Abstract
It is widely believed that relationism cannot make room for the possibility of intervals of time during which no changes occur. Benovsky has recently challenged this belief, arguing that relationists can account for the possibility of changeless time in much the same way as substantivalists do, thereby concluding that the two views are interchangeable for all theoretical purposes. This paper intends to defend the meaningfulness of the traditional dispute between substantivalists and relationists, by contending that the particular form of relationism on which Benovsky has based his criticism is in fact alien to that debate.
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Notes
This is true, in particular, of the classical or non-modal version of relationism. Relationists have recently tried to accommodate the possibility of changeless periods of time by developing a modal version of relationism, according to which time is a logical construction out of actual and possible events and their metrical relations (Bunge 1968; Forbes 1993; Burnor 2000. Cfr. also Le Poidevin 1993). However, we shall hereafter be exclusively concerned with non-modal relationism of the kind that is typically attributed to Leibniz in his controversy with Clarke (whether this was his last word about time is open to debate). Moreover, we shall focus solely on what substantivalism and relationism say about time, leaving aside their disagreement about space. Finally, we shall exclusively concentrate on the pre-relativistic versions of either view, thus leaving the complications introduced by relativistic physics aside.
This contention is itself debatable. Earman (1989: 11–15), for instance, enumerates at least three other ways substantivalism and relationism may differ. Firstly, while the former claims that space and time (or better space-time) possesses structures that support absolute motion, the latter denies it. Secondly, while the former contends that events and objects owe their mutual spatial and temporal (spatio-temporal) relations to the spatial and temporal (spatio-temporal) locations they occupy, the latter argues that such relations are unmediated and hold directly between objects and events. Finally, while the former can meaningfully attribute monadic and irreducible properties to spatial and temporal (spatio-temporal) points, the latter demands that all such attributions should be paraphrased away.
Whether he really succeeded in this task is contentious (Warmbrōd 2004). It is interesting to notice that, according to Benovsky, this is not the true moral of Shoemaker’s argumentation: rather, he contends, the possibility of Shoemaker’s world establishes the causal efficacy of the pure passage of time (Benovsky 2012).
This claim is presumably meant to avoid the objection that postulating a multiplicity of different simultaneity relations might appear too theoretically expensive to a relationist. However, Benovsky fails to justify it in a satisfactory way. He seems, in fact, to rely on something like the following argument: each event is simultaneous to some event or other, so if there were only one relation of simultaneity then all events would be simultaneous, and therefore there would exist just one class of simultaneity; hence, according to relationism there would exist only one instant, which is clearly not what relationists maintain (2011: 495). This argument, however, evidently relies on a false premise. Given any four events e 1, e 2, e 3, and e 4, in fact, it is perfectly possible that e 1 and e 2 stand in exactly the same simultaneity relation as the one obtaining between e 3 and e 4, even though e 1 and e 3 be not so related with one another. To argue otherwise is to confuse the binary relation of simultaneity with the relational property of belonging to a specified class of simultaneous events. For each class of simultaneity there exists exactly one such property, so if only one such property existed then indeed all events would have to be simultaneous; however, this by no means implies that one and the same simultaneity relation could not partition a given set of events into distinct equivalence classes.
This is admittedly a bit loose. Relations are abstract objects and, as such, they are inaccessible to empirical observation. Properly speaking, what we can observe is the fact that events temporally succeed, or are simultaneous to, one another. Purists are free to rephrase this whole discussion in terms of facts about temporal relations, rather than in terms of temporal relations as such. This will only make the argumentation more cumbersome, without any substantive gain.
See also Loemker 1969: 529, 544, 583.
This interpretation disagrees with a long-standing historiographical tradition, according to which Leibniz regarded space and time as perceptual contents, and more precisely as well-founded phenomena (Rescher 1979; Russell 1900). For a thorough defense of it see Hartz and Cover (1988) and Crockett (1999).
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Carl Hoefer and to two anonymous referees for their constructive comments.
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Mazzola, C. Still foes: Benovsky on relationism and substantivalism. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 6, 247–260 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-015-0132-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-015-0132-y