ANEXO XXIX Convenio de Concertación
ANEXO XLI
I. Componente de Sanidad a) Salud Animal;
L
ately a new tone has been heard among B-theorists, marked mostly by being unapologetic. The founding fathers of the theory got it right, goes this recent campaign, and the onslaught they encountered, which resulted in the emergence of the softened “new B-Theory”, was ungrounded. The crux of the criticism against the B-theory was that it clashed with experience, specifi- cally in that it turned tense and passage into illusions. Obviously, once it had been established that reality as it is portrayed by a theory is unlike what we thought it was, the theory finds itself on the defensive. Why should we believe a theory that is not corroborated by experience, or even worse, actually runs against it? And so the next generation of B-theorists went back to the drawing boards and devised an ingenious twist to the plot. Reality is indeed tenseless and, yes, passage is an illusion. But, they claimed, there is nothing mysterious about this illusion or about its existence. It can be accounted for and even shown to be an outcome, a blessed outcome, of evolutionary processes. To act successfully we need to be equipped with A-beliefs, beliefs in which events are located with respect to the present. Reality is tenseless and there are no A-facts, so such beliefs cannot be grounded in A-facts. But that does not mean they are false or groundless. There are B-facts, tenseless relations, which endow A-beliefs and A-utterances with their meaning and truth. With the manifold of A-beliefs in place and solidly anchored to the unchanging, stable ground of B-facts, we can enjoy its uses, position ourselves at the right places at the right times, time our actions so that theyare efficacious, but without having to carry the metaphysically superfluous baggage of A-facts. The new theory offers, as Mellor puts it (1998: 23), a trade inof tensed facts for tensed beliefs, an exchange which allows us to confine tense to the only place in which it is needed—our heads. Tense is indeed an illusion, but one we live with happily, even thankfully.
Note, however, that the new B-theory acknowledges the existence of a substantial gap between how things appear and how they are in reality— they appear to be tensed, but in reality, as conceived by the theory, they are tenseless. And as effective as accounting for this gap may be, it is inevitably accompanied by an apologetic undertone.
That is not how things stood when the B-theory was expounded originally, claim contemporary thinkers such as Dieks (2006) and Oaklander (2012)2.
The theory’s theses were perhaps surprising but were certainly not viewed as conflicting with experience. Tense and passage were never said to be illusions. Rather, they were shown to be something other than what naïve understanding makes them out to be. Instead of the notion that passage and tense consist of something that passes, some “moving Now”, the B-theory offered an explanation of how they originate with tenseless relations.
But something went wrong. An attendant thesis to the original theory’s tenseless ontology was that a tenseless language, one which corresponds to how things really are, can be devised. Soon enough, however, it became clear that a tenseless language is bound to remain an unrealizable fantasy, and the original theory was abandoned for the sake of the new one, which embraces tense as part of language while denying it ontological status. Thus, a theory purporting to harmonize with experience was displaced by a new version in which the absence of such harmony is admitted but shown to be harmless. Now we are witnessing a revival of the original spirit of the B-theory. The new wave consists of renditions of the theory that pride themselves on meshing perfectly with experience. Accusations claiming the existence of gaps between how the theory conceives reality and how reality is experi- enced are flatly rejected. There is even a re-evaluation of the feasibility of a tenseless language3. This chapter is devoted to Oaklander’s defense of the
old B-theory.4 Oaklander calls the theory he defends the B/R theory (after
Broad and Russell, who pioneered the view), and I will follow suit.
In the B/R theory the world is dynamic, just as it appears to be. Temporal relations are indeed tenseless, but they are not static. Oaklander reverts to capital letters to distinguish the old B-theory’s dynamic TENSEless relations from the static tenseless relations of the new B-theory. Here, too, I will follow him. In the new B-theory we are subject to a constant and inescapable illusion, not to say, error—that of taking the world to be dynamic when in fact it is a frozen block. Thus, the bulk of the effort expended by new B-theorists goes into accounting for how a static tenseless world gives rise to the dynamic
experience of flow. The old B-theory, and Oaklander’s B/R theory, will have none of this. The task is not to offer excuses for the theory’s deviation from how we experience temporal relations, but to show that what we actually experience are TENSEless relations.
To further explain this, Oaklander invokes what he calls, again following Broad, The Principle of Pickwickian Senses:
According to this principle, the proper analysis of a phenomenon or a concept may not be what commonsense implicitly and unknowingly takes it to be, since the implicit analysis, if in fact there is one, may be subject to dialectical difficulties and not hold up to critical examination. The Pickwickian sense of a concept, although perhaps not intuitive, has the advantage that it is quite certain that there is something that answers to it, “whereas with the other definitions of the same entities this cannot be shown to be so” (1924: 93). (Oaklander 2014: 5)
Experience is not faulty. But uncritical appeal to it may lead to unwarranted conclusions. Thus, naïve, pre-critical common sense may tacitly acquiesce to the notion that “only the present is real” and mistakenly construe the ontology underpinning our temporal experience as consisting of A-facts, of a “moving Now” that renders ontologically superior the events it visits. It is not that experience introduces us to a kind of ontological hierarchy in which present events are ontologically distinguished from those that are not present. It is that common sense, tacitly or explicitly, gleans such distinctions from experience.
