to say, at an initial time T1, that a certain event will happen, but one is not in a position to say, at a later time T2, that the event in question did happen, and this despite no change in one’s evidence between T1 and T2. In other words, the passage of time can, by itself, undermine one’s warrant for asserting something. I argue that the best explanation of this phenomenon involves the claim that subjects in these cases lose knowledge merely by moving through time.