events and time's flow

Mind Association

Events and Time's FlowAuthor(s): Arnold B. LevisonSource: Mind, New Series, Vol. 96, No. 383 (Jul., 1987), pp. 341-353Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Mind AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2254311 .

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Events and Time's Flow

ARNOLD B. LEVISON

I

The belief that time in some sense moves or passes and that events are carried from the future toward the present and then recede further and further into the past seems to be deeply embedded in our common-sense way of looking at the world. There is, however, a problem about whether this notion of temporal passage is consistent with the equally deeply entrenched idea that events 'exist' only while they are occurring or going on, that is, only in the present, and hence that events cannot literally 'move' from the future to the present and then to the past. This problem was recognized by Augustine, G. E. Moore, and C. D. Broad among others, and its solution was central to A. N. Prior's philosophy of time, as we shall see below. However, Prior's solution depended on rejecting a view about the nature and ontological status of events which has recently become widely accepted, namely, that events are not abstract entities such as universals or states of affairs but 'concrete individuals'-unrepeatable, ephemeral parti- culars with a specific location in space and time. (For details, see Davidson, I969, pp. 2I6-34). For, if we accept this outlook, we seem to have to say that events 'exist' tenselessly and hence that tense characteristics such as being past, present, or future are not genuine properties of events. This seems to lead once again to the conclusion that temporal passage is a myth. As George N. Schlesinger wrote a few years ago: '. . . the majority of analytic philosophers hold that the transient view of time is hopelessly flawed and have characterized all attributions to time of such properties as flying, passing or rolling on ... as involving very misleading metaphors, since in actual reality all events and moments stay forever fixed in the position where they occur' (Schlesinger, I982, p. 501). Thus in his recent book, Real Time, D. H. Mellor has stated: '. . . the tensed [i.e. transient] view of time is self- contradictory and so cannot be true. McTaggart showed that in I908, while trying to show time itself to be unreal. Time, however, is not unreal.... The world ... is intrinsically tenseless: events and things are not in themselves either past, present or future. Tense is only a way we have of looking at them ... not the way that in reality they are' (Mellor, I98I, pp. 5 and 24).

If the world is really tenseless, though time is real, as Mellor claims, i.e. if there is really no such thing as the passage of time, then the problem that interested Augustine and the other philosophers I mentioned above is merely a pseudo-problem. I hope to show, however, that properly interpreted the notion of temporal passage is perfectly intelligible and that



342 Arnold B. Levison

the view that temporal passage is a genuine feature of the world is consistent with an ontology of concrete events.

II

In a famous passage of his Confessions Augustine observes that since men foresee the future and recall the past, and 'that which is not, cannot be seen' (i.e. remembered or anticipated), it must be the case that even past and future events in some sense 'are', and that there is some 'secret place' from which they come and to which they go. In other words, past and future events, at least as far as they can be recalled or anticipated, cannot be nonentities-they must 'exist' in some sense. But this does not help us much, Augustine says, since wherever 'time past and time to come' may 'be', 'they are not there as future, or as past, but present. For if there also they be future, they are not yet there; if there also they be past, they are no longer.' And he concludes: 'Wheresoever then is whatsoever is, it is only as present' (Augustine, Confessions, xi. 17-I8).

G. E. Moore was concerned with a similar problem. He observed that an event (say, the Battle of Waterloo or the death of Queen Anne) 'which was present, is past', and that 'every event has, when it is present, a characteristic which it does not possess at any other time-a characteristic which is what we mean by saying that at that time and no other it is present'. But 'no event possesses any characteristic at any time except the time at which it is'. For, 'It certainly can't be, as language suggests, that the same event is at all times, and possesses at one a characteristic which it doesn't possess at others'. That 'would assimilate an event to a thing which persists and has at one time a quality which it hasn't got at others'. Furthermore, Moore pointed out, the time at which an event 'is present, means the time at which it is', and he asks rhetorically, 'How can an event have a characteristic at a time at which it isn't?' (Moore, I962, p. 97).

