  McDowell’s and Sayre’s versions of the argument also face the following objection. It is obvious how, given flux, a present-tense claim like “Item X is present” can quickly cease to be true, because e.g., “Item Y is present” comes to replace it. But it isn’t obvious why flux should exclude the possibility of past-tense statements like “Item X flowed into item Y between t1 and t2,” or of tenseless statements like “Item X is present at t1, item Y is present at t2.” As Bostock 1988: 105–6 points out, “So long as we do have a language with stable meanings, and the ability to make temporal distinctions, there is no difficulty at all about describing an ever-changing world.”