Meta Ontology

This paper begins with a puzzle about certain temporal expressions: phrases like `Jones as he was ten years ago' and `the Jones of ten years ago'. There are reasons to take these as substantival, to be interpreted as terms for temporal parts. But it seems that the same reifying strategy would also force us to countenance a host of less attractive posits, among them fictional counterparts of real things and much more. I argue that there is a better way: we need only the idea of pretense or make-believe to make sense of claims embedding such phrases, leaving us with no reason, so far, to accept an ontology of temporal parts