In the early twentieth century, many philosophers in America thought that time should be taken seriously in one way or another. George P. Adams (1882-1961) argued that the past, present and future are all real but only the present is actual. I call this theory ‘actualist eternalism’. In this paper, I articulate his novel brand of eternalism as one piece of his metaphysical system and I explain how he argued for the view in light of the best explanations of (...) class='Hi'>temporal experience and the present. I argue that his exploitation of analogies between time and modality offer some lessons for current debates about time such as the importance of providing a temporal epistemology. I also extract what I call the temporal boundary problem and argue that it gives rise to an unaddressed challenge for presentists and growing block theorists. (shrink)

Abstract Temporal Externalism is the view that future events can contribute to determining the present content of our thoughts and utterances. Two objections to Temporal Externalism are discussed and rejected. The first is that Temporal Externalism has implausible consequences for the epistemology of biology and other taxonomic sciences (Brown, 2000). The second is that it is committed to implausible claims about dispositions.

In addressing the Lucretian symmetry problem, the temporal bias approach claims that death is bad because it deprives us of something about which it is rational to care (e.g., future pleasures), whereas prenatal nonexistence is not bad because it only deprives us of something about which it is rational to remain indifferent (e.g., past pleasures). In a recent contribution to the debate on this approach, Miguel and Santos argue that a late beginning can deprive us of a future pleasure. (...) Their argument is based on the claim that for birth or death to deprive a person of any value in life, the historically closest counterfactual situation that contains the value is such that the person begins to exist earlier or dies later. This is what they call the Historical Condition. However, the Historical Condition is untenable for several reasons. First, this condition substantially weakens the explanatory capacity of the deprivation account because it implies that most ordinary sorts of pleasures are not deprived by death. In addition, the Historical Condition is vulnerable to counterexamples. In particular, what they offer as a standard case of the deprivation of future pleasure due to a late beginning (what they call Seeing The Beatles), or some of its variants, can be used to falsify this condition. Finally, the Historical Condition is theoretically indefensible because it is based on a faulty analysis of deprivation. (shrink)

Temporal ontology is concerned with the ontological status of the past, the present and the future, with presentism and eternalism as main contenders since the second half of the last century. In recent years several philosophers have argued that the presentism/eternalism dispute is not substantial. They have embraced, one may say, deflationism. Denying or downplaying the meaningfulness of tenseless language and wielding the so-called triviality objection have been their main argumentative tools. Other philosophers have opposed this trend, thereby holding (...) fast to what could be named substantialism. Their leading defensive strategy has consisted in bringing to the fore tenselessness or unrestricted quantification in an attempt to resist the triviality objection. Despite this reaction, the past few years have hosted a new wave of deflationism, wherein the triviality objection and qualms about the legitimacy of tenselessness and unrestricted quantification still loom large. This paper counters this trend, by providing a new clarification of tenseless predication, unrestricted quantifiers and their role in rescuing substantialism from the triviality objection. A crucial ingredient is this: the appeal to unrestricted quantifiers and to tenseless predication are not alternative strategies, but rather two sides of the same coin, since substantialism requires quantifiers that are both tenseless and unrestricted. (shrink)

Temporal binding is the phenomenon in which events related as cause and effect are perceived by humans to be closer in time than they actually are). Despite the fact that temporal binding experiments with humans have relied on verbal instructions, we argue that they are adaptable to nonhuman animals, and that a finding of temporal binding from such experiments would provide evidence of causal reasoning that cannot be reduced to associative learning. Our argument depends on describing and (...) theoretically motivating an intermediate level of representations between the lower levels of associations of sensory features and higher symbolic representations. This intermediate level of representations makes it possible to challenge arguments given by some comparative psychologists that animals lack higher-level abstract and explicit forms of causal reasoning because their cognitive capacities are limited to learning and reasoning at the basic level of perceptual associations. Our multi-level account connects time perception with causal reasoning and provides a philosophically defensible framework for experimental investigations that have not yet been pursued. We describe the structure of some possible experiments and consider the implications that would follow from a positive finding of temporal binding in nonhuman animals. Such a finding would provide evidence of explicit awareness of causal relationships and would warrant attribution of intermediate representations that are more abstract and sophisticated than the associations allowed by the lower level of the two-level account. (shrink)

