Category: Metaphysics

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Brigitte Everett, Andrew J. Latham and Kristie Miller  – “Locating Temporal Passage in a Block World”

In this post, Brigitte Everett, Andrew J. Latham and Kristie Miller discuss the article they recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of their article can be found here.

“Dynamism of a Cyclist” (1913) Umberto Boccioni

Imagine a universe where a single set of events exists. Past, present, and future events all exist, and they are all equally real—the extinction of the dinosaurs, the birth of a baby, the creation of a sentient robot. The sum total of reality never grows or shrinks, so the totality of events that exist never changes. We may call this a non-dynamical universe. Does time pass in such world? 

If your answer to the above question is “no”, then perhaps you think that time passes only in a dynamical universe.

A dynamist is someone who thinks that there is an objective present time, and that which time that is, constantly changes. Many dynamists think that time only passes in dynamical worlds (Smith 1994, Craig 2000, Schlesinger 1994). Perhaps more surprisingly, many non-dynamists—those who deny that there is an objective present time, and that which time that is, constantly changes—have also traditionally held that time does not pass in non-dynamical worlds.

However, recently some non-dynamists have argued that in our world there is anemic temporal passage, namely, very roughly, the succession of events that occurs in a non-dynamical world. (Deng 2013, Deng 2019, Bardon 2013, Skow 2015, Leininger 2018, Leininger 2021). These theorists argue that anemic temporal passage deserves the name “temporal passage”. One way of interpreting this claim is as the claim that anemic passage satisfies our ordinary, folk concept of temporal passage.

Viewed in this way, we can see a dispute between, on the one hand, those who think that anemic temporal passage is not temporal passage at all, because it does not satisfy our folk concept of temporal passage, and, on the other hand, those who think it is temporal passage, because it does. 

We sought to determine whether our folk concept of temporal passage is a concept of something that is essentially dynamical; that is, whether we have a folk concept of temporal passage that is only satisfied in dynamical worlds, or whether something that exists in non-dynamical worlds, such as anemic passage, can satisfy that concept. 

You might wonder why any of this matters. One reason is that the non-dynamical view of time has often been accused of being highly revisionary. It is often claimed to be a view on which what seem like platitudes turn out to be false. For instance, you might think it’s platitudinous that time passes, and yet, it is argued, if a non-dynamical view of time is true, then this platitude turns out to be false. So, if our world were indeed that way, it would turn out to be very different from how we take it to be.

To determine whether our folk concept of temporal passage would be satisfied in a non-dynamical world, we undertook several empirical studies that probe people’s concept of temporal passage. 

We found that, overall, participants judged that time passes in a non-dynamical universe, when our world was stipulated to be non-dynamical. That is, a majority of participants made this judgement. In particular, we found that a majority of people who in fact think that our world is non-dynamical, judge that there is temporal passage in it. As for people who in fact think that our world is most like a moving spotlight world, we found that they judge that, were our world non-dynamical, it would nevertheless contain temporal passage. Interestingly, though, with regards to people who think that either presentism or the growing block theory is most likely true of our world, we obtained a different result: they did not think that our world would contain temporal passage, were it non-dynamical. 

In a second experiment we asked participants to read a vignette claiming that “time flows or flies or marches, years roll, hours pass… time flows like a river” and other vivid descriptions of passage, and then we asked them to state how likely it is that the description is true of a dynamical vs. a non-dynamical world.  We found that participants judged that the description is equally likely to be true of a non-dynamical world as it is of a dynamical world. 

In the last experiment we probed whether people think that time passage is mind-dependent. Overall, we found that participants judged that time passes regardless of whether there are any minds to experience its passing or not.

Our results indicate, first, that the folk concept of temporal passage can be satisfied in a non-dynamical world, and second, that it is not a concept of something essentially mind-dependent. This suggests that non-dynamists should not concede that theirs is a view on which, in some ordinary sense, time fails to pass. 

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/4639/.

