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An Empirical Investigation of the Role of Direction in our Concept of Time

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Abstract

This paper empirically investigates one aspect of the folk concept of time (amongst US residents) by testing how the presence or absence of directedness impacts judgements about whether there is time in a world. Experiment 1 found that dynamists (those who think the actual world contains an A-series), showed significantly higher levels of agreement that there is time in dynamically directed (growing block) worlds than in non-dynamical non-directed (C-theory) worlds. Comparing our results to those we describe in Latham et al. (n.d), we report that while ~ 70% of dynamists say there is time in B-theory worlds, only ~ 45% say there is time in C-theory worlds. Thus, while the presence of directedness makes dynamists more inclined to say there is time in a world, a substantial subpopulation of dynamists judge that there is time in non-directed worlds. By contrast, a majority of non-dynamists (those who deny that the actual world contains an A-series) judged that there was time in both growing block worlds (78.1–80.5%) and C-theory worlds (70.7–75.6%), with no significant differences between the means. Experiment 2 found that when participants are only presented with non-dynamical worlds—namely, a directed (B-theory) world and a non-directed (C-theory) world—they report significantly higher levels of agreement that there is time in B-theory worlds. However, the majority of participants (67.2–73.8%) still judge that there is time in C-theory worlds. We conclude that while the presence of directedness bolsters judgements that there is time, most people do not judge it to be necessary for time.

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Notes

  1. Sometimes people use ‘B-theory’ synonymously with ‘block universe theory’. Used this way, the view does not entail that time has a direction. However, that usage makes little sense of the debate between B-theorists and C-theorists (nor is it faithful to McTaggart’s (1908) introduction of the terms), or the debate amongst B-theorists, regarding in virtue of what time has a direction. At any rate, we intend to use ‘B-theory’ to pick out a view on which time has a direction, regardless of whether or not this is standard usage.

  2. While McTaggart (1908), who introduced C-relations, thought of them as being non-temporal precisely because they are undirected, C-theorists contend that C-relations generate a temporal ordering.

  3. Zimmerman, (2008) Smith (1994), Craig (2000) and Schlesinger (1994). See See Baron, Cusbert, Farr, Kon, and Miller (2015) for discussion.

  4. When we, following Baron and Miller (2015a, b), talk of the (or a) folk concept of time, what we mean by ‘concept’ is nothing more than a contentful state that can be a constituent of a thought.

  5. Callender (2017) frames his discussion of these issues in terms of a naïve theory of time.

  6. See inter alia Evans (2003:14), Sinha and Gardenfors (2014), Boroditsky et al. (2011), Fuhrman et al. (2011), Chen (2007), Boroditsky (2001), Casasanto and Bottini (2014) and Núñez et al. (2012).

  7. Though surprisingly, in Latham et al. (forthcoming), we found that people only weakly agree that time seems to pass.

  8. These are vignettes in which the worlds are described using time-neutral language—language which makes no mention of times, or relations of earlier-than or later-than, or properties of presentness, etc.—and whose description is then supplemented with a claim that some people believe that the relations/properties are relations of earlier-than/later-than or the property of presentness.

  9. See Tooley (1997) and Forbes (2016).

  10. These vignettes did not explicitly characterise worlds in terms of time, times, or temporal relations, or otherwise use temporal locutions. As this makes it more difficult to understand the world described, we introduced the locution: ‘some scientists, philosophers and theologians in universe [C/D/E] think that…’ followed by a shorter description of some aspects of the universe making use of temporal locutions. To allay concerns about whether participants understand time-neutral vignettes, we re-ran the study reported in Latham et al. (2019) using time-neutral versions of the 6 vignettes (only three of which are used in the present two experiments). The distribution is similar, which supports the idea that participants understand time-neutral vignettes.

  11. Our final sample size in this experiment was lower than anticipated due to the large number of people who failed the comprehension test. However, we observe no changes to the reported results if we include all those participants who failed the comprehension questions.

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Acknowledgements

Kristie Miller would like to thank the ARC (grants FT170100262 and DP18010010).

James Norton would like to thank the Icelandic Centre for Research (grant 195617-051).

Andrew J. Latham would like to thank the Ngāi Tai Ki Tāmaki Tribal Trust for their support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

    Andrew J. Latham, Kristie Miller & James Norton

  2. Department of Philosophy, University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland

    James Norton

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  1. Andrew J. Latham
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  2. Kristie Miller
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  3. James Norton
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Correspondence to Kristie Miller.

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Latham, A.J., Miller, K. & Norton, J. An Empirical Investigation of the Role of Direction in our Concept of Time. Acta Anal 36, 25–47 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-020-00435-z

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