Abstract
Apart from the support allegedly lent to the B-Theory of time by SR, there are few arguments of a positive nature in support of the B-Theory. In his oftreprinted defense of the mind-dependence of temporal becoming,1 Adolf Grünbaum briefly exposits three such arguments. According to Grünbaum’s analysis, what qualifies a physical event at a time t as occurring now is that some mind-possessing organism M experiences the event at t in such a way that at t M is conceptually aware that his having the experience of the event is simultaneous with an awareness of the fact that he has that experience at all.2 For example, in order for a gunshot at t to qualify as occurring now, M must be judgmentally aware at t (i) that he hears a gunshot and (ii) that that awareness of his hearing the gunshot is simultaneous with his hearing the gunshot. Note that M’s awareness of (i) involves a present-tense belief, for otherwise any event of which M ever has an experience could qualify as now. But since tense is an expression of what is the case in relation to the present or now, Grünbaum’s characterization of nowness is circular. In a revised version of his article, he freely admits this; the nowness of an event E is made to depend on someone’s knowing at t that he is experiencing (present tense) E, which is tantamount to someone’s judging at t, “I am experiencing E now.”3 But Grünbaum insists that his characterization of nowness is non-viciously circular because he is not attempting to define “now” in such a way as to eliminate nowness in favor of tenseless temporal attributes or relations but rather is merely articulating the mind-dependence of nowness. He is, in effect, saying that in order for a physical event at t to qualify as occurring now, it must at t be consciously experienced as occurring now by some person.
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References
The same piece has appeared with only minor alterations as “The Status of Temporal Becoming,” in Modern Science and Zeno’s Paradoxes (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), pp. 7–36;“The Meaning of Time,” in Basic Issues in the Philosophy of Time,ed. E. Freeman and W. Sellars (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1971), pp. 196–227; “Is There A `Flow’ of Time or Temporal `Becoming’?” in idem, Philosophical Problems of Space and Time,2d ed., Boston Studies for the Philosophy of Science 12 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1973), chap. 10, and has been often reprinted in various anthologies.
Grünbaum, “Status of Temporal Becoming,” p. 17.
Grünbaum, “The Exclusion of Becoming from the Physical World,” rep. in The Concepts of Space and Time, ed. Milic Capek, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 22 ( Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1976 ), pp. 480–481.
Grünbaum, “Status of Temporal Becoming,” p. 18. Because he overlooks Grünbaum’s use of the present-tense, McGilvray is led to complain that the stipulated necessary conditions for nowness, if true at some time, are always true and that the notion of temporal becoming needs to be introduced in order to make the conditions sufficient for an event’s occurring now (James A. McGilvray, “A Defense of Physical Becoming,” Erkenntnis 14 [19791: 293).
Lynn Rudder Baker, “Temporal Becoming: The Argument from Physics,” Philosophical Forum 6 (1975): 220.
See discussion in Tensed Theory of Time,chap. 4.
This underappreciated distinction is neatly drawn by Paul Horwich, Asymmetries in Time ( Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987 ), pp. 20–21.
Ironically, for an example of indexical confusion see E. J. Lowe, “The Indexical Fallacy in McTaggart’s Proof of the Unreality of Time,” Mind 96 (1987): 6270.
For a very stimulating discussion of the different ways in which “now” may be used indexically to refer to past and future times, imaginary times, and non-temporal items, see Quentin Smith, “The Multiple Uses of Indexicals,” Synthèse 78 (1989): 167–191.
But it is noteworthy that all his other uses of “now,” though grammatically present-tense, in fact concern tenseless uses of “now.”
A prime example would be Paul Helm’s misconceived attempt to prove, on the basis of the analogy between the spatial indexical “here” and the temporal indexical “now,” that arguments against divine timelessness from considerations of tense have parallel arguments that would also serve to undermine divine spacelessness (Paul Helm, Eternal God [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988], pp. 41–55; see especially p.
