In his 1980 PSA paper, "Is Temporality Mind-Dependent?", Paul Fitzgerald suggests that philosophical understanding of the problems often subsumed under the heading, "the status of temporal becoming," or more tendentiously, "the myth of passage," may be advanced by focussing on a distinction "which is invariably blurred by those who discuss the issue" (Fitzgerald, 1980, p. 283): a distinction between what he calls the "indexicality theme" and the "elapsive theme."
Since part of my criticism is that Fitzgerald says next to nothing about what the elapsive theme amounts to, let me begin by quoting in full his initial statement of the contrast. He notes that discussions of the status of temporal becoming often mimic moves in the more widely known discussions of the mind-dependence of secondary qualities (a parallel he has explored further in Fitzgerald, 1982). When we ask about the ontological status of temporality as we experience it, similar questions arise as for colours and tastes; but according to Fitzgerald irrelevant issues are obstructing the path to the appropriate answers. "The irrelevant issues have to do with nowness, pastness, futurity and other properties allegedly expressed by indexical expressions such as "is occurring now" and "happened yesterday." These properties are sometimes called "A-determinations," after McTaggart's A-series. I take the essential issue to be that of finding out to what extent the durational character, the "timeyness," "transiency," or "elapsive" quality of our experience, is found mind-independently in the physical world as well. This elapsive theme has almost nothing to do with the indexical theme, the question of whether nowness and other A-determinations are found outside of mind." (1980, p. 283)
Before turning to criticism, let me note three points to applaud in Fitzgerald's paper. First, he rejects the assumption that to every distinct predicate there is a distinct property. In particular he denies that indexical predicates "communicate their peculiar kind of information by predicating of their subjects irreducibly indexical properties" (1980, p. 284); rather, he thinks, they work by a kind of linguistic pointing. How they work is not a matter I wish to get embroiled with, but Fitzgerald is to be commended for not allowing his account of what properties there are to be a mere reflex of the distinct predicates he recognizes (cf. Armstrong, 1978).
Second, Fitzgerald is open to an appeal to what we experience. This appeal, he thinks, sustains transiency but knocks out indexicality or nowness. "There is felt temporality within experience, a directly experienced transient or elapsive character. But it is not essentially indexical. Phenomenal temporal features of experience are fully expressible in tenseless language, as in "my feelings of nausea surge up quickly and pass as suddenly" . . . The dawdle and whoosh of experienced time is perfectly well expressed by tenseless talk" (1980, p. 285). He goes on to try to explain away any impression we might have that we must acknowledge presentness within experience by saying that " "Is happening now" is only temporarily predicable not because the particular of which it's predicated has an evanescent property of nowness, but because it is evanescent. Later acts of predication are too late to be simultaneous with the shortlived particular" (1980, p. 286). While most philosophy of space and time quite properly takes the universe for its topic and advanced physics as its guide, it is right that we should on occasion recall the typical human experience of time, and treat this experience, as we do elsewhere, as something that has somehow to be accomodated within our metaphysics, if not always on its own terms. Mais où sont les neiges d'antan? or other literary evocations of our experience of temporality may not settle our metaphysics for us, but they point to what has somehow to be provided for.2
A third commendable point is Fitzgerald's response to one of the standard arguments for the mind-dependence of temporal becoming. The argument goes: physics does not need to recognize a, or the, now; so the most that can be said for it/them is that it is minddependent. As we have seen, Fitzgerald sees no need for any kind of now, but he says that if he were a believer in some sort of now this argument would leave him umnoved. "Physics focusses on those properties required to differentiate the actual world form other conceivable spatio-temporal worlds. But presentness, pastness and futurity are found in any conceivable temporal world. That's why physics need not mention them" (1980, p. 287). Scientifically idle properties are not just for that reason no properties at all. I am inclined to think this correct, and with it the somewhat more independent role it assigns to the philosophy of science and empiricist metaphysics; but while it might be interesting to explore the possibilities of a metaphysics based upon, but not exhausted by, contemporary science, I must turn now to the more restricted issue of what Fitzgerald has done, or rather failed to do, to advance our understanding of temporal becoming.
Fitzgerald's paper begins by trying to distinguish the elapsive and the indexicality themes. He then discusses some aspects of the indexicality theme and moves into the nature of our experience of time. I have quoted his introduction of the two themes and some of his main claims about our experience of time and how it is easily misinterpreted in terms of the indexicality theme. The final section of his paper takes four arguments for the mind-dependence of becoming, which are usually interpreted in the light of the indexicality theme, but which Fitzgerald re-examines with his two contrasting themes in mind. In three cases the arguments are said to fail when applied to the elapsive theme; the fourth is left to another occasion, but its bearing even on indexicality is queried.
