Is ‘What is time?’ a good question to ask?
Philosophers typically tend to presume that time
is something like a continuum of instants, or a succession of durationless
‘nows’. This presumption faces some serious difficulties.
It
is unclear how one can possibly build up to time, as continuous, from
durationless instants. It is very like the notion of building up a line from
dimensionless points. There are certain contexts in which it might do no harm
to think of a line as ‘composed’ of points -- for example, in certain rarefied
contexts of theoretical geometry; or perhaps, if one was trying to explain to a
student how to measure a line; or, more straightforwardly (with the points now
transparently not dimensionless), if
one was wishing to paint a line ‘Monet-style’ or ‘Seurat-style’. But it is
absurd to surmise that a collectivity, however large, of dimensionless points
could actually result in something with dimension.[1]
There
seems then to be something very dubious about the idea of time as composed of instants.
Furthermore,
‘now’ is a paradigmatically indexical and
context-relative expression: when
specified somewhat more closely, it can mean today, this year, the modern age,
this instant (i.e. ‘right away’); etc. . It isn’t any kind of temporal unit whatsoever
-- and hence time can’t be a sequence of those ‘units’.[2] Much the same is I think true, if less obviously,
of ‘instant’. Compare, “Come here this instant!” It would seem deeply
misleading to think of this command as congenitally vague -- or, oppositely, as
implicitly invoking a quasi-scientific unit of time. Rather, it is surely an
adequate, ordinary, indexical, context-relative etc. utterance.
Michael
Dummett [3] has recently argued powerfully in these pages to
fairly similar effect: he has criticised severely the ‘classical’ model of
time, a model he notes is strongly present in Hume and after, and which he thinks has deep ‘Realist’ pretensions (Actually, he speaks of a super-realist metaphysics here (p.497)).
That is, the notion of time as composed of durationless instants:
(1)
presumes that there is always a completely precise answer to the question,
‘When did x happen?”, even if such an
answer is entirely and in principle beyond our cognitive powers. Furthermore, it:
(2)
invites the postulation of seemingly ‘conceptually-impossible’ scenarios.
Dummett
proposes an alternative (more or less ‘Anti-Realist’, or at least
Anti-‘super-realist’) model of time. We shall get to its details in the course
of the following discussion. But I want to begin by remarking that we need to
be very careful, from the beginning, not to buy into latent nonsense here, if
we are inclined to agree with Dummett’s (terms of) criticism -- if we are
inclined, that is, to agree that there seems something abhorrent or nonsensical
about the classical model. I will take (1) and (2) in turn, and we will see
that Dummett’s manner of dealing with them leaves his own incipient philosophy
of time in an unstable and potentially nonsensical condition.
(1) If we are inclined not to agree that a
‘completely precise’ answer can be given (by God) to some (or any) ‘When did x happen?’ questions, we should not
rush to the conclusion that this is because x
happened, for instance, at a vague time.
Rather than rushing to give an alternative answer to the ‘Realist’’s question
we should instead ask whether any sense has yet been attached to what the
‘Realist’ asks and then asserts (for others to deny).
The
Realist seems in the grip of an attractive picture. A picture, we might say, of
the universe as everywhere and everywhen just as it is, and not another way.
But
that now sounds tautological. Can the picture be made any clearer than that,
and controversial enough for someone actually to disagree with? I am not sure
it can. But the point is: Dummett does not stop to find out. He instead assumes
that the Realist picture is intelligible and contentious, and presses
immediately to provide an alternative picture, a picture he thinks less
‘implausible’, more ‘parsimonious’, or something like that. It is hard to know
how one can actually assemble criteria
for judging between these pictures, for saying that there is an alternative to
Realism that is “more satisfactory” (p.505), or “better” (p.505). It is unclear
whether Dummett is using a philosophical method,
one might say. Unless he is simply ‘doing metaphysics’. But didn’t we learn
anything from Wittgenstein? Can we just presume that the question “What is
time?” is well-defined, or that the question “When did x happen?” must always have some kind of definite answer, even if
that answer attributes indefiniteness to x?
But
am I being unfair to Dummett? Doesn’t he actually understand at least somewhat
a central Wittgensteinian objection to metaphysical Realism, namely that it is
not a coherent picture at all? That it yields various conceptual
impossibilities (see e.g. p.503, p.505)? This is where (2) comes in:
(2) We should be alarmed that Dummett
seems to have no problem describing
exactly what the ‘conceptual impossibilities’ are that he claims follow
from ‘Realism’ about time. Dummett claims that there is something
unintelligible about the ‘Realist’ picture of time, that it involves the
postulation of phenomena that ought “to be rejected as impossible on pure
conceptual grounds” (p.505); but
he acts and talks as if he understands
it perfectly well.
