How to Know That Time Travel Is Unlikely Without Knowing Why

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (1):90-113 (2018)
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Abstract

What's the point of time travel? Not to change the past; no matter how carefully a time traveler plans, all of her attempts to change the past end in failure. Paul Horwich has argued that the implausibility of such failures gives us reason to doubt that there will be frequent time travel to the local past. I defend a modified version of Horwich's argument and show how we might gain evidence about the chance of there being frequent time travel in the future without having any information that explains why that chance value obtains.

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Author's Profile

Katrina Elliott
University of California, Los Angeles

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References found in this work

The Paradoxes of Time Travel.David K. Lewis - 1976 - American Philosophical Quarterly 13 (2):145-152.
Asymmetries in Time.Paul Horwich - 1990 - Noûs 24 (5):804-806.

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