Regardless of whether Solomyak’s view about modality is correct, the analogous
view about time is very compelling. There is a presentist perspective we take, in
which the present time and its contents are all that there is, and properties like shapes
are really properties rather than relations to times. But there also seems to be an
“atemporal”perspective in which the present is merely one moment among many,
and in which its contents have“properties”like shapes only relative to times.
Corresponding to these perspectives are two distinct modes of being. The natural
analogue for Solomyak’s view is minimal Meinongian presentism, but what I say
below could with minor modification be adjoined with PEP as well. Either way,
corresponding to these two modes of being are two ways of saturating a fact. Let’s
illustrate this via an example. Consider the ordinary adjective“red.”Setting aside
concerns about vagueness, there is exactly one feature that is the semantic value of
“red.”But, on the Hybrid view, there is no fundamental fact about its logical form.
With respect to one mode of being, the mode that includes past objects, the value of
“red”isis red at t. A fully saturated ascription of redness is of the form:xis red att.
According to the past mode of being, redness is a relation to times. However,
according to the present mode of being, the value of“red”isis red. Redness, on
this mode, simply is a one-place property. A fully saturated ascription of redness is of
the form:xis red. More generally, there are entities within the range of one
fundamental quantifier—times—that are not within the range of another fundamen-
tal quantifier. There are also facts within the range of one quantifier that are not
within the range of the other. Facts are supposed to be fully saturated entities.^59
Roughly, a fact F is fully saturated just in case there is noxsuch that it is possible to
addxto F. This is where quantification enters in to the notion of saturation. And
ontological pluralism recognizes different fundamental quantifiers, allowing us to
define up two different corresponding notions of saturation, neither of which is
objectively thecorrectnotion of saturation to use. But we can still distinguish a
respect in which one kind of fact-participation is attenuated: things that exist only
with respect to the past mode of being are not justflat-out red. Things that enjoy
present existence can be.^60
Why is this a Hybrid view? Well, it is similar to the relationalist view in that, with
respect to one mode of being, alleged properties are relations—but remember that
with respect to the other mode of being they really are properties. There’s no absolute
fact about which of these they are. In a way, we have something like modes of
instantiation, but they are dispensed with at the ground-floor metaphysical level and
(^59) For more on saturation, see Sider (2011: 247–65).
(^60) In section 1.5.3, I noted that for many applications of ontological pluralism, not much turns on
whether being and its modes arefirst-order or second-order properties. But it seems that, if we want to
make sense of views like the Hybrid view, being and its modes should correspond to quantifiers rather than
ordinary predicates.