Again,
the worry here is that Dummett goes far too quickly. He tends to very quickly
-- without giving any philosophical (let alone sociological, or linguistic,
etc.) justification -- cite certain features of ‘our concepts’ (see e.g.
p.499), and just as quickly wheels them in to attack ‘Realism’ about time. Take
the following example (from p.503):
“[Consider] a pair of objects which,
throughout a certain interval, were exactly 2cm apart, save at one particular
instant in that interval, when they were 4cm apart. Our conception of
physical quantities is plainly such that this supposition makes no sense.
Yet the classical model allows it a sense; according to it, it is barred, if it
is barred, only by the laws of physics, and not by conceptual necessity.
The classical model supplies descriptions for states of affairs which, being
conceptually impossible, should admit no description.” (emphases mine) [4]
This
example does indeed seem to bring out something ‘unsatisfactory’ about the
picture of time as a continuum of durationless
instants. (It is not clear that anything at all has genuinely been pictured, if
we are asked to imagine something being somewhere only for an instant that has
no duration.) I have already suggested that we need to go
right back to the ‘start’ of that picture, and ask ourselves how we could ever
have imagined in the first place that you can ‘develop’ continuity, time,
change, out of changeless points alone. I don’t see how the picture gets off
the ground; it’s as hopeless as the fantasy of getting perception out of
empiricist sense-data. But it seems incoherent to let the picture get off the
grounds, and then counterexample it,
if the way that the counterexample you describe supposedly proves your point is
that ... the counterexample has not described anything! Why shouldn’t the
Realist respond to Dummett simply thus: “Given that it is obvious that you and
I both understand the plain English used in your example, it is a self-refuting
‘counterexample’.”
One
has to have a way of ‘dialoguing’ with the Realist that does not first accept his terms and then (as he will not unreasonably see
it) beg the question against him. If one is reducing one’s opponent to absurdity,
one must not accept his terms; one should at most ‘entertain’ them, and
make perspicuous that they were not terms anyone could ever intelligibly accept
and use (as opposed to mention) in sentences of one’s own.
If
Dummett wants to employ the ‘scenario’ he describes, he should either: (a) endeavour to get it to be
‘self-deconstructing’, from the start, merely a rhetorical device, a piece of
nonsense to bring out the latent nonsense of ‘Realism’. (Otherwise there will
clearly be a latent contradiction in what he has done: describing something (e.g. take his example involving “a pair of
objects...2cm apart save for at one particular instant...”) that he precisely
wants to argue is indescribable (at
least, ‘for us’).)
Or,
better still:
(b) he could
actually take the risk of allowing us to think for ourselves about the topic,
to think about these difficult matters in all their complexity. What do I mean?
I am thinking of the striking difference between the examples and scenarios
which Dummett employs, and those which are invoked in Wittgenstein’s texts.
Typically, the latter are more ‘open-textured’. We have in a way to decide for
ourselves whether or not a scenario has actually been depicted at all, in most
of Wittgenstein’s ‘examples’. Take for example the ‘builders’,[5] the ‘woodsellers’,[6] ‘pain-patches’ and ‘pain in stones’ [7] etc.; do we really know what to say (in advance
of thinking them through in a potentially almost endless dialogue) about any of
these? Or do they rather engage with our profound temptations to mire ourselves
in nonsense? (I will return to this matter later in this paper.)
Anti-Realist
(e.g. Relativist) interpretations of Wittgenstein tend to short-circuit all
that is most profound and potentially therapeutic in his thought. When one
encounters a teasing ‘example’ in Wittgenstein, one will perhaps inevitably at
first work with the assumption that it makes sense, that something possible in
another culture or at least in a world with different natural-scientific ‘laws’
is being described. But Wittgenstein’s writing then tends to bring out features
of the ‘scenarios’ he has apparently described which induce those ‘scenarios’
to collapse in on themselves. One way of expressing what Wittgenstein’s
examples tend to show is that we are deluded if we think of what can be
thought, of conceptual possibility, on anything at all like the model of
physical possibility. ‘Conceptual possibilities’ are not, as they seem to be
for Dummett, ‘impossible possibilities’ [8] -- they are simply expressions which delude us
into thinking we know how to use them. Whereas we are far from having found a
use for them at all.
But
one could equally express the tentative, situation-relative, confusion-relative
‘insights’ that working through Wittgenstein’s ‘examples’ yields in ways quite
different from the above, even in ways apparently contradictory to it. For the
thing is, not to establish any philosophical thesis; the important thing is to
resolve the contradictory impulses one already has, probably latently, in relation
to the seemingly-underlying ‘questions’ (e.g. ‘What is language?’, in the case
of the ‘builders’; ‘Is there only one possible ‘system’ of logic, or of
arithmetic, or are there several?’, in the case of the ‘woodsellers’; and so
on). The important thing is to face honestly the difficulty attending any wish
we might have to speak of ‘something’ that seems conceptually impossible.[9]
Dummett,
by contrast, knows exactly the answer he wants us to reach, the philosophical
thesis he wants us to enunciate along with him; the devices he uses to get
there do not essentially interest him, and that is perhaps how he misses their
incoherency -- how he misses the respects in which, evidently, he himself does
not have a good grip on the words he is using; the respects in which he is only
mirroring the absurdities of the ‘Realist’, not in any way ‘correcting’ or
transcending them, not perspicuously bringing them out. In short: It is just no
good to state just what it is that one’s opponents impossibly conceptualise.
