Bradley on the Nature of Time and Space
In order to have some overview of the matter under discussion, one should first decide what he understands by space and time. More specifically, one should decide in what way they are perceived.
The first answer that comes to mind in the case of space perception is the notion of shape. We see space as the thing that can fit a certain shape. An even simpler notion is distance, and one can say that space has distance.
But what makes these notions so important? Certainly a distance is important insofar as it might have been different, or, in other words, if there are other existent distances. These can either exist at the same time or at different times, but what is really important is the fact that our notion of distance is nontrivial, in the sense that it is not a name. There are other "things" that we can call distances.
With our willpower we change the "sight" in font of us and, through this, we modify what we see. For example we walk towards an obj 616h79g ect and its size changes, and maybe its shape changes too. We observe a difference and compare it to our record of the image of the object. We see that what we perceive has changed and only in our mind we correlate the past image with the present one to produce a idea of continuity and an identification of an element in the "sight picture". This mark is most often the shape. It might also be the color for example, or any other sensible property or combination of properties. For a simple analogy consider the images on a TV set. We know from science that a TV set is a simple device that projects a square array of lighted dots at a rate of 32 frames per second. The colorful dots are only dots: no smell, no depth encoding, no physical interaction. But what we see is much more. In fact experience tells us that this simple device can give us a whole new range of perception. It is very important to notice that a few lighted dots can mimic space in such a convincing way.
To sum up this little introspection on the nature of space, we notice that space is something in our mind, something that goes beyond perception reality in the sense that it is created from this and does not come with the sensory input. Whether it is a property of what we perceive (the fact that we can sense space) is a different matter.
The essential data comes to us from the senses and memory. In fact it is important to point out that it makes no sense to talk about anything in our mind without the concept of memory, which for the present discussion can be considered as just another stream of sensory input.
In a similar way we can inspect the concept of time. Time is clearly connected to memory and the notion of change. What we "see" in our sense picture has to change so that we can infer time flow. Even if the normal senses (sight, hearing, etc.) don't give us changing signals, we still must feel something from the inside to conclude that time is passing, a feel that is just another form of sensory input. To return to the crude example of the TV set, when we see images changing on a screen, we can generally deduce time pass in the TV reality. If the tape stops playing, we know that the people "inside" will resume their life exactly from the point they were left at, after we fix the tape problem.
And analogous argument to the one above follows. We can safely conclude that the notion of time is in our mind, based on perception from senses and from memory. Again, if this notion is in some way fundamental to what we sense is a pending issue.
In Bradley's philosophy, the treatment of the nature of space and time is founded on a previous discussion of relations. There are many unclear issues that can be discussed about his theory of relations (e.g. the infinite regression in finding relations between quantities). The most important fact is that relations are a form of judgment and judgment is part of the mental realm.
In the following part, I want to discuss Bradley's arguments for the contradictory nature of space.
First, I want to analyze and argue for his conclusion that space is nothing but a relation. He argues that space is a sum of his parts, parts which are in their turn sums of smaller parts, and so on. The sum constitutes the relation, or, in other words, the nature of sum of parts which defines a bigger part is what gives the parts a common property, thus making them related. He then goes on to say that by extending this process ad infinitum, one can conclude that no ultimate substantial terms can exist. By this he infers that space is only relation and nothing else.
The main problem with this argument comes from a lack of understanding of infinity. It does not necessarily follow that if something is infinitely divisible, it is then insubstantial in its basis. Substance is not a property of something that does not posses the property of being divisible, i.e. it is possible to have a substance that is divisible. What that means to our case is that we can have space being more than a relation, and still be a connection of smaller parts by a relation. Arguing that something does not have substance because it can be divided further is countered by claiming that the substance can be in the parts that form the whole. Arguing that there is no substance in the end because the parts are infinitely small can be countered by saying that there is no end (to the infinite division), and any stop of the division process for the sake of analysis will produce parts that are not infinitely small, but finite in size.
Nevertheless, I agree that space is nothing but a relation. As was argued above, space is nothing more than an idea. There is nothing substantial about space, and I don't mean the lack of chemical substance. What we call space is just another abstraction for the idea that we know it is possible that things could be observed instead of others at the same instant and position, and we link them together by their common property of possibly appearing to our senses at that time and place instead of each other. This possibility is still a product of our intellect.
