John D. Norton (of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh) wrote an essay back in 2012 called “What is Time? Or, Just What do Philosophers of Science Do?” I figure that as an attempt to define a word it’s LH material, but it also confirms me in my belief that philosophers think they have a better grasp on language than they do. He begins:
There is a competition, the “Flame Challenge,” underway at the time I write these words for the best answer to the question “What is time?” The target audience is eleven year old children and children of this age will be the ultimate judges. […]
The challenge is introduced with a perfunctory and familiar disclaimer. First comes a celebrated quote from Augustine
“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”
– Saint AugustineThe sentence that follows arrives with reliability that night follows day follows night and was offered, I expect, without reflection. Doesn’t everyone know that…
It’s a deep question, and it has no simple answer.
Is that really so?
He goes on to say that “the question ‘What is time?’ as asked is not really a scientific question at all”:
Scientists trying to answer this question will almost invariably start by trying to deflect the question. If you ask them the question, you may first get the rather superficial quips:
“Time is what clocks measure.”
“Time is what stops everything happening all at once.”
They are not real answers, but merely amusing retorts that often serve to quieten an annoying questioner.
A more serious attempt to answer will tell you not what time is but about some interesting temporal phenomenon.
In his special theory of relativity, Einstein showed that different observers can disagree on which of two events happened first and that can happen with neither being wrong. Or in his general theory of relativity, we learn that space and time together have a geometry and that its curvature is gravity. Or we learn from thermal physics that time increases with a thermodynamic quantity, entropy, under the guidance of the Second Law.
This may satisfy you. Or you might press harder and complain that these responses only report some facts about time. But they do not say what time IS. What IS time? you insist.
This display of stubbornness will likely be met with awkwardness. The conversation may end with a cough or another deflection. The answering scientists will be able to proceed only if they adopt a different style of analysis. That is, they will need to approach the question “What is time?” like a philosopher.
How do philosophers approach this question? Or at least how do philosophers of science of my stripe do it? They are much less confused by the question. They see that the core difficulty is that “What is time?” is itself a bogus question or, to use the more technical term beloved by philosophers, it is a pseudo-question.
The grammatical form of the question makes it look like other simple questions such as:
“What is the Atlantic Ocean?”
“What are submarines?”
“What are stars?”
“What is the Leidenfrost effect?”All these questions admit straighforward answers: a certain body of water; a boat that goes underwater; very hot balls of gas; what happens when a water drop is suspended above a very hot plate by a layer of vapor.
The question “What is time?” has no corresponding answer. The “IS” question demands that we identify time with something else typically but not necessarily better known to us, much as we identify submarines with boats that go underwater. The very asking of the question in this illicit form is what makes time mysterious.
He complains that any attempt to define time “degenerates into a circular word game.” What he does not seem to realize is that that is true of all attempts to define words. Keep asking “but what is that?” and you will just wind up with more words. There is no escape from language; to quote Godard/Wittgenstein:
… We could say that the limits of language are the limits of the world… that the limits of my language are the limits of my world. And in that respect, whatever I say must limit the world, must make it finite.
Time is, of course, mysterious, but Norton has not (as far as I can see) rendered it either more or less so; he has just scored some philosophical points in a game that does not interest me.
He goes on to say that “the question ‘What is time?’ as asked is not really a scientific question at all”:
I wonder how he might define “a scientific question “.
Presumably it would be easier to answer than an unscientific question.
A dog chases its tail; a bird flies into a mirror.
Somewhere or other quite recently, I was reading an essay that soberly asserted that “time” was itself a modern concept, due to Newton or something. (It may have been one of those Eon things which seem all very authoritative and wise until you actually start thinking about them.)
Given that there are numerous language families of impressive time-depth with unequivocal tense systems, this is a perfectly inane thesis. And of course, there are no natural languages which altogether lack words referring to time.
It is true that plenty of languages don’t have a “word for ‘time'”; many African languages have clearly borrowed their words for “time” from (ultimately) Arabic, for example, including, naturally, Kusaal. But then Kusaal has no “word for ‘colour'” either, and that doesn’t prevent it from having perfectly good colour terms.
You’d think that philosophers, at least, would have realised by now that a concept can be perfectly useful even when it defies any neat definition. Just as well, really …
And in fact, plenty of philosophers have made this grand intuitive leap, St Ludwig (obviously) among them. I suspect that this Norton is just not very good at his job. One should not judge all philosophers by his performance.
Planck time is roughly 5.4 * 10 to the -44 seconds; we cannot define or observe any kind of sequence of events or change below this level. So time is a sequence of Planck units, or, in the language of the normals, one damn thing after another.
Following St. Augustine’s befuddlement, we might observe that self-conscious reflection on the nature of capital-T Time tends to evoke utterances that sound vaguely poetic and perhaps profound but also tend towards incoherence upon closer parsing. E.g.,
We are made of it, and if we give submission
Among our chances there’s a chance we can choose
And if we take it by uncertainty’s permission,
Then it’s impossible to lose
https://genius.com/Richard-hell-and-the-voidoids-time-lyrics
Time is what stops everything happening at once.
It seems deeply unfair to pick on “time” for this kind of treatment. You could perform the same kind of rigmarole with “space”, “matter”, “energy” … or, come to that, with “colour.” Or “knowledge.”
In fact, virtually any abstract noun …
Come to that, how about “What is ‘three’?” is itself a bogus question?
