Flowing Time: Emergentism and Linguistic Diversity

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is an excellent paper which will make an important contribution to the special issue ‘Nature of Structure and Structure of Nature’. The author argues, contrary to many current B-theoretic views, that there is no divergence or tension between human, or phenomenal time, and physical time. Instead, flow is a by-product of the fundamental characteristics of human experience, including epistemic commitment and emotional attitudes to eventualities. This strikes me as an important and novel contribution to the debate. The author provides evidence and data from linguistics to support her/his argument.

 

There is one minor issue to be addressed: proposition (23) was missing, possibly overridden by some formatting. This made it somewhat difficult to follow the argument at what was quite a crucial stage of the paper.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your comments. (23) was indeed scrambled in the version supplied by the publisher. I have now supplied it on a separate page and in pdf, for clarity. I have also made some other minor revisions and added a few relevant references.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The author's motivations are remote from this reviewer's notion the structuralism and the historical meanings of the term "Emergence".  Consequently, it is of little interest to philosophy of structuralism  and even more remote from the historical scientific roots of emergent phenomenology.

The author does not grasp the notion of a mathematical equation and abuses the formal notation.  This must be corrected before publication. 

Author Response

Thank you for your comments. Indeed, the paper does not engage with the history of emergentism, merely with one specific explanation of the human concept of time as provided e.g. by Ismael, to which I add an argument from linguistic semantics. Concerning the symbol of equation, I use it in the general sense of conceptual equation, although I do not exclude a possibility of an algorithmic support. Therefore, I retained it as is but clarified it. This is a common practice in the literature in this field. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I believe other recent physicist' works, such as Carlo Rovelli's "What If Time Didn't Exist?", and transdisciplinary studies on other levels of reality might help enlarge the overall perspective.

Author Response

Thank you for your comments. I have now added more relevant literature, as well as some minor revisions -- see the attached in 'review' mode. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx