The B-Theorist Model Of Change Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Davies & Gribbin (1992: 130-1):

At this point, the sceptical reader may well protest … 'Whatever the physicists and philosophers may say, of course things happen. There is change; I experience it directly. For example, today I smashed a coffee mug: this event occurred at 4 o'clock … . My coffee mug is now broken, and it wasn't this morning.'

The B-theorist, however, will retort that there is only an illusion of change. 'All you are really saying is that before 4 o'clock the coffee mug is intact, after 4 o'clock it is broken, and at four it is in a transitional state.' This neutral mode of description — the physicist's B-series — conveys precisely the same information about the coffee mug events, but makes no reference to the passage of time. There is no need to talk of the coffee mug changing into a broken state, or to say that this happened at 4 o'clock. There are simply dates, and states of the coffee mug; that is all. No more need be said.'

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, B-theorists do not believe that change is an illusion, but that all change can be described in 'before-after' terms, without recourse to tense distinctions. Clearly, in these terms, a smashed coffee mug has undergone a change of state from intact (before) to broken (after).

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the authors are here confusing process with time, misconstruing the unfolding of a process (smash) as the passage of time. From the perspective of the General Theory of Relativity, time is one axis of four-dimensional space-time, and dimensions do not "pass".

Clearly, what the authors present as the physicist's B-series mode of description is not neutral, since it is epistemologically motivated. Moreover, it does not convey precisely the same information about the coffee mug events, since it reconstrues a material process ('smash') as a temporal relation between qualities ('intact' and 'broken').