C. D. Broad, in his examination of McTaggart's argument against the reality of time, was also puzzled by this problem. He pointed out that when we analyse a tensed statement such as 'It has rained' as, say, 'An event characterized by raininess is now past' or '. . . was but no longer is present', we misleadingly suggest that over and above the raininess which 'has been, and no longer is being, manifested in [our] neighbourhood', there is (non- temporally) a 'rainy event', which 'momentarily possesses the quality of presentness and has now lost it and acquired . . . pastness'. Here again we have the suggestion of events 'existing' when they are no longer occurring or perhaps have not yet occurred (Broad, 1938, p. 315).

Of course, it is our ordinary notions of event, material object, and temporal flow that seem to create these puzzles. Some philosophers have suggested that we replace these notions by the idea of a four-dimensional space-time region which may be said to 'exist' tenselessly or atemporally.



Events and Time's Flow 343

Thus W. V. Quine has written: 'A drastic departure from English is required in the matter of tense. The view to adopt is the Minkowskian one, which sees time as a fourth dimension on a par with the three dimensions of space.' On this view, as Quine points out: 'Quantifiers [i.e. phrases like "There is an x .. . " and "Every x .. . "] must be read as timeless. The values of "x" [i.e. individual variables in quantified formulae] may themselves be thing-events, four-dimensional denizens of space-time, and we can attribute dates and durations to them as we can attribute locations and lengths and breadths to them; but the quantifier itself attributes none of these things. "Ex" says neither "there was" nor "there will be", but only, in a tenseless sense, "there is"' (Quine, I982, p. 195).

On this Minkowskian view, the problem that baffled Moore, Augustine, and Broad cannot arise. Time is very much like space, consisting only in unchanging relations among coexisting objects and events. All the objects and events of history alike exist, in the same tenseless sense of 'exist'. Ferrel Christensen explains this outlook:

This is not to say that they all exist at the same time, nor is it said (as in ordinary speech) that they exist at different times; both of these expressions modify the word 'exist' with a temporal adverb. It must be said, rather, that the things and events that exist are at different times, which does not modify 'exist', but conjunctively adds predicative information. To say, again tenselessly, that they are at different times is just to say that they bear different temporal relations to one another (Christensen, 1976, p. 141).

Does the Minkowskian view solve the Augustine-Moore-Broad problem? As Christensen says, whether such a view of time itself is correct 'is a very large and difficult question', but in any case it will not do 'as an analysis of the ordinary language of time', since it is 'unable to account for the "passage of time" locutions' (p. 141). In a similar vein, David Wiggins speaks of the need for philosophy to 'do justice to ... the actual questions of continuity and persistence that perplex our habitual modes of thought.... What these questions need is not replacement by other questions given in terms of phases of things or thing-moments, or in an alien four-dimensional mode. What they want from philosophy is answers given in language that speaks as . . . natural languages speak of proper three-dimensional continuants-things with spatial parts and no temporal parts, which are conceptualized in our experience as occupying space but not time, and as persisting whole through time.' As for 'the everyday conception of event', Wiggins notes:

An event takes time, and will admit the question, 'How long did it last?' only in the sense 'How long did it take?' An event does not persist in the way a continuant does-that is through time, gaining and losing new parts. A continuant has spatial parts, and to find the whole continuant you have only to explore its boundary at a time. An event has temporal parts, and to find the whole event you must trace it through its historical beginning to its historical end. An event does not have spatial




parts in any way that is to be compared with (or understood by reference to) its relation to its temporal parts (Wiggins, I980, p. 25).

