This article develops a new account of the relation “before” between events. It does so by taking the set of all states of an object, irrespective of any presupposed order, and then finding the order between events by exploiting a characteristic asymmetry which appears on this set, called the “record asymmetry”. It is shown that the record asymmetry 1. implies a weak temporal order (“before or simultaneous with”), and 2. is necessary for measuring a strong temporal order (“before”). I then propose a condition necessary and sufficient for a strong temporal order in terms of the set of states of a single object. The upshot is that temporal ordering is not ontologically primitive, but reducible to the record asymmetry. Also, it is a local phenomenon which requires no global temporal structure of spacetime.

本文对事件之间的“之前”关系进行了新的解释。它通过获取对象的所有状态集来实现这一点，而不管任何预设的顺序，然后通过利用出现在该集合上的特征不对称性（称为“记录不对称”）来找到事件之间的顺序。结果表明，记录不对称 1.意味着弱的时间顺序（“之前或同时”），以及 2.对于测量强大的时间顺序（“之前”）是必要的。然后，我提出了一个必要且充分的条件，即单个对象的状态集，以实现强大的时间秩序。结果是，时间排序不是本体论上的原始，而是可以简化为记录的不对称性。此外，它是一种局部现象，不需要时空的全局时间结构。