On the radio....

Ah, so a little while back I posted about wishing philosophers did more to get their work 'out there'. In the spirit of putting my money where my mouth is, I've worked with the University on promoting some of my work about trust. The first notable output from this was a press release. You can read it here.

I felt ok about that. After all, it's in a medium I'm familiar with. But then....

I realise that in reality it's no big deal, but after that I had the opportunity to go and speak about the work on BBC radio Nottingham. The interview itself was fun--I hope listeners enjoyed it!

But two things really struck me. First--and it was a useful reminder--was just how insignificant me and my work are to folks as they go about their everyday lives. We (/I?) aren't a staple. Where what scientists say is probably held up as quite important, or at least interesting, it's a bit less clear that we can say the same about philosophy. Now that's not the fault of the people who don't do the philosophy! We've just done such a bad job as a discipline at getting ourselves into their lives, that we've allowed ourselves to be thought of as less relevant than we really are.

Second, and this was a bit less fun, was the reminder of the challenges that we can all face when in a novel environment. I've never gone on live radio before, and it's safe to say that I'd have benefited from training and practice. So in the hopes that this wasn't my first and last chance to do something like that, I think I need to locate some media training and work out a bit more of a plan. But in any case, a nice reminder. We often put students in novel positions (1st years away from home for the first time; personal tutees being expected to form a professional relationship with a tutor for the first time). It's always good to be reminded of just how daunting that can be.

[Updated: for a month or so, you can listen to me warble on, here [1:25:20 onwards].]

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.