The heart of my dissertation project is the proposal of a new updating rule for responding to learning experiences consisting of continuous streams of evidence. I suggest characterizing this kind of learning experience as a continuous stream of stipulated credal derivatives, and show that Continuous Probability Kinematics is the uniquely coherent response to such a stream which satisfies a continuous analogue of Rigidity – the core property of both Bayesian and Jeffrey conditionalization. In the first chapter, I define neighborhood norms (...) of rationality with reference to Kenny Easwaran’s definition of neighborhood properties. I summarize and comment on some of the key arguments in the dispute between time-slice epistemologists, who argue that there are no fundamentally diachronic norms of rationality, and the proponents of diachronic norms. I am sympathetic to two of the key motivations often given in support of the synchronist position: mentalist internalism and the idea that metaphysical disputes about the identity of persons in bizarre puzzle cases should not play a central role in epistemologists’ assessments of the rationality of agents. However, I argue that time-slice epistemology cannot adequately address the rationality of temporally-extended processes like reasoning and learning. Neighborhood norms present a viable third way between these two positions, capturing much of the spirit of the previously-discussed synchronist motivations while still providing just enough temporal structure to meaningfully guide and evaluate temporally-extended rational processes. Continuous Probability Kinematics is an example of one such neighborhood norm. In the second chapter, I develop my updating rule CPK and establish many of its core properties. Of special note here are the deep connections to Jeffrey’s Probability Kinematics, as well as some key differences. The net result of any CPK updating process will always be representable as a Jeffrey shift on the refined partition generated by the propositions that the agent is receiving direct evidence concerning. However, one crucial difference is that CPK provides an intuitive account of how to combine the effects of learning experiences that are each about fundamentally different underlying partitions. In CPK’s formalism, an agent can receive simultaneous evidence streams about an arbitrary (finite) number of propositions, which can themselves be evidentially related in any way. At any given instant, the result of the combination is a simple sum of the effects that learning about the individual propositions would have separately. CPK is concerned with a novel kind of learning experience and involves a novel characterization of evidence. The third and final chapter of this dissertation is concerned with explaining what this characterization of evidence means and with arguing that it can be the basis for genuine learning. I begin by characterizing learning experiences in terms of the Value of Information, and prove a Value of Information theorem for CPK learning experiences under the assumption of a Martingale constraint on the agent’s prior distribution over the signals that they might receive. I examine Timothy Williamson’s arguments that evidence must be propositional and express my skepticism. I then explore two different routes to model agents who update by CPK as if they are learning some propositional content and updating the rest of their credences by Bayesian conditionalization on this content. The second of these two routes provides a very interesting lens to reexamine the evidential commitments that underwrite updating by CPK, which I analyze. (shrink)

Temporal externalism (TE) is the thesis (defended by Jackman (1999)) that the contents of some of an individual’s thoughts and utterances at time t may be determined by linguistic developments subsequent to t. TE has received little discussion so far, Brown 2000 and Stoneham 2002 being exceptions. I defend TE by arguing that it solves several related problems concerning the extension of natural kind terms in scientifically ignorant communities. Gary Ebbs (2000) argues that no theory can reconcile our ordinary, (...) practical judgments of sameness of extension over time with the claim that linguistic usage determines word extensions. I argue that Ebbs shows at most that no theory other than TE can effect this reconciliation. Furthermore, while Ebbs’ argument undermines Jessica Brown’s solutions to two closely related problems about natural kind term extensions (Brown 1998), TE can solve both problems without difficulty. Some criticisms of TE are briefly addressed as well. (shrink)

According to Sosa’s virtue epistemological account, an instance of (animal) knowledge is a belief that instantiates the property of being apt. The purpose of this contribution is, first, to show why this claim is, without further clarification, problematic. Briefly, an instance of knowledge cannot be identified to an apt belief because beliefs are states and aptness is a property that only actions —and no states— can exemplify. Second, I present the metaphysical amendment that the tenants of virtue epistemology can (...) adopt in order to avoid this objection. This conducts me to suggest a new, metaphysically sounder version of the virtue epistemological account of knowledge in which knowledge is extrinsically apt belief. (shrink)