To conclude a contradiction, Bradley goes on to say that space cannot be a relation since it consists of extended parts that are themselves, in effect some kind of three-dimensional solid objects. This is clearly a weak argument and the addition of words that would indicate substance does not save it. Three-dimensionality is a mathematical concept clearly pertaining to the realm of ideas, solidity is more the property of the object that could be inside and the fact that the part of space is in itself is a grammatical artifice. In fact a relation is a relation in itself. The underlying error is disregarding the fact that the mind can treat an abstraction as if it where a sense-object. If I look on my window, I see the sun outside, green trees, children playing, I hear birds singing etc.; all this objects are placed in a space. I can also focus my eyes on close or far objects. But what do I really see? I see colors and brightness and I notice that I have a certain degree of control over what I see. Besides that, everything is inference, therefore a product of the mind. There is no tree without my notion of a tree and, similarly, there is no space without my notion of space.
A related fallacy is also his argument with the totality of space: the whole space cannot have a limit, since then it is not the whole space but only what's not beyond the limit; yet if it has no boundaries, it is not space.
It is a personal choice to define as space only something which has boundaries. If he does so, then he denies the quality of being a space to the sum of all spaces, as he proves with his argument. His argument is dependent on a concept, namely the "whole space". If space is what we observe in everyday life as containing objects, then it is unwarranted to use a concept as the "whole space". If the "whole space" is space, then space is not only something that has boundaries. Another point is that to be able to work with the notion of the "whole space" extended from the definition of space intuitive to the senses, we have to decide what is space where we're not looking, which are the things considered as occupying space and many other details before even beginning to discuss about such a concept. The contradiction pointed out does not stand.
Now I proceed to a discussion of Bradley's arguments on the contradictory nature of time.
On similar lines to previous arguments, Bradley asserts that time is a relation and, on the other side, is not one. He argues that time is a "before" and an "after" in one, and this is fundamental to its character. The two concepts are necessarily defined together and they exist only in this relation, but they are not identical. He argues that each one of the terms is defined by the two, thus it is defined by the only existent relation between them and the other, and so on, in essence following the line of thought in his relational infinite regression.
Therefore the same argument that would counter the necessity of infinite regression in analyzing relations works just as well here. There is no need to define anything in terms of the relation to the relation with other things, as this has no explanatory meaning but only restates the first definition and adds more words to the explanation. An idea/abstraction/relation is what explains, not the proposition in which is defined, and thus the process of infinite regression in analyzing relations is superfluous.
A good point indeed is that time is not ontologically separable from the things that exist in time. Yet this is also obvious if we think time as merely the product of our recollection of past sensory experiences and the fact that these change. It is clear that since time is based on change, it is fundamentally related to the things that change, as there is no change without a subject. This only strengthens the position that time is a product of thinking through being the product of noticing change.
Another conclusion of Bradley is that time is internally complex since if we try to identify time as being the "now", then we imply the existence of "before" and "after", which then leads to the problem presented in his first argument. It is obviously true that time cannot be identified only as the "now". This would amount to saying that time is defined in time, which is nonsense. In fact all the considerations on the nature of time show us that time is the change itself, the only thing that cannot be captured in a picture of an instant. Defining time as a "now" should relate a "snap-shot" of the information fed by the senses with time. But can change be present in a static picture?
The problem as to whether the "now" is divisible into parts and these parts have to be reducible to some solid terms for time to be something more than a relation is simply a restatement of the same argument for space. Thus the same arguments and counterarguments follow. We notice that now it is even more obvious that there is no "solid" essence to the notion of time. There is nothing solid that fits into a time period in the same way a solid fits into a space.
In conclusion there is no reason to say that the notions of time and space are contradictory. This conclusion is based on the belief that relations are objects of the intellect, of a different nature than sensory input, an idea that Bradley himself would accept. Very important is also the notion of infinity: I consider that the need for infinite regression in the analysis of relations is unwarranted and infinite divisibility does not pose the problems that Bradley points out.
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