What Is Set in Stone

Contents

1. Set in stone, stated fairly
2. The neighbours
3. Three cases the picture cannot hold
4. To exist is to vary
5. The one thing that does not change
6. Slower is not closer
7. What the phrase is doing
8. What it does not mean
9. What it costs
10. An ordinary Tuesday

The phrase comes in two tenses. There is the reassurance, said while something is still being worked out: nothing is set in stone yet. And there is the closing of a door, said once it has been worked out: that’s set in stone. The wedding date, once the deposit is paid. The budget, once the board has signed it. The rule, once it is in the handbook. The decision, once it has been announced to the people it affects.

Both rest on one picture. Things start soft and harden. A plan is pencilled in, then confirmed, then signed, then set in stone, and at each step it is harder to change, until at the end it cannot be changed at all. Stone is the image because stone is what people have to hand that seems not to change: they carve into it the things they want kept.

The picture is not foolish. Some plans really are much harder to move than others, and knowing which is which is most of what it takes to run a household or a project. So the question here is not whether a particular plan is hard to change. It is what the far end of the scale would be — the thing that cannot change at all — and whether anything a person can point at is it.

The neighbours

Four earlier pieces sit close enough that the differences should come first. The piece on undo dealt with taking back a mark already made, and why the reading of it cannot be taken back with it. This piece is not about marks already made. It is about a plan or a rule that is still being kept, and what is being claimed when somebody says it cannot be moved.

The piece on being unmoved used the same primitive as this one, together with the foundation’s result about perception, to read it didn’t affect me as a report on a person. There is no perception in this piece. Its subject is not a person who claims to be unchanged but a plan, a date or a rule that is claimed to be unchangeable.

The early essay on rest used this primitive to show that a person cannot rest by approaching stillness, because stillness is not on offer to anything that exists. That essay already said that the node is off the scale rather than at the bottom of it, and said it about a body and a day. This piece makes the same point about promises and schedules, where the scale is not stillness but hardness. And the piece on the whole story found that a telling does not become the whole by getting longer. The shape is similar — a scale with a false end — and the machinery is different. That piece ran on branches and the totality. This one runs on variation, and on a quantity that is undefined rather than small. What lasts, and what a monument is for, are subjects of their own and get one sentence here: an inscription is history in the locked sense, an artifact — present, surrounding, revisable — and it weathers.

Three cases the picture cannot hold

The seam is the same in all three. The picture treats the unchangeable as the far end of a scale of hardness. In the first case the date was never at the end; it was kept, and then it was not. In the second, a text built to be at the end says in its own words that it is not. In the third, the phrase lands on something that genuinely cannot change — and it is not a thing anyone can put a hand on. The first and third cases are composites, not reported events. The second is reported, and its source is given at the foot of the page.

Figure 01

Three things “set in stone” can be said of, and which of them it is true of

Said of	What it is	Does it vary?
A plan, a date, a rule, a decision	Something present that people keep — in diaries, contracts, handbooks, other people’s expectations.	Yes. How fast depends on how hard it is kept, and by whom.
Stone	Something present that varies slowly by the standards of a human life. The idiom’s image.	Yes. Slowly — and the claim is not about slow.
The Past	The node: one totality, complete. Real, and does not exist.	No — and its rate of change is undefined, not zero.

To exist is to vary

I work from a small set of numbered primitives and the results derived from them. The one doing the work today is the one about existence. To exist is to vary. Nothing that exists is ever still. That which does not vary does not exist, in the only sense of exist available to varying things (P3).

The foundation records that physics agrees with it in two places, and I will not go further than it does. Absolute zero cannot be reached, by the third law; and a quantum oscillator in its lowest state still carries energy that cannot be taken out of it. Perfect stillness is a limit that no existing thing occupies. That is all the physics this piece uses, and nothing below depends on any more of it.

