Abstract
On the basis of our examination of the principal arguments supporting a B-Theory of time, we have concluded that there appear to be no compelling reasons to adopt the B-Theory of time and to reject the objectivity of tense and the reality of temporal becoming. Moreover, the B-Theory also faces a number of philosophical and theological problems which appear to be quite serious. In this section I wish to examine three philosophical problems which attend the B-Theory.
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References
Milic Capek, The Concepts of Space and Time,Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 22 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1976), p. XXVI.
Ibid., p. XLIX; cf. p. XXX. Elsewhere he writes, “In symbolizing time by the axis t (of independent variables) there was at first no conscious attempt at spatializing time. The dynamic and progressive character of time was symbolized by an ideal motion of the pointlike present sliding along the time axis from the past to the future. But in contemplating a spatial diagram of temporal process it is easy and psychologically natural to forget its underlying dynamic meaning. Any spatial symbol contemplated at a given moment is completed, i.e., all its parts are given at once, simultaneously, in contrast with the temporal reality which is by its own nature incomplete and whose `parts’—if we are justified in using such a thoroughly inadequate term—are by definition successive, i.e. non-simultaneous. The spatial symbolism leads us to forget the essential difference between juxtaposition and succession and to reduce the differences between the past, present, and future to simple differences of position: `past’ events are symbolized by the positions lying to the left of the point representing the `present,’ while `future’ events lie to the right of the same point on the same already drawn `temporal axis.’ Thus the spatial diagram suggests the wrong idea that the successive moments already coexist and that their pastness and futurity is not genuine, but only `phenomenal’ or `apparent— (Milic Capek, The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics [Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1961], p. 163).
Peter Kroes, Time: Its Structure and Role in Physical Theories, Synthèse Library 179 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), p. 210.
For example, Aristotelian space was anisotropic in that the directions toward and away from the center of the universe had different causal properties.
Some A-theorists would deny that tenseless temporal relations obtain among temporal particulars, insisting that we should not assert, for example, that “e 1 is earlier than e2“ but that ” ei was earlier than e2“ or some other appropriately tensed locution (see, for example, A. N. Prior, ”Tense Logic and the Logic of Earlier and Later,“ in Papers on Time and Tense [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968], p. 123; Andros Loizou, The Reality of Time [Brookfield, Ver.: Gower, 1986], p. 95). But although such thinkers insist that the temporal relations earlier than/later than do not obtain tenselessly, they nonetheless concur in making such relations derivative from the more primitive and foundational A-determinations. It is thus somewhat misleading to refer to these temporal relations as B-relations, since, if the A-theorist is correct, they, as temporal relations, are parasitic upon objective tense and cannot exist independently of it, as the B-Theory postulates. I shall therefore refer to them as ”so-called B-relations.“
John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, The Nature of Existence, 2 vols., ed. C. D. Broad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927; rep. ed.: 1968), 2: 30.
D. Broad, Scientific Thought (London: Kegan, 1925), p. 303; D. Y. Deshpande, “Professor Ayer on the Past,” Mind 65 (1956): 86; Wilfried Sellars, “Time and the World Order,” in Scientific Explanation, Space, and Time, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 3 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962), p. 546; Richard M. Gale, The Language of Time, International Library of Philosophy and Scientific Method (London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1968), pp. 27–28, 86100; George Schlesinger, Aspects of Time (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), pp. 46–47; Loizou, Reality of Time, p. 95; F. M. Christensen, Space-like Time (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), pp. 123124.
D. H. Mellor, Real Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 140.
Michael Tooley, Time, Tense, and Causation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), chap. 6.
Gale, Language of Time, p. 93.
