ABSTRACT
An important theme running through D. H. Mellor’s work is his realism or, as I shall call it, his objectivism: the idea that reality as such is how it is, regardless of the way we represent it, and that philosophical error often arises from confusing aspects of our subjective representation of the world with aspects of the world itself. Thus central to Mellor’s work on time has been the claim that the temporal A-series (previously called ‘tense’) is unreal while the B-series (the series of ‘dates’) is real. The A-series is something that is a product of our representation of the world, but not a feature of reality itself. And in other, less central areas of his work, this kind of theme has been repeated: ‘Objective decision making’ (Mellor 1991a) argues that the right way to understand decision theory is as a theory of what is the objectively correct decision, the one that will actually as a matter of fact achieve your intended goal, rather than the one that is justifi ed purely in terms of what you believe, regardless of whether the belief is true or false. ‘I and now’ (Mellor 1991b) argues against a substantial subjective conception of the self, using analogies between subjective and objective ways of thinking about time and subjective and objective ways of thinking about the self. And in the paper which shall be the focus of my attention here, ‘Nothing like experience’, Mellor (1991c) contests arguments that try and derive anti-physicalist conclusions from refl ections on the subjective character of experience. A common injunction is detectable: when doing metaphysics, keep the subjective where it belongs, that is inside the subject’s representation of the world.