Units with names like Space, Time, and Causation are a staple of undergraduate philosophy. All three offer immediately accessible challenges for the beginner, kindling a sense of vertiginous unknowing that perdures through the entire philosophical career. (The aptest collective noun, according to one colleague: a baffle of philosophers.)
Yes, DE: we could of course readily resort to matter, life, person, world, mind, and so on if the dizziness ever threatened to recede. (Which it doesn’t.) But like tinnitus, this vertigo is only a problem if thinking makes it so. (Which it sometimes does.)
»Das issen Knochenberg,« sagte sie und half mit dem Daumen nach. Viele und Harry widersprachen, ohne genau zu sagen, was südlich der Batterie zuhauf lag.
Störtebekers Antwort lag, obgleich frisch ausgesprochen, schon seit Wochen bereit: »Wir müssen das Zuhaufliegen in der Offenheit des Seins, das Austragen der Sorge und das Ausdauern zum Tode als das volle Wesen der Existenz denken.«
Tulla wollte es genauer wissen: »Und ich sag Dir, die kommen direkt aus Stutthof, wetten?«
Störtebeker konnte sich geografisch nicht festlegen lassen. Er winkte ab und wurde ungeduldig: »Quatscht doch nicht immer mit Euren abgeklapperten naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffen. Allenfalls kann man sagen: Hier ist Sein in Unverborgenheit angekommen.«
—
That’s a heap of bones, she said, giving additional support by pointing at it. Viele and Harry disagreed, without saying exactly what it was that lay in a pile south of the artillery post.
Störtebekers answer, although apparently spontaneous, had already been prepared weeks previously: “We must consider in-a-pile-laying in the openness of Being, bringing away of worry and holding on until death as the complete nature of Existence.”
Tulla thought more precision was needed. “And I’m telling you, the bones have come right from Stutthof, want to bet on it?”
Störtebeker could not allow himself to be pinned down geographically. He shook his head and said impatiently “Why do you keep on blabbing about your obsolete scientific concepts? In any case one can say: Being has arrived at Unconcealment here.”
Günter Grass, Hundejahre
well, man, could it be that the girls and boys
are trying to be heard above your noise?
and the lonely voice of youth cries:
“what is three?”
5.4 * 10 to the -44 seconds; we cannot define or observe any kind of sequence of events or change below this level.
I find these days about ten minutes is my limit for ‘sequence of events’. Did I turn the iron off? I’d better go back and check. Whereas the episode of the Christchurch earthquake — 4:35 am September 4th 2010 — is seared in lucid memory.
@AntC, 10 minutes is about 1.11 * 10 to the 46th Planck units. So you’re doing very well indeed if you can follow that!
Planck time is roughly 5.4 * 10 to the -44 seconds; we cannot define or observe any kind of sequence of events or change below this level. So time is a sequence of Planck units, or, in the language of the normals, one damn thing after another.
I disagree with that last sentence. There’s good reason to think that somewhere around that time scale (and the associated scales of length, mass, energy, etc.), current theories won’t be valid, and maybe even that spacetime will be “foamy” and a sequence of events will be even harder to define than it is in present quantum mechanics. But it doesn’t mean that time is a sequence of Planck units.
I agree, though, that time is one damn thing after another.
(The aptest collective noun, according to one colleague: a baffle of philosophers.)
A Loveliness of Ladybugs
A picture of this wonderful concept is here:
https://www.ctdaylily.com/productsa/p/a-loveliness-of-ladybugs-fall
Some collectives are timeless.
David Eddyshaw: “You’d think that philosophers, at least, would have realised by now that a concept can be perfectly useful even when it defies any neat definition.”
John D. Norton: “What does this failure mean? Does it mean that this innocent question has pressed us to confront a dark and shameful chasm in our knowledge? Hardly.” Followed by a paragraph of explanation from a fake 11 year old’s point of view.
Some random thoughts:
The problem is not how to define the word “time”, but what is the concept behind it.
“Time is what clocks measure.” This was a definition from my undergraduate physics textbook. It was a source of considerable amusement over the years. But in fact, it is a reasonably deep answer. Maybe ultimately incorrect or limited, but not trivial.
Many physicists, including those not prone to philosophical aspirations, do feel that there is a necessity to clarify what we mean by time at a fundamental level. Philosophical denials as well as suggestions that 11 year olds know all there is to know about it somehow are not convincing.
Norton: “Perhaps we might be assured that time is really just one of the dimensions of a four dimensional spacetime manifold… What makes some candidate four-dimensional manifold a spacetime manifold as opposed merely to some four-dimensional space with no association with time?” — Metric signature. Satisfied? Neither am I.
As far as I’ve been able to observe, a linguistic philosopher’s “pseudo-question” coincides almost perfectly with what everyone else calls a “philosophical question”. The claim is that all such questions are so misleading in their presuppositions that they need to be unasked and reduced to studies of word usage. In which case, why not just leave the job to lexicographers? (And perhaps consider extending the exercise to languages other than the philosopher’s L1?)
I think it’s a trick question, in that it presumes an answer formed as a reasonably readable sentence starting something like “Time is…”, with no presuppositions. You’d need a story, followed by “… in these circumstances, we say that time…”
It reminds me of the less difficult case of mathematical definitions, which depend on a long chain of other definitions. How do you give a concise, naive answer to “what is a fibration”? (The mathematicians here could come up with worse examples, I am sure.) At least there there is no uncertainty over the meaning of the terms, once a definition has been stated.