the language and reality of time jul 2006

[...]... Mellor (1981, 1998) and Oaklander (1991) For surveys of the A-theory and the B-theory, see Oaklander and Smith (1994) and Craig (2000a, b) 20 The Language and Reality of Time Closely related to the question of the shape of ordinary time is the question of the ontology of ordinary time Ontology raises issues of what there is Temporal ontology raises the issue of whether there is a past and a future According... description of the temporal dimension of reality in terms of times The spacetime conception, on the other hand, is a description of the temporal dimension of reality in terms of spacetime points and regions We may distinguish four different views of the relationship between these conceptions and the world These views agree that the spacetime conception describes reality correctly but differ on the status of the. .. that the semantics of natural language takes the form of a T-theory.2 A T-theory yields theorems of the form: (T) s is true ≡ p where s is an expression in the object language the language that is under investigation and p is an expression in the metalanguage the language in which the investigation is conducted The semantics of the simple temporally unmodified predication ‘a is F’, which has the logical... dimension of reality independently of the temporal dimension of language More specifically, it is possible to discuss the problems of spatiotemporal location and instantiation independently of the problem of temporal predication What is the reason, then, for pursuing these projects together, for exploring the temporal dimension of language in the same context as the temporal dimension of reality? The reason... status The fact that Clinton is US president was future in the distant past, present in the recent past, and is past in the present; the same fact was future, then became present, and has now become past So reality is immersed in the irreducible flow of time, in which the future becomes the present and the present becomes the past The combination of tenserism and A -time is commonly known as the A-theory of. .. metaphysics of time with the semantics of temporal discourse Before the supervenience of ordinary temporal facts on spacetime facts can be explained, the shape of ordinary time needs to be clarified This is a further task of Chapter 1 Since ordinary time is the conception of time to which we are committed in virtue of the way we speak, the metaphysical question of the shape of ordinary time is closely... Substantivalism and relationism are competing ontologies of spacetime The substantivalist takes the physicist’s talk of spacetime at face value: the points that make up spacetime are genuine entities The relationist, on the other hand, rejects the genuine existence of spacetime points and reduces all talk of spacetime to talk of spatiotemporal relations between entities of a more safe and sane ontology Among the. .. objects such as persons and tables, and their ordinary properties such as shapes and colours, related to time? We might further ask how events, such as parties and explosions, are related to time But for reasons of simplicity I shall ignore events The question 18 The Language and Reality of Time about the relation of reality and time may then be split up into three questions: (a) What is time? (b) How are... and A -time in the context of temporal supervenience with the aim of promoting detenserism as the correct account of tense and B -time as the true shape of ordinary time With detenserism in the background the problem of temporal supervenience becomes the task of explaining how facts about B -time supervene on facts about spacetime Part of the problem of temporal supervenience is the problem of spatiotemporal... points the family of hyperplanes of simultaneity is a partition of pre-relativistic spacetime In addition to being ordered by the simultaneity-relation, spacetime points stand in the earlier-relation (or the later-relation) to each other, which gives the spacetime a temporal direction The earlier-relation, like simultaneity, is intrinsic to the geometry of the spacetime and independent of the states of . Supervenience 7 The right-hand side of the theorem specifies the literal truth conditions of the sentence on the left-hand side; and the truth conditions of a sentence deliver the semantic content of that. tenserism and A -time in the context of temporal supervenience with the aim of promoting detenserism as the correct account of tense and B -time as the true shape of ordinary time. With detenserism in the. metaphysical question of the shape of ordinary time is closely linked with the semantic question of the status of grammatical tense. The construal of ordinary time as A -time corresponds to the tenserist account of