Review of: "Knowledge Arguments for Time" Steven Gimbel 1 1 Gettysburg College Potential competing interests: No potential competing interests to declare. Paul Merriam’s article “Knowledge Arguments for Time” begins with a clever insight. If there is a phenomenological awareness of the flow of time, but a philosophical disagreement over whether time actually flows, then it seems like we should be able to construct a temporal version, or indeed, set of versions, of Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument concerning temporal qualia instead of color qualia. Doing so should elucidate or expose questions in the foundation of the philosophy of time, the philosophy of mind, and semantics. Jackson’s famous thought experiment places Mary, a person with normal human rationality and normal fully functioning human sense organs in a completely black and white environment, but she is given a complete scientific education concerning color. She knows everything there is to know about color, but has never experienced it. Mary is then taken out of the room and experiences the world of color. Does Mary now know something she did not know before? The intuition is, of course. But if that is true, then there must be knowledge about color that is purely phenomenological and not capable of being expressed or known otherwise. Color is more than any scientific/philosophical theory can account for. Merriam seeks to set up an analogous situation for Nathan, who is kept in a room in which time does not flow, learns every fact about the nature of time, and then is released into a world in which time is flowing. Since we have a phenomenological experience of flowing time, we ought to be able to say the same thing about Nathan as we do about Mary and we ought to have the same sort of questions concerning temporal qualia as we have concerning color qualia. Merriam takes this a step farther and contends that because Giuliani Torrengo (2013) contends that we need to distinguish between the metaphysics of time, the ontology of time, and the semantics of time, we could, in fact, reframe this as a set of three distinct thought experiments. For these moves to work, three things have to be the case: (1) time and color have to be similar in relevant ways, that is to say, the facts of color and the facts of time must be the same sort of facts, (2) the phenomenological experiences of color and time flow have to be similar in relevant ways, (3) the trichotomy in Torrengo (2013) has to produce sufficiently independent questions to give rise to distinct version of the question at hand. I am not convinced that any of these three are true. Color and Time What makes Jackson’s initial example work is that we do live in a world with color, whether we experience it or not. Mary’s Qeios, CC-BY 4.0 · Review, October 30, 2022 Qeios ID: 6EIDNB · https://doi.org/10.32388/6EIDNB 1/4