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Conceptualizations of Time
Edited by Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk
[Human Cognitive Processing 52] 2016
► pp. 3–24

Temporal Reference Without the Concept of Time?

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In this article I argue that whatever the preferred construal of time is, it is always further reducible to one that assumes tenseless reality. In particular, I argue for the superiority of an approach according to which the differences between the future, present and past are quantitative on the level of basic building blocks over a more intuitive view on which the differences are, as on the surface level, qualitative. I demonstrate that a qualitative construal is reducible to a quantitative one and that as such the latter fares better with the B-theoretic, tenseless outlook on reality.

Keywords: A-theory, B-theory, Default Semantics, Direct-Quantitative View, Modal-Contextualist View, supervenience
Published online: 14 June 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.52.01jas
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