Contemporary philosophers who support an ontology of both continuants and particular events seem to have in mind the ordinary conception of event, the one described by Wiggins, and not an artificially constructed, four-dimensional replacement. Thus Davidson has recently written: 'Occupying the same portion of space-time, event and object differ. One is an object which remains the same object through changes, the other a change in an object or objects. Spatio-temporal areas do not distinguish them, but our predicates, our basic grammar, our ways of sorting do. Given my interest in the metaphysics implicit in our language, this is a distinction I do not want to give up' (Davidson, I985, p. 176). However, despite his concern about preserving the everyday distinction between 'event' and 'object', Davidson seems to accept Quine's idea that quantifiers are to be read as tenseless. To use one of Davidson's examples, 'Sebastian walked slowly and aimlessly in Bologna at 2 a.m.' may be symbolized in predicate logic as:

(Ex)(x is a walk & x is slow (for a walk) & x is aimless & x is in Bologna & x is at 2 a.m. & x is by Sebastian).

In this formula, the value of the individual variable 'x' is supposed to be an ephemeral event which is dated, i.e. tenselessly a subject of a temporal property (namely, 'being at 2 a.m.'). If we were to add to this a tense property such as 'x is past' or 'x is future', we would be confronted with the problem that concerned Augustine, Moore, and Broad. Moreover, this procedure would be incompatible with our ordinary talk about temporal passage, as I shall try to show further on. Firstly, however, I need to discuss A. N. Prior's alternative approach to the interpretation of quantifiers and the ontological status of events in tensed sentences, which was designed in part to alleviate these difficulties.

III

Prior favoured a view that is sometimes called 'event language reduc- tionism'. '. . . [W]hat looks like talk about events', he wrote, 'is really at bottom talk about things [i.e. continuants] and ... what looks like talk about changes in events is really just slightly more complicated talk about changes in things' (Prior, I968, pp. io-ii). Prior thought that this applied 'both to the changes that we say occur in events when they are going on, like the change in speed of a movement [such as occurs when a car accelerates] ... and the changes that we say occur in events when they are not going on any longer, or not yet, e.g. my birth's receding into the past' (p. i i). Thus he said that when we speak of a 'movement' (i.e. an event of a certain sort) as if we were referring to an object, the word 'movement' is merely afaqon de parler;




'there is just the moving car, which moves more quickly than it did'; similarly, "'birth" is afaqon de parler-there's just me being born, and then getting older' (p. i i). To support this thesis, Prior analyses the following example, which is based on the assumption that he fell out of a punt six years before he wrote the sentence.

(i) My falling out of a punt has receded six years into the past.

As he remarks, (i) 'suggests that something called an event, my falling out of a punt, has gone through a performance, called receding into the past, and moreover has been going through this performance even after it has ceased to exist, i.e. after it has stopped happening' (p. io). But we can avoid this suggestion, he thought, if we realize that (i) is 'just a paraphrase' of:

(2) It is, now six years since it was the case that I am falling out of a punt.

In (2) there is no nominal purporting to stand for an event, such as 'my falling out of a punt', and there are no temporal predicates to modify it, such as '. . . has receded into the past'. The expression of both temporal flow or recession and the past tense has been transferred from verb forms to nested adverbial clauses which are attached to a whole present tense sentence (namely, 'I am falling out of a punt'). However, (2) is not about any objects 'except me and that punt'. Hence, 'there is no real reason to believe in the existence either now or six years ago [i.e. relative to the time Prior was writing] of a further object called "my falling out of a punt"'.

If Prior is right and this procedure can be generalized, then there is nothing in ordinary temporal language that requires us to believe in a literal recession of events from the present to the past, or from the future to the present. It is not our language but our tendency to reify-to interpret all semantically meaningful noun phrases as genuine designators or referring terms-that creates the puzzles about events and time's flow that troubled Augustine, Moore, and Broad.

