The Fragmentation of Being

The notion of a fundamental ontological kind is not indexical; nor are the
fundamental kinds themselves. Bricker draws a helpful analogy with the concept
and property of water: the concept of water just is the concept of the watery stuff in
my environment with which I am acquainted, and hence is a partially indexical
concept, whereas the property of being water just is the property of being constituted
by H 2 O, which is not an indexical property.
Bricker distinguishes between merely indexical concepts and those concepts that
provide us with substantialde seknowledge; he calls the latter conceptsperspectival.
If being present is an indexical concept, it seems that it is also a perspectival concept.
As discussed in section 3.2, the two modes of being recognized by PEP can be
distinguished from one another via both the tense logic that governs them and the
temporal relations connecting the entities that enjoy them; call these the“tense-
temporal facts”about the respective modes. For example, there are two modes
of being, and one of them is such that some entities that enjoy it are non-
simultaneous, while the other is such that all the entities that enjoy it are simultan-
eous with each other. By my lights, these differences are grounded in the modes of
being themselves, but it is consistent with this claim that our concept of presentness
analytically contains these differences. By Bricker’s lights, this allows us to under-
stand the concept of presentness as containing the following components: an index-
ical component, that I am present, an ontological component that says that anything
enjoying all my modes of being is present, andfinally a temporal component stating
the tense-temporal facts about presentness.
The indexical response nicely explains how it can be obvious that we are present:
it’s conceptually true. This might suggest that any appeal to the phenomenological
response is unneeded, and moreover cannot make the indexical response more
appealing. However, this might be too quick. It is an interesting question why we
have this particular concept of presentness in addition to the far more straightfor-
ward ordinary concept of nowness. The obvious response to this question is that we
need a concept of presentness because we are sensitive to an ontological divide
between things and to which side of this divide we are placed. We have indexical
concepts like the concept of water because we are acquainted with a qualitative divide
among things in our environment; we do not willy-nilly develop indexical concepts
without having some grasp of the entities to which they are intended to apply.
If Bricker is right about ontological concepts, which are among the central
concepts of metaphysics, then metaphysics as a discipline cannot be characterized
in terms of thetransparencyof its concepts in the sense of Fine (2012b). According to
Fine (2012b), one of the distinctive things about metaphysical inquiry is that it makes
use of concepts that aretransparent.Fine (2012b: 9) says,“Roughly speaking, a
concept is transparent if there is no significant gap between the concept and what it is
a concept of. Thus thereisa significant gap between the conceptwaterand the
substance H 2 O of which it is a concept butnosignificant gap between the concept
identityand the identity relation of which it is a concept.”Fine (2012b) later clarifies

WAYS OF BEING AND TIME 