Conventionalism about time direction
Authors
Publication Date
2022-02Journal Title
Synthese
ISSN
0039-7857
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Volume
200
Issue
1
Language
en
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Farr, M. (2022). Conventionalism about time direction. Synthese, 200 (1) https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03540-1
Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>In what sense is the direction of time a matter of convention? In <jats:italic>The Direction of Time</jats:italic>, Hans Reichenbach makes brief reference to parallels between his views about the status of time’s direction and his conventionalism about geometry. In this article, I: (1) provide a conventionalist account of time direction motivated by a number of Reichenbach’s claims in the book; (2) show how forwards and backwards time can give equivalent descriptions of the world despite the former being the ‘natural’ direction of time; and (3) argue that this offers an important middle-ground position between existing realist and antirealist accounts of the direction of time.</jats:p>
Keywords
Original Research, All Things Reichenbach, Time, Direction of time, Conventionalism, Reichenbach, Past hypothesis
Identifiers
s11229-022-03540-1, 3540
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03540-1
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/334672
Rights
Licence:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Statistics
Total file downloads (since January 2020). For more information on metrics see the
IRUS guide.