See Nelson Goodman, “Time and Language, and the Passage of Time,” in The Structure of Appearance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951), chap. 11, §§ 2, 3, reprinted in Problems of Space and Time,ed. J. J. C. Smart, Problems of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan Co., 1964), p. 363. Goodman’s example of a purely relational use of the terms in question is “We can know at a given time only what is past at that time or present at that time, not what is future at that time.”
Quentin Smith, “The Infinite Regress of Temporal Attributions,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 24 (1986): 383–396; idem, “The Logical Structure of the Debate about McTaggart’s Paradox,” Philosophy Research Archives 14 (1988–89): 371–379, the latter being a reply to L. Nathan Oaklander, “McTaggart’s Paradox and the Infinite Regress of Temporal Attributions: a Reply to Smith,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 25 (1987): 425–431.
Paul Fitzgerald, “Nowness and the Understanding of Time,” in PSA 1972, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 20, ed. Kenneth F. Schaffner and Robert S. Cohen ( Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974 ), p. 261.
See remarks of Ferrel Christensen, “The Source of the River of Time,” Ratio 18 (1976): 137; Arnold B. Levison, “Events and Time’s Flow,” Mind 96 (1987): 346–350; also my “In Defense of Presentism: A response to Smith’s paper `Reference to the Past and Future’,” Time, Tense, and Reference,ed. Quentin Smith and Alexander Jokic (forthcoming).
See Alfred J. Freddoso, “Accidental Necessity and Logical Determinism,” Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983): 264. He writes,That this implies a sort of power over the past (as well as the future) is explained by idem, “Accidental Necessity and Power over the Past,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 63 (1982): 54–68. For a discussion see my Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom: The Coherence of Theism I: Omniscience,Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 16 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991), pp. 83–90, 179–190. If one does not accept that propositions are tensed, then one could reformulate the metaphysical primacy of the pure present in terms of non-propositional, present-tensed features of reality (e.g.,God’s de se knowledge of what He is creating).
See Levison, “Time’s Flow,” pp. 349–350. Horwich objects that statements like “The present-tense proposition `The Battle of Waterloo is occurring’ is true in 1815” fail to express any fact in the portion of the sentence enclosed in single quotation marks. He says that the term “fact” should not be used for those aspects of reality whose explicit descriptions are true only relative to some context (e.g.,“It is raining”) but should be reserved for those aspects of reality whose explicit descriptions are sentences that are true simpliciter (e.g.,“It is raining in Manchester”). Hence, we should not countenance a sentence like “E is past” as a fact but reject it as an idiosyncratic and unmotivated conception of “fact.” The real facts are described by sentences of the form “E is past at t,” in which “past” has become a relational predicate meaning “earlier than” (Horwich, Asymmetry of Time,pp. 22–23). All this amounts to, however, is the mere rejection of tensed facts on Horwich’s part. He provides no argument as to why no such absolute, tensed facts obtain. Ironically, his example of a genuine fact is not, on his own account, a fact at all, since “It is raining in Manchester” is not true simpliciter,but only relative to a time. If we adopt his canonical form, what is a fact is “It rains in Manchester at t”—but then we no longer know whether it is now raining in Manchester. The A-theoretic understanding of tensed facts is no more idiosyncratic than the B-theorist’s interpretation of the same and is far from unmotivated, seeking to account coherently for the objectivity of temporal becoming.
Lowe, “Indexical Fallacy,” pp. 64–65.