Now apply the primitive to the idiom’s own image. Stone exists. So stone varies. It weathers, it takes lichen, it is recut, it is carted off to a museum, and underneath all of that it is doing what any existing thing is doing — not holding still, because holding still is not on offer to it. Stone was chosen for the idiom because, among things to hand, it varies slowly. It was not chosen because it does not vary. There is no such thing to hand.

And apply it to what the phrase is usually said of. A wedding date exists as a present thing: an entry in two diaries, a line in a contract with a venue, a printed card on a hundred fridges, and an expectation in the heads of everybody who read the card. Each of those varies. The budget, the rule and the decision are the same kind of thing. None of them is still. The question the phrase answers is not whether they vary. It is how fast, and who is keeping it slow.

Stone was chosen because it changes slowly, not because it does not change. There is nothing to hand that does not.

The one thing that does not change

There is one thing in the foundation of which it cannot change is literally true. The axiom is that the past is immutable (P0). Stated precisely, it is a constraint on the record set, not a claim about a place: the records admit exactly one consistent assignment, and no present operation can produce a different one.

Put that next to the primitive about existence and the foundation draws the conclusion in three lines of its own. The Past does not change. What does not change does not vary. What does not vary does not exist. So the one thing the phrase can be literally true of is the one thing that does not exist — real, in the foundation’s locked sense of being structurally indispensable, and not existing, in its locked sense of varying.

One more step, and it is the one the whole piece turns on. It is tempting to say the Past varies at a rate of zero — that it is the stillest thing there is, the far end of the scale of slow. The foundation says otherwise. Temperature, frequency, and all descriptors of change over time do not apply at the boundary: they are undefined there, not zero (R5). A rate of revision is exactly such a descriptor. So the Past is not the slowest thing. It is not on the scale of slow at all. Zero is a reading on a scale; the node is where the scale runs out.

Go back to the race. The speaker said that’s set in stone and was right, but not about anything they could point at. The scoreboard, the record book and the footage are present things, history in the locked sense, and they vary. What does not vary is the race as settled, and the race as settled is not a thing among things. The phrase was accurate about its target and wrong about its image: stone is exactly the kind of thing the target is not.

Slower is not closer

There is an obvious reply. Granted that nothing present is perfectly fixed, some things are far more fixed than others. A signed contract is more fixed than a pencilled diary entry; an entrenched constitutional clause is more fixed than an office rota. Surely the phrase is just the far end of that — very, very hard to change — and the Past is simply the limit it points toward.

The first half of that is right and the second half does not follow. The differences between a pencilled entry and an entrenched clause are genuine and they matter. They are differences of rate: how often, how easily, at what cost the thing gets revised. But the Past is not the low end of that scale, because the Past has no rate. A limit is a value that a sequence approaches. Here there is no value on the other side to approach. However slowly something is kept changing, it is still a varying thing, and the difference between it and the Past is not how slow. It is that one exists and the other does not.

• Pencilled in A present thing, kept loosely. Varies. Cheap to revise. The people relying on it know it might move. Kept, lightly.
• Set in stone A present thing, kept hard. Varies. Expensive to revise. Somebody is paying to keep it slow. Kept, hard.
• Settled The Past. Real, and does not exist. Does not vary. Its rate is undefined, not zero. Nobody keeps it. Not kept. Not on the scale.

What the phrase is doing

So when somebody says the date is set in stone, they are not reporting that the date has stopped varying. It has not and cannot. They are reporting something about a rate — that this date will be revised only at great cost, if at all — and a rate of revision is not a property of a date. Dates do not keep themselves. A rate of revision is what somebody is doing: declining to reopen it, paying the cost of holding it, refusing the easier Tuesday.

The idiom half-knows this. Set is a participle with a setter hidden in it. Somebody set it. The grammar keeps the person; the image of the stone lets the person drop out of view, so that what is in fact a keeping sounds like a property of the material.