References

  • Bardon, A. (2013). A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time. Oxford University Press.
  • Craig, W. L. (2000). The Tensed Theory of Time: A Critical Examination. Kluwer Academic.
  • Deng, N. (2013). “Our Experience of Passage on the B-Theory”. Erkenntnis 78(4): 713-726.
  • Deng, N. (2019). “One Thing After Another: Why the Passage of Time is Not an Illusion”. In A. Bardon, V. Arstila, S. Power & A. Vatakis (eds.) The Illusions of Time: Philosophical and Psychological Essays on Timing and Time Perception, pp. 3-15. Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Leininger, L. (2018). “Objective Becoming: In Search of A-ness”. Analysis, 78(1): 108-117.  
  • Leininger, L. (2021). “Temporal B-Coming: Passage Without Presentness”. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 99(1): 1-17.
  • Schlesinger G. (1994). “Temporal Becoming”. In N. Oakland and Q. Smith (eds.) The New Theory of Time, pp. 214–220. Yale University Press.
  • Skow, B. (2015). Objective Becoming. Oxford University Press.
  • Smith, Q. (1994). “Introduction: The Old and New Tenseless Theory of Time”. In L. N.  Oaklander and Q. Smith (eds.) The New Theory of Time, pp. 17–22. Yale University Press.

About the authors

Brigitte Everett is a doctoral student at University of Sydney, Department of Philosophy. Her research interests focus on the philosophy of time.

Andrew J. Latham is an AIAS-PIREAU Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies and Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Philosophy and History of Ideas at Aarhus University. He works on topics in philosophy of mind, metaphysics (especially free will), experimental philosophy and cognitive neuroscience.

Kristie Miller is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney. She writes on the nature of time, temporal experience, and persistence, and she also undertakes empirical work in these areas. At the moment, she is mostly focused on the question of whether, assuming we live in a four-dimensional block world, things seem to us just as they are. She has published widely in these areas, including three recent books: “Out of Time” (OUP 2022), “Persistence” (CUP 2022), and “Does Tomorrow Exist?” (Routledge 2023). She has a new book underway on the nature of experience in a block world, which hopefully will be completed by the end of 2024.

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Christopher Frugé – “Janus-Faced Grounding”

In this post, Christopher Frugé discusses the article he recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of his article can be found here.

Picture of the Roman double-faced god Janus: one face, older in age, looks back to the past, while the other, younger, looks forward to the future.
Detail of “Bust of the Roman God Janus” (1569) © The New York Public Library

Grounding is the generation of the less fundamental from the more fundamental. The fact that Houston is a city is not a fundamental aspect of reality. Rather, it’s grounded in facts about people and, ultimately, fundamental physics.

What is the status of grounding itself? Most theorists of ground think that grounding is non-fundamental and so must itself be grounded. Yet, if grounding is always grounded, then every grounding fact generates an infinite regress of the grounding of grounding facts, where each grounding fact needs to be grounded in turn. I argue that this regress is vicious, and so some grounding facts must be fundamental.

Grounding theorists take grounding to be grounded because it seems to follow from two principles about fundamentality. Purity says that fundamental facts can’t contain any non-fundamental facts. Completeness says that the fundamental facts generate all the non-fundamental facts. The idea behind purity is that the fundamental is supposed to be ‘pure’ of the non-fundamental. There can’t be any chairs alongside quarks at the most basic level of reality. Completeness stems from the thought that the fundamental is ‘enough’ to generate the rest of reality. Once the base layer has been put in place, then it produces everything else.

These principles are plausible, but they lead to regress. For example, the fact that Houston is a city is grounded in certain fundamental physical facts. By the standard construal of purity, this grounding fact is non-fundamental, since it ‘contains’ a non-fundamental element: the fact that Houston is a city. But by completeness, non-fundamental facts must be grounded, so this grounding fact must be grounded. But then this grounding fact must be grounded for the same reason, and so on forever.

We have what’s called the fact regress:

The standard take among grounding theorists is that the regress isn’t vicious, just a surprising discovery. This is because it doesn’t violate the well-foundedness of grounding. Well-foundedness requires that at some point each path of A grounds B and C grounds A and D grounds C… must come to an end.

The fact regress doesn’t violate well-foundedness, because each grounding fact can ground out in something fundamental. It’s just that each grounding fact needs to be grounded. Consider a case where A is fundamental and grounds B, but this grounding fact is grounded in a fundamental C. And that grounding fact is grounded in a fundamental D and so on. This satisfies well-foundedness but is an instance of the fact regress.

