Temporal and spatiotemporal vocabulary is indispensable in scientific representation, but representational indispensability does not by itself determine ontology. The semantic audit shows how polysemy, metaphor, indexicality, and reification can facilitate transitions from representational claims to ontological ones without making the intervening premise explicit. The empirical audit shows that experimental results constrain physical changes, correlations, and geometric relations, while leaving open the metaphysical interpretation of those results. The metaphysical audit then asks whether the roles attributed to time or spacetime can be discharged by change and lawful dependence relations.
The Ontological Necessity Criterion isolates the methodological question that remains: once the relevant empirical and explanatory roles have been accounted for, is there any residual work that requires a temporal or spatiotemporal posit as an additional constituent of reality? If there is, ONC permits the posit. If there is not, representational indispensability does not establish ontological necessity. The Conditional Redundancy Thesis is therefore conditional rather than eliminative in advance: temporal and spatiotemporal ontology is redundant where change and relational structure discharge all the relevant empirical and explanatory work. The paper does not claim to have shown that no temporal or spatiotemporal ontology can satisfy this requirement. Its narrower claim is methodological: the move from indispensable temporal representation to ontological fundamentality requires an additional premise, and that premise must be supported by evidence or explanation rather than inferred from representational necessity alone.
The resulting framework is compatible with realist, relational, functionalist, and emergent approaches, provided their ontological commitments are assessed separately from the representational vocabulary used to formulate them. Its contribution is consequently not a new physical theory of time, but a diagnostic framework for keeping semantic, empirical, and metaphysical claims distinct.
