Specious present

Last updated

The specious present is the time duration wherein one's perceptions are considered to be in the present. [1]

Contents

Description

The term was coined by E. Robert Kelly, [2] who wrote under the pseudonym "E. R. Clay". [3] In The Alternative: A Study in Psychology (1882), he wrote:

The relation of experience to time has not been profoundly studied. Its objects are given as being of the present, but the part of time referred to by the datum is a very different thing from the conterminous of the past and future which philosophy denotes by the name Present. The present to which the datum refers is really a part of the past—a recent past—delusively given as being a time that intervenes between the past and the future. Let it be named the specious present, and let the past, that is given as being the past, be known as the obvious past. All the notes of a bar of a song seem to the listener to be contained in the present. All the changes of place of a meteor seem to the beholder to be contained in the present. At the instant of the termination of such series, no part of the time measured by them seems to be a past. Time, then, considered relatively to human apprehension, consists of four parts, viz., the obvious past, the specious present, the real present, and the future. Omitting the specious present, it consists of three ... nonentities—the past, which does not exist, the future, which does not exist, and their conterminous, the present; the faculty from which it proceeds lies to us in the fiction of the specious present. [1]

The concept was further developed by philosopher William James. [3] James defined the specious present to be "the prototype of all conceived times... the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible". [4] C. D. Broad in "Scientific Thought" (1930) further elaborated on the concept of the specious present, arguing that it may be construed as the temporal equivalent of a sensory datum.

The specious present can be classed as a 'thick' conception of time perception, to be contrasted with 'thin' conceptions that see the present as instantaneous. [5]

The concept raises some seemingly paradoxical problems. For example, Robin Le Poidevin notes that the specious present amounts to a duration in which events are both simultaneous and successive: "What we perceive, we perceive as present—as going on right now. Can we perceive a relation between two events without also perceiving the events themselves? If not, then it seems we perceive both events as present, in which case we must perceive them as simultaneous, and so not as successive after all." [6]

Notes

  1. 1 2 Clay, E.R., cited in James, W. (1893). The principles of psychology. New York: H. Holt and Company. Page 609.
  2. Anonymous (E. Robert Kelly), The Alternative: A Study in Psychology. London: Macmillan and Co., 1882.
  3. 1 2 Andersen, Holly; Rick Grush. "A brief history of time-consciousness: historical precursors to James and Husserl" (PDF). Journal of the History of Philosophy . Archived from the original (PDF) on 2008-02-16. Retrieved 2008-02-02.
  4. James, William (1886). "The Perception of Time". The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. 20 (4): 374–407. JSTOR   25668117 via JSTOR.
  5. Dowden, Bradley. "Time". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 2024-07-08.
  6. Le Poidevin, Robin (10 May 2019). "The Experience and Perception of Time". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 2024-07-08.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edmund Husserl</span> Austrian-German philosopher (1859–1938)

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was an Austrian-German philosopher and mathematician who established the school of phenomenology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Time</span> Order of the past, present, and future

Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to compare the duration of events or the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change of quantities in material reality or in the conscious experience. Time is often referred to as a fourth dimension, along with three spatial dimensions.

Reality is the sum or aggregate of all that is real or existent within the universe, as opposed to that which is only imaginary, nonexistent or nonactual. The term is also used to refer to the ontological status of things, indicating their existence. In physical terms, reality is the totality of a system, known and unknown.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Phenomenology (philosophy)</span> Philosophical method and schools of philosophy

Phenomenology is the philosophical study of objectivity and reality as subjectively lived and experienced. It seeks to investigate the universal features of consciousness while avoiding assumptions about the external world, aiming to describe phenomena as they appear to the subject, and to explore the meaning and significance of the lived experiences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Franz Brentano</span> Austrian Catholic priest and philosopher (1838–1917)

Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Josef Brentano was a German philosopher and psychologist. His 1874 Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, considered his magnum opus, is credited with having reintroduced the medieval scholastic concept of intentionality into contemporary philosophy.

Intentionality is the mental ability to refer to or represent something. Sometimes regarded as the mark of the mental, it is found in mental states like perceptions, beliefs or desires. For example, the perception of a tree has intentionality because it represents a tree to the perceiver. A central issue for theories of intentionality has been the problem of intentional inexistence: to determine the ontological status of the entities which are the objects of intentional states.

