In this post, I use the words “A-theory” and “B-theory” as a sloppy shorthand for “presentism” and “eternalism”, respectively. The point is that these are theories of ontology (“Does the future exist?”), and not just theories about how we should talk about time. This shouldn’t seem like merely a semantic or vacuous dispute unless, as in certain caricatures of logical positivism, you think that the question of whether X exists is always just the question of whether X can be directly experienced.
In this post, I use the words “A-theory” and “B-theory” as a sloppy shorthand for “presentism” and “eternalism”, respectively. The point is that these are theories of ontology (“Does the future exist?”), and not just theories about how we should talk about time. This shouldn’t seem like merely a semantic or vacuous dispute unless, as in certain caricatures of logical positivism, you think that the question of whether X exists is always just the question of whether X can be directly experienced.
(I’ve added this as a footnote to the post.)