Undoubtedly this attempt to solve the Augustine-Moore-Broad problem is extremely ingenious and highly attractive in its promise of ontological parsimony. If Prior is right, we do not need 'events' as an independent, irreducible category of objects; we can get by basically with continuants undergoing various kinds of change, in a tense-logical framework. Un- fortunately, however, contrary to Prior's claim, (i) is not 'just a paraphrase' of (2). In (i) the subject phrase, 'my falling out of a punt', has the force of a definite description, i.e. a phrase which implies that there was one and only one such fall at the time in question, whereas (2) has no such implication. Any of several falls by Prior from a punt would be consistent with the truth of (2). Thus, suppose that on the day in question Prior fell out of his punt twice. It would still be true, as (2) says, that it was the case six years before Prior wrote this essay that he is falling out of a punt; but it would not be true




that there was one and only one such fall, as (i) implies. This means that (i) and (2) cannot have the same truth conditions. If so, however, they cannot be equivalent; as I said, (i) cannot be 'just a paraphrase' of (2).

Moreover, contrary to Prior's statement, there may be good reason to believe in the existence of what he describes as a 'further object called "my falling out of a punt"'. Suppose that as a result of his falling out of a punt that day, Prior caught a cold. Then it would be true to say, presumably, that his falling out of a punt caused his catching of a cold. If causal relations hold between concrete individual events, as many philosophers believe, then the events that are terms of such relations must exist-at least they must exist at the time they enter into the causal relations.

Finally, and again contrary to Prior's claim, even a sentence like (2) may involve an underlying ontology of events, as Davidson has shown. Thus, consider a present-tense version such as 'Prior is falling from a punt'. This sentence might appear in reasoning like the following: (a) In every fall from a punt, water is splashed; (b) Prior is falling from a punt; so (c) water is being splashed. The first sentence appears to contain a quantification over falls from a punt (events), the second and third do not. Yet there must be some logical relation between these sentences, since the argument they make up is valid. One explanation is that the second and third sentences may be assigned logical forms that involve quantification over events, namely, falls from a punt, and the argument comes out valid in the ordinary predicate calculus. For instance, (b) might be assigned the form: 'There is a fall and it is from a punt and it is by Prior.' (These and many other reasons for believing in the existence at specified times of particular events are provided by Davidson in various papers, many of which have been reprinted in his Essays on Action and Events.)

Nevertheless, despite these difficulties in his proposed solution to the Augustine-Moore-Broad problem, it seems to me that Prior was on the right track when he suggested that (2) and not (i) perspicuously displays the logical form of the relevant fact, even supposing that there was one and only one fall by Prior from a punt on that day. For given that assumption, (2) could easily be revised to read:

(3) It is now six years since it was the case that my falling out of a punt is occurring (or is causing my catching of a cold, and so on)

What we should maintain, in the face of such objections as those cited above, is not that statements like (i) and (2) are equivalent in any sense, nor that statements like (i) reduce to statements like (2); but that statements like (i) are false, while those like (2) or (3) are true and correctly reflect the facts. This is a step in the direction of reconciling Prior's tense-logical approach with Davidson's ontology of particular events.

There are several reasons for taking this position. Firstly, a statement like (i) is false because it suggests that there is now an object called 'Prior's




falling out of a punt' concerning which it is true that it has undergone a performance of receding n years into the past. But there is not and perhaps could not now be such an object (for reasons that I shall explain below). Furthermore, as Christensen remarks

In order to have any properties at all, as that term is normally understood, an entity must exist; to have a property now it must exist now, to have had a property earlier it must have existed then. Hence it would also seem that to have such properties as presentness and pastness, an event or state of affairs would have to exist. That is, it exists for an indefinitely long period during which it has the property of futurity, it then momentarily has the property of presentness, and it has the property of pastness, while continuing to exist, ever after.... [S]uch an interpretation is false: to say that an event is past and no longer present really only means that it did exist but no longer exists, that it was occurring but is not.... (Christensen, 1976, p. 137).

Thus, Prior's fall from a punt did not exist at the time he was writing, and that fact is enough to make (i) false; rather, it existed six years prior to that time, if it existed at all. But this fact evidently does not falsify (2) or (3).