Experience refers to conscious events in general, more specifically to perceptions, or to the practical knowledge and familiarity that is produced by these processes. Understood as a conscious event in the widest sense, experience involves a subject to which various items are presented. In this sense, seeing a yellow bird on a branch presents the subject with the objects "bird" and "branch", the relation between them and the property "yellow". Unreal items may be included as well, which happens when experiencing hallucinations or dreams. When understood in a more restricted sense, only sensory consciousness counts as experience. In this sense, experience is usually identified with perception and contrasted with other types of conscious events, like thinking or imagining. In a slightly different sense, experience refers not to the conscious events themselves but to the practical knowledge and familiarity they produce. Hence, it is important that direct perceptual contact with the external world is the source of knowledge. So an experienced hiker is someone who has actually lived through many hikes, not someone who merely read many books about hiking. This is associated both with recurrent past acquaintance and the abilities learned through them.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Direct and indirect realism</span> Debate in the philosophy of mind

In the philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind, direct or naïve realism, as opposed to indirect or representational realism, are differing models that describe the nature of conscious experiences; out of the metaphysical question of whether the world we see around us is the real world itself or merely an internal perceptual copy of that world generated by our conscious experience.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Present</span> Period of time occurring now

The present is the period of time that is occurring now. The present is contrasted with the past, the period of time that has already occurred, and the future, the period of time that has yet to occur.

"The Unreality of Time" is the best-known philosophical work of University of Cambridge idealist J. M. E. McTaggart (1866–1925). In the argument, first published as a journal article in Mind in 1908, McTaggart argues that time is unreal because our descriptions of time are either contradictory, circular, or insufficient. A slightly different version of the argument appeared in 1927 as one of the chapters in the second volume of McTaggart's greatest work, The Nature of Existence.

Philosophical presentism is the view that only present entities exist. According to presentism, there are no past or future entities. In a sense, the past and the future do not exist for presentists—past events have happened and future events will happen, but neither exist at all since they do not exist now. Presentism is a view about temporal ontology that contrasts with eternalism—the view that past, present and future entities exist —and with no-futurism—the view that only past and present entities exist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Theodor Lipps</span> German philosopher

Theodor Lipps was a German philosopher, famed for his theory regarding aesthetics, creating the framework for the concept of Einfühlung (empathy), defined as, "projecting oneself onto the object of perception." This has then led onto opening up a new branch of interdisciplinary research in the overlap between psychology and philosophy.

<i>Phenomenology of Perception</i> 1945 book by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Phenomenology of Perception is a 1945 book about perception by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in which the author expounds his thesis of "the primacy of perception". The work established Merleau-Ponty as the pre-eminent philosopher of the body, and is considered a major statement of French existentialism.

<i>The Philosophy of Freedom</i> Philosophical treatise by Rudolf Steiner

The Philosophy of Freedom is the fundamental philosophical work of philosopher, Goethe scholar, and esotericist Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925). It addresses the question of whether and in what sense human beings are free. Originally published in 1894 in German as Die Philosophie der Freiheit, with a second edition published in 1918, the work has appeared under a number of English titles, including The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, The Philosophy of Freedom, and Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path.

Apperception is any of several aspects of perception and consciousness in such fields as psychology, philosophy and epistemology.

In psychology and neuroscience, time perception or chronoception is the subjective experience, or sense, of time, which is measured by someone's own perception of the duration of the indefinite and unfolding of events. The perceived time interval between two successive events is referred to as perceived duration. Though directly experiencing or understanding another person's perception of time is not possible, perception can be objectively studied and inferred through a number of scientific experiments. Some temporal illusions help to expose the underlying neural mechanisms of time perception.

Retention and protention are key aspects of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of temporality.

The theory of sense data is a view in the philosophy of perception, popularly held in the early 20th century by philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, C. D. Broad, H. H. Price, A. J. Ayer, and G. E. Moore. Sense data are taken to be mind-dependent objects whose existence and properties are known directly to us in perception. These objects are unanalyzed experiences inside the mind, which appear to subsequent more advanced mental operations exactly as they are.

Buddhist thought and Western philosophy include several parallels.

Early phenomenology refers to the early phase of the phenomenological movement, from the 1890s until the Second World War. The figures associated with the early phenomenology are Edmund Husserl and his followers and students, particularly the members of the Göttingen and Munich Circles, as well as a number of other students of Carl Stumpf and Theodor Lipps, and excludes the later existential phenomenology inspired by Martin Heidegger. Early phenomenology can be divided into two theoretical camps: realist phenomenology, and transcendental or constitutive phenomenology.

References