See discussion in Tensed Theory of Time,chap. 6. 2` Such an account of presentism exonerates the A-theorist from the confused charges leveled against the creationist/annihilationist by Melvin M. Schuster, “On the Denial of Past and Future Existence,” Review of Metaphysics 21 (1967–68): 447–467. Oaklander has objected that such an account succumbs to McTaggart’s Paradox or the Problem of Temporary Intrinsics (Nathan Oaklander, “Comments on William Craig’s `McTaggart’s Paradox and the Problem of Temporary Intrinsics’,” Central Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, April 23–26, 1997); cf. idem, “Bigelow, Possible Worlds, and the Passage of Time,” Analysis 54 [1994]: 244–248. But Oaklander forgets that tensed possible worlds are not abstract objects timelessly existing, but abstract objects which exist at times and endure through time. Oaklander’s objection that my explication falls prey to McTaggart’s Paradox must be, therefore, that WI* at t lacks the property of being actual, whereas W`* at t* has the property of being actual; therefore IF t* at t is not identical with W’* at t*, which is ex hypothesi absurd. But now the solution to the problem is obvious: the solution is just presentism once more. If t* is present, then only entities which exist at t* are real, including WI*. Therefore, the only properties Wt* has are the properties Wt* has presently, including actuality. Thus, W’*, like any entity existing at t*,does not have incompatible properties.
Grünbaum, “Status of Temporal Becoming,” p. 20.
Ibid.
For a particularly bold statement of this point see Christensen, “Source,” pp. 135–137.
Fitzgerald, “Nowness,” p. 260.
It seems to me inessential to the issue at hand whether we adopt an ontology of events or things. Typically, A-theorists, such as Broad and Prior, have propounded thing ontology, according to which104 (1995): 523–531.
Grünbaum, “Status of Temporal Becoming,” p. 20.
Richard M. Gale, The Language of Time, International Library of Philosophy and Scientific Method (London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1968), pp. 93–100, 224. For discussion see George N. Schlesinger, Aspects of Time (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), pp. 44–47 and Andros Loizou, The Reality of Time ( Brookfield, Ver.: Gower, 1986 ), pp. 79–108.
Fitzgerald, “Nowness,” p. 277.
Baker, “Temporal Becoming,” p. 223.
G. J. Whitrow, The Natural Philosophy of Time,2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 350; H. A. C. Dobbs, “The `Present’ in Physics,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 19 (1969): 317324.
A. Grünbaum, “Are Physical Events Themselves Transiently Past, Present and Future? A Reply to H. A. C. Dobbs,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 20 (1969): 145–162.
Grünbaum, “Status of Temporal Becoming,” p. 12.
H. A. C. Dobbs, “Reply to Prof. Grünbaum,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 21 (1970): 275.
Quentin Smith, “The Mind-Independence of Temporal Becoming,” Philosophical Studies 47 (1985): 112–115. Here Smith’s failure to distinguish the uses of “now” as a tenseless temporal indexical and as a tensed expression, which I mentioned in note 11, seems to trip him up.
See the symposium organized by process thinkers and published as David R. Griffin, ed., Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time (Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press, 1986 ).
See Adolf Grünbaum, “Carnap’s Views on the Foundations of Geometry,” in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, ed. P. A. Schilpp, Library of Living Philosophers ( LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1963 ), p. 6
where he distinguishes between the semantic and pragmatic levels of physics. See also idem, “Operationism and Relativity,” in The Validation of Scientific Theories,ed. with an Introduction byIbid., p. 55.
Ibid., p. 84. In an American Philosophical Association Central Division session devoted to his book, Price compared this situation to a carpenter who threw away half his nails because they were pointed at the wrong end!
Ibid., p. 234.
Ibid., p. 259.
Ibid., p. 260.
He says, for example, that “The less charitable verdict is that the vast majority of physicists are simply mistaken, and have allowed their science to be guided by an assumption which is as groundless as the geo-centric foundations of ancient cosmology. Insofar—so very, very far—as physics relies on this assumption, then, it is likely to be grossly in error” (Ibid., p. 259). Even “the more irenic verdict” is that physics is “correct as a description of reality from a particular standpoint” and therefore gives us the partial truth about the world (Ibid.). At best physical theories give us the truth from the perspective of a moment in A-series time but as such do not give us the objective truth about the world.
See The Tensed Theory of Time,chap. 7.
See chapter 2.
