A tale of two Williams: James, Stern, and the specious present

Abstract

As a typical subject, you experience a variety of paradigmatically temporal phenomena. Looking out of the window in the English summer, you can see leaves swaying in the breeze and hear the pitter-patter of raindrops steadily increasing against the window. In discussions of temporal experience, and through reflecting on examples such as those offered, two phenomenological claims are widely – though not unequivocally – accepted: firstly, you perceptually experience motion and change; secondly, while more than a momentary state of affairs is presented in your ongoing perceptual experience, that which is presented nonetheless seems to be of a quite limited temporal extent. These two claims are frequently tied to the notion of the specious present. However, there has recently been a push back against the supposed link between perceived motion and the specious present. I argue that there are two ways of understanding this link, and while one has recently been the target of criticism, the other withstands such criticism. My overarching aim is to clarify the notion of the specious present through a discussion of the notion’s origins, in addition to recent criticism directed at the notion, with the hope of reframing how contemporary debates proceed.

Keywords:

• temporal experience
• specious present
• William James
• William Stern
• perceptible motion
• temporal limits

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this material was presented at conferences in Durham and Hertfordshire, I would like to thank the audiences for their stimulating questions and discussion on each occasion. Thanks go to two anonymous referees for the journal for their constructive comments on an earlier draft of this paper. In particular, I would also like to thank Matt Soteriou and Christoph Hoerl for several discussions of earlier versions of this work and other related material.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Jack Shardlow is an early career researcher in philosophy, currently based at the University of Warwick. His research primarily concerns the relationship between consciousness and time, where this involves episodes of perceptual experience, remembering, and imagining; (awareness of) agency; one’s passing thoughts, emotions, and moods; as well as how time is represented in the visual arts and literature.

Notes

1 I will mostly drop the prefix of ‘perceptual’, but there is no philosophical significance behind doing so, throughout my focus will remain on perceptual experience, except when I explicitly state otherwise. (This is not to say that the arguments presented could not, in some cases, be extended to all phenomenally conscious occurrences.) I will also use the term ‘present’ so as to be neutral between various accounts of the nature of perceptual experience. I take it that saying experience ‘presents’ x could be read as experience ‘presents through a relation of acquaintance’, ‘presents through a relation to sense data’, or ‘presents through representation’.

2 Advocates of such accounts appear to include Dainton (2001, 2006, 2008, 2014); Foster (1979, 1982, 1991); Hoerl (2013); Phillips (2010, 2011, 2014a, 2014b); Rashbrook (2013); Russell (1992); and Soteriou (2010).

3 Advocates of such accounts appear to include Almäng (2014); Grush (2007); Kiverstein (2010); and Lee (2014a, 2014b, 2014c).

4 For Kelly’s characterisation, see the quote James attributes to ‘Clay’ (James 1890, 406). On the confusion around Kelly being given the pseudonym ‘Clay’, see Andersen and Grush (2009) and Andersen (2014).

5 His notion of presence-time may be broadly similar to the specious present, but this is not to say that they are identical (depending on how one characterises the specious present). Stern appeals to presence-time as the stretch of time over which a mental act can be extended, but he comments that this is not identical with the time during which a presentation persists (in this latter case he appeals to ‘primary memory’). He only discusses the term ‘specious present’ in a footnote (see Stern 1897, 325, footnote 15).

6 See Andersen and Grush (2009) and Andersen (2017) for the suggestion that James and Kelly did have the very possibility of the perception of motion (partly) motivating their appeal to the specious present. Also see Andersen and Grush (2009) for a discussion of the genesis of these ideas in writers prior to James and Kelly; in particular Hodgson (1878, 1898).

7 See Shardlow (2019) for a greater discussion of this line of argument.

8 I cannot do justice to what Hodgson has to say about the relationship between experience and time in the current context. See Andersen (2017) for a discussion of how Hodgson’s writing relates to current debates regarding temporal experience; see Mander (2014) for a detailed account of Hodgson’s philosophical position as set out in his The Metaphysic of Experience (1898).

9 Spicker (1973) offers a detailed comparison of the writing of Husserl and Hodgson, noting how much of Hodgson’s work anticipates ideas taken up by Husserl.

10 For greater discussion of this point, see Phillips (2011), Shardlow (2019), and Soteriou (2013, ch.4).

11 But it does have its advocates. For example, see the models discussed by Arstila (2018), Chuard (2011, 2017), and Le Poidevin (2007).

12 There may be further complications. It may be that we have to take into account what is presented in the visual field over the interval of the specious present. To illustrate this thought, suppose that a subject is moving at a continuous rate perpendicular to an object (such as a wall) which varies in colour very gradually, keeping her gaze straight ahead at whatever portion of the object is perpendicular to her. It may be that if the subject remained stationary and looked at the object from a given location, she would not be able to visually discriminate any variation in colour (given the portion of the object which falls within her visual field). However, given that she is in continuous motion and the portion of the object she is visually aware of is changing it may be that she is able to visually discriminate some variation in colour as a result of what is presented in the visual field over the specious present. For simplicity I leave this complication aside when presenting the case in the text.

13 Dennett also suggests that the time represented in experience and the time of representing may come apart at short timescales (Dennett 1991, 161). On this claim, see Phillips (2014a, 145–147), where it is argued – contra Dennett – that some features of the temporal structure of experience and the temporal structure of its objects must match.

14 Note that appeal to the specious present does not preclude one from holding that the temporal interval so presented is constituted, in part, by some form of short term memory (or retention); where this is to be distinguished from the role played by episodic or semantic recall, which can allow a subject to become aware that something has moved/changed. Such a model of the specious present is often explicitly endorsed, referred to as a retentional account (see note 4). Though it is to be granted that the main aim of Prosser and Roselli in this context is to call into question how substantial the apparent differences are between supposedly competing models of the specious present (and temporal experience more generally).

Additional information

Funding

Some of the work towards this article was supported by a Research Fellowship at the University of Warwick on the AHRC project “Time: Between Metaphysics and Psychology” (AH/P00217X/1), Principal Investigator Christoph Hoerl and Co-Investigator Teresa McCormack.