See Loizou, Reality of Time, pp. 79–95. Perhaps Gale would appeal to McTaggart’s statement “And this—the B series—cannot be got out of the A series alone. It is only when the A series, which gives change and direction, is combined with the C series, which gives permanence, that the B series can arise” (J. Ellis McTaggart, “The Unreality of Time,” Mind 17 [19081: 464). But McTaggart may be speaking loosely here, meaning that the B-series cannot be derived from A-determinations alone. The A-series only arises when A-determinations supervene on an atemporal C-series. Or he may think the A-series must be combined with a C-series in order to yield a B-theoretical ontology; but then he errs in thinking such a becomingless ontology is necessary for the existence of temporal relations. In view of his claim that the C-series cannot be derived from the A-series and the crucial role played by an ontology of permanent events in McTaggart’s Paradox, this second interpretation is likely. But in neither case are we to think of the A-series as involving a “blob” past or future.
Gale, Language of Time, p. 99.
Recall Reichenbach’s analysis in Hans Reichenbach, Elements of Symbolic Logic (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1947), pp. 288–297. Tooley, Time,Tense, and Causation, p. 163.
Ibid., pp. 179–180. Tooley also denies that the A-theorist can show that the proposition any event causally dependent upon a present event lies in the future is analytic; but I should simply say that this proposition is false. Tooley also admits that his argument that later than cannot be reductively analyzed in terms of more future is question-begging because one of his arguments on p. 163 involved the claim that the concept future is unanalyzable, but he insists that the other argument on p. 163 did not involve that claim, thereby avoiding a petitio principü. But if the reader examines the two arguments on p. 163, I am confident that he will find that they both depend crucially on the claim that the concept offuture can only be analyzed in terms of later than, which on pp. 179–180 Tooley cannot justify.
Gale, Language of Time, pp. 90–91. So also Tooley, Time, Tense, and Causation, p. 161, contra Sellars and Schlesinger. See my The Tensed Theory of Time: a Critical Examination, chap. 3.
Cf. Tooley’s odd claim that event E lies (tenselessly) in the present at time t is a tensed proposition (Tooley, Time, Tense, and Causation,p. 192).
Gale, Language of Time, p. 97.
Typically, two events are said to simultaneous with each other in that they occur at the same time. But it would be odd to say that an event and a time are simultaneous, i.e., occur at the same time. Indeed, we see that being “at a time” is foundational to the notion of simultaneity, rather than the other way around.
L. Nathan Oaklander, “McTaggart’s Paradox and Smith’s Tensed Theory of Time,” Synthèse 107 (1996): 211.
McTaggart, “Unreality of Time,” pp. 461–462. Perhaps this is as good a place as any to say a word about Oaklander’s interpretation of McTaggart as holding that time does not essentially involve 13- relations (Nathan Oaklander, Temporal Relations and Temporal Becoming [Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1984], pp. 33–37). Oaklander’s cited texts only show that McTaggart took A-determinations and the A-series as more fundamental or ultimate than B-relations and the B-series but do not state that the latter are not, however, essential to time. On the contrary, McTaggart expressly says they are. His view is that if one takes a C-series and invests it with A-determinations, then the ordering relations among the terms will be the earlier than/later than relations and the terms will be events.
McTaggart, Nature of Existence, 2: 31.
Oaklander, Temporal Relations and Temporal Becoming, p. 17.
Temporal relations are primitive and unanalyzable relations, and the difference between spatial and temporal relations is an irreducible qualitative difference“ (Oaklander, ”McTaggart’s Paradox,“ p. 209). The problem is that such relations are not unanalyzable and irreducible, as the A-theorist has shown.
D. H. Mellor, “McTaggart, Fixity and Coming True,” in Reduction, Time and Reality, ed. Richard Healey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 80.
Milic Capek, “The Inclusion of Becoming in the Physical World,” in Concepts of Space and Time, p. 501. I owe the following two quotations to Capek.
E. Cunningham, The Principle of Relativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), p. 191.
L. Silberstein, The Theory of Relativity (London: Macmillan, 1914), p. 134.
Paul Langevin, for example, protested, “We do not at all mean to say that time is a fourth dimension of space; that would make no sense” (P. Langevin, “L’aspect général de la théorie de la relativité,” Bulletin scientifique des étudiants de Paris 2 [April-May, 1922], p. 6).