Nonetheless, I claim that the fact regress is still vicious. This is because what’s grounded doesn’t merely depend on its ground but also depends on the grounds of its grounding fact – and on the grounds of each grounding fact in the path of grounding of grounding. Call this connection dependence.

Why is connection dependence a genuine form of dependence? Suppose that A grounds B, where B isn’t grounded in anything else. But say that C grounds that A grounds B, where A grounds B isn’t grounded in anything else. Then, B depends not just on A but also on C. If C were removed, then A wouldn’t ground B. So then B would not be generated by anything and so would not come into being. For example, if a collection of particles ground the composite whole of those particles only via a composition operation grounding this grounding fact, then if, perhaps counterpossibly, there were no composition operation then those particles would not ground that whole. Similar reasoning applies at each step in the path of grounding of grounding.

So, then, the fact regress is bad for the same reason that violations of well-foundedness are bad. Without well-foundedness, it could be that each ground would need to be grounded in turn, and so the creation of a non-fundamental element of reality would never end up coming about because it would always require a further ground. Yet, given the fact regress, there can also be no stopping point—no point from which what’s grounded is ultimately able to be generated from its grounds. So determination, and hence what’s determined, would always be deferred and never achieved.

Therefore, I uphold well-connectedness, which requires that every path of grounding of grounding facts terminates in an ungrounded grounding fact:

This prohibits the fact regress.

Well-connectedness falls out of the proper interpretation of completeness, which imposes the requirement that the fundamental is enough for the non-fundamental. For any portion of non-fundamental reality, there is some portion of the fundamental that is ‘enough’ to produce it. If well-connectedness is violated, then there is no portion of fundamental reality that is sufficient unto itself to produce any bit of non-fundamental reality. There would always have to be a further determination of how the fundamental determines the non-fundamental. But at some point the grounding of grounding must stop. Some grounding facts must be fundamental.

However, the fact regress seems to fall out of completeness and purity. So what gives? I think the key is to see that the proper interpretation of purity doesn’t require that grounding facts be grounded.

There’s a distinction between what’s called factive and non-factive grounding. Roughly put, A non-factively grounds B if and only if given A then A generates B. A factively grounds B just in case A non-factively grounds B and A obtains. So it could be that A non-factively grounds B even if B doesn’t obtain since A doesn’t obtain. Thus, in a legitimate sense, the fact that A non-factively grounds B doesn’t ‘contain’ A or B, since that grounding fact can obtain without either A or B obtaining. We can think of the non-factive grounding facts as ‘mentioning’ the ground and ground without ‘containing’ them. But this is consistent with purity, since fundamental non-factive grounding facts don’t have any non-fundamental constituents.

Want more?

Read the full article at: https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/4664/.

About the author

Christopher Frugé is a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford in St John’s College. He received his PhD from Rutgers. He works on foundational and normative ethics as well as metaphysics. 

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Kristie Miller – “Against Passage Illusionism”

Detail of Salvador Dalì’s tarot card “The Magician” (1983)

In this post, Kristie Miller discusses her article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Kristie’s article can be found here.

It might seem obvious that we experience the passing of time. Certainly, in some trivial sense we do. It is now late morning. Earlier, it was early morning. It seems to me as though some period of time has elapsed since it was early morning. Indeed, during that period it seemed to me as though time was elapsing, in that I seemed to be located at progressively later times.

One question that arises is this: in what do these seemings consist? One way to put the question is to ask what content our experience has. What state of the world does the experience represent as being the case?

Philosophers disagree about which answer is correct. Some think that time itself passes. In other words, they think that there is a unique set of events that are objectively, metaphysically, and non-perspectivally present, and that which events those are, changes. Other philosophers disagree. They hold that time itself is static; it does not pass, because no events are objectively, metaphysically, and non-perspectivally present, such that which events those are, changes. Rather, whether an event is present is a merely subjective or perspectival matter, to be understood in terms of where the event is located relative to some agent.