(Have we learned nothing from Frege’s wrestlings with this? Nor from the
central difficulty of the Tractatus?[10] )
My
view, then, is that we should ask ourselves with the utmost seriousness whether
it is wise to think as Dummett does. He replies more or less in the negative to
the question, “Is time a continuum of instants?” [11] I am pretty sympathetic. But he seems to think
that this negative reply entails giving an alternative theoretical account; he
nowhere canvasses the possibility that there is something amiss with the question, with what we want when we
raise such questions in the first place. In other words, he thinks that he
still has to reply to the question, “What (then) is time?” He canvasses a few
possibilities, and appears most sympathetic to the anti-classical model of time
which he terms “constructive”. Here are his concluding remarks on this
alternative model:
“The constructive model does not
represent time as composed of durationless instants corresponding to
determinate real numbers, as the classical model does, nor of small
constitutive intervals, as the unmodified fuzzy realist model does. Rather...it
represents time as a continuum which we can dissect into intervals whose
end-points are the initiation and termination of physical processes. We can
determine the end-points of such intervals as themselves much smaller
intervals, these being our approximations to the instants at which they
occured. Such instants are indeed representable by real numbers, and it is on
them that are defined the functions giving the magnitudes of other quantities
at different times; in this respect all is as in the classical model, and we
may [in this sense] say that time is composed of such instants. But the
constructive model differs from the classical one in that these instants are
not precisely located...” (p.514-5)
Now, this ‘constructivism’ is explicitly a variant of what Dummett earlier in his
paper termed ‘fuzzy realism’. (Both views look rather like versions of what is
I think typically and more generally termed ‘Anti-Realism’.) ‘Fuzzy realism’ constitutes a particular
counter-claim to Realism’s thought that physical quantities always have
definite even in in principle unknowable magnitudes. The ‘fuzzy realist’
counter-claim is that physical quantities may have indeterminate magnitudes,
but that they really do have those
magnitudes, and no others -- that their
degree of indeterminacy may be perfectly ‘precise’.
This
can be (and sometimes is) re-expressed as follows: Realists hold that all
objects are precise. Whereas some ‘Anti-Realists’ (in this case, for example,
‘Fuzzy Realists’) hold that at least some objects are vague (albeit, typically,
‘precisely vague’). Thus while Realists say, as Dummett intimates (on p.499),
that “We cannot determine [such and such
a] magnitude more closely than to within some approximation: but in reality, it
is completely precise”, Anti-Realists tend not to question what this could
mean, but simply to negate it, by means of counterposing a picture along the
following lines: ‘In reality, this
magnitude is imprecise.’ And “in reality” in these sentences is not supposed to
mean simply, ‘Honestly, it is’, but rather, ‘Reality, ‘out there’, is literally
like this’ (whatever that means...).[12]
This
all seems to me very peculiar. It seems to involve a predication to the object
of what is ordinarily perspicuously understood to be a feature of the mode of
presentation. What are we doing, when
we speak of vague objects (or for
that matter of ‘precise objects’)?[13]
Note
further that if one argues that one of these possibilities is incoherent, one
should for that reason say the same
of the other. Thus ‘Anti-Realists’ should beware of suggesting that there
couldn’t be any such thing as a ‘precise object’, such that all objects ‘are’
vague. Because this will have the immediate consequence that we can make no
sense of the concept of a ‘vague object’ either. If there can’t be ‘precise
objects’, then there are simply objects
(As seems to me the case. ‘Vague object’ only makes sense if there is a
genuine contrast class.).
The
same applies the other way around, and this is very important: Some Realists
are rather inclined to hold that the very concept of a ‘vague object’ is
absurd, laughable. (They are perhaps more dismissive of their opponents, typically,
than is true contrariwise.) But if
‘vague object’ is oxymoronic, then so is ‘precise object’. Unless ‘vague
objects’ are retained in play as conceptual possibilities, then the field is
cleared of all but (plain) objects, objects as they were before metaphysicians
got their hands on them. In fact, this point creates a dangerous incentive for
each side in the Realism vs. Anti-Realism debate to avoid appearing to win the
debate too decisively. For if they reduce their opponent to absurdity, they reduce
themselves to absurdity at the same time!
