Paradox

186 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE PARADOXmeans simultaneous with this utterance, “past” means earlierthan this utterance, and “future” means later than thisutterance. Given facts about the speed of light and sound, itis natural for human beings to organize time in a pastpresent-futureseries. Think of how navigational concerns ledus to develop the longitude-latitude system. This imaginarygrid organizes complicated geographical facts. The relationshipsbetween the equator and the prime meridian can bestudied in a precise mathematical way, just like the “logic oftime” implicit in the A series. But the system is a useful fictionrather than an x-ray of reality.The Pythagoreans took amenability to mathematicalanalysis to be the mark of truth. McTaggart takes theprecision of calendars and stop watches to be a sign of afabricated order. The order we “discover” is the order of anotational scheme that we project onto the world.This conventionalism already had deep roots inAquinas’s era. The medieval nominalists rejected Plato’srealm of universals and analyzed words as having no morebehind them than custom. They believed we frequentlymisconstrue the hand of man as the hand of God. As we shallsee in the next chapter, accusations of this kind of mistakeeasily escalate into charges of blasphemy and heresy.