Temporal error theory

Very pleased--nay, delighted!--that my 'An Error in Temporal Error Theory' is now forthcoming at the Journal of the American Philosophical Association (JAPA). The target of the paper is the idea of timelessness. There are some famous cases in the philosophical literature of philosophers looking to deny the reality of time and some more recent cases of physicists doing the same. One of the questions that hasn't really been asked, though, is what it would mean to deny the reality of time. Crudely, what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for reality to be timeless? There hasn't been much written on this, apart from one interesting paper by Kristie Miller and Sam Baron--'What is Temporal Error Theory?'

Much as I like Kristie and Sam's paper, I think that they err in spelling out the details. So, this paper looks to provide what I think is the correct account of what it would take for reality to be timeless. In a nutshell I claim it comes to this: temporal discourse--the sum of all present tensed sentences--is truth-apt, but false. There's a bit more nuance than that in the end, but that's a decent enough starting point. You can read a draft, here.

I'm hoping to do a bit more work on timelessness, building on this paper, as well as my 'Causation in a timeless world?'. The current plan is to work with Sam and Kristie and see where we get to collaboratively, rather than writing papers back and forth to each other. We'll see how that goes.

I should also note that I had a brilliant experience with JAPA. The referees were great (smart, timely and helpful) and the whole process was really well managed. Along with Ergo and the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, one of my favourite journals to deal with.