Abstract: In modern European languages there is only one word for time and several worlds for uncertainty.
I have a first question for the audience: in each language you know, can you write down all the words that are related to time and/or expressing something uncertain (with a tentative explanatory translation)?
A crowd of philosophers have written about time and very few about uncertainty, which leads to my second question: Do you know any that address both together explicitly?
I'm no philosopher and I just wish to present some elements of the understandings I developed through my work and many books that I was handed from our IFP librarian. I hope this will open ways to discussions.
A third question, that I'm mainly asking myself following Augustine and that other philosophers didn't answer to my satisfaction is: What are we talking about when we refer to time?
From my decision theory point of view, time isn't a thing, an object, it's merely a qualification of other things (this can be find in Vedic, Jain and Buddhist philosophers, for instance, together with other views). Physics measures such qualifications of objects in relation to their movements in space, it doesn't care about the object in most cases. The set on which a measure is defined is a set of states as defined with certainty by a phenomenon: a clock for instance measures dates. If the phenomenon is ill observed, act at random, work by chance, is unpredictable, etc., we say its states are uncertain.
As well as for time, we have defined, in some cases, what a measure of such uncertain states could be: for instance a measure of evidence that some object (a roulette wheel) could be in one state rather than in another (according to the phenomenon: launching the wheel). Probability is the most common of such measures.
I shall argue that the notions of time and of uncertainty are connected. I'll go further and argue that they may be interpreted as two expressions of the same concept. I refer to a literature in psychology about 'time focus' and relate it to a more general literature on concepts and contexts referring to modern as well as ancient thinking not restricted to European cultures. From both, I'll extract two notions:' timing' and 'time attitudes'.
My reference, all along, will be decision theory and its formalisation. A decision maker may develop three different notions of time related to the context defined by its attitudes: looking for its future, looking at it's past, or being present while making its decision. In each context, dates and uncertain states differ but both are needed to grasp the concept of time.
I propose: "uncertaintimes" to summarize these concepts.
Organisers:Department of Social Sciences, French Institute of Pondicherry.
Venue : Jawaharlal Nehru Conference Hall, French Institute of Pondicherry, 11, Saint Louis Street, Pondicherry - 605 001.