Those who claim that time itself passes typically use this claim to explain why we experience it as passing: we experience time as passing because it does. What, though, should we say if we think that time does not pass, but is rather static? You might think that the most natural thing to say would be that we don’t experience time as passing. We don’t represent there being a set of events that are non-perspectivally present, and that which those are, changes. Of course, we represent various events as occurring in a certain temporal order, and as being separated by a certain temporal duration, and we experience ourselves as being located at some times (rather than others) – but none of that involves us representing that some events have a special metaphysical status, and that which events have that status, changes. So, on this view, we have veridical experiences of static time.

Interestingly, however, until quite recently this was not the orthodox view. Instead, the orthodoxy was a view known as passage illusionism. This is the view that although time does not pass, it nevertheless seems to us as though it does. So, we are subject to an illusion in which things seem to us some way that they are not. In my paper I argue against passage illusionism. I consider various ways that the illusionist might try to explain the illusion of time passing, and I argue that none of them is plausible.

The illusionist’s job is quite difficult. First, the illusion in question is pervasive. At all times that we are conscious, it seems to us as though time passes. Second, the illusion is of something that does not exist – it is not an experience which could, in other circumstances, be veridical.

In the psychological sciences, illusions are explained by appealing to cognitive mechanisms that typically function well in representing some feature(s) of our environment. In most conditions, these mechanisms deliver us veridical experiences. In some local environments, however, certain features mislead the mechanism to misrepresent the world, generating an illusion. These kinds of explanation, however, involve illusions that are not pervasive (they occur only in some local environments) and are not of something that does not exist (they are the product of mechanisms that normally deliver veridical experiences). This gives us reason to be hesitant that any explanation of this kind will work for the passage illusionist.

I consider a number of mechanisms that represent aspects of time, including those that represent temporal order, duration, simultaneity, motion and change. I argue that, regardless of how we think about the content of mental states, we should conclude that none of the representational states generated by these mechanisms individually, or jointly, represent time as passing.

First, suppose we think that the content of our experiences is exhausted by the things in the world that those experiences typically co-vary with.  For instance, suppose you have a kind of mental state which typically co-varies with the presence of cows. On this view, that mental state represents cows, and nothing more. I argue that if we take this view of representational content, then none of the contents generated by the functioning of the various mechanisms that represent aspects of time, could either severally or, importantly, jointly, represent time as passing. For even if our brains could in some way ‘knit together’ some of these contents into a new percept, such contents don’t have the right features to generate a representation of time passing. For instance, they don’t include a representation of objective, non-perspectival presence. So, if we hold this view on mental content, we should think that passage illusionism is false.

Alternatively, we might think that our mental states do represent the things in the world with which they typically co-vary, but that their content is not exhausted by representing those things. So, the illusionist could argue that we experience passage by representing various temporal features, such that our experiences have not only that content, but also some extra content, and that jointly this generates a representation of temporal passage.

I argue that it is very hard to see why we would come to have experiences with this particular extra content. Representing that certain events are objectively, metaphysically, and non-perspectivally present, and that which event these are, changes, is a very sophisticated representation. If it is not an accurate representation, it’s hard to see why we would come to have it. Further, it seems plausible that the human experience of time is, in this regard, similar to the experience of some non-human animals. Yet it seems unlikely that non-human animals would come to have such sophisticated representations, if the world does not in fact contain passage.

So, I conclude, it is much more likely, if time does not pass, that we have veridical experiences of a static world rather than illusory experiences of a dynamical world.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/2914/.

About the author

Kristie Miller is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney. She writes on the nature of time, temporal experience, and persistence, and she also undertakes empirical work in these areas. At the moment, she is mostly focused on the question of whether, assuming we live in a four-dimensional block world, things seem to us just as they are. She has published widely in these areas, including three recent books: “Out of Time” (OUP 2022), “Persistence” (CUP 2022), and “Does Tomorrow Exist?” (Routledge 2023). She has a new book underway on the nature of experience in a block world, which hopefully will be completed by the end of 2024. 

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Jonas Werner – “Extended Dispositionalism and Determinism”

Picture of a tall glass tumbler, meant to represent the glass disposition to break.
“Nr. 1598” (2001) Peter Dreher © Courtesy of the Peter Dreher Foundation

In this post, Jonas Werner discusses the article he recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Jonas’ article can be found here.