Despite an attempt to break with the hierarchical picture in traditional emergentist thought, non-standard accounts of emergence are often still committed to a premise that ontology is prior to epistemology. This paper aims to topple this last remnant of the traditional hierarchy by explicating a pragmatic view of emergence based on John Dewey’s work. Dewey argued that the traditional notion of ontology is premised on a view of existence as complete. Through a discussion of Dewey’s work it is argued (...) that this premise results in a process of reification that unduly excludes from ontology many precarious and indeterminate aspects involved both in everyday life and in philosophic and scientific inquiry. Building on a recent explication of transformational emergence the paper proposes a diachronic and non-hierarchical account of emergence, called pragmatic emergence. According to that account the relation between ontology and epistemology is a temporally reciprocal one. This means that ontological and epistemological features co-determine each other over time. Determinacy and continuity become historical features of a multitude of unfinished processes that we view from within. (shrink)

There is a profound paradox in modern medical knowledge production: The more we know, the more we know that we (still) do not know. Nowhere is this more visible than in diagnostics and early detection of disease. As we identify ever more markers, predictors, precursors, and risk factors of disease ever earlier, we realize that we need knowledge about whether they develop into something experienced by the person and threatening to the person’s health. This study investigates how advancements in science (...) and technology alter one type of uncertainty, i.e., temporal uncertainty of disease diagnosis. As diagnosis is related to anamnesis and prognosis it identifies how uncertainties in all these fields are interconnected. In particular, the study finds that uncertainty in disease diagnosis has become more subject to prognostic uncertainty because diagnosis is more connected to technologically detected indicators and less closely connected to manifest and experienced disease. These temporal uncertainties pose basic epistemological and ethical challenges as they can result in overdiagnosis, overtreatment, unnecessary anxiety and fear, useless and even harmful diagnostic odysseys, as well as vast opportunity costs. The point is not to stop our quest for knowledge about disease but to encourage real diagnostic improvements that help more people in ever better manner as early as possible. To do so, we need to pay careful attention to specific types of temporal uncertainty in modern diagnostics. (shrink)

A lot of people believe that distinct objects can occupy precisely the same place for the entire time during which they exist. Such people have to provide an answer to the 'grounding problem' – they have to explain how such things, alike in so many ways, nonetheless manage to fall under different sortals, or have different modal properties. I argue in detail that they cannot say that there is anything in virtue of which spatio-temporally coincident things have those properties. However, (...) I also argue that this may not be as bad as it looks, and that there is a way to make sense of the claim that such properties are primitive. (shrink)

This volume explores Husserl's theory of sensibility and his conceptualization of spatial and temporal constitution. The author maps the linkages between Husserl's 'transcendental aesthetic', the theory of pure experience in empirio-criticism, as well as Immanuel Kant's transcendental philosophy. The core argument in this analysis centers on the relationship between spatiality and temporality in Husserl's philosophy. The study interrogates Husserl's understanding of the relationship between spatiality and temporality in terms of stratifications, analogies and parallelisms. It incorporates a discussion of the (...) potentialities and limitations of such an understanding. It concludes that such limits can be overcome by adopting an understanding of spatiality and temporality as interwoven moments of sensible experience-a 'spatio-temporal intertwining'. This 'intertwining' is made explicit in a thorough inquiry into three central topics in the phenomenological analysis of sensible experience: spatio-temporal individuation, perspectival givenness and bodily experience. The book shows how such an inquiry can form the bedrock of a dynamic and relational understanding of experience as a whole. (shrink)

B. A. Farrell; XIII*—Temporal Precedence, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 73, Issue 1, 1 June 1973, Pages 193–216, https://doi.org/10.1093/arist.

In this paper, I try to make a bundle theory of objects consistentwith a temporal parts theory of object persistence. To that end,I propose that such bundles are made up of tropes includingthe co-instantiation relation.