See Émile Meyerson, La déduction relativiste (Payot: Paris, 1925), pp. 97–110, reprinted in Concepts of Space and Time, 353–362. Meyerson, and Capek after him, equated the tenseless theory of time with the literal spatialization of time, so that they mistakenly took Einstein and others’ repudiation of the alleged spatialization of time by SR as an affirmation of the objective reality of temporal becoming. He was bewildered by such thinkers’ continued advocacy of a tenseless, B-theoretical, spacetime ontology despite the fact that such thinkers had rejected the notion of time as a fourth spatial dimension.
Albert Einstein, “Comment on Meyerson’s `La déduction relativiste’,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 105 (1928): 166, reprinted in Concepts of Space and Time, p. 367.
Thus, Smart avers that there is no objection whatever to spatializing time in the sense of thinking of spacetime as a four-dimensional space in the geometrical sense of the word “space” (J. J. C. Smart, “Spatialising Time,” Mind 64 [19551: 241). What Smart fails to do, however, is provide any justification for interpreting this four-dimensional geometrical space as a spacetime.
Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), p. 24. Cf. the remark of de Beauregard with respect to Minkowski’s fusion of time and space: “it must be recognized that this was really the essence of relativity theory: an equivalence of space and time, fusing geometrically to constitute the universe…. It is really impossible to push the `spatialization of time’ any further than Einstein and Minkowski did; the ancient tendency stemming from Aristotle here actually attains its final development…,” (O. Costa de Beauregard, “The Principle of Relativity and the Spatialization of Time” [Revue des questions scientifiques 7 (1949)1, rep. in Bergson and the Evolution of Physics, ed. P. A. Y. Gunter [Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1969], pp. 246–247).
See C. Misner, K. S. Thorne, and J. A. Wheeler, Gravitation (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1973), p. 823.
See J. Hartle and S. W. Hawking, “Wave Function of the Universe,” Physical Review D 28 (1983): 2960–2975. For good discussions of the nature of this Euclidean, four-dimensional space, see Christopher Isham, “Creation of the Universe as a Quantum Process,” Physics,Philosophy, and Theology: a Common Quest for Understanding, ed. R. Russell, W. Stoeger, and G. V. Coyne (Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory, 1988), pp. 375–408; idem, “Quantum Theories of the Creation of the Universe,” unpublished paper, a preliminary version of which appears in Interpreting the Universe as Creation, ed. V. Brummer (The Netherlands: Pharos, 1991).
Kroes, Time, p. 209. Cf. idem, “Physics and the Flow of Time,” in Time, Nature, and History, ed. P. A. Kroes, Nijmegen Studies in the Philosophy of Nature and its Sciences 4/2 (Nijmegen, The Netherlands: Catholic University of Nijmegen, 1985), pp. 43–52, where he concludes, “it is dubious whether coordinate time deserves to be called `time’ at all” (p. 49).
See our discussion in Tensed Theory of Time, chap. 7.
See again my Tensed Theory of Time, chap. 7.
Paul Horwich, Asymmetries in Time (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), p. 43.
Mellor himself affirms, “any kind of event could be a perception. It is not being of some special kind—e.g. electrical or chemical or organic—that makes an event a perception. Perception is simply a causal process of acquiring belief, a process from which no kind of event can be excluded a priori…. I am not interested only in human perception. My proposal is to apply to all perceptions of precedence, by all conceivable perceivers, among all sorts of events, things and dates, and it must be defensible as such” (Ibid., p. 153).
Tooley does offer a causal analysis of temporal priority in Time,Tense, and Causation, chap. 9, but his account is based upon a dynamic conception of time according to which only the past and present are real and so is incompatible with a B-Theory of time.
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Craig, W.L. (2000). The “Spatializing” of Time. In: The Tenseless Theory of Time. Synthese Library, vol 294. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3473-8_7
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