Abstract

I argue that there could be observational evidence for absolute motion. My argument employs a spatial analogue of Shoemaker's classic ‘global freeze’ thought experiment, wherein he imagines a world whose inhabitants would seem to have strong evidence that a period of time without change had occurred. The inhabitants of my own imagined world, I claim, would have strong evidence that everything in the universe had moved the same distance in the same direction and, thus, strong evidence for absolute motion. This conclusion seems to pose a problem for spatial relationists insofar as they cannot account for absolute motion.

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