Is Precedence a Secondary Quality?

Abstract

One of the challenges faced by anyone who proposes to revise our ordinary conception of time — and one who denies the reality of tense is surely proposing such a revision — is to show that the consequent revision can be reconciled with the facts about our ordinary experience of time (especially, in the case of the tenseless theory, those aspects of our experience which appear to point to real tense). One such fact is that our experience is temporally limited, in that what we experience, when we experience it, is always experienced as present. Another, related, fact is that we seem to share the same present, in that we tend to agree with each other, on the basis of our perceptions, what is going on now. Yet another fact is that we perceive precedence: we perceive, not just one thing that occurs after another thing we perceive, but that one thing occurs after another.