Probably
to avoid this risk, participants in these debates typically try to speak as if
the debate between them is a genuine question of a matter of fact; as though
the question is not whether their opponents’ view is coherent, but about whether their opponents’ view is false (and their own, true). The
difficulty, as hinted earlier, is that it is hard to come up with arguments --
with criteria -- for the falsity or truth of such abstract claims as we are
here dealing with. Dummett and his opponents do not wish to fall victim to
properly scientific refutation or ridicule. But they want to have something to
say against each other more than just, “I don’t like your picture”. So they
tend periodically to fall into making ‘logical’ or ‘conceptual’ claims against
one another after all -- thus leaving
themselves open again to the kind of meta-criticism I have just essayed, in
the paragraph above, and in consideration of point (2), earlier. I have
already, then, shown some of these turns of the dialectic in operation in
Dummett’s paper, and the confusions associated with them. (More will
follow.) It becomes increasingly hard to
see where Dummett can go so as to have anything to say which does not fall into
one or other of these traps.
But
before going on, I want to remark that I find it interesting that Dummett
should allow (p.505-6) that his own view might well be called a form of Realism. For, as set out above, though
Dummett does not accept unalloyed ‘fuzzy realism’, he does accept a modified
version of it (p.508f.), which he then calls ‘constructivism’ (in this case,
constructivism about time). This suggests to me something I shall increasingly
argue for in what follows: That ‘Anti-Realism’ is invariably a form of Realism, just an odd, subtly
inconsistent form. Anti-Realism keeps the fundamental metaphysical picture of
Realism intact; it does not radically alter but only slightly broadens the
structure of options, of categories, that are open to one. I suspect that deep down,
rather than merely thinking of itself as the most coherent and helpful
available way of talking metaphysically, Anti-Realism still thinks that there
is a Reality...settling whether Realism or Anti-Realism is correct! We might
say that ‘Anti-Realism’ is never anti-Realist enough, or not consistently
anti-Realist. It inevitably tends, as a matter of rhetoric, toward regarding
its dispute with Realism as one about a
matter of fact. Among other things, this enables it to be philosophically
‘respectable’; it does not seriously challenge well-established philosophical
‘games’, it does not raise questions about philosophy itself, or even about
philosophical method. It appears to be in the game of stating ‘how things are’,
when it falls back from its incoherent criticisms of Realism as nonsensical,
incoherent, into a criticism of Realism as ‘false’.
If
I am right, Anti-Realism is essentially conservative. Thus it is perhaps no
surprise that Dummett tries to win respectability and deflect Realist
opprobrium by half-calling his own view a kind of Realism. For Realists should acknowledge Dummett as, on the
points that really count, one of their own. The disagreement between classical
Realism and Dummettian Realism (it perhaps matters less now whether we include
the prefix ‘Anti-’ or not) is like the disagreement between the Conservatives
and New Labour; most of the non-rhetorical differences between the two sides
are within their accountants’ margins of error.
But,
as yet, some of the above may appear to remain mere assertion. I need to do a
little more philosophical work, concerning the work that ‘the philosophy of
time’ (allegedly) does, concerning its ‘cash value’, in order to convince
anyone sceptical of my claims, and so as to lead up to my conclusion -- which
concerns the degree to which the activity that Dummett is engaged in is
anything different from traditional (more or less pre-Kantian, certainly
pre-Wittgensteinian) metaphysics.
Perhaps
Dummett and a Realist opponent of his would jointly
object to my arguments, at a high level of generality, roughly as follows: “You
are trying to evacuate the philosophy of time of content and significance. But
the questions we are trying to answer are important. You have still offered no
good reason for us to think that
there is not an issue between us, between Dummett and his target and critic.”
After
all this discussion, it is possible that I am not alone in wondering, rather by
contrast: ‘What is the point of all
this Realist and Anti-Realist contestation about time? What could really turn on the answer to the questions that
Dummett is considering?’ If these
questions are in the reader’s mind at all, then I am evidently very
sympathetic. For what is the ‘cash
value’ of disputes between ‘Realist’ and ‘Anti-Realist’ hereabouts? Does
physics need these pictures, these metaphors? Possibly they might help, they
might provide ways in which physicists might want to think about time; but it
is hardly as if physicists are going to let themselves be instructed by
philosophers as to how they must think about time.[14] If the point is to offer potentially helpful
images of time to physicists, then at the very least the tone of the debate
between Dummett and his opponent should change rather. In fact, it would become
rather unclear whether there was really a disagreement
between the two, at all. If I paint one picture or compose one piece of
music, and you paint or compose a discordantly different one, are we disagreeing?
Is
it perhaps rather psychology, or sociology -- human science as opposed to
natural science -- which needs help from the philosopher in understanding time?
