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Plenty to come: making sense of Correia's and Rosenkranz's growing block

Deng, Natalja (2021) Plenty to come: making sense of Correia's and Rosenkranz's growing block. [Preprint]

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Abstract

Fabrice Correia’s and Sven Rosenkranz’s book Nothing to come: a defence of the growing block theory of time offers an incredibly rich and skillful defense of the growing block theory (GBT), a view of time that arguably has much intuitive appeal, and which has been under attack from many sides. Nonetheless, I have to report that the book’s tense-logical course of treatment has not worked for me; I still struggle with making sense of the GBT. This article begins by drawing out some implications of the book’s set up. First, the notion of existence in play here is not interpretable on the basis of ordinary usage. Second, it would be a mistake to take the tense-logical framework to have any metaphysical significance. I then articulate two main worries about their version of the GBT. The first worry takes a familiar shape: it is just hard to see how their view is dynamic in the relevant sense. The second worry is that the topic seems to have been changed. C&R’s logical system helps itself to key notions whose intended interpretation includes a solution to every metaphysical puzzle about the GBT, so that these puzzles are not so much addressed as enshrined in a formal system. That is, their view seems to answer the question of how language should behave, if the GBT were (somehow) true.

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Item Type: Preprint
Creators:
CreatorsEmailORCID
Deng, Nataljanmdeng@gmail.com0000-0001-5668-9271
Keywords: Growing block theory, metaphysics of time, eternalism
Subjects: General Issues > Scientific Metaphysics
Specific Sciences > Physics > Relativity Theory
Depositing User: Prof. Natalja Deng
Date Deposited: 28 Jun 2021 04:26
Last Modified: 28 Jun 2021 04:26
Item ID: 19245
Subjects: General Issues > Scientific Metaphysics
Specific Sciences > Physics > Relativity Theory
Date: 27 June 2021
URI: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/19245

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