Ingthorsson Rögnvaldur D. - McTaggarts Paradox

The method applied in this project merits a brief comment because it is not often applied in philosophy, as far as I can tell, and it is relevant for the validity of the conclusions reached in this book. The inspiration for this plan grew out of my work as a lecturer in research methods in the social and health sciences and out of an encounter with the work-process used in systematic reviewing in the health sciences within the Cochrane collaboration (Higgins & Green 2011).

Obviously, the method used in this project is only inspired by the Cochrane method, because, for one thing, philosophy doesnt deal with numeric data generated by objective tools of measurement in randomized controlled studies with a double-blind research design; nor can the results of philosophical investigations be standardized and compiled for statistical meta-analysis. What I found inspiring is the way in which the review process starts with the construction of a detailed protocol in which it is specified in advance which research questions one is looking to answer, what counts as relevant literature, how to go about finding all relevant literature, as well as how one is going to extract the relevant answers to the research question and analyse them.

My own adaptation of this process was to treat my earlier study of McTaggart, and of that limited sample of literature that I scrutinised then, as a pilot study whose results provided a base for the construction of a research protocol, which I would use to scrutinise what I earlier left out. The research grant proposal submitted to the Swedish Research Council was then based on that protocol, specifying and explaining the initial research questions, and how I meant to go about answering them.

Once the grant was awarded, the first step was to compile a list of everything ever written in English about McTaggarts argument for the unreality of time. I searched with the help of various indexes and search engines such as Philosophers Index, JStor, Web of Science, Search Elite, and Google Scholar. It quickly became evident that philosophical literature is poorly indexed. For instance, searches using specific terms such as McTaggart or unreality of time fail to find monographs in which McTaggarts argument is a subject. They might perhaps be indexed as philosophy of time, but so is every other book on the subject of time that never mentions McTaggart. Even using the term philosophy will exclude relevant hits, because not all philosophical literature is indexed as philosophy. In the end I simply searched for McTaggart, and Time on every search engine I could think of and then manually skimmed through the approximately 11.000 hits to exclude the obviously irrelevant. I further reduced the number of relevant hits by reading abstracts and then ended with around 850 journal articles, books, and book reviews.

Going through the list in chronological order, I first searched for items available electronically. For those not available in that way, e.g. all the monographs, I sought to identify where I could find them. Living in Oxford, with the Bodleian Library at hand, was a gift.

The next step was to construct a matrix that allowed me to categorise each item on the list as relevant, peripheral, or irrelevant, as well as to further categorise relevant and peripheral papers according to which research questions they provided answers to. Items categorised as irrelevant were those that did not contain a discussion of either the time argument or any issue related to it (say, the endurance/perdurance controversy or the reduction of tensed sentences to tenseless ones). An item counted as a discussion if it contained discernible arguments about some part of the argument or issue related to it, as opposed to merely mentioned the argument, or stated an opinion on it, or on related subjects, without attempting to justify it. Readings were categorised as peripheral if they did not explicitly discuss the time argument, but did discuss issues related to it, in the sense of discuss outlined earlier. Readings counted as relevant were those that explicitly discussed the time argument.