The main question of metasemantics, or foundational semantics, is why an expression token has the meaning (semantic value) that it in fact has. In his reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work, Saul Kripke presented a skeptical challenge that threatened to make the foundational question unanswerable. My first contention in this paper is that the skeptical challenge indeed poses an insoluble paradox, but only for a certain kind of metasemantic theory, against which the challenge effectively works as a reductio ad absurdum (...) argument. My second contention is that as a result of rejecting the theory which entails a paradoxical outcome, we will see that the foundational question essentially involves a temporal dimension. After arguing that the skeptical challenge gives us a strong reason to adopt a historical view of meaning, I shall further argue against certain authors who claim that meanings not only have histories but futures as well, or that the meaning of a word may change retroactively in time as a consequence of counterfactual change in its future use. The major aim of the paper is thus to bring together the arguably interrelated debates about the skeptical challenge and temporal externalism in philosophy of language. (shrink)

We argue that sensitivity to the distinction between the tensed notion of being something and the tensed notion of being located at the present time serves as a good antidote to confusions in debates about time and existence, in particular in the debate about how to characterise presentism, and saves us the trouble of going through unnecessary epicycles. Both notions are frequently expressed using the tensed verb ‘to exist’, making it systematically ambiguous. It is a commendable strategy to avoid using (...) that verb altogether in these contexts and to use quantification and a location predicate instead. (shrink)

Three major ways in which temporal asymmetries enter into scientific induction are discussed as follows: 1. An account is given of the physical basis for the temporal asymmetry of recordability, which obtains in the following sense: except for humanly recorded predictions and one other class of advance indicators to be discussed, interacting systems can contain reliable indicators of only their past and not of their future interactions. To deal with the exceptional cases of non-spontaneous "pre-records," a clarification is (...) offered of the essential differences in the conditions requisite to the production of an indicator having retrodictive significance ("post-record"), on the one hand, and of one having predictive significance ("prerecord" or recorded prediction), on the other. Purported counter-examples to the asymmetry of spontaneous recordability are refuted. 2. It is shown how in cases of asymmetric recordability, the associated retrodiction-prediction asymmetry makes for an asymmetry of assertibility as between an explanandum (or an explanans) referring to a future event and one referring to a past one. But it is argued that this epistemological asymmetry in the assertibility per se must be clearly distinguished from a logical asymmetry between the past and the future in regard to the inferability (deductive or inductive) of the explanandum from the explanans. And it is then contended that the failure to distinguish between an epistemological and a logical asymmetry vitiates the critiques that recent writers have offered of the Popper-Hempel thesis, which affirms symmetry of inferability as between predictive and post-explanatory arguments. In reply to Scriven, it is maintained that predictions based on mere indicators (rather than causes) do not establish an asymmetry in scientific understanding as between predictive arguments and post-explanatory ones. 3. As a further philosophical ramification of the retrodiction-prediction asymmetry, a set of sufficient conditions are stated for the correctness of philosophical mechanism as opposed to teleology. (shrink)

John Perry has argued that language, thought and experience often contain unarticulated constituents. I argue that this idea holds the key to explaining away the intuitive appeal of the A-theory of time and the endurance theory of persistence. The A-theory has seemed intuitively appealing because the nature of temporal experience makes it natural for us to use one-place predicates like past to deal with what are really two-place relations, one of whose constituents is unarticulated. The endurance view can be (...) treated in a similar way; the temporal boundaries of temporal parts of objects are unarticulated in experience and this makes it seem that the very same entity exists at different times. (shrink)

This paper argues that, in light of certain scenarios involving time travel, Sider’s definition of ‘instantaneous temporal part’ cannot be accepted in conjunction with a semantic thesis that perdurantists often assume. I examine a rejoinder from Sider, as well as Thomson’s alternative definition of ‘instantaneous temporal part’, and show how neither helps. Given this, we should give up on the perdurantist semantic thesis. I end by recommending that, once we no longer accept such semantics, we should accept a (...) new set of definitions, which are superior in certain respects to Sider’s original set. (shrink)

In first personal accounts of the experience of grief, it is often described as disrupting the experience of time. This aspect of the experience has gained more attention in recent discussions, but it may nonetheless strike some as puzzling. Grieving subjects do, after all, still perceptually experience motion, change, and succession, and they are typically capable of orienting themselves in time and accurately estimating durations. As such, it is not immediately obvious how we ought understand the claim that grief disrupts (...) the experience of time. In the present discussion I suggest that we can shed light on this aspect of the experience of grief by distinguishing between three temporal perspectives that experiencing (human) subjects typically occupy: the perceptual, the agential, and the narrative. Appeal to these three temporal perspectives helps to clarify the phenomenology of grief; it reveals a way in which grief can disrupt the experience of time; and it can also help us to analyse pre-existing issues in the literature on grief. (shrink)

