Abstract
In a recent paper (“How to Square a Non-Localized Present with Special Relativity”) Yuval Dolev argues that the best way to preserve pre-relativistic intuitions regarding tense – that idea that events can and must be sorted into those that are past, present, and future – is to relativize this notion to inertial frames. I highlight the weaknesses of this view, its arbitrariness and lack of connection to experience, and suggest that one straightforwardly embrace the partial temporal ordering of events in Minkowski spacetime. Events are merely past, future, or elsewhere. Introducing a local present can, to some degree, mitigate the odd consequences of this relativistic (but not relativized) notion of tense.
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Notes
- 1.
I believe the situation to be no different in the general theory of relativity, but that is a discussion for another occasion.
- 2.
This is more a rhetorical than a real question. The special theory of relativity hinges on the existence of a fundamental four-dimensional invariant quantity, the spacetime interval. Various familiar three-dimensional quantities are then seen to be relative to the way this invariant is projected onto 3 + 1 spaces.
- 3.
See Reichenbach (1958: §19).
- 4.
A surface, that is, in which all events are pairwise spacelike separated.
- 5.
This point is emphasized in Dieks (2006).
- 6.
I chose this name since the Russian mathematician Alexandroff was, as far as I know, the first to investigate this structure. Pooley and Gibson (2006) call this structure the Stein present (of the interval [e 0 , e 1 ] on the world lineΓ) in honor of Howard Stein, whose papers on time led many us to think about this structure. It might be best to call this structure the causal present (for the interval [e0, e1] on Γ).
- 7.
I would like to thank Yuval Dolev for helpful comments on a previous draft of this paper, though he of course disagrees with its central contentions.
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Savitt, S. (2010). Relativity, Locality and Tense. In: Suárez, M., Dorato, M., Rédei, M. (eds) EPSA Philosophical Issues in the Sciences. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3252-2_20
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