Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

C.D. Broad and the Growing Block

18 December 2013  |  15:00  |  Seminari de Filosofia UB

Abstract

C. D. Broad and the Growing Block.

Talk based on joint work with Fabrice Correia, Université de Neuchâtel.

 

Abstract: The Growing Block Theory of time, or GBT for short, conceives of temporal reality as being in a constant accumulative process of becoming: always things come to exist that did not exist before, while never anything ceases to exist. It is also an essential ingredient of GBT that always, there is an edge of becoming – a last moment preceding no other. We owe the idea of temporal reality as a growing block to C. D. Broad who, in his Scientific Thought (1923), provides us with a first characterisation of GBT. Broad’s characterisation has two shortcomings: it presupposes an ontology of exclusively instantaneous things in time, and it proves to lack the resources to adequately respond to the sceptical challenge that, for all we know, the edge of becoming is located, not in our present, but in the future – a challenge a statement of which we find in Bourne (2002), Braddon-Michtell (2004) and Merricks (2006). The difficulty to respond to the sceptical challenge is further aggravated by recent worries, expressed with the usual flourish by Williamson in his 2013 Modal Logic as Metaphysics, that the notion of presentness, at work in both Broad’s version of GBT and standard formulations of presentism, proves too elusive to be theoretically illuminating. The aim is to come up with a clean and simple version of GBT that accommodates an ontology of non-instantaneous things in time, does not draw on any presentness-predicate in addition to familiar tense-logical and quantificational resources, and yet still proves strong enough to answer the sceptical challenge in a constructive way. Pursuit of this aim can thus be seen as an attempt to improve upon the characterisation, and defence, of GBT that we gave in earlier work (Correia and Rosenkranz 2013).