Do the folk represent time as essentially dynamical?

ABSTRACT

Recent research [Latham, Miller, and Norton 2019. “Is our Naïve Theory of Time Dynamical?” Synthese] reveals that a majority of people represent actual time as dynamical. But do they, as suggested by McTaggart and Gödel, represent time as essentially dynamical? This paper distinguishes three interrelated questions. We ask (a) whether the folk representation of time is sensitive or insensitive: i.e. does what satisfies the folk representation of time in counterfactual worlds depend on what satisfies it actually – sensitive – or not – insensitive, and (b) do those who represent actual time as dynamical, represent time in all possible worlds as dynamical – what we call insensitive dynamism – or do they represent time in all possible worlds as dynamical only conditional on the actual world in fact being dynamical – what we call sensitive dynamism, and (c) do dynamists and non-dynamists deploy two different representations of time, or deploy the same representation, but disagree about what actually satisfies that representation? We found no evidence that the folk representation of time is sensitive, or that the folk representation of time is essentially dynamical in either sense, though we did find evidence of a largely (though not universally) shared representation, on which dynamical features are sufficient, but not necessary, for time.

KEYWORDS:

• Temporal dynamism
• A-theory
• folk concept of time
• experimental philosophy
• time

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 By a representation we just mean a contentful state that can be a constituent of thought.

2 Callender (2017) speaks of a naïve theory of time.

3 See Baron and Miller (2015a, 2015b).

4 Dynamists (or A-theorists) hold that events are ordered in terms of whether they are objectively past, present or future; the location of events within that ordering is dynamic in that a set of events, E, is future, will be present, and will then become past and this constitutes the flow of time. By contrast, non-dynamists deny that there are objective properties of pastness, presentness or futurity; all that exists is an ordering of events in terms of the relations of earlier-than, later-than and simultaneous-with, and hence there is no temporal flow.

5 Of course, there are many temporal dynamists who think that it is essential to time that it flows, but who do think that this is a conceptual necessity. It might simply be, as a matter of metaphysics, that the A-series is essential to time.

It is often unclear exactly what view different A-theorists take on this matter. For instance, Smith (1993), Gale (1968) Ludlow (1999) and Schlesinger (1982) think that we must posit an A-series because we cannot reduce A-theoretic talk to B-theoretic talk plus indexicals. If we think that our concept of time is intimately connected to our ways of talking about time and our position in it, then if A-theoretic talk is not reducible to B-theoretic talk, this might constitute its being conceptually necessary that time is dynamical.

6 See Baron et al. (2015).

7 For arguments of this kind see Zimmerman (2008), Smith (1994), Craig (2000) and Schlesinger (1994).

8 For ways of discharging this burden see Ismael (2012), Callender (2017) and Miller, Holcombe, and Latham (2020).

9 Baron and Miller (2015a, 2015b) consider but do not defend this view.

10 Notably, the non-dynamical worlds we discuss are all worlds in which there is a direction of time. So by ‘non-dynamism’ in this paper we mean ‘non-dynamical yet temporally directed’. In Latham, Miller, and Norton (2020), we investigate whether people’s representation of time is sensitive to the presence or absence of temporal direction.

11 As such, scenarios need not describe genuinely possible worlds. So for instance, perhaps dynamical worlds are metaphysically impossible, and so a description of a dynamical scenario, considered as actual, is not the consideration, as actual, of a possible world. That is why we use the term ‘scenario’, rather than ‘world’.

12 In experiment 1 of Latham, Miller, and Norton (2019) we found that 14.5% chose the moving spotlight theory, 17.4% chose presentism, 34.3% chose the growing block, 17.2% chose the block universe, 9.3% chose the C-theory and 7.3% chose Quantum Gravity, as being most like our universe. For our minimally modified vignettes, we found that 14.3% chose the moving spotlight theory, 22.7% chose presentism, 17.6% chose the growing block, 27.5% chose the block universe, 12% chose the C-theory and 4.9% chose Quantum Gravity as being most like our universe. While this distribution is not exactly the same as that found by Latham, Miller, and Norton (2019), it is close enough. 600 people participated in the study. Participants were U.S. residents, recruited and tested online using Amazon Mechanical Turk, and compensated $2 for approximately 20 min of their time. 56 participants had to be excluded for failing to follow task instructions. This means that they failed to answer the questions (47), or failed an attentional check question (9). The remaining sample was composed of 544 participants (aged 19–70; 226 female; 1 prefer not to answer). Mean age 36.61 (SD = 10.81). Ethics approval for this study was obtained from the University of Sydney Human Research Ethics Committee. Informed consent was obtained from all participants prior to testing. The survey was conducted online using Qualtrics.

13 It is notable that a majority of participants (we did not test this for significance) judged that the eternalist B-theoretic scenario was more like the actual world, given that in Latham, Miller, and Norton (2019), we found the growing block theory to be the most popular theory of time. As per a helpful suggestion from an anonymous referee, we suspect that this effect is in part due to the time-neutral rendering of the vignettes, which lowered the popularity of the growing block while bolstering the popularity of the B-theoretic eternalist view. We do not think there is anything concerning about this result. Firstly, we only gathered data from participants who passed comprehension checks for both vignettes. Secondly, while our time-neutral replication of our (2019) study roughly halved the popularity of the growing block from our (2019) experiment 1 (from ∼34% down to ∼17%), only ∼24% of participants chose the growing block in our (2019) experiment 2 (which was a replication of experiment 1).

14 Impairment in counterfactual thoughts can occur after sustained damage to the prefrontal cortex (e.g., Beldarrain et al. 2005 and Knight and Grabowecky 1995) or from other causes such as Parkinson’s disease, and has been shown to have far reaching consequences for people’s capacity to understand intentions and make decisions, and also for their experience of certain emotions such as regret, and the accuracy of their social attributions such as blame and responsibility (Beldarrain et al. 2005; Roese et al. 2008).

15 See Gopnik et al. (2004), Kushnir et al. (2010), Lagnado and Sloman (2004), Steyvers et al. (2003) and Sloman (2005).

16 See Einhorn and Hogarth (1986). Indeed, interventionist accounts of what causation is have been proposed by Pearl (2009), Woodward (2003) and Menzies (2007), among others. As Woodward (2003: 11) puts it:

one ought to be able to associate with any successful explanation a hypothetical or counterfactual experiment that shows us that and how manipulation of the factors mentioned in the explanation (the explanans, as philosophers call it) would be a way of manipulating or altering the phenomenon explained (the explanandum). Put in still another way, an explanation ought to be such that it can be used to answer what I call a what-if-things-had-been-different question: the explanation must enable us to see what sort of difference it would have made for the explanandum if the factors cited in the explanans had been different in various possible ways.

17 Kristie Miller would like to thank the Australian Research Council (FT170100262 and DP18010010), James Norton would like to thank the Icelandic Centre for Research (195617-051) and Andrew J. Latham would like to thank the Ngāi Tai Ki Tāmaki Tribal Trust for their support.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number DP18010010, FT170100262]; Icelandic Centre for Research [grant number 195617-051].