Exploring people’s beliefs about the experience of time

Jack Shardlow, Ruth Lee, Christoph Hoerl, Teresa McCormack, Patrick Burns, Alison Fernandes

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Philosophical debates about the metaphysics of time typically revolve around two contrasting views of time. On the A-theory, time is something that itself undergoes change, as captured by the idea of the passage of time; on the B-theory, all there is to time is events standing in before/after or simultaneity relations to each other, and these temporal relations are unchanging. Philosophers typically regard the A-theory as being supported by our experience of time, and they take it that the B-theory clashes with how we experience time and therefore faces the burden of having to explain away that clash. In this paper, we investigate empirically whether these intuitions about the experience of time are shared by the general public. We asked directly for people’s subjective reports of their experience of time – in particular, whether they believe themselves to have a phenomenology as of time’s passing – and we probed their understanding of what time’s passage in fact is. We find that a majority of participants do share the aforementioned intuitions, but interestingly a minority do not.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1-23
Number of pages23
JournalSynthese
Early online date10 Jul 2020
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 10 Jul 2020

Bibliographical note

© The Author(s) 2020

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