On Time chez Dummett

TL;DR

The paper explores philosophical connections between Dummett's views on time and aspects of physics, especially quantum theory, highlighting implications for perception, multiverse uncertainty, and the nature of temporal truth.

Contribution

It offers a novel analysis linking Dummett's philosophical ideas with contemporary interpretations of quantum mechanics and the nature of time.

Findings

Perceptual processing supports a 'common now' concept across space.

Subjective uncertainty relates to the impossibility of a complete temporal description.

Statements about the past may lack definitive truth values due to undecidability.

Abstract

I discuss three connections between Dummett's writings about time and philosophical aspects of physics. The first connection (Section 2) arises from remarks of Dummett's about the different relations of observation to time and to space. The main point is uncontroversial and applies equally to classical and quantum physics. It concerns the fact that perceptual processing is so rapid, compared with the typical time-scale on which macroscopic objects change their observable properties, that it engenders the idea of a 'common now', spread across space. The other two connections are specific to quantum theory, as interpreted along the lines of Everett. So for these two connections, the physics side is controversial, just as the philosophical side is. In Section 3, I connect the subjective uncertainty before an Everettian 'splitting' of the multiverse to Dummett's suggestion, inspired by McTaggart, that a complete, i.e. indexical-free description of a temporal reality is impossible. And in Section 4, I connect Barbour's denial that time is real---a denial along the lines of Everett, rather than McTaggart---to Dummett's suggestion that statements about the past are not determinately true or false, because they are not effectively decidable.