This book clarifies Husserl's notion of perceptual experience as "immediate" or "direct" with respect to its purported object, and outlines his theory of evidence. In particular, it focuses on Husserl's account of our perceptual experience of time, an aspect of perception rarely noted in', recent philosophical literature, yet which must be taken into consideration if an adequate account of perception is to be provided. Perhaps equally important, there is a new wave of work in phenomenology (and intentionality), reflecting a synthesis (...) of phenomenological and analytic philosophy, Miller's book is an important contribution to that "new wave," and has a significant bearing on contemporary issues in cognitive science. (shrink)

According to the deductivist view of mathematics which became the rule during the nineteenth century, formal proofs working with symbolic formulas replaced the intuitive knowledge that used to be gained by the step-by-step construction of geometric fgures and diagrams. Twentieth century epistemological refection on symbolic formulas and formal proofs, however, took them to be diagrams respectively exhibiting formal relations and transformations. The claim was also made that, for such diagrams to be proofs, temporal displays of transformations—and of other speech (...) acts—were required. By returning to the signifcant elements of contemporary theories of mathematical proofs, we will here show how these proofs came to be a matter for semiotics and pragmatics as much as for formal logic. Once this is done, we will provide a few arguments against the standard objections to the ability of diagrams to present temporal order or perform speech acts. (shrink)

The connections between the fields of queer theory and continental philosophy are strange and strained: simultaneously difficult and all too easy to ferret out, there is no easy narrative for how the two fields interconnect. Both sides of the relation seem either to disavow or simply repress any relation to the other. For example, despite the impact of Foucault's History of Sexuality, Volume One on early queer theory, current work in queer of color critique challenges the politics and epistemology (...) of placing this text in such a canonical position, particularly for the adamantly anti-foundational field of queer theory. 1 On the other hand, continental philosophy, perhaps in its ongoing beleaguered attempt to form an identity within the analytically dominated discipline of philosophy in the United States, 2 seems largely to ignore the growth of queer theory, despite the provocative and invigorating work on some of continental philosophy's most beloved topics, such as temporality, embodiment, desire, the negative, and radically anti-foundational subjectivity, epistemology, and politics. Setting aside the thorny project of their genealogical connections and disconnections, this essay turns to current trajectories in the field of queer theory, particularly the heated debates about temporality and the future, to indicate how this contemporary scholarship both draws on and exceeds a grounding in continental philosophy. (shrink)

This dissertation explores the influence of time constraints on different research practices. The first two parts present case studies, which serve as a basis for discussing the epistemological and ethical implications of temporal limitations in scientific research. Part I is a case study on gravitational wave research, conducted by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. This exemplifies fundamental research – without immediate societal applications, open-ended in terms of timeline and in terms of research goals. It is based, in part, on qualitative (...) interviews conducted with gravitational wave physicists. I show that considerations about time and speed play a role in every stage of research: goal setting, method design, and the evaluation and communication of results. Part II provides a case study on translational medicine, an approach explicitly dedicated to accelerating research in order to develop and implement new therapies. This epitomizes applied research with high social stakes, motivated by non-epistemic goals. Here, epistemic trade-offs between speed and reliability intersect with ethical trade-offs between different types of harms. In Part III, the insights from both of these case studies are used as the basis for a more general discussion concerning the pragmatic aspects of epistemic practices, especially in relation to current debates centered on the role of values in science. A particular focus is on the value of speed and the ability to generate reliable results, either via choice of methods, or via decisions about which goals to set, as well as decisions about when to stop further testing. The primary thesis of the dissertation is that pragmatic considerations stemming from limitations of resources are a necessary feature of the pursuit of epistemic aims, and that the epistemic is thus inherently pragmatic. (shrink)

