A certain pedant is claiming that beginning a sentence with "That being said" is grammatically incorrect owing to the apparent logical contradiction in claiming that something in the past (e.g. the previous paragraph) is still "being said", i.e. unfolding in the present. He claims that only "that having been said" can be grammatically correct.
I'd like a simple prescriptive grammatical argument to counter him. In my view, using "that being said" is permissible on the one hand as a collocated expression; on the other, owing to the fact that English grammar is full of apparent logical contradictions that have been brought about in order to advance the cause of expressing meaning.
But this argumentation is too broad. Can anyone give me an airtight, standard grammatical explanation as to why "that being said" is permissible despite its supposed logical contradiction?
Best Answer
Your pedant is completely wrong, not just because he's protesting in futility to a well-established idiom, but because his grammatical analysis of the construction is mistaken.
That being said is an adverbial participle phrase. Note that the verbal portion of the phrase, being said, does not contain a finite verb, and only finite verbs are tensed. (This is not just a fact of English, but a general facet of Western European verbal systems: non-finite verb forms generally indicate aspect and voice, but not tense.) The terminology is somewhat confused on this point since being is often called the "present participle", but there is in fact nothing that specifies the present tense about this construction, as the following examples show:
In all of these cases, the bolded portion does not contribute any tense information at all -- it rather indicates the progressive aspect and passive voice. The tense is entirely indicated by the finite verb in italics.
The idiomatic phrase that being said contains no finite verb and no tense. Your pedant has merely demonstrated his own ignorance of English grammar. There is absolutely no reason to object to this idiom.