You should handle glasses with care because they are fragile and could break. Dispositions, like fragility or inflammability, go hand in hand with possibilities, like the possibility that the glass breaks or the paper ignites.

Modal dispositionalists take this observation as the starting point for their theory of metaphysical modality. Every possibility, so they claim, is underwritten by a disposition. Some of these dispositions are possessed to a very small degree, some are iterated (dispositions to acquire certain dispositions), and some were lost and are only a thing of the past.

At the heart of the modal dispositionalist’s position  lies the following biconditional:

It is metaphysically possible that p just in case something has, had, or will have an (iterated or non-iterated) disposition to be such that p.

I call the proponent of this biconditional the “classic dispositionalist”.

I argue that, for some p, it is possible that p although nothing has, had, or will have a disposition to be such that p. Some possibilities are only indirectly underwritten by dispositions. 

Why should one be unhappy with classic dispositionalism? Because, when combined with certain plausible assumptions, it quickly leads to a disaster.

The first assumption is that dispositions are always future-directed: nothing can be disposed to change the past.  For the classic dispositionalist, this immediately leads to the result that the first moment in time (if there is one) could not have been different.

The second assumption is that there are immutable truths about the dispositional roles of fundamental physical objects. Plausibly, nothing has the power to change these dispositional roles. For example, nothing can stop electrons from repelling protons. As a result, truths about the fundamental dispositional roles of fundamental objects turn out to be necessary for the classic dispositionalist.

The problem with both assumptions is that they generate too many necessities. To see the force of this worry, assume (something close to) determinism:

A complete description of the state of the universe at the first moment in time, in conjunction with immutable truths about the dispositional roles of physical objects, entails a complete description of every later state of the universe.

Now, the first assumption gave us that the state of the universe at the first moment in time is necessarily the way it is, while the second assumption gave us that fundamental dispositional roles are necessarily the way they are. Whatever is entailed by necessities is itself a necessity. Hence, we get the result that every state of the world obtains by necessity.

According to this result, for a match that never ignites – because I accidentally dropped in a pond, for example – it is impossible that it ignites. If we were to still subscribe to classic dispositionalism, we would even have to say that it was never flammable. This seems absurd!

Of course, there is some room for manoeuvre for the classic dispositionalist, which I discuss in some detail in the paper. For now, I just wish to mention that the case based on determinism is just an extreme version of the general worry that the classic dispositionalist might be forced to accept necessities that are incompatible with the manifestation of some dispositions.

In the second part of my paper, I propose a variant of dispositionalism that is immune to this problem, which I dub “extended dispositionalism”.

Clearly, the right-to-left part of the biconditional has to be saved. Something having a disposition to be such that p needs to be sufficient for the possibility that p, otherwise the central idea of modal dispositionalism is lost. But the dispositionalist need not say that something having a disposition to be such that p is necessary for it being possible that p.

Extended dispositionalism allows that possibilities are indirectly underwritten by dispositions; it allows that the left-to-right direction of our biconditional fails. This blocks the problem described above, because from the fact that nothing is disposed to be such that p we need not conclude that it is not possible that p.

How can possibilities be indirectly underwritten by dispositions?

In a nutshell, we can take a collection of true propositions to be a candidate for a collection of metaphysical necessities just in case every disposition is such that its manifestation is logically consistent with the conjunction of all propositions in this set.

There will be many such collections. However, some of them might be more plausible candidates for a basis of all metaphysical necessities than others. Maybe there is a maximal collection; maybe a collection is the largest one that avoids arguably objectionable cases of arbitrariness; or maybe it turns out that what’s necessary is indeterminate.

In any case, the method of looking for a collection of necessities that is compatible with the right-to-left direction of our biconditional has it that dispositions keep their role as the source of modality.

Still, we might have possibilities that are not the manifestation of any dispositions. We could, for example, hold that the first state of the universe is not necessary, although nothing ever has, had, or will have a disposition for it to be different.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/2280/

About the author

Jonas Werner is a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern. He received his PhD from the University of Hamburg. His research focuses on metaphysics and the philosophy of language.