Christensen's remarks seem to entail not only that there is not now an object such as Prior's falling from a punt (n years ago), but also that tenselessly there is no such object. As we saw above, the tenseless existence of events seems to be implied by the standard method of symbolizing sentences that quantify over events. But to deny either that there is now such an object as Prior's falling out of a punt or that there is tenselessly such an object at such-and-such a time, which supposedly has various other such temporal properties as having receded six years into the past (when Prior wrote the sentence in question)-to deny all this does not entail, I believe, that events have absolutely no status in reality, or that they are nothing but 'logical constructions' as Prior seems to have thought. That is to say, this denial is not necessarily a repudiation in toto of an 'event ontology'. For as Prior himself remarks, one of the things that is 'odd about the change that we describe figuratively as the flow or passage of time-the change from an event's being future to its being present, and from its being present to its being more and more past' is that it is supposed to take place at times when the event does not exist. 'If a lecture gets duller or a movement faster then this is something it does as it goes on; but the change from past to still further past isn't one that occurs while the event is occurring, for all the time that an event is occurring it isn't past but present.... [S]uch changes as the change in the rate of movement are . . . changes that go on in events or processes while they exist ... in the only sense in which events and processes do exist, namely while they are occurring. But getting more and more past seems to be something an event does when it doesn't exist, and this seems very queer indeed' (Prior, I962, pp. 3-4). Thus we could say that in the case of Prior's fall from a punt, there once was such an event (and only one, if that is what is intended); but saying this would not compel us to believe in either the atemporal, tenseless existence or the present existence of such an object.




And it is entirely consistent with this attitude to say that there now exists, for example, the event or process of my writing this sentence. Similarly, we could maintain that there now exists the event or fact of Prior's once having fallen out of a punt, or that while my birth does not now exist my having been born does now exist (or in general there are such things as birthdays).

The principle on which claims like these could be based is one familiar to logicians. It concerns the scope of logical operators like 'every', 'some', 'it's not the case that', and so on. The basic idea is that we may interpret the verbal tenses in their various forms as a species of logical operator on sentences, in the manner illustrated above. Thus to say

(4) It was the case n years ago that (there is an X such that X is my falling out of a punt),

does not imply

(5) There is an X such that (it was the case n years ago that X is my falling out of a punt).

This might be true whether we interpret 'There is . . .' in (5) tenselessly or as expressing the present tense. For, if (5) were true, then we could validly infer that X exists and perhaps that it has undergone something called receding into the past for n years. But (4) has no such implication, and if sentences like (5) are false for the reasons I suggested above, (4) could yet be true. This is because in (4) the quantifier 'there is an X' falls within the scope of a tense operator, and the laws of tense forbid us to infer the present or tenseless existence of something merely from the fact that it once existed (or occurred), just as 'I believe that there is someone who stole my pencil' does not entail 'There is someone (i.e. a particular person) such that I believe that he stole my pencil'. A similar point may be made about future-tense statements. 'It will be the case that n years hence someone will land on the planet Mars' does not entail that there is now anyone who will land on Mars nor that there is a particular future person who will land on Mars. It only means that someone then existing will be landing on the planet Mars. (All these points, of course, were originally made by Prior.)

Iv

Above I suggested that the tenseless interpretation of quantifiers, combined with an ontology of particular events, is incompatible with our ordinary talk of temporal passage. To see why this is so, we need to recall McTaggart's famous argument for the conclusion that the passage of time is impossible. However, I shall rely on D. H. Mellor's recent revival of this argument (Mellor, I98I, pp. 92 ff.), since Mellor takes account of the replies that have been made by tense-logicians since McTaggart's day.