This paper contributes to an increasing literature strengthening the connection between epistemic logic and epistemology (Van Benthem, Hendricks). I give a survey of the most important applications of epistemic logic in epistemology. I show how it is used in the history of philosophy (Steiner's reconstruction of Descartes' sceptical argument), in solutions to Moore's paradox (Hintikka), in discussions about the relation between knowledge and belief (Lenzen) and in an alleged refutation of verificationism (Fitch) and I examine an early argument (...) about the (im)possibility of epistemic logic (Hocutt). Subsequently, I deal with interpretive questions about epistemic logic that, although implicitly, already appeared in the first section. I contend that a conception of epistemic logic as a theory of knowledge assertions is incoherent, and I argue that it does not make sense to adopt a normative interpretation of epistemic logic. Finally, I show ways to extend epistemic logic with other branches of philosophical logic so as to make it useful for some epistemological questions. Conditional logics and logics of public announcement are used to understand causal theories of knowledge and versions of reliabilism. Temporal logic helps understand some dynamic aspects of knowledge as well as the verificationist thesis. (shrink)

Epistemology is about how we can know the various things we claim to know. Epistemology is driven by attempts to answer the question, “How do you know?” This gives rise to investigations on several different levels. At the lowest level, philosophers investigate particular kinds of knowledge claims. Thus we find theories of perceptual knowledge (“How do you know the things you claim to know directly on the basis of perception?”), theories of induction and abduction (“How do you know (...) the general truths you infer from observation of particular cases?”), theories of our knowledge of other minds, theories of mathematical knowledge, and so forth. At an intermediate level, topics are investigated that pertain to all or most of the specific kinds of knowledge discussed at the lowest level. Theories of reasoning, both deductive and defeasible, occur at this level. At the highest level we find general epistemological theories that attempt to explain how knowledge in general is possible. At this level we encounter versions of foundationalism, coherentism, probabilism, reliabilism, and direct realism. One can be doing epistemology by working at any of these levels. The levels cannot be isolated from each other, however. Work at any level tends to presuppose something about the other levels. For example, work on inductive reasoning at least presupposes that reasoning plays a role in the acquisition or justification of beliefs and normally presupposes something about the structure of defeasible reasoning. (shrink)

This article addresses the notions of gender performativity and temporality in Butler’s early work on gender. The paper is articulated in four steps. First it gives an account of the role and nature of temporality in Butler’s theory of gender performativity. Second, it shows some similarities and connections between the role played by temporality in Butler’s theory of gender performativity and its role in Marx’s analysis of capital. Third, it raises some criticisms of Butler’s understanding of temporality and historicity, focusing (...) in particular on the lack of historicisation of her own categories in bothGender TroubleandBodies that Matter. This deficit is a consequence of the epistemological framework within which she is operating, in particular of her understanding of social practices and relations through the lens of linguistic concepts extrapolated from their theoretical context. The article concludes by referring to Floyd’s and Hennessy’s analyses of the formation of sexual identities as examples of the fruitful historicisation of gender performativity, which also sheds some light on the ‘the abstract character’ of the temporality of gender performativity. (shrink)

Temporal consciousness is philosophically problematic because it appears to have features that cannot be analyzed in a way compatible with the fundamental view of time as a one-dimensional order of events. For example, it seems to be a manifest fact of experience that within a strictly present state of consciousness one can be immediately aware of a succession of events, yet the standard view of time denies that successive events can co-exist, so how can they be given together in (...) a present perceptual state? Such puzzles have occasionally led philosophers to reject scientific or mathematical theories of time. Some time ago C. D. Broad developed a largely unappreciated theory of temporal cognition to cope with these puzzles. In this paper the evolution of Broad’s theory is traced, and it is defended from the misinterpretations of later critics. Finally, it is suggested that a modification of Broad’s theory, which frees it from the trappings of sense-data epistemology, shows it to be compatible with sane current naturalistic approaches to experience that also would need to account for temporal experience within the framework of scientific time. (shrink)

Hoerl claims that episodic memory is necessary for a concept of the past, and that we should consider some severely amnesic patients as lacking such a concept. I question whether this description of such patients is plausible, and whether it helps us understand lack of insight in amnesia. I finish by arguing that Hoerl’s analysis of what constitutes a concept of the past raises interesting developmental issues.

