The story of the tablecloth: deriving “before” from atemporal notions

Abstract This article develops a new account of the relation “before” between events. It does so by taking the set of all states of an object, irrespective of any presupposed order, and then finding the order between events by exploiting a characteristic asymmetry which appears on this set, called the “record asymmetry”. It is shown that the record asymmetry 1. implies a weak temporal order (“before or simultaneous with”), and 2. is necessary for measuring a strong temporal order (“before”). I then propose a condition necessary and sufficient for a strong temporal order in terms of the set of states of a single object. The upshot is that temporal ordering is not ontologically primitive, but reducible to the record asymmetry. Also, it is a local phenomenon which requires no global temporal structure of spacetime.