The Notion That Time Cannot Be Measured Directly — Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Davies & Gribbin (1992: 131):

Indeed, the B-theorist can go beyond this, by pointing out that we never measure time directly. What we actually measure is something physical, like the position of a hand on a clock, or the position of the Earth in its orbit around the Sun. When we say that something was broken at four o'clock, what we are really saying is that intact states correlate with the little hand of the clock being above the number 4, and broken states correlate with the little hand being below the number 4. In this way, it is actually possible to eliminate all reference to time in describing the world.

The A-theorist might counter that the notion of the changing position of the clock hand itself requires a reference to time, unless it too is correlated with something, such as the rotation of the Earth. But then one can wonder about the motion of the Earth, and so on. What lies at the end of this regress?

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of the General Theory of Relativity, interpreted in terms of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, time is the dimension along which processes unfold, so processes provide the criteria for determining time intervals or units.

For example, the process of the Earth orbiting the Sun once provides the time interval 'year', and the process of the Earth rotating on its axis once provides the time interval 'day'. The time interval 'hour' derives from arbitrarily dividing the duration of one Earth rotation into 24 equal intervals.

So we don't "measure the position of a hand on a clock". Instead, the hand on a clock indicates the time at a spatial location in terms of the Earth's rotation.

And, in this regard, we don't exactly "measure the position of the Earth in its orbit around the Sun". Instead, the duration of the orbiting process provides time intervals that serve as units for measuring the extent and location of processes in general.

So when we say that a coffee mug was broken at 4 o'clock, we are temporally locating the mug's process of breaking relative to the Earth's process of orbiting for a given spatial location. The qualities 'intact' and 'broken' describe the medium of the breaking process, the mug, before the inception of the process and after its completion.

On this basis, it is not time that the authors have attempted to remove from their description, but process. The description depends on the reference to the time of four o'clock, but it removes the process of breaking.