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Causal Order, Temporal Order, and Becoming in Special Relativity

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Abstract

I reconstruct from Rietdijk and Putnam’s well-known papers an argument against the applicability of the concept of becoming in Special Relativity, which I think is unaffected by some of the objections found in the literature. I then consider a line of thought found in the discussion of the possible conventionality of simultaneity in Special Relativity, beginning with Reichenbach, and apply it to the debate over becoming. We see that it immediately renders Rietdijk and Putnam’s argument unsound. I end by comparing my approach to others found in the literature, primarily Stein’s.

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Notes

  1. Godfrey-Smith later changed his name to Grey; I shall refer to him below by his present name.

  2. Tooley is an exception (1997, Chap. 11); however, he did that by arguing for absolute simultaneity in Special Relativity, but this seems ad hoc, as no phenomenon within the theory supports absolute simultaneity [see (Stein 1991), note 2 to pages 154–155].

  3. I don’t know who first drew this distinction in the literature, but it is found already in (Sklar 1974, p. 273).

  4. Like Stein, Clifton and Hogarth stipulate a time orientation and work with a ‘beefed-up structure of time-oriented Minkowski spacetime’. What justifies taking ‘time-orientation […] to be an objective property of the world’ they deem a difficult issue, which they don’t try to resolve (1995, p. 359). In this way much of the work of refuting Rietdijk and Putnam’s argument is done by an unjustified stipulation. Referring to Reichenbachian causal considerations, by contrast, justifies an additional directional element and also immediately yields the desired result. When Clifton and Hogarth discuss causality’s relation to becoming, they consider impossible travels in the speed of light; subjects’ alleged psychological sense of becoming, including that of such subjects who, per impossiblile, move in the speed of light; and the suggestion to take all points on a backward light cone of an event as sharing the same ‘now’ with it (364–365). Their approach to the relation of causality to temporal concepts is thus quite unlike the one considered in this paper.

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  1. Philosophy Department, Central European University, 9 Nador Street, Budapest, 1051, Hungary

    Hanoch Ben-Yami

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  1. Hanoch Ben-Yami
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Correspondence to Hanoch Ben-Yami.

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Ben-Yami, H. Causal Order, Temporal Order, and Becoming in Special Relativity. Topoi 34, 277–281 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-014-9237-8

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