From Ian Dunbar, Warrington, Cheshire, UK
Daniel Cossins says the search for answers to the mysteries of time “takes us into the strange borderlands between neuroscience and physics” (6 July, p 32). He should include philosophy in that map. The philosopher Peter Geach argued in Mental Acts for the necessity of philosophy in such cases, saying that no experiment can either justify or straighten out a confusion of thought: “if we are in a muddle when we design an experiment, it is only to be expected that we should ask Nature cross questions and she return crooked answers”.
A simple analysis of the different uses of the word “time” reveals ambiguities. When we use it, for example, to refer to the quantity measured in seconds, we are talking about two related but distinct quantities: lapse and duration. Unless we use the tools of analytic philosophy to sort out such matters, our efforts to solve these difficult problems are doomed to be mired in muddle.