Is it time as lived / as experienced which is actually at issue between Dummett
and his opponents? This seems even less likely -- for, unlike many in the
‘Continental’ tradition (e.g. Bergson, Heidegger, Schutz), Anglo-American
philosophers seem extremely uninterested in the ‘secondary’ question of how
time is lived. Even most ‘Anti-Realists’, who might have been expected to have
been gripped by the phenomenon of time-for-humans, actually show little
ostensible interest in it. (Though many human scientists, practitioners of
anthropology, sociology, etc., who work on ‘time’ can I think be reasonably
described as ‘Anti-Realistic’, as implicitly more or less ‘Dummettian’.[15] )
Are
there questions lying ‘behind’ questions like “Is time a continuum of
instants?”, questions which do have a
more genuine or weighty interest, or use? For example, is one perhaps really
trying to understand how change is
possible, when one asks questions like Dummett’s? Well, if one is, one is
unfortunately pursuing an entirely unproductive route of approach to that
question (a metaphysical question, a question whose level of generality is such
that it is admittedly unlikely to be a productive question to ask in the first
place). For the point is that Dummett’s ‘theory of time’ does not actually help
us understand how change is possible in the slightest, being itself entirely parasitic upon the
phenomenon/phenomena of change. The ‘grammar’ of change -- in fact, the
‘grammar’ of temporality in general -- is already presupposed by Dummett’s
apparatus (in the ‘modified fuzzy realist model’ (p.509), which is essentially
his own preferred model, the ‘constructivist’ model): the apparatus of
constitutive intervals (of time) of varying lengths, etc. . These units, of
which time is ‘composed’, already presuppose the passage of time. Someone might want to regard this as an
improvement over the ‘classical’ model of time, wherein it seems impossible to
constitute time at all, given that all we have in that model are durationless
units.[16] But the improvement is pretty fishily bought --
rather than have no understanding of time result from one’s model because one
has quite deprived oneself of time (of duration, of continuousness), one has an
understanding of time ... because one has presupposed time, has presupposed
what time is!
Dummett’s
own ‘model’ appears to me, then, not actually to offer any assistance at all to
anyone, be they scientist, layperson, or even philosopher, in understanding
what time ‘really’ is, or in understanding apparently related matters, like
‘how change is possible’. Compare the following remark, from p.509 of Dummett’s
text: “Time is the measure of change: its existence simply consists of there
being functions giving the magnitudes of other quantities at different times. So time is given as the totality
of possible arguments of such functions: instants on the classical model,
constitutive intervals on the fuzzy
realist one. The arguments of such functions are the basic temporal units: it
is of them that time is composed.” (Emphases mine) I fail to see how this helps anyone at all,
unless perhaps it be as an attempted ‘reminder’. At best, it re-states (pretty
unperspicuously) what we all already knew. Dummett still shares the fatal myth
of the classical Realist: to think that it is helpful or True to state that
time is composed of anything at all.[17]
Except
perhaps: a pure metaphysician might be ‘helped’ by Dummett. Someone who thinks
there is simply an autonomous subject: ‘The theory/metaphysics of time’,
orthogonal to physics, or to psychology, or to (post-Wittgensteinian)
philosophy.
In
the end, it appears that Dummett may in fact be happy to self-identify as such
a metaphysician. His paper ends as follows:
“A [charitable] realist will say
that [Dummett’s] is a good description of our imperfect methods of determining
instants and magnitudes, but that we must believe that the limits we cannot
attain exist in reality, though known only to God. The constructivist asks why
we should believe this: he does not think that reality contains, or that God
creates, anything of which His rational creatures cannot in principle become
aware.” (p.515)
I
don’t want to read too much into
this; perhaps it is just a cute rhetorical flourish. But the reading of it that
I am at least strongly inclined to give does fit the line of argument which I
have pursued in this paper. Dummett is, in the end, still I think playing a
quasi-medieval game: he is still trying to figure out what reality contains, or
what God creates, and so to answer the allegedly ‘straightforward’ question,
“What is time?”
The
Realist says that the World contains more than we, constrained as we are by our
alleged ‘finitude’, can understand or know. But the Realist thinks that we can
look beyond those ‘limits’, in philosophy (metaphysics), to say something about
what there is beyond what we can actually understand or know. The Anti-Realist
(e.g. the ‘constructivist’) says that the world contains nothing more than we
find, within our ‘limits’. But the Anti-Realist thinks that we can look beyond
those ‘limits’, in philosophy (metaphysics), to say something about what there isn’t beyond what we can actually
understand or know.
When
one puts it like that, isn’t it obvious how very much the two ‘combatants’
share, how barely differentiable are their positions? Anti-Realism does not
really question the big Realist picture of things at all -- it just denies its truth. Or, to put it much less
grandly, ‘Realists’ and ‘Anti-Realists’ just differ about how words like
‘world’ should be used. The difference between them seems, from the point of
view of one who is not attracted by their games, to be above all a merely semantic difference.
We
who do not see a need anymore to actually do metaphysics are not content to let
the Realist picture stand in the first place. We abandon the picture of limits,[18] the picture parasitic upon the picture of the
Realist notion of the world beyond those ‘limits’. Whereas, again,
‘Anti-Realism’ does not in the end
question those pictures.
That
is why I said, earlier, that it is reasonable to characterize ‘Anti-Realism’ as
a (deviant) form of ‘Realism’. Depending on one’s taste, one might say that it
is a poor man’s Realism; or that it is Realism groping its way towards a
tenable alternative. But, either way, anyone in search of a genuine alternative
to metaphyics, to Realism, needs to look considerably further afield.
