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2 The Development of the “Specious Present” and James’s Views on Temporal Experience Holly Andersen 2.1 Introduction The term “specious present” was introduced to philosophy and psychology by William James in his influential Principles of Psychology (1890). The specious present doctrine, as it is often referred to, is the view that we experience the present moment as nonpunctate, as having some short but nonzero duration. It can be illustrated by comparing our experience of the now or present moment with the way the present is represented on a timeline. Mathematically or physically, the present can be represented by a single point on a timeline separating past from future, moving along the line from the past toward the future. Such a present moment has no duration. In contrast, the temporal character of our experience at least prima facie seems to span some duration, one that might range from as short as several hundred milliseconds to, as James thought, as long as twelve seconds or more. Perception of motion is frequently offered as a justification for the specious present doctrine. Motion requires some nonzero amount of time in which to take place. We perceive many kinds of motion as motion, rather than perceiving static successive locations of objects and inferring motion from them. Perceptual differences with different rates of motion highlight the temporal span of experience. Motion that is extremely fast, for instance, may not appear as motion at all. We see movies as continuous, even though they are comprised of changing static images; we see overly fast motion as simply a blur or a line. At the other end of the range, motion that is extremely slow doesn’t perceptually appear to be motion either. The movement of the hour hand of a clock is not perceptible by simply looking at it. In order to notice that it has moved, we have to compare its current position to a previous position that we remember rather than perceive. Within a certain range of rate of change, though, we perceive motion as motion, rather than inferring that motion has taken place. This must mean, the reasoning goes, that our experience of time was sufficiently extended as to include a portion of that movement. The way in which the specious present is described can sound self-contradictory. It involves attributing to the experience at a given moment of consciousness contents that 26 Holly Andersen must span some nonzero interval of physical time. It can be understood to take experience to be punctate and simply include nonpunctate contents; more realistically, though, it takes experience to both include nonpunctate content and to do so in a way that is both spread over some range of time and yet still “present” in some sense of the word. And even though the idea is that we perceive these contents at the same time, punctate or not, we do not perceive them as simultaneous. Wilfrid Sellars called this “an incoherent combination of literal simultaneity and literal successiveness” (1982, 232). Whether or not the specious present doctrine ultimately turns out to be self-contradictory , it raises a variety of intriguing challenges and questions for our understanding of time itself, of temporal awareness specifically, for consciousness in general, and for the connection between experience and the physical processes that give rise to it. Do we really experience the present as temporally extended, or are first-person reports to this effect somehow misguided or false? Is the discrepancy between experienced and represented time merely apparent, or are they genuinely in conflict? What implications does this discrepancy have for our epistemic positions with respect to time itself, or for finding the physical processes underpinning temporal experience? Many of these questions come down to what may be the primary overarching questions on which the specious present doctrine bears: the temporal extent of the content of consciousness, the temporal extent of acts of consciousness, and how these two temporal extents compare with one another. James’s introduction of the specious present doctrine spawned a wide range of philosophical and scientific discussions, some of which endorse the nonpunctate nature of temporal experience, some of which problematize it, and some of which take it for granted and apply it (see, inter alia, Broad, 1923; Le Poivedin, 1999; Dainton, 2001; Grush, 2003; Kelly, 2005; Oaklander, 2002). There is an already strong and growing trend to attempt to ground Husserlian phenomenology of time consciousness in various aspects of cognitive science (see, inter alia, Gallagher, 1997; Varela, 1999...

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