As Mellor points out, according to McTaggart (I908; 1927, chap. 33),




past, present, and future tenses are mutually incompatible properties of things and events. An event which is yesterday, for example, cannot also be tomorrow; what will be future cannot also have been past; and so on. But because tenses are forever changing, every event has to have them all. Thus, on the tensed view of time, McTaggart thought, every event occupies every temporal position, from the remotest future, through the present, to the remotest past. But nothing can really have incompatible properties, so no event in reality can be past, present, or future.

Defenders of tense hope to evade this argument, Mellor explains, by pointing out that nothing has incompatible tenses at the same time. 'Nothing is present when it is past, or future when it is present. Things and events only have these properties successively; first they are future, then present, then past. And nothing prevents things having incompatible properties at different times. On the contrary, that is how change is defined: the successive possession of incompatible properties. All that McTaggart has shown is that changing tense fits that definition, as it should' (Mellor, I98I, p. 93).

But Mellor thinks that this type of reply is inadequate. The tensed view of time cannot be saved merely by pointing out that events do not have incompatible tenses all at once. For 'saying in tensed terms just when they do have them only generates another set of properties, including mutually incompatible ones . . ., all of which every event has to have'. Mellor says that this creates an endless, vicious regress because at no stage can all the supposed tensed facts be consistently stated (p. 94). While he admits that the appearance of contradiction can be removed by distinguishing the different times at which events have different tenses, he claims that McTaggart's critics 'ignore the fact that the tensed means they use to distinguish these times are also subject to the contradiction they are trying to remove'. Thus Mellor thinks that although McTaggart's proof is sound, the present situation regarding McTaggart and his critics is more like a stalemate than a clear-cut victory for either side (p. 95).

However, we can break this stalemate by pointing out that McTaggart's argument against the reality of time's flow presupposes that events are atemporal or perhaps sempiternal entities which have various 'temporal properties' (McTaggart called them 'A-series' properties), such as being past, present, or future. Similarly, he presupposed that events occupy pre- existing 'temporal positions' successively. In other words, McTaggart implicitly represents the events of history as existing forever and changing temporal positions all the while. In effect he adopts a tenseless interpretation of 'There is . . .', and proceeds to 'quantify over' events regardless of whether they are supposed to be past, present, or future. In his defence of McTaggart, Mellor makes the same presuppositions and adopts the same procedures (cf. Mellor, I98I, pp. 93ff.). But as I have already suggested, following Prior, we need not accept the tenseless event ontology. We can




hold instead that events 'exist' only when they are going on or occurring. On this view, to say that an event, X, is past and no longer present really only means that it was the case that X exists or is occurring but it is not now the case that X exists or is occurring. For instance, if I say 'The Battle of Waterloo is past', I only mean that it was the case that the Battle of Waterloo is being fought. Similarly for the other tenses. But if we do not assume that there is (tenselessly) any event which successively occupies past, present, and future temporal positions, then McTaggart's incompatibility argument cannot get off the ground. Since the tensed view of time does not require this assumption, McTaggart has not established that the tensed view of time is impossible. He has only shown that it is impossible if we adopt a tenseless interpretation of quantifiers together with an ontology of concrete events, along the lines suggested by the standard way of symbolizing sentences about events, assuming an underlying event ontology, such as 'Sebastian walked slowly through the streets of Bologna at 2 a.m.' (as I illustrated above).

V

There is another, closely connected objection to the tensed view of time that is due originally to J. J. C. Smart (see Smart, 1949). A brief consideration of this problem will help us to understand how the approach explained in the preceding section helps to solve McTaggart's problem about time's flow. As Prior explains Smart's objection, time cannot really flow or pass since genuine flowing or passage, such as we find in the flow of a river, is something which occurs in time and takes time to occur. Hence if time itself flows or passes-if it literally moves-there must be a containing time-a 'super-time' as it were-in which it does so. Furthermore, 'whatever flows or passes does so at some rate, but a rate of flow is just the amount of movement in a given time, so how could there be a rate of flow of time itself? And if time does not flow at any rate, how can it flow at all?' (Prior, I968, p. i).