My criticism is that Fitzgerald has failed to provide even the beginnings of a theory of his own about the elapsive theme. The only way I can see for a scientific metaphysics to progress, when once it refuses simply to read off answers from the currently fashionable theories, is to provide theories of its own, or if "theory" is somewhat too pretentious, at least to say something rather more definite and examinable than the poetry that expresses our experience of time. Fitzgerald offers us "dawdle and whoosh" but precious little else. If we grant him a distinction between his themes, his argument strategy (examining mind-dependence arguments first for one theme and then for the other) might work and persuade us of the point of pursuing his elapsive theme; but I doubt that it does even that much, since one is immediately forced back to ask what exactly the elapsive theme commits one to.
Let me illustrate by reference to the discussion of his first standard argument for mind-dependence: that nowness is scientifically idle. We have already noted that Fitzgerald thinks that this argument has in fact little force against the indexicality theme, but he claims that it has much less against felt transciency — "for physics does find it necessary to attribute to physical things a mind-independent temporal extension which we call duration" (1980, p. 288). The issue then is "is this kind of duration the same that we find instantiated within consciousness?" Besides suggesting the relevance of some supposed mystical states to this question, Fitzgerald just leaves it unanswered. My first reaction to the question is to think that if it means anything the answer is most probably "no"; and for the reason that Fitzgerald himself offers in a different context: conscious experience is in many respects unlike the physical world it is in part caused by. But my second reaction is to wonder whether in Fitzgerald's context it really does mean very much. The dawdle and whoosh of the sun's duration? Just what properties are we supposing the sun, or the sun's duration, to possess? As I have said above, we are forced to ask what the elapsive theme amounts to; how, if at all, it differs from the equally elusive indexicality theme.
To begin my own answer, I would suggest that in following Fitzgerald's appeal to human experience we go one step further and note that the nature of that experience of time is such that many people are pushed towards a kind of philosophically naive theorizing3 or towards the familiar metaphors of the passage of time or the passage of my consciousness along my world-line, both of which teeter on the brink of paradox or ad hoc extra time dimensions. Our experience is not pure unconceptuahzed wallowing but is shot through with thought, thought about the structure and metaphysics of time in this case.4 It seems to me that a remark such as Hobbes' "the Present onely has a being in Nature; things Past have a being in the Memory onely, but things to come have no being at all" (1929, part 1, ch. 3) is precisely an attempt to capture the elapsive theme, to capture how duration is experienced, and that it is no accident that many such attempts have made much of the special status of the present, of the now. It seems equally clear to me that remarks such as Hobbes' are not to be construed as perverse misinterpretations of the semantics of token-reflexives, but clearly they do leave the door wide open for those who think that the way we use temporal language can settle our metaphysics for us. So while there may be significant features of felt duration that are omitted in the Hobbesian insistence on the present, it seems to me that Fitzgerald's indexicality theme is not so much a distinct and irrelevant issue (though it may have become one in some philosophers' hands) as a necessary, though quite possibly misguided, attempt to theorize the elapsive theme. What I am wanting is, as Mellor has recently admitted, something that most philosophers have shirked, or otherwise performed unintelligibly: "saying what is temporal about the non-spatial dimension of their four-dimensional Minkowski manifolds" (1981, p. 80). My present point is that Fitzgerald has not succeeded in laying the ghost of the now, since it is that ghost that seems most characteristic of temporal duration as we experience it.
In the case we looked at above Fitzgerald's failure to theorize makes it difficult to decide how far his proposals have taken us. In another, and crucial, case his failure to theorize allows him an altogether too easy escape from a difficult problem. Special Relativity poses a problem for a mind-independent now. Fitzgerald presents the argument as hinging on the fact that given the relativity of simultaneity "even instantaneous events occur not just at one time, but at an infinity of frame-times" (1980, p. 289). If "nowness-attributions" to physical events are all riddled with false implications of a unique frame-time, and so are all false, we may find that the only acceptable "nowness-attributions" are intramental, and so find ourselves with mere mind-dependence. Fitzgerald's response is to say "I would suggest that neither ordinary tensed nor tenseless claims that things are happening now should be regarded as so fatally flawed by failure to specify a frame as to be automatically false. Why not see them as vague enough to be true?" (1980, p. 289)
If one follows Fitzgerald in seeing the whole discussion of now-ness as irrelevant to any important issue about time, this heedless charity may seem fitting; but if, as I have suggested, talk about nowness should be seen as an attempt to explicate the elapsive theme, one should be more concerned about the fact that nowness theories do seem to postulate a unique now, at least in many cases,5 and so a preferred frame of reference for time determinations, and so seem to run right up against the standard interpretation of Special Relativity.
