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completely clear what exactly Brown wants to argue for. He does not seem
to disagree that pictures are indeed misleading sometimes, for he himself
presents a number of examples in which this is the case. On the other
hand, none of the authors quoted by Brown seem to advocate the view
that pictures are always useless or misleading. So the point that they might
sometimes work as good evidence, or that they might sometimes substitute
a proof for a professional mathematician seems hardly controversial.
One aspect of the book that might be unsatisfactory is that sometimes
the author introduces too many different although related topics in a
single chapter. The discussion of the topics chosen is, as a rule, very brief
and does not go into any of them in depth. (This is, perhaps, unavoidable
in an introductory text like the book under review.) This might be good
for students, since it gives an overview of the field. But it might also convey the wrong impression that matters are all a bit too simple. This is, of
course, not good for students, and this is clearly not the authors intention.
It all seems to depends on how instructors and readers will use the book
in a class: it will be a good source if taken as a preliminary guide for a
deeper discussion, but it will be superficial if taken as the end of the story.
However, the author is careful enough to remind the reader several times
that there is a much broader and more complex discussion going on among
professional philosophers on the topics dealt with in this book.
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Brazil

MARCO RUFFINO

Jeremy Butterfield (ed.), The Arguments of Time, Oxford University Press,

Oxford, 1999, 253 pages, GBP 28.00.
The present volume is the contribution of the philosophy section of the
British Academy to its series of Centenary Monographs that intend to
highlight topics of important interest at the turn of the millenium. Its theme
is time a perennial source of philosophical puzzlement. The choice of
such a topic can be well understood. First, it is of sufficient interest for
contemporary philosophy. Second, it is controversial enough to warrant
a detailed philosophical discussion. And third, it is an interdisciplinary
subject par excellence, with strong connections to physics, but also to
psychology.
The nine essays can be roughly grouped into three parts, with many
connections between them. The first three are on philosophy, the next four
on physics, and of the remaining two one is on linguistics and one on
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psychology. From its ten authors, seven are from the UK (with five from
Oxford), two from the US, and one from the rest of the world. In a sense,
the central part are the physical chapters. They focus on the concept of
time in modern physics, in particular on the notorious problem of time in
quantum gravity. Thereby they intend to serve as a stimulus for a thorough philosophical discussion of these ideas. The book is carefully edited
and contains a short introduction which concisely reviews the various
contributions.
John Lucas argues that there is temporal becoming in an objective
sense. From a physical point of view, this means that there is an objective
irreversibility, in spite of the known fundamental laws of physics being
time-reversal invariant. Lucas claims that McTaggarts conclusion about
the unreality of time is fallacious and that philosophers should not use
the view from nowhen that he insinuates scientists to hold. For Lucas,
it is in particular the notorious collapse of the wave packet in quantum
theory, which seems to support his ideas. I shall say below more about the
consistency of this viewpoint.
Michael Tooley, on the other hand, claims that temporal becoming is
not fully objective. In this sense, his position deviates somewhat from that
of Lucas. As in many philosophical articles, emphasis is put on tensed
statements (a tensed location is a relation relative to the present). Tooley
argues that tenseless statements are more basic than tensed statements and
that tensed properties are only relational. Like in Lucas contribution, here
too the irreversible nature of the world is at least tacitly assumed.
Gregory Currie asks whether there is a literary philosophy of time, i.e.,
whether fiction can tell us anything reliable about the nature of time. This
would be in sharp contrast to a logico-philosophical philosophy of time,
according to which time can be understood only through physical theories.
He discusses an example that is often used to answer the above question in
the affirmative: In Marcel Prousts A la recherche du temps perdu there is a
well-known scene in which the taste of a madeleine dipped into tea causes
an involuntary memory to a similar experience made much earlier, leading
the proponent to the conclusion of the existence of a timeless essence.
Currie, however, presents convincing arguments that a literary philosophy
of time is impossible, basically because it can never achieve the same level
of credibility than physical theories of time with which it would have to
compete, a conclusion that I would regard as self-evident.
Opening the physical essays on time, Roberto Torretti reviews the concepts of time in the theories of special and general relativity. In particular,
he discusses at some length the possibilities of closed timelike curves, i.e.,
worldlines along which an observer could in principle travel via the future

