What is the nature of time in historical and legal research?

Time. We all live through it, but do we understand it? Is there a difference in the nature of time in historical research and physics research? Mary L. Dudziak presents some interesting insights into the nature of time. Here is an example:

In the scholarship on law and war, time is seen as episodic. It is sometimes seen as linear and progressive, but the most common feature is that time is episodic. There are two different kinds of time: wartime and peacetime. Historical progression consists of moving from one kind of time to another. Law is thought to vary depending on what time it is. The relationship between citizen and state, the scope of rights, the extent of government power are thought to depend on whether it is wartime or peacetime.

A central metaphor is the swinging pendulum – swinging from strong protection of rights and weaker government power to weaker protection of rights and stronger government power. Moving from one time zone to the next is thought to cause the pendulum to begin swinging in a new direction. [Snip]

"Like everyone else," she writes, "historians assume that time exists, yet despite its obvious importance to historical writing – what is history but the account of how things change over time? – writers of history do not often inquire into the meaning of time itself." One of the difficulties in talking about time is that the words we use to describe it seem to presuppose an understanding of time. Hunt continues: "Time feels like an essential and defining feature of human life, yet when pressed to define it, we inevitably fall back upon duration, change, and ultimately, the tenses of our languages, past, present, and future."

Time has been central to other fields, especially physics, philosophy, and anthropology. Within fields, ideas about time have been highly contested. "Temporality enters our conceptual framework both as a descriptive component of our immediate experience and as a component of our theoretical description of the world," writes Lawrence Sklar.

Most of us simply believe that time just "IS" and that we understand it. But that assumption simply isn't true. Time is as much a linguistic phenomenon as it is a physical one, as is demonstrated above in its conception as "the tenses of our languages, past, present, and future."

Then you have to look at time in the manner it is applied in the different disciplines such as history and physics. In history time is seen as episodic, but in physics it is considered to be a constant and measurable dimension. Those views of time clearly conflict. Most of us are not even aware of the conflict, let alone which of the views we subscribe to.

Why do those views differ? It's because time performs different functions in the theories of history and of physics. So how is that possible?

It's because we are human beings. We don't ever know everything. We can't - as was described by Herbert A Simon in his theory of Bounded Rationality. We adopt the theory of time that makes the theories we are working in work.

The different views of time are each appropriate to the purposes to which we wish to achieve. The result is that physicists use a view of time as being constant and measurable, while historians and legal scholars use a view of time as being episodic. Very rarely do the two views contradict each other, unless the members on one discipline attempt to apply the theory appropriate to the other.

Since different views of time are rarely stated explicitly, the likelihood of confusion is high. This is especially true when politicians apply an inappropriate view by ignoring the experience of experts in the field without any understanding of what they are doing. Or more maliciously, that kind of confusion makes political propaganda quite easy to sell.

Consider how the Bush administration insists that we are at war with some strange amorphic enemy they call Terrorism - another effort is to create some enemy they call Islamo-fascism. It is blatantly an effort to change the nature of law and the relationship of the Presidency to the Federal Government. That propaganda fiction is what is behind the idea of the so-called Unitary Presidency.

By making the explicit nature of time and its application to theory, along with an understanding of the different possible views of time and when each is appropriate, the propaganda fiction the Bush administration is attempting become clear. There has not been a real shift to a state of war. War requires an existential threat to the nation, one that the various forms of banditry that the conservatives, Neocons and Bushies try to lean on to justify their actions simply don't achieve. That is the real fiction that is being created to justify the criminal actions of the current administration.

Ms. Dudziak's post presents an interesting analytical tool to those of us mere humans who attempt to deal with reality in spite of bounded rationality.