Even
such a one, finding perhaps what they were looking for much more in
Wittgenstein (and perhaps also in Cavell, Diamond, Conant, McDowell, and recent
Putnam[19] ) than in Dummett, might still ask whether I
really mean to deny that ‘constructivism’ is any progress at all away from /
beyond Realism. Doesn’t constructivism help one to give up ‘philosophical
theism’? Isn’t it a partial cure, a way-station on the road to abandoning a God
who isn’t required as
‘super-realists’ (Dummett, p.497) and Lewis and Davidson and Chalmers and Colin
McGinn and a thousand others throughout Anglo-American philosophy still
arguably require God?[20]
Maybe so. But it seems just as likely to
me that ‘Anti-Realism’ simply drives the illness deeper underground. That it is
a neurotic condition resulting from repression of the illness’s starker
symptoms. ‘Anti-Realism’ can appear to have more philosophical acuity about it
than ‘Realism’ -- I have suggested that this is only because it rather hides
its own ‘Realism’, partly through systematically failing to choose whether its
criticism of standard ‘Realism’ is that it is false or that it is nonsensical. Where ‘Anti-Realism’ is in my opinion
potentially most acute, where it appears to have something to say beyond the
alleged ‘implausibility’ or ‘unhelpfulness’ of ‘classical’ Realism, is where it
looks to characterize ‘Realism’ as nonsensical, but this cannot be done coherently except in the genuinely
Wittgensteinian style of philosophizing that I have tried to essay in this
paper, a thoroughgoingly ‘negative’ style which Dummett, the great theoretical
Anti-Realist, is, it would seem, not prepared to embrace.
Sometimes,
then, I would rather deal with the honest and plain metaphysics -- the visible
absurdities -- of the likes of David Lewis and Timothy Williamson and Roy
Sorenson and Colin McGinn, than with the subtle latent nonsense of
‘constructivism’.
I offer no answer whatsover to ‘questions’ such as
“Is time a continuum of instants?” Rather, I ask what it could possibly mean to
say that it is (and by extension, whether it can mean anything at all to say
that it isn’t).
In
physics, ‘time’ is whatever it is, and philosophy will never second-guess
physics successfully or even, I suspect, remotely usefully.[21] In normal social life -- in the alleged ‘domain’
of the ‘human sciences’ -- people generally have no trouble being in time, and
would in most cases I think regard as utterly absurd and pointless any effort
to say whether their experience was, for example, ‘really’ continuous or not.
Until
we question the questions that
metaphysics has bequeathed us, questions that we can I think bring ourselves
and others to see as pointless and empty, questions that ‘Anti-Realism’ just as
much as ‘Realism’ purports to have clear answers to, we will never achieve
philosophical peace. And we will never achieve even the level of understanding
arguably native to one and all of us, as masters of the language and as
competent social actors: the understanding of time, as lived, as a ubiquitous
tool, a variegated organisational
phenomenon, saturating our conceptions, our experience, our interactions, our
activities. Time is in the end no more mysterious than other more mundane
organisational devices: such as maps or tape-measures or rulers. And so: Asking
‘What is time?’ is actually no more likely to result in philosophical advance
or clarity than asking (e.g.) ‘What is a metre-ruler?’, while breathlessly
expecting some theoretical or deep or revelatory answer to one’s question...[22]
[1] This
background theme of the present paper, I treat in greater detail in my “Slicing
time” (forthcoming in Orders of Ordinary Action (eds. D. Francis and
S.Hester; London: Ashgate, 2002)) and my “Neither languages nor linguistic
competences are usefully said to be ‘infinitary’” (jt. with T. DeMarco,
unpublished). A name for that theme might be: the ‘incommensurability’ of finitude and infinitude.
[2] Michael
Dummett (“Is time a continuum of instants?”, Philosophy 75 (2000), 497-515) recognises the indexicality of ‘Now’
(pp.508-9), but fails to draw the requisite consequences, consequences writ
large in Wittgenstein (and in Ethnomethodology -- see my “Slicing Time” (op.cit.)). In particular, he still,
rather bizarrely, tends to treat time as composed
of units, as we shall see in detail below.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Compare
also the passage immediately preceding this one, on pp.502-3: “Consider
intensity of illumination. // ...The
[‘classical’, Realist] model... represents...abrupt change as being one or
other of two physically distinct events: one in which the illumination vanishes
at the instant of change, the surface
having a positive illumination at every instant before the change; and the other in which the surface continues to
have a positive illumination at the instant of change, but 0 illumination for
every instant in some interval after
that instant. // Plainly,
there are no two such distinct physical possibilities: nothing could determine
whether the surface had zero or positive illumination at the precise instant of
change, and we cannot conceive of there being any genuine distinction between
the two cases. Here the classical model provides a means of differentiating
between two physically different states of affairs which cannnot possibly
correspond to any distinction in physical reality.”