Max Black, review of The Natural Philosophy of Time, Scientific American 206 (April 1962), p. 181. Cf. idem, “The Direction of Time,” Analysis 19 (1958–59): 54–63. See also Alan G. Padgett, God, Eternity and the Nature of Time (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), pp. 82–95; J. R. Lucas, Space, Time, and Causality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 36–38, 57, 119ff.
Peter Kroes, Time: Its Structure and Role in Physical Theories, Synthèse Library 179 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), p. 208. See also Peter Kroes, “Physics and the Flow of Time,” in Nature, Time, 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.
Black, review of Natural Philosophy of Time,pp. 182–183; see also Padgett, God, Eternity and the Nature of Time,pp. 83–85.
Grünbaum, Problems of Space and Time,p. 327.
Mary F. Cleugh, Time and its Importance in Modern Thought,with a Foreword by L. Susan Stebbing (London: Methuen, 1937), pp. 46–47. Cf the judgement of de Broglie:
science has always allowed, almost without discussion, the possibility of representing time as a simple variable, which can be plotted along a line like a spatial dimension, and that, by that very fact, science condemns itself to not being able to comprehend why time and space present themselves in our experience under different aspects, why, in particular, time always flows in the same direction, though any dimension of space can be pursued indifferently in two directions“ (Louis de Broglie, ”The Concepts of Contemporary Physics and Bergson’s Ideas on Time and Motion,“ in Bergson and the Evolution of Physics, ed. P. A. Y. Gunter [Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1969 ], p. 47 ).
A point made by A. A. Merrill, “The t of Physics,” Journal of Philosophy 19 (1922): 238–241. See also Herbert Dingle, Science at the Crossroads (London: Martin Brian & O’Keefe, 1972), pp. 31–32 and my remarks in “’What Place, then, for a Creator?’: Hawking on God and Creation,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 41 (1990): 229–234.
Cleugh, Time,p. 46.
Black, review of Natural Philosophy of Time,p. 182. Similarly, Kroes: “…it is dubious whether coordinate time deserves to be called `time’ at all” (Kroes, “Physics and the Flow of Time,” p. 49). Sklar writes
If what we mean by `time’ when we talk of the time order of events of the physical world has nothing to do with the meaning of `time’ as meant when we talk about the order of time of our experiences, why call it time at all? Why not give it an absurd name, deliberately chosen to be meaningless (like `strangeness’), and so avoid the mistake of thinking that we know what we are talking about when we talk about the time order of events in the world?“ (Lawrence Sklar, ”Time in Experience and in Theoretical Description of the World,“ in Time’s Arrows Today,ed. Steven F. Savitt [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995], p. 226).
Denbigh aptly remarks
it would be erroneous to regard the more comprehensive time-concept of conscious awareness as if it were obtained by the adding on of further features to a supposedly more basic concept originating in physics. The reverse, I believe, is closer to the truth; the t-coordinate is obtained by a process of discarding—by an elimination of these particular features of time-as-it-is-to-conscious-experience which are not required for the limited purposes of physical theory. In other words there are aspects of the more comprehensive time-concept which need not be made use of in the theories of micro-events and of reversible motions.
would be a prejudice arising from the great success of physics in its own proper field if the pared-down or minimal notion of time which it uses were to be regarded as `more true’ in some sense.“ (Kenneth G. Denbigh, Three Concepts of Time [Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1981], pp. 67–68).
Grünbaum, “Status of Temporal Becoming,” p. 26; cf. 21.
Ibid., pp. 26–27. In Smart’s original text, the final “occurred” is italicized, indicating that it is a tenseless verb (J. J. C. Smart, Philosophy and Scientific Realism [London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1963 ], p. 135 ).
Grünbaum, “Status of Temporal Becoming,” p. 27.
Ibid., p. 21.
C. D. Broad, Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938; rep. ed.: New York: Octagon Books, 1976), 2: 316.
Smart, Philosophy and Scientific Realism,p. 135
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Craig, W.L. (2000). Three Arguments for the Mind-Dependence of Becoming. In: The Tenseless Theory of Time. Synthese Library, vol 294. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3473-8_6
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