Talk About Timelines

I have argued that:

it is contradictory for a Time Patrolman to say that the timeline within which he is speaking might turn out never to have existed;

the "deletion" of a timeline does not entail either that the inhabitants of that timeline have never existed in any sense or that there is a moment at which they cease to exist from their point of view.

My way of speaking about timelines and the relationships between them contradicts the Time Patrol's way of speaking about them. Thus, in two recent posts (see here), I discuss what would have happened in timeline (i) as a consequence of Everard's disappearance from that timeline whereas a Patrolman might reply that timeline (i) does not exist so therefore nothing happens in it.

However, even to state that a particular timeline, e.g., timeline (i), does not exist is to refer to that specific timeline rather than another and thus to raise the question of what would have happened in it if had existed. Possible English sentences are:

Everard's colleagues in timeline (i) investigate his disappearance;
Everard's colleagues in timeline (i) investigated his disappearance;
Everard's colleagues in timeline (i) would have investigated his disappearance -

- but Temporal is meant to have more precise tenses for such scenarios. A "deleted" timeline is remembered and has a causal relationship to the current timeline. Thus, there has to be some neutral way of talking about timelines and their interrelationships even if the question of their existence continues to be regarded as debatable or unresolved.