Conor Husbands - The Temporality of Determinacy: Functional Relations in Metaphysics and Science

The way in which events in the world relate to the rules and laws which govern them has long been a matter of philosophical dogma. Both Ancient and modern thinking has embraced the uniformity and consistency of nature: the world does not fluctuate as if the caprices of a deity, but is orderly, causal, and intelligible to the mind. Prominent scholars have held that this intuitive precept requires exogenous rules and laws, acting on events from outside, quite separate from the systems they describe. Such rules and laws escape the ravages of time which affect these systems. They neither evolve nor change, no matter how profoundly the world metamorphoses: events occur in time, but laws stand outside of time, and the causes and forces which animate the world are the same for any epoch. Thus, some go so far as to label them eternal, as if to mimic Spinozas characterisation of substance. Nature evolves according to laws independent of timeand must, in order to be consistent. The alternative, it is claimed, would plunge the world into chaos, and unintelligibility to the human mind.

This commitment to the time-independence of laws has an important implication. It owes to the fact that laws are frequently taken to confer determinacy on events. If they are free from the dynamics of any given system, the determinacy they impart is atemporal. The subjection of an event to rules and laws is independent of time, and is in no sense a process. Events such as this unfold according to laws which are eternal, not evolving. In turn, if laws of nature are considered to be represented by functionsthe language of modern sciencethe variables they describe are determined once and for all to be as they are at each moment. It is for this reason that modern authors speculate that the time variable t can be expunged from these functions which quantify this evolution over time, and that the truth or falsity of the corresponding laws cannot become such as they will be, once were or are at any time, but always are so. They have no temporal structure.

The thesis of this book is the negation of this statement. It is not the case that the laws of nature are absolutely independent of time. Its argument for this conclusion adduces developments in the physical and non-physical sciences, as well as the commitments of certain philosophical schools, which force this atemporality conjecture to be jettisoned, and cast into relief a number of phenomena whose mode of determinationthat is, their subjection to the rules of scientific theorydoes, in fact, display a temporal structure. These phenomena conform to laws which evolve with them, and which, rather than acting from an unworldly eternity, belong also to the systems they make up.