As far as ordinary "nowness-attributions" go, I agree with Fitzgerald that we need not judge them false, either because they fail to specify a frame of reference, as they do, or because they presuppose that there is only one frame of reference, which anyway they don't. Certainly (as Owen [1976] for one points out) they are vague in as much as they leave the extent of the duration of the present to be inferred. But I would prefer to resolve the question of frame of reference by saying that our ordinary space-time attributions are typically elliptical, in that they almost always omit the frame of reference that must be supplied to understand them as determinately true or false (cf. Swinbume, 1968, p. 78-80). In many ordinary cases, these ellipses can be properly filled by our homely frames of reference, and the result may well be simply true or false. So while we do not have to abandon all ordinary space-time attributions to the limbo of pervasive error or unspecified vagueness, we should, I believe, take seriously the challenge of Special Relativity when it comes to articulating a theory of temporal becoming; an adequate scientific metaphysics will progress by grappling with that challenge rather than by slurring the issue à la Fitzgerald.
NOTES
1 A version of this paper was read at the Royal Institute of Philosophy's Conference on Space, Time, and Causality at the University of Keele in September 1981. I am grateful to Professor Swinbume for the opportunity to present it, and to the Consultancy Fund of the School of Education, U.W.I., Mona, Jamaica, for some support towards the costs of attending the conference. I should also like to acknowledge the financial support of the Humanities' Research Fund of Fourah Bay College, the University of Sierra Leone, towards my work on the philosophy of space and time some years ago.
2 D.H. Lawrence, for one instance out of many, wrote: "In the immediate present there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished. The strands are all flying, quivering, intermingling into the web, the waters are shaking the moon" (1950, pp. 286-287).
3 Lawrence goes on to add: "Give me the still, white seething, the incandescence and the coldness of the incarnate moment: the moment, the quick of all change and haste and opposition: the moment, the immediate present, the Now. The immediate moment is not a drop of water running downstream. It is the source and issue, the bubbling up of the stream" (1950, 288). The point is not that this is crystal clear, or that Lawrence is an authority on the phenomenology of time uncorrupted by equally unclear philosophical reflections, but simply that he should find these sorts of metaphor fitting.
4 I readily concede to Fitzgerald that it is not easy to get away from vague metaphor. Even Nerlich has to say that while the content of our experience has some temporal extension and its objects have a much more extensive temporal spread, the experiencing itself is not given to us as "across time" (Nerlich, 1979, p. 18).
5 I am afraid I can hardly find an argument for thinking that there must be strong pressure for anyone who believes in the objectivity of temporal becoming to accept one and only one Now (but see now Waterlow, 1984). I suspect it flows from a commitment to one universe, but I cannot extract an argument from my gut-reactions here.
REFERENCES
Armstrong, D.M. (1978), Universals and Scientific Realism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fitzgerald, Paul (1980), "Is Temporality Mind-Dependent?" in P.D. Asquith and R.N. Giere, eds., PSA 1980, Volume One. East Lansing: Philosophy of Science Association.
Fitzgerald, Paul (1982), "Temporality, Secondary Qualities, and the Location of Sensations" in P.D. Asquith and T. Nickles, eds., PSA 1982, Volume One. East Lansing: Philosophy of Science Association.
Hobbes, Thomas (1929), Leviathan. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Lawrence, D.H. (1950), Selected Essays. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Mellor, D.H. (1981), "McTaggart, fixity and coming true" in Richard Healey, ed., Reduction, Time and Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nerlich, Graham (1979), "How to Make Things Have Happened," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 9:1- 22.
Owen, G.E.L. (1976), "Aristotle on Time" in Peter K. Machamer and Robert G. Turnbull, eds., Motion and Time, Space and Matter. Ohio: Ohio State University Press.
Swinbume, Richard (1968), Space and Time. London: Macmillan.
Waterlow, Sarah (1984), "Aristotle's Now," Philosophical Quarterly 34:104-128.
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© Ed Brandon, 1985, 2001. HTML prepared using 1st Page 2000, last revised May 29th, 2001.