Prior thinks that this problem has a prima-facie solution. He writes:

Suppose we speak about something 'becoming more past' not only when it moves from the comparatively near past to the comparatively distant past, but also whtn it moves from the present to the past, from the future to the present, and from the comparatively distant future to the comparatively near future. Then whatever is happening, has happened, or will happen is all the time 'becoming more past' in this extended sense; and just this is what we mean by the flow or passage of time. And if we want to give the rate of this flow or passage, it is surely very simple-it takes one exactly a year to get a year older, i.e. events become more past at the rate of a year per year, an hour per hour, a second per second (Prior, I968, pp. I-2; see also his 1958, pp. 244-6).

This attempt to solve Smart's problem encounters several difficulties.




Firstly, it seems to imply that events do after all 'exist' in the future and the past as well as the present, and that they undergo change as they become more past-a result which would open the door once again to McTaggart's refutation of the tensed view of time. Secondly, one time unit per time unit is a strange sort of 'rate', and talk of such a 'rate' in the end may not avoid an implication of a 'time' within which time moves. Thus Christensen complains:

With every day that passes, January becomes a day closer-hence January is approaching at the rate of one day per day! (Or one hour per hour, one second per second.) But this is surely unintelligible. For it evidently involves not just ordinary garden-variety time, but also some sort of mysterious 'meta-time': events approach at the rate of one second of regular time per second of meta-time. We have only to look closely at our talk of temporal passage to see that it would be sheer nonsense if taken literally (Christensen, I976, p. I31).

However, there appears to be a misunderstanding here. Adherents of the tensed view of time may admit that talk of time's flow is metaphorical and yet insist that there is a literal meaning behind the metaphor, as we shall see below. Furthermore, even if the idea of a 'rate' of temporal flow of one time unit per time unit is 'queer' it need not entail any 'super-' or 'meta- time'. Thus Prior writes: 'It has taken exactly one year of ordinary time for my age to increase by exactly one year of ordinary time' (Prior, I958,

p. 244-my emphasis). Prior could defend this claim by pointing out that we can keep track of the rate of time's passage by nesting adverbial clauses within adverbial clauses, in a way that is perfectly grammatical. For instance:

(5) It was the case 6 months ago that (it was the case only 56 years ago that (my birth is occurring)), and it is not now the case that (it was the case only 56 years ago that (my birth is occurring)).

(5) could be the literal meaning which is behind talk to the effect that my fifty-sixth birthday is now six months past; it also makes literal sense of the metaphorical statement that my fifty-sixth birthday is receding into the past, say at the rate of one month per month (of ordinary time) (Prior, I968, p. 9). Whether we call this a genuine rate of change or not is unimportant, Prior claims: 'If a "rate" of change is a ratio between something else and a time-interval, there is no rate at which my age changes; if it is just a ratio between something (whether a different something or the same something) and a time-interval, my age changes at the rate stated above; and in any case I become a year older every year (there are such things as birthdays) whether this be called a "rate" of a year per year or not' (Prior, I958, p. 244; see also his I967, p. I9). The fact that grammar permits construction of sentences like (5) shows pretty conclusively, I think, that we may lay to rest the idea that our ordinary talk of time's flow compels us to believe in a super- or a meta-time for it to flow in.




VI

Let us now return to McTaggart's problem whether, if time really flows or passes, events must 'exist' atemporally or perhaps sempiternally and undergo such changes as receding into the past. It would seem that an event- ontologist can hold, with Prior, that the flow of time is only a metaphor, but one whose force can be explained. To see this, consider the fact that genuine changes, such as one's hair turning grey, a child's growing taller, a volcanic eruption, and so on, can be said to have the tensed form:

