McTaggart's Paradox

R.D. Ingthorsson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317195818
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

McTaggart's argument for the unreality of time, first published in 1908, set the agenda for 20th-century philosophy of time. Yet there is very little agreement on what it actually says - nobody agrees with the conclusion, but still everybody finds something important in it. This book presents the first critical overview of the last century of debate on what is popularly called "McTaggart's Paradox". Scholars have long assumed that McTaggart's argument stands alone and does not rely on any contentious ontological principles. The author demonstrates that these assumptions are incorrect - McTaggart himself explicitly claimed his argument to be dependent on the ontological principles that form the basis of his idealist metaphysics. The result is that scholars have proceeded to understand the argument on the basis of their own metaphysical assumptions, duly arriving at very different interpretations. This book offers an alternative reading of McTaggart's argument, and at the same time explains why other commentators arrive at their mutually incompatible interpretations. It will be of interest to students and scholars with an interest in the philosophy of time and other areas of contemporary metaphysics.

1 The Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315559636-1

J. M. E. McTaggart’s infamous argument for the unreality of time, popularly known as McTaggart’s Paradox, is undeniably a centrepiece of 20th-century philosophy of time, for better or for worse. His distinction between the so called A and B series put into sharper contrast than ever before the two competing views of time that we now know as the A and B views of time.¹ H also mounted what still count as the most important objections against each view: (i) that the A series is contradictory and (ii) that there is no change in the B series. Hardly anybody accepts McTaggart’s final conclusion that time is unreal, but proponents of the A view tend to accept the validity of his objection to the B view, and proponents of the B view tend to accept the validity of his objection to the A view, although nobody accepts that their own view is in any danger. However, McTaggart’s analysis of the appearance of time in terms of the A and B series is widely accepted as valid and true, even by his most devout critics. For instance, it served as the inspiration for modern tense logic, through the work of J. S. Findlay (1941) and Arthur Prior (1967), who both firmly denied the validity of McTaggart’s final conclusion.

The controversy surrounding the argument revolves around the fact that, although everyone thinks McTaggart is wrong to conclude that time is unreal, they disagree about why he is wrong. Proponents of the A view think he hasn’t shown that their view is contradictory, but agree that there is no change in the B series. Proponents of the B view insist that there is change in the B series, but agree that the A series is contradictory. The dispute is thus partly about the validity of the argument, but also, obviously, about what the argument actually says.

The debate has been characterised by a strange incommensurability of views. Philosophers of different convictions do not just disagree, but seem unable to state clearly why it is that they disagree, wherefore the discussion usually ends up in the kind of stalemate situation here described by Quentin Smith: The bold conjecture of this book is that the incommensurability of views has arisen because the argument was received in the wrong way from the beginning and thus was and continues to be misunderstood. To be more precise, it has been assumed that McTaggart’s argument does not rely on any contentious metaphysical premises and should therefore be valid independently of whether an A or B view of time is adopted. However, when it is read in that way, proponents of both views find the argument incomplete, and in their attempt to either criticise or support the argument, tend to understand it on the basis of their particular metaphysical framework and arrive at mutually incompatible readings. I think I can conclusively demonstrate that McTaggart does explicitly rely on major metaphysical premises, what those premises are, and thus arrive at an unambiguous reading of what exactly he argues. Furthermore, I can explain how the proponents of the A and B views, respectively, have misunderstood him—each in their own way—and consequently why they are unable to understand the viewpoint of the other. But before I develop that conjecture, let me complete the historical background.

Indeed, a reader of the literature on McTaggart’s paradox might well come away with an impression of futility, a sense that the debate repeatedly ends in the same impasse, with the tensers predictably making a certain move and the detensers predictably responding with a certain countermove

(Smith 1994: 202)

Origins and Initial Reception

McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time first appeared in 1908, in the form of a journal article in Mind. Almost 20 years later, in 1927, it reappeared as Ch. 33, ‘Time’, in the posthumously published 2nd Volume of McTaggart’s masterpiece The Nature of Existence. I will confine my discussion to the later mature version. In what follows, I will refer to the two volumes as NE I & NE II and make use of its organisation into seven books, 67 chapters, and 913 sections, for more precise references, using the abbreviations Bk., Ch., and § to indicate each.