This article examines the temporality of organ transplantation with a focus on memoirs where the recipient has received an organ from a deceased donor. I argue that death constitutes life. That is, this absent presence – that the organ is materially present but the person is dead and therefore absent – is the foundation for rethinking relationality as constituted through the haunting presence of those who remain central to the continuity of life but who are not alive in any strict (...) definition of the term. This article is therefore attentive to the various meanings of haunting, drawing on queer theory to show how narratives of haunting are derealised experiences and thus a struggle for epistemological authority over specifically transplantation and relationality more broadly. It draws out how these epistemological challenges reimagine ontology as a haunted experience, and thus an intimate tie between the living and the unknown – and somewhat present – dead. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to argue that a temporal asymmetry may be established within the framework of quantum field theory, independently of any violation of CP, and thereby T, in weak interactions, and independently of the property of time reversal invariance that its dynamical equations instantiate. Particularly, I shall argue that the temporal asymmetry can be stemmed from assessing the links between the proper group of symmetries of the theory and the ontology of the theory: arguments (...) applied to establish which elements and magnitudes remain invariants under group transformations can also be used to establish a temporal asymmetry. (shrink)

In a class of quantum gravity approaches it is indicated that our observable world emerges out of a fundamental structure that appears highly resistant to any clear spatial or temporal interpretation. In this work we are examining an analogue quantum system that appears to simulate such an unintuitive structure: the emergence of the so called topological phase of matter depicted by the Chern–Simons gauge theory. By investigating the proposed analogy from the lens of category theory, we offer a clear (...) interpretation of the way in which space and time act at the fundamental level. (shrink)

This article will explore the ways in which early twentieth century physics informs and sustains Gaston Bachelard’s writing on epistemology and time. By investigating the scientific underpinnings of Bachelard’s philosophy of time, this article will also establish a connection between his epistemological and temporal works that are underdeveloped in the secondary literature. This discussion will seek to prove an epistemological commitment, scattered throughout Bachelard’s work on science, in which all epistemological claims are beholden to the claims of modern (...) science. It will be demonstrated how this epistemological claim is implemented in Bachelard’s work on time—specifically, the ways in which relativity theory and microphysics influences his philosophy of time. Such an approach will bridge the gap between Bachelard’s epistemological writings and his work on time while simultaneously illustrating the ways in which physics influences his thinking. (shrink)

Many philosophers posit abstract entities – where something is abstract if it is acausal and lacks spatio-temporal location. Theories, types, characteristics, meanings, values and responsibilities are all good candidates for abstractness. Such things raise an epistemological puzzle: if they are abstract, then how can we have any epistemic access to how they are? If they are invisible, intangible and never make anything happen, then how can we ever discover anything about them? In this article, I critically examine epistemological objections (...) to belief in abstract objects offered by Paul Benacerraf, Colin Cheyne and Hartry Field. (shrink)

We propose a logic of temporal contingency, which has operators of past and future contingency as primitive modalities. This logic is less expressive than standard temporal logic over the class of bidirectional frames, and cannot define some basic frame properties such as bidirectionality and transitivity. We present a minimal system based on two key ‘bridge axioms’ and a bimodal version of a so-called ‘almost definability’ schema in the literature. The completeness proof is highly nontrivial due to the requirement (...) that the canonical model be bidirectional. We then extend the results to the simplest dynamic case: public announcements. (shrink)

The novel coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has had far-reaching effects on public health around the world. Attempts to prevent the spread of the disease by quarantine have led to large-scale global socioeconomic disrup- tion. During the outbreak, public authorities and politicians have struggled with how to manage widespread ignorance regarding the virus. Drawing on insights from social epistemology and the emerging interdisciplinary field of ignorance studies, this article provides evidence that the temporality of non- knowing and its intersection with knowing (...) is a force that leads political decision-making during a crisis. Illuminating the epistemic analysis with statements given by the Finnish government to the media in decision- making documents and in press conferences, this paper proposes that a crisis situation, itself, seems to demand from political decision-makers dynamic action while simultaneously knowing little (‘non-knowing’) about the different fronts of tackling the pandemic. We conclude that non-knowing must be recognized explicitly as an enduring and central condition in deci- sion-making, which we call ‘epistemic humility.’. (shrink)

Indexical reference is personal, ephemeral, confrontational, and executive. Hence it is not reducible to nonindexical reference to what is not confronted. Conversely, nonindexical reference is not reducible to indexical reference. (Castañeda 1989, p. 70).