But critical examination, which goes beyond common sense, reveals that no such distinctions are to be found in experience. Critical examination does not encounter the properties of presentness, pastness, or futurity in experience or in the events experienced, at any rate, not the tensed properties championed by common sense. Our experience of passage is not an illusion. But it is not what common sense is prone to make of it. One should shun the errors of pre-critical thinking but remain a realist about passage by construing temporal relations as dynamic TENSEless relations. By prompting us to be realists in this way, critical examination earns us “the real truth that underlies the vague facts we start off with” (Oaklander 2014: 7–8).
Let me at this point digress for a moment to assess Oaklander’s criticism of my analysis of the tenseless/tensed debate.5 Oaklander levels two principal
charges against me: one, that I fail to recognize the Principle of Pickwickian Senses; and second, that I overlook a third metaphysics of time, the old B-theory. I am more than willing to admit to the second charge. My target in Time and Realism as well as other publications was indeed current views, namely, the A- and the new B-theories. I still hold that everything I said about the new
B-theory and about the nature of the A–new B-theory debate stands, and there is nothing in what Oaklander writes that indicates he would disagree. But it is now emerging that the old B-theory, thought falsified and forgotten, was eulogized prematurely and must be re-engaged. The bulk of what follows is devoted to the old B-theory. My conclusion will be that despite its merits, it too is untenable, and that my former claim that the A–B theory debate must be superseded by a phenomenological inquiry is revalidated.
As for the first charge, I must reject it. I have not and do not defend a common-sense view of time, when this is taken to denote some naïve view that remains on the level of pre-critical, vague conceptions. I, too, think that critical examination leads to a better understanding of time, and that, as will be seen, on some issues this new understanding deviates signifi- cantly from our naïve, pre-critical thinking. But I disagree with Oaklander that the Pickwickian principle distinguishes “between commonsense and ontology.” Why ontology? Why must that be what the Pickwickian principle contrasts common sense with? The contrast should be with any analysis that promotes our understanding of the concept. And it certainly must not be with any phenomenologically unviable analysis, as the one suggested, I will argue, by the old B-theory. Thus, to reject the old B-theory is not to reject the Pickwickian principle, but to favor a different analysis of time as the source for the clarity that is absent from the common-sense apprehension of it. As I hope to show, far from indicating a failure to appreciate the significance of the Pickwickian principle, I think the alternative I propose is a good example of how to implement it.
Before proceeding, let me note that Oaklander’s specific objections are all offshoots of one of the above two main criticisms. To give an example, when Oaklander says that “to assume at the outset that the tensed and the tenseless views agree on the existence of ‘tenseless relations’ and only disagree about the existence of tensed relations is to misunderstand the metaphysical dispute in the philosophy of time” (p. 16), the reason he gives is that the B/R theory’s TENSEless relations cannot be part of such an agreement. In other words, the agreement I pointed out indeed exists, but only between the tensed and the tenseless theory (the new B-theory), and not with the TENSEless theory. Oaklander’s objection, then, is that my analysis overlooked TENSEless relations, a fault, it must be said, it shares with new B-theorists, who are thus also guilty of misunderstanding the metaphysical dispute in the philosophy of time. In what follows I respond to these kinds of charges by responding to Oaklander’s two chief criticisms. Oaklander claims that on my construal of the tenseless view, the relations that supposedly obtain between events are not even temporal. Events turn out to constitute a C-series, not a B-series. Oaklander’s critical remarks about Laurie Paul’s position suggest that he indeed believes that the new B-theory
can hardly be called a theory of time because the static relations it takes to obtain between events are not temporal. By contrast, the axes around which the B-theory revolves are dynamic TENSEless relations. My analysis, he states, begs the question: it targets tenseless relations that are not even temporal and then proceeds to criticize the tenseless view for not succeeding to capture the essence of time.
Needless to say, Oaklander continues, this maneuver cannot be effective against the old B-theory. Dynamic TENSEless relations grant us, as part of reality and not merely of how we experience things, all the temporality we are familiar with from experience.
But, of course, whether or not the old B-theory delivers the goods is the key question here. We need a theory of time that is phenomenologically viable, one which does not harbor gaps between the way things appear to us and the way they really are. So the question is whether the original B-theory, in contrast with its successor (and, as I argued at the time, with the A-theory), offers an account of time which harmonizes our experience with reality. If it does, then this theory is very attractive indeed, and it would be difficult, and superfluous, to come up with a reason to reject it.