A Unified Tenseless Theory of Time

type versions. Each of these five versions of the B-theory has received serious attacks from the A-theorists, some of whom even claim that the tenseless theory “though still widely held, is a theory in retreat ” (Craig 1996), and that “if Quentin Smith (1993) delivered the mortal blow to the New B-Theory of Language then Laurie Paul (1997) has written its obituary ” (Craig 1999). In this paper, by mak-ing more precise some key notions involved in the formulation of a tenseless theory – in particular, two notions of truth conditions, two notions of meaning and two notions of translation are distinguished – I have come up with a single B-thesis for the B-theory. When charitably interpreted, the two versions of the old theory and the three versions of the new theory can all be regarded as special ways of presenting the same B-thesis, and the various A-attacks raised against these versions can then be resolved in a systematic way. KEY WORDS: B-theory of time, ch-meaning, cn-meaning, pt-truth-condition, pw-truth-condition, tk-translation, tp-translation