Debates on borders in both normative political theory and critical border studies tend to focus on the spatiality of bordering. This article evaluates this territorialist epistemology by identifying the complex temporality of borders and highlighting the specific normative challenges that it engenders. In particular, it argues for the centrality of time–space governance as a frame for examining bordering processes. This challenge is exemplified through contemporary debates on the movement of people and theoretical arguments about how to construct migration policy. (...) The article contends that complex temporality necessitates an orientation to the future that reconfigures the manner in which theorists should address the time–space governance of migration. (shrink)

Some theists have adopted materialism for human persons. They associate this metaphysics with their belief in resurrection and focus on problems arising from personal identity, temporal gaps or material constitution, but, in this paper, I argue that being a materialist for human persons leads to an epistemological problem regarding our knowledge of God’s life. The only way to avoid this problem is to choose a particular materialist metaphysics for human persons, that is, a constitution theory that emphasizes the irreducibility (...) of the first-person perspective. (shrink)

In this study I propose an epistemological discussion of multiple spatio-temporal scales in neuroscience. Are such scales merely convenient levels of description of structure and function, or do they correspond to irreducible levels of brain organization? What criteria should we employ in order to reduce one level to another, or to identify levels that are not reducible to others? Should we think of these criteria as based on empirical and/or theoretical reasons? Beginning with an empirical criterion – the necessity (...) of different experimental methodologies for the measurement of different phenomena in the same system – I summarize spatial and temporal scales currently used in neuroscience and discuss the possibility of a more general theoretical criterion. I conclude that multiscaling should be recognized as a central concept in the epistemology of neuroscience. (shrink)

Social bots are computer programs that act like human users on social media platforms. Social bot detection is a rapidly growing field dominated by machine learning approaches. In this paper, we propose a complementary method to machine learning by exploring bot detection as a model checking problem. We introduce Temporal Network Logic (TNL) which we use to specify social networks where agents can post and follow each other. Using this logic, we formalize different types of social bot behavior with (...) formulas that are satisfied in a model of a network with bots. We also consider an extension of the logic where we explore the expressive power of including elements from hybrid logic in our framework. We give model checking algorithms for TNL and its hybrid extension, and show that the complexity of the former is in p and the latter in pspace. (shrink)

Our ordinary conception of time has it that there are temporal particulars: not only do people do things, but there are particular doings by people; not only are we born, but the birth of each one of us was a particular event, and each of us will have our own particular death. Temporal particulars in this sense are individuated, fundamentally, by their temporal locations or relations, rather than by their intrinsic or qualitative characteristics. In this respect they (...) are unrepeatable, not just de facto, but as a matter of their very nature. However, there is a tradition in philosophy that seriously downplays this aspect of our thinking about time. According to this tradition, the fundamental unit of temporal representation is _tensed truth_; the notion of an unrepeatable particular, individuated by its temporal location, is at best an abstraction from a complex of tensed truths. The aims of this paper are, first, to argue that the representation of temporal particulars is deeply implicated in our ordinary conception of the past as fixed and unalterable; and, secondly, to argue that the theorist of tensed truth is able to provide only a pale imitation of this aspect of our thinking. I will then reflect on the consequences of this for debates about the metaphysics of tense. (shrink)

In a recent book, Asymmetries in Time, Paul Horwich presents a systematic account of various temporal asymmetries, including a neo-Reichenbachian account of the (apparent) fact that we know more about the past than the future, the epistemological time asymmetry. I find some obscurities in Horwich's presentation, however, and I argue that when his view is understood in a way that I shall propose, it does represent an advance on Reichenbach's, but it fails to vindicate Horwich's "main point...that our special (...) knowledge of the past derives from the fork asymmetry. (shrink)

ABSTRACTModern democratic societies are contradictory societies. They are grounded on normative premises, which are not fully realized in practice. Non-democratic practices have been tolerated in d...