There are those who argue that the differences between the two versions are important and overlooked (e.g. Kristóf Nyíri 2008), but McTaggart himself says that the mature version is “pretty nearly” identical to the paper in Mind (§334, footnote 1), and this is echoed by Paul Marhenke (1935). I would say that in so far as there is a difference, then it is all in favour of the mature version, both in terms of what is added and what is removed. The additions consist of answers to criticisms levelled at the first version and discussion of views that emerged only after McTaggart wrote the journal article, such as Bertrand Russell’s view of change (1915) and C. D. Broad’s growing block theory (1923). The original article addresses the C series in more detail than anything found in Ch. 33, ‘Time’, but this is only because McTaggart then devotes six whole chapters to the discussion of the C series in NE II (Chs. 44–9). I’ll address this issue in more detail in Ch. 4 (of this book).

What is perhaps the most important difference is that in the original article McTaggart argues that the attempt to resolve the contradiction involved in the A series gives rise both to a vicious circle and to a separate vicious regress (McTaggart 1908: 468–9), while in the mature version there is only a vicious regress. The vicious circle is supposed to arise when one tries to resolve the contradiction of events being future, present, and past in the A series by again invoking the A series. This argument is dropped in The Nature of Existence, presumably because McTaggart has realised that his own metaphysical system is built on so many primitive notions (for instance, existence, reality, substance, quality, relation, etc.), i.e. notions that cannot be defined, that he would be unable to accuse anyone of circularity who took tense to be a primitive notion, without becoming himself vulnerable to the same charge. Indeed, in the mature version he himself declares that he thinks that tenses are “simple and indefinable” (§327) and stresses that there is no vicious circle involved in the difficulties he thinks he is exposing (§332: footnote 1). To my mind, the original journal article is only an incomplete draft of the mature version.

There was an immediate reaction to the initial paper, for instance, by Victoria Welby (1909) and Hugh Reyburn (1913), but the debate didn’t acquire any serious momentum until after the publication of the two volumes of NE in 1921 and 1927. McTaggart’s death in 1925 also served to renew interest in his philosophical works, e.g. by the publication of a biographical overview of his life and works (G. Lowes Dickinson 1931) and a collection of papers edited by S. V. Keeling (McTaggart 1934), not to forget C. D. Broad’s detailed study of McTaggart in the two volumes of Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy (1933 & 1938). These works combined cemented the idea that McTaggart’s works were indeed of great philosophical interest.

The Development of the Debate

The debate about McTaggart’s Paradox can be divided into a number of phases. There was the initial reaction to the 1908 paper, as already mentioned, but after the publication of NE II in 1927, the discussion acquired a little more momentum until the advent of WW II. Of particular interest in this period are the works of R. B. Braithwaite (1928), Broad (1928, 1933 & 1938), J. Macmurray (1928), J. A. Gunn (1929), D. W. Gotshalk (1930), Keeling (1933), Martha Hurst (1934), D. S. Mackay (1935), P. Marhenke (1935), Louise Robinsson Heath (1936), Susan Stebbing (1936), M. F. Cleugh (1937), Findlay (1941), and Patterson (1941).

These first two phases of the debate are characterised by greater heterogeneity than what comes later, which is perhaps what can be expected after the publication of an argument of this kind. All the ideas that are still being discussed about what might be wrong with McTaggart’s argument are mentioned in this period. However, one can complain that they are not always very clearly stated. One can suspect that these writers were struggling to find ways to formulate explicitly and defend what they before had intuitively taken for granted but were now forced by McTaggart’s argument to address and make explicit. As we know, it can take generations to arrive at a clear statement of things like that. On the other hand, one can complain of works in the later phases of the debate that, in an effort to increase clarity, have become so technical and/or formal and abstract that they have become difficult to penetrate.

There is less focus on semantic issues in the first two periods compared to later and, with the exception of Broad and Patterson, the authors tend to think that the argument relies on unwarranted assumptions that are part of McTaggart’s idealist metaphysics. What exactly those assumptions are is not always clear, and it is never made clear where to find them stated in McTaggart’s works. Rather, the authors are speculating about what the assumptions must be, in an attempt to arrive at a reading of the argument that makes sense to them. There is a perfectly good explanation to this. His idealist metaphysics didn’t appear clearly stated in print until 1921, when NE I came out.

Of all the works produced during the first two periods, only Broad’s writings are still regularly referred to in the contemporary debate. This is unfortunate. My own particular favourites are the papers by Reyburn (1913), Gotshalk (1930), and Marhenke (1935). Indeed, I think we can find in the works of these three writers the embryos (and often much more than that) to nearly all the worries and solutions that have since been discussed, as well as some worries that have been sadly overlooked by later writers, including the one which I think is the most important: McTaggart’s presupposition th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Introduction
• 2 The Metaphysics
• 3 The Argument
• 4 The C Series
• 5 The Defenses
• 6 The Objections
• 7 The B View and the Problem of Change
• 8 The A View and the Problem of Tense
• 9 The Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index