Response to the Comments on Time, Tense, and Causation by Storrs McCall, Nathan Oaklander, and Quentin Smith

Abstract

Let me begin with the gentlest of my three critics — Professor Storrs McCall. With regard to some very fundamental issues in the philosophy of time, his views are in some ways, as we shall see below, close to my own. At the same time, there are some very important differences. Thus, on the one hand, I hold a view of time that, as Storrs McCall points out, is quite similar in some respects to the view advanced by C. D. Broad in his book, Scientific Thought (1923, pp. 53–84) — since it involves, first of all, the idea that while the past and the present are now real, the future is not, and secondly, the idea that the world grows over time by the accretion of new facts or states of affairs. Storrs McCall, by contrast, has put forward a rather different view of time in his very interesting and important book, A Model of the Universe (1994). On that view, the world, rather than growing by the accretion of new facts, shrinks, so to speak, by the deletion of facts. But McCall is not putting forward what might be called a “flipped-over” Broad-type view — to the effect that while the future and the present are real, the past is not. (It is risky, in the philosophy of time, to claim that no one has ever held a certain view. But in the case of the flipped-over Broad-type view, a list of advocates does not, at least, readily spring to mind.) McCall’s view is rather that what gets deleted with the passage of time is simply the future possibilities that are not actualized — possibilities that McCall views in a fashion similar to the way that David Lewis views other possible worlds — namely, as things that are no less concrete than past facts or present facts.