W. V. O. Quine Analysis

W.V.O. Quine argues for the point of view that time is a dimension similar to space. He considers time from the position of language. The way we talk about time is very biased towards certain ways of thinking about it. He writes, “Relations of date are exalted grammatically as relations of position, weight, and color are not.”1 Grammar requires verbs to be tensed, but Quine thinks this to be complicating matters unnecessarily. Additionally, he finds that it is demanding “lip service to time even when time is farthest from our thoughts.”2 The remedy to this, according to Quine, would be to allow the form of the present to remain, but consider it as a temporal neutral.
Quine contends that such a method is utilized in mathematics and science without second thought. Considering the sentence, “Seven of them remained and seven is an odd number,” the 'is ' seems to be timeless, but when Quine evaluates the sentence, “George married Mary and Mary is a widow,” the 'is ' cannot be. From the first sentence we may infer that an odd number of them remained, but a similar inference in the second requires a fallacy, according to Quine. Thus, the …show more content…
He writes, “seeing time in the image of space helps us appreciate that infinitely many periods of time can just as well add up to a finite period as can a finite distance be divided into infinitely many component distances.”10 Therefore, the problem of crossing an infinite amount of divisions in a finite distance is made simpler under Quine 's treatment of time – in crossing the distance one takes a finite amount of time which may also be divided ad infinitum. If it is impossible to cross an infinite amount of component distances it must also be impossible to traverse an infinite amount of component time periods. However, if one had an infinite amount of component time periods, crossing an infinite amount of component distances should no longer be