The practical arrow

ABSTRACT

Ismael traces our sense that the past is fixed and the future open to what she calls ‘the practical arrow’ – ‘the sense that we can affect the future but not the past.’ In this piece I draw a sharper distinction than Ismael herself does between agents and mere observers, even self-referential observers; and I use it to argue that Ismael’s explanation of the practical arrow is incomplete. To explain our inability to affect the past we need to appeal to our own temporal orientation as agents, and not merely to the ingredients from physics that allow us to predict the consequences of our actions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Cf. Ismael’s ‘[s]ophisticated cognitive agents … self-consciously choosing actions with an eye to the records they will create.’

2 This doesn’t mean that Decision doesn’t also yield knowledge. But it is a special kind of knowledge, for which, as Ismael herself puts it, we hold an epistemic ‘wild card’ (2011, 161).

3 Should I turn over a new leaf? Do I dare to make a peach? The imagination soon runs dry!

4 We can get close to this from our own experience, if we know what it is like to feel severely depressed.

5 Again, imagine the viewpoint of someone who is severely depressed.

6 Perhaps a highly idealised agent, a step that leads in the direction of the interventionist approach of Woodward (2003) and Pearl (2000).

7 Set aside the practical and ethical difficulties that the experiment would involve!

8 I use the term ‘intervention’ deliberately here, though it is given a somewhat more precise sense in so-called interventionist approaches to causation (Woodward 2003). I have argued (Price 2017) that such approaches cannot account for the ordinary time-orientation of causation unless they retain this link to our de facto temporal orientation as agents.

9 In (Price 1996, 145–146) I made this point by imagining God intervening from the future.