The foundation is plain about where that keeping sits. The host can occupy a position from which its response to a readable condition is revisable (P5). Agency is relocated, not abolished: the person is the site of conscious responsibility (R13). Keeping a date is a response, and it is revisable, including by the person keeping it. When the grandmother needs surgery, the surgery does not move the date; somebody weighs the cost and moves it. When nothing comes up, the date does not stay by itself either; somebody goes on keeping it.

This is also why the phrase is worth saying, and why a kept rate is worth something. Other people build on what they expect. In the foundation’s equation, R is the actual over the expectation, and the expectation is partly prediction that runs below awareness (P4). When the date is announced, a hundred people read it, and records update expectation forward (R2): each of them now expects the fourteenth. Flights are booked against it. Leave is taken against it. If the date moves, the actual departs from what each of them expects, and each of them pays that departure as surprise. That is what a kept rate protects. The foundation gives no scale for how large any of those surprises is, and this piece does not rank them. It says only where the cost of a revision lands: on the people who were told, and not on the stone.

What it does not mean

Three misreadings are close enough to this argument that they should be named and refused.

Everything is negotiable. It does not follow that nothing should be kept, or that a kept date is a pretence. A kept rate is a genuine thing and a valuable one. A good deal of what people mean by trustworthy is what a person keeps slow. The claim is only that the slowness is kept, and by whom.

The past can be changed after all. The opposite. The argument puts the unchangeable exactly where the axiom does, and nowhere else. What it removes is the habit of pointing at a present thing — a record, a stone, a signature — as if it were the unchangeable. The record of the race can be corrected; the race cannot. That difference is the axiom, and the piece on undo covers what can and cannot be taken back once a mark is made.

Nothing is set in stone yet. This one is true, and more than true: it is true of everything present, and will be true of the plan after the deposit, after the signature and after the fourteenth of June. The yet carries the picture of hardening — soft things turning, if kept still long enough, into the unchangeable. The foundation has no such hardening. A plan does not become the Past by being held still enough; the Past is not a very still present. So the reassurance is accurate and the yet is not. The plan will stay a present thing, varying, for as long as it exists.

What it costs

Three costs, and each takes away something people lean on.

The excuse loses its cover. I can’t change it, it’s set in stone is one of the most comfortable sentences an office has. It makes a refusal sound like geology. On this reading it is a person declining to pay a price, which may be exactly the right thing to decline — but it is theirs, and they answer for it.

Promises lose their borrowed permanence. A vow, a contract, a treaty, the word forever: each is a present thing, kept. None of them is made of the Past. Each lasts exactly as long as somebody goes on keeping it, and the keeping has to be done again every day by people who could stop. That is unwelcome, and it should be said rather than softened. It is also, if you look at it long enough, much of what makes a kept promise mean anything.

There is nothing fixed to hold on to. The picture offered a comfort: somewhere at the hard end of the scale, among the things of the world, is something that will not move. The foundation offers one unchangeable, and it is not among the things of the world. Everything that can be held varies. The only fixed thing cannot be held, because it does not exist.

An ordinary Tuesday

1. When somebody says it’s set in stone, ask who is keeping it. And what it would cost to move. The answer is usually a person and a price, and both can be talked to.
2. When you are the one keeping it, say so. I’m holding the fourteenth, and I’ll go on holding it unless something serious comes up. It is the same commitment, with the keeper named and the price stated, and it is the only version somebody else can reason with.
3. Price a revision in other people’s surprise. The cost of moving a kept thing lands on the people who were told (P4). If it has to move, tell them early and tell them plainly. Records update expectation forward (R2); the sooner the new mark is read, the less anybody builds on the old one.
4. Stop waiting for things to harden. A plan does not become safer by being left alone. It stays a present thing, kept or not kept. If you want it slow, keep it slow. The response is yours and revisable (P5), and you answer for it (R13).
5. Save the phrase for what is done — and even then, point at the right thing. The race is settled. The record book is a record book.