Abstract
One of the most gripping intuitions that people have about time is that it, in some sense “flows.” This sense of flow has been articulated in a number of ways, ranging from us moving into the future or the future rushing towards us, and there has been no shortage of metaphors and descriptions to characterize this sense of passage. Despite the many forms of the metaphor and its widespread occurrence, it has been argued that there is a deep conceptual problem in any assumption that time “passes” or “flows.” The idea expressed by the metaphor is supposed to be incoherent. But is the idea expressed by this metaphor really incoherent? In this essay I will argue that, on one understanding of the metaphor, it is not. I’ll argue that the metaphor can be unpacked as representing three features of temporal experience, and while these features together appear to lead to paradox, I will argue that correctly handled they do not.
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Notes
If you are concerned about relativistic effects you can relativize this to an inertial frame if you wish. See Sklar (1977) for ideas about how this might be done.
The “new B-theory” might spot me this but argue that the relevant perspectival properties can be cashed out in terms of our psychology—we need not take them as being properties of the physical world (see Mellor 1998 for an example). If one is an anti-Cartesian about psychology (as I am) it is difficult to see how this view makes sense. That is, if there are no tensed physical states I don’t see how there can be tensed psychological states.
I recognize that there are languages which appear to allow such a phenomenon. I have some doubts about the scope of such claims, but clearly such shifted tenses are not really possible in English. I believe the so-called sequence of tense phenomenon discussed in Higginbotham (1995) does not successfully make the case for a shifted tense, although it may well make the case for a shifted temporal reference.
Williams, for his part, thought that the movement could be cashed out solely in terms of the B-theoretic relations. That seems exceptionally optimistic to me.
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Ludlow, P. Tense, the Dynamic Lexicon, and the Flow of Time. Topoi 34, 137–142 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-014-9244-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-014-9244-9