X-phi about time: a reply to Hodroj, Latham, and Miller’s “The moving open future, temporal phenomenology, and temporal passage”

Abstract

Hodroj, Latham, and Miller use X-phi methods to investigate why people tend to represent time as dynamic (i.e., as (robustly) passing), even though, as deflationists maintain, they do not perceive time as passing. More specifically, what the authors investigate is the hypothesis that people believe time is dynamic because they believe the future is objectively open (moving open future hypothesis, MOFH); they find no evidence for the relevant associations. They conclude that a different (temporally aperspectival replacement, TARH) hypothesis based on non-X-phi proposals by Hoerl (Hoerl, 2018) and Sattig (Sattig, 2019a, 2019b) is worth investigating further by X-phi methods. The authors’ empirical methodology in this and other papers is especially welcome given widespread suspicion of purely a priori methods (those of “armchair” or “free-range” metaphysics). Yet, it is not always obvious how best to interpret these kinds of findings. In this reply, I express some worries about the paper’s framing regarding its empirical findings, including their relation to the debate about temporal perception. I also consider whether the responses recorded in these surveys are best interpreted as indicating that people stably (even tacitly) represent time in ways articulated by metaphysicians. I take it to be another facet of the value of X-phi work on time that it raises these interpretative (and related metametaphysical) issues, whose relevance to disputes over proper methodology in the philosophy of time is easy to overlook.