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to its own past. In a sense, Torretti sets the stage for the following articles
on the quantisation of gravity through which these concepts of time are
transcended.
Julian Barbours contribution is devoted to a thorough discussion of
Machs principle in modern physics. He focuses on Machs principle of
time according to which time should not play an absolute role in fundamental physical theories. He shows how nonrelativistic theories can
implement this principle through the notion of the relative configuration
space. Such theories are invariant under reparametrisations of a time parameter, but Newtons time is recovered by the demand that the physical laws
assume the simplest form. This distinguished time arises from an average
over all the motions in the Universe. Barbour then shows that general relativity already obeys the Machian principle of time, and claims that this is
most important for its quantisation.
Jeremy Butterfield and Chris Isham, in their essay, discuss the emergence of standard time from quantum gravity. Here, emergence is used in
a non-temporal sense to avoid a circulus vitiosus. After a general discussion of the concept of emergence, the authors give an introduction into the
problem of time in quantum gravity. This problem arises because general
relativity employs a dynamical concept of time, whereas ordinary quantum
theory relies heavily on the presence of time as an absolute concept. As a
consequence, a straightforward unification of both does not contain any
time parameter at all. The discussion takes place mainly within the framework of quantum geometrodynamics, but the Euclidean programme of
quantum gravity is also touched upon. The authors critically review the
approaches that aim at a recovery of standard time within approximate
situations, the so-called semiclassical limit. They emphasise that the emergence of time is not a process in time. In the Euclidean programme, the
semiclassical approximation often leads to the wrong picture of the Universe emerging from nothing in a temporal way. The authors advertise the
topic of their contribution to philosophers of time as a largely unexplored
area.
While Butterfield and Isham mainly address the emergence of time
from a timeless theory, Karel Kuchar presents a thorough discussion of
the problem of time itself. In general relativity, dynamical laws can
be replaced by instantaneous laws. The generator of change itself, the
Hamiltonian, is a constraint only and thus has instantaneous character.
This is why time is a mere label in the classical theory and disappears
completely in the quantum theory. Kuchar discusses various attempts to
recover a suitable time variable at the fundamental level (not to be confused
with the emergence of time at the approximate level), but shows that each

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attempt has its deficiencies. It thus seems that quantum gravity is truly
timeless and standard time can be understood as an emergent, approximate,
quantity only.
The last two essays deal with linguistics and psychology, respectively.
James Higginbotham is concerned with our way of talking about time
within the basic notation of ordinary spoken daily language. He emphasises the need for integrating contextual and linguistic material in the
interpretation of natural languages. Finally, Michel Treisman discusses the
perception of time by human beings. The existence of an objective notion
of physical time, and a physical world in general, is taken for granted.
He distinguishes between primary qualities, such as the perception of spatiotemporal relations, and secondary qualities, such as the perception of
colours. The relation of the latter to the physical world is usually assumed
to be much less clear than the former. Treisman argues, however, that also
for the former this relation is not as direct as one might think. According
to him, the time sense relies on properties of the brain itself as a physical system, having different internal clocks with different frequencies. He
presents detailed experimental material to support his thesis.
The material collected in this volume demonstrates convincingly what
central role the concept of time plays in all sorts of disciplines. Roughly
speaking, one could order the essays and, in fact, the whole discussion
on time into two classes. The first is mainly concerned with the concept
of time in physics and its philosophical implications, especially with the
developments in connection with the theories of special and general relativity. The second class focuses more on linguistic problems, in particular
on the use of the tenses, especially for the word to be, and on perception
of time. As is emphasised by Butterfield and Isham, the most interesting
philosophical problem in the first class seems to be the problem of time
in quantum gravity. Its occurrence is in fact not restricted to special approaches like quantum geometrodynamics. Any theory that dispenses with
absolute notions of time at the classical level faces this problem at the
quantum level. Therefore, any unified theory such as superstring theory has
to deal with the disappearance of time at the most fundamental level. The
philosophical implications of these developments are really tremendous
and their discussion has started only recently.
Different from this issue of timeless quantum gravity is the question
of the arrow of time: Where does the irreversible nature of our world
come from? After all, our standard physical theories are essentially timesymmetric. This also holds for quantum mechanics, where the Schrdinger
equation does not distinguish between past and future. The collapse of the
wave packet is, of course, irreversible, but no one has succeeded, despite

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many attempts, to find the appropriate dynamical law for its description.
This collapse can thus not be taken as the cause for temporal becoming, but
is itself part of the problem of irreversibility, which needs explanation. The
origin of time-asymmetry is of course especially interesting in the context
of timeless quantum gravity. Here it is often claimed that irreversibility
should be derivable from boundary conditions yielded by such an encompassing theory. Unfortunately, these issues are discussed only marginally
in this book.
A major problem in discussions of time is the status of the present (the
specious present, as it is often called). This is touched upon in many
of the essays, but a final assessment is lacking. From a physical point
of view, it must be emphasised that this concept cannot assume a fundamental role. As Carnap recalls from a conversation with Einstein, . . . that
this experience [of the present] cannot be grasped by science seemed to
him a matter of painful but inevitable resignation. Physics does not offer
any conceptual means for a definition of the Now. In a certain sense, the
perception of the present can be compared to the subjective perception
of colours by an observer. In fact, the fundamental problem which lies at
the core of these issues, is the role of the observer. It is well known that
the process of observation in quantum theory is a delicate topic and far
from being fully understood. The clarification of observation in general is
needed before a comprehensive view of the world can be gained. But this
requires an interdisciplinary effort par excellence, for which the discussion
in this thought-provoking volume can play a seminal role.
Fakultt fr Physik
Universitt Freiburg
Germany

CLAUS KIEFER

Nancy Cartwright, The Dappled World. A Study of the Boundaries of Science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, viii + 247 pages,
GBP 35.00 (cloth), GBP 12.95 (paperback).
The laws of physics do not lie after all. All it is is that they are not universal and merely ceteris paribus. A law may be true despite the fact that
laws cannot be reconstructed as regularities laws apply only in special
circumstances and to a small domain of the empirical world. The world is
dappled because it fails to display the regularities attributed to it. If anything, a patchwork of laws needs to be employed to describe what is going
on in different situations and parts of the world. Capacities or natures
Erkenntnis 54: 411415, 2001.