(6) It was the case that p and it is not now the case that p,

i.e. 'It was the case thatJane has black hair and it is not now the case that she has black hair', 'It was the case that Mt. St Helens was dormant and it is not now the case that Mt. St Helens is dormant', and so on (cf. Prior, I968, p. i i). We could also have such statements as 'It was the case that the avalanche is knocking down the house and it is not now the case that the avalanche is knocking down the house', which overtly purports to be about an event. However, our ordinary talk about the flow of time can be represented as conforming to the same pattern, provided it is realised that the embedded sentence 'p' can be as complex as required. For instance, it can itself contain tense adverbs, as in (5)-the example given above of my fifty-sixth birthday occurring six months ago. This means, according to Prior, that although the flow of time is metaphorical, we use the metaphor because what we call the flow of time fits this pattern (namely, (6)) (Prior, I968, pp. i iff.). This suggestion seems to agree with Christensen's claim that 'the only thing our "passage of time" locutions really say, ultimately, is what is said by the temporal adverbs from which they are derived' (Christensen, I976, p. I40). But let us remind ourselves that linguistically speaking past, present, and future tenses are themselves adverbial constructions, since their grammatical function is to modify verbs. Moreover, if all temporal expressions, whether they be singular terms like 'the future' and 'the past', monadic predicates like 'is past' and 'is future', or dyadic predicates like 'is earlier than', can be reduced to the tenses, as Prior and Christensen have argued, then there is no ontological commitment either to temporal objects, properties, or relations in the ordinary use of such expressions.

If this approach is on the right track, we can solve Augustine's problem about the 'secret place' where past and future events 'are'. When Augustine said that even past and future events must be 'present' if they are in this 'secret place', his linguistic intuitions were sound; he was merely speaking metaphorically. Although he may not have known or suspected it, he was referring to the phenomenon of scope and the grammatical fact that past and future tense are perspicuously expressed by tense operators on core present- tense sentences. This does not mean, however, that sentences about the




past, present, or future are really about language and not about the world. On the contrary, tensed sentences may reflect a genuine structural feature of the world. To say that time really flows or passes in the sense that there are tensed facts whose logical form reflects the pattern of (6), does not imply that there must really be what McTaggart called an 'A series', i.e. a series of temporal positions which 'runs from the far past through the near past to the present, and then from the present through the near future to the far future' (McTaggart, I927, chap. 33).

University ofNorth Carolina ARNOLD B. LEVISON

Greensboro NC 274I5

U.S.A.

References Broad, C. D. (1938), An Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy, Vol. II,

Cambridge. Christensen, F. (1976), 'The Source of the River of Time', Ratio, Vol. XVIII,

No. 2, pp. 3I -43. Davidson, D. (i969), 'The Individuation of Events', in N. Rescher, ed., Essays in

Honor of Carl G. Hempel, Dordrecht, pp. 2i6-34. (ig80), Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford. (I985), 'Reply to Quine on Events', in Ernest LePore and Brian P.

McLaughlin, eds., Actions and Events: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, Oxford and New York, Basil Blackwell.

McTaggart, J. E. (i108), 'The Unreality of Time', Mind, i8, pp. 457-84. (I 927), The Nature of Existence, Vol. II, Cambridge.

Mellor, D. H. (i98i), Real Time, Cambridge. Moore, G. E. (i962), in C. Lewy, ed., The Commonplace Book of G. E. Moore,

Notebook II (c. I926). London, Allen & Unwin. Prior, A. N. (I958), 'Time after Time', Mind, 67, pp. 244-6.

(i967), Past, Present and Future, Oxford. (i968), Papers on Time and Tense, Oxford.

Quine, W. V. (i982), Methods of Logic (4th ed.), Harvard. Schlesinger, G. N. (i982), 'How Time Flies', Mind, 9I, pp. 50I-23. Smart, J. C. C. (949), 'The River of Time', in A. G. N. Flew, ed., Essays in

Conceptual Analysis, London, I966, pp. 2I3-I7. Wiggins, David (I980), Sameness and Substance, Oxford, Basil Blackwell.



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