Against radical relationalism: in defense of the ordinal structure of time

Abstract

Some authors in the quantum gravity community endorse, explicitly or implicitly, a radical relationalist view of time which states that the ordinal structure of time is not needed even in our classical theories, especially in general relativity. In this article I analyze this position and the arguments supporting it, and I argue that there are some serious concerns with some of the radical relationalists’ arguments which make it an unattractive position. In this sense, I conclude that the chrono-ordinal structures of our theories play important theoretical and explanatory roles and that they can be taken to be part of the empirical content of our theories.

This research is part of the Proteus project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 758145) and of the project CHRONOS (PID2019-108762GB-I00) of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.

Peer Reviewed

Postprint (author's final draft)