Against Radical Relationalism: in Defense of the Ordinal Structure of Time

Abstract: Some authors in the quantum gravity community endorse, explicitly or implicitly, a radical relationalist view of time which states that the ordinal structure of time is not needed even in our classical theories, especially in general relativity. In this article I analyze this position and the arguments supporting it, and I argue that there are some serious concerns with some of the radical relationalists' arguments which make it an unattractive position. In this sense, I conclude that the chrono-ordinal structures of our theories play important theoretical and explanatory roles and that they can be taken to be part of the empirical content of our theories.