The folk concept of time

Given that time pervades all aspects of our lives, structuring our day-to-day interactions and decision making in fundamental ways, you might think that there must be some underlying agreement between us on what time is. We must all share a set of common sense beliefs about, some folk concept of, an intuitive theory of, time – mustn’t we? Many theorists working within the philosophy and physics of time give an implicitly affirmative answer to this question, insofar as they stand the time of modern physics in contrast to the time of common sense – i.e., a view of time people are often said to widely share prior to any sophisticated introduction to research on the nature of time. However, the true answer to the previous question may be more complicated, as we outline in this chapter.