The question is whether we are to take seriously,
‘literally’, the words emphasized above. If we do not, then Dummett surely begs
the question against the ‘classical-ist’. His only means of avoiding such
question-begging is his resort to stating what is ‘conceptually impossible’.
But that resort raises precisely the problems I am addressing in (2).
[5] About
‘whom’, for example, Rush Rhees has written an entire book. Imagine by contrast
trying to write a book about ‘removable discontinuities’, at least as described
by Dummett on p.504.
[6] For
discussion of the woodsellers, the would-be ‘mathematical strangers’, in
Wittgenstein’s Remarks on the Philosophy of Mathematics, discussion of
just the kind I am recommending in contrary spirit to Dummett, consult the
essays by Crary and Cerbone in Crary and Read (eds.), The New Wittgenstein
(London: Routledge, 2000). (See also J. Conant’s “The search for logically
alien thought: Descartes, Kant, Frege and the Tractatus”, in Philosophical
Topics 20 (1991), pp.115-180.)
[7] See Philosophical
Investigations, Zettel, etc. .
[8]
Compare
para. 500 of Philosophical Investigations: “When a sentence is called
senseless, it is not as it were its sense that is senseless.”
[9] This
means that we need to be very suspicious of moments in Dummett such as the
following (p.505): “How can we arrive at a more satisfactory model [than the
‘classical’ model] of time...? Such a model should render conceptually
abhorrent discontinuities impossible to describe, and eliminate any distinction
between diverse descriptions of abrupt changes.” So: the “conceptually
‘abhorrent’” (or ‘impossible’) must be rendered “impossible to describe”; yet
we have already seen Dummett laying out for us -- describing -- examples of
precisely such allegedly impossible discontinuous changes. We are told that
there must not be allowed to be any “distinctions” between “diverse
descriptions” of “abrupt [discontinuous] changes”; yet Dummett himself appears
precisely to have distinguished such descriptions, so as to have an argument to make against the classical model.
‘Anti-Realism’ , the class of
views outlined and defended by Dummett on p.510f., escapes from the absurdities
of ‘Realism’ -- the imagining of conceptual impossibilities -- only by
imagining...those very conceptual impossibilities (so as to state that they are
are impossible)! Anti-Realism is condemned by its own proceedure. It requires
us to ‘leave our skins’ so as to have an argument
for why it is ‘impossible’ for us ... to ‘leave our skins’, as ‘Realism’ impels
us to do.
[10] On these
questions, see Cora Diamond’s The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge, MA: MIT,
1991). See also Joan Weiner’s and Tom Ricketts’s work; and n.6 & n.8,
above. My suggestion, which of course I cannot substantiate here, is that the
work of these commentators/philosophers
shows that Dummett has not learnt the most important ‘metaphilosophical’
lessons -- for example, those tied to the concept of ‘elucidation’ -- of the
writings not only of (early) Wittgenstein, but even of Frege.
[11]
“According to the classical model, time is composed of durationless instants.
According to the fuzzy realist model, in its unmodified form, it is composed of
intervals all of the same length.” (p.509) Dummett himself favours a modified
version of fuzzy realism -- see below for more detail.
[12] Here is
Dummett making exactly this move, this mistake, on p.505: “[A good model of
time and of other physical quantities] will represent each physical quantity as
fully describable by specifying an interval within which its magnitude lies.
The interval will not merely represent the best approximation that we can
achieve by measuring it: it will constitute the magnitude of the quantity as it is in reality.” To ask what time
is composed of as Dummett continues to do is like asking what a ruler is
composed of. (Cf. Wittgenstein on the standard metre (Philosophical
Investigations para.50), and on vagueness (para.s 68-88). For strong
criticism (amenable to my own views) of Dummett (and Fine) on vagueness as an
issue in the philosophy of language, see David Houghton’s “Vagueness, stipulation
and context” (UEA Papers in Philosophy New
Series 11 (2000), 1-24, especially pp.12-13).)
[13]
Here
is something we could be doing: we could be contrasting (say) objects like
clouds with objects like rocks or aeroplanes. I think it will be evident to the
reader that, while there is a genuine contrast involved here, it is not that involved in the philosophical
debate at issue (e.g. in Dummett).
[14] Arguably,
after Einstein, physicists tend rather better than others (psychologists, for
example) to appreciate that a certain kind of pursuit of the essence of time is
without point. It would take me too far afield in the present context, to
justify or elaborate on this claim; but see n.20 (below), and my “Slicing Time” (op.cit.).
[15] I cannot
justify this claim here, but the interested reader might care to look, with a
critical eye, at the work on time of major contemporary sociologists such as
Eviatar Zerubavel or Anthony Giddens.
[16]
Especially, one might find an improvement over the ‘classical’ model, in this
remark of Dummett’s: “It must be the sequence of events that gives substance to
the instantaneous states, not the instantaneous states that together give
substance to the sequence.” (p.501) My
difficulty with this is only: it makes it sound too much as if there remains a
foundation or ‘reduction basis’ for time, only not the one that we expected.
