ABSTRACT
Perhaps a different way of cashing out the problem with the time machine’s ‘design’ is simply that it’s ridiculous on the face of it. At a first pass, it seems like people might be able to define design as the activity of deliberately imagining a novel solution to some problem by creating plans for a new kind of object which one genuinely believes would solve the problem in question. One virtue of such an account is that it leaves clear room for failure: there’s no condition requiring that the object successfully solve the envisaged problem. The problem is that the starting thought experiment seems to satisfy these conditions, and yet people hesitate to call it a case of design: they can easily imagine someone who doesn’t know that the parts in question are all fictional, a child, perhaps, drawing up elaborate plans for a time machine.