The ‘reduction basis’ turns out to be not instants, but sequences of events (or
temporal intervals). I have already intimated that this is at best charitably construed as a presentation of time as we always
already grasp it in our practices and experiences; not as a theorisation, not as an account of what time ‘really’ is.
[17] Cf. also
here Dummett’s most succinct statement of the ‘fuzzy realist’ model with which
he has a degree of sympathy: “Time, on this model, is not composed of
durationless instants, densely ordered, but of overlapping intervals having
some temporal extension.” (p.506)
Plainly, Dummett is here interested in answering just the same question
as the classical ‘Realist’; but he has not showed that that question makes
sense; nor has he showed that his preferred class of plausible answers to it do
not presuppose ‘the grammar of time’ through and through.
[18] Or at
least we radically reinterpret it, as Wittgenstein did throughout his work.
I.e. Virtually whenever Wittgenstein
uses words such as ‘limits’, the word needs to be understood in a
‘transitional’, and in fact almost Pickwickian sense -- one is not limited from anything (One needs not to think about language, and
not to ‘intuit’, but to look, with
care, to see that Wittgenstein is using the word in this way, whether in the Tractatus
or the Philosophical Investigations.). Thus also, Wittgenstein’s
‘quietism’; one is not quiet about anything.
There is nothing -- nothing that amounts to anything -- that is passed over. (For argument in support of
these several claims, see the papers by Diamond, Cerbone, and myself in Crary
and Read (op.cit.), and also my
“Meaningful Consequences” (jt. with J. Guetti, Phil. Forum 30:4 (1999), 289-315).
[19] And with
these figures on board, it is perhaps worth making a claim about how the
Wittgensteinian approach which I am commending wishes, in the end, critically
to characterize Realism and Anti-Realism: neither is realistic enough (using this word now in Diamond’s sense, after
Wittgenstein, in her The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1991)).
Neither is prepared to allow the (reality of) time, or number, etc., to simply be: both think that Philosophy has to
pronounce on what they ‘Really’ are (e.g. Platonic forms, or subtle objects, or
aspects of our minds, etc.), if they are to be at all.
[20] I am
thinking in part here of Nietzsche’s conception of what it would really be to
be beyond requiring God (see e.g. essay 3 of On the Genealogy of Morality
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998 [1887]). I believe that Nietzsche has a lot to say
about for example the too-heavy spirit
in which most philosophisizing is still done.
In this connection, it is worth
mentioning that it is occasionally hard to know whether Dummett actually does
want his proposals about time to be taken seriously at all -- in which case (if
he does not necessarily want such seriousness) perhaps I would be outright more sympathetic with him than with his
opponents! I am referring especially to the moment on p.509 when, much
differently to his usual rhetoric, he speaks of “the units of which time is
composed” as a “metaphor”. So, are
all possible answers to the question, “What is time?” or “Of what is time
composed?” equally metaphorical? Is the issue between Realist and Fuzzy Realist
and Constructivist an issue only of which metaphors we find the most appealing?
Or of which are most conducive to scientific progress?
Is there perhaps after all in Dummett
some genuine spirit of wanting ‘Anti-Realism’ to be a path beyond the sterile
quasi-theistic metaphysics of Realisms?
[21] This
however is not to suggest that there
are no ways in which philosophical reflection can help in (relation to) science
-- only to imply that those ways are quite orthogonal to those of Dummett and
his mainstream critics. Philosophising can clarify the ‘logical grammar’ of
scientific and non-scientific ‘language-games’ involving the word ‘time’ and
related words. In particular, by either showing a certain dispensability of
time (as to some extent Einstein does) or by showing the indispensability in
general of time (as to some extent Wittgenstein and I think some Recent
Continental thinkers do), or both (in different respects and contexts).
Roughly thus is how I think we shoud understand the justly-famous
quotation from the great philosopher-scientist, Heinrich Hertz that I give
below. Hertz in the original text is discussing chiefly difficulties around the
concept of ‘force’; I have taken the liberty of substituting the word ‘time’,
to which I think highly parallel considerations apply: “[W]e have accumulated
around [the term “time”] more relations than can be completely reconciled
amongst themselves. We have an obscure feeling of this and want to have things cleared
up. Our confused wish finds expression in the question as to the nature of
[time]. But the answer which we want is not really an answer to this question.
It is not by finding out more and fresh
relations and connections that it can be answered; but by removing the
contradictions existing between those already known, and thus perhaps by
reducing their number. When these painful contradictions are removed, the
question as to the nature of [time] will not have been answered; but our minds,
no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions.” (Principles of
Mechanics (Toronto: General Publishing, 1956 (1900)), pp.7-8.) I hope in this essay to have made a small
contribution to something like Hertz’s task, by showing some respects in which
“What is time?” and related questions are ‘illegitimate’, and do not address the vexations whose dissolving is our real need.