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282Time and tense in perceptual experiencePhilosophers' Imprint 9 1-18. 2009.We can not just see, hear or feel how things are at a time, but we also have perceptual experiences as of things moving or changing. I argue that such temporal experiences have a content that is tenseless, i.e. best characterized in terms of notions such as 'before' and 'after' (rather than, say, 'past', 'present' and 'future'), and that such experiences are essentially of the nature of a process that takes up time, viz., the same time as the process that is being experienced. Both claims have b…Read more
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350Young children's reasoning about the order of past eventsJournal of Experimental Child Psychology 98 (3): 168-183. 2007.Four studies are reported that employed an object location task to assess temporal–causal reasoning. In Experiments 1–3, successfully locating the object required a retrospective consideration of the order in which two events had occurred. In Experiment 1, 5- but not 4-year-olds were successful; 4-year-olds also failed to perform at above-chance levels in modified versions of the task in Experiments 2 and 3. However, in Experiment 4, 3-year-olds were successful when they were able to see the obj…Read more
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214Reply to Jean Decety: Perceiving actions and understanding agencyIn Jerome Dokic & Joelle Proust (eds.), Simulation and Knowledge of Action, John Benjamins. pp. 45--73. 2002.Decety presents evidence for the claim that neural mechanisms involved in the generation of actions are also recruited in the observation and mental simulation of actions. This paper explores the relationship between such neuropsychological findings and our common-sense understanding of what it is for a person to imitate or imagine performing an action they have observed. A central question is whether imitation and imagination necessarily involve the ability to distinguish between one's own acti…Read more
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589Memory, amnesia, and the pastMind and Language 14 (2): 227-51. 1999.This paper defends the claim that, in order to have a concept of time, subjects must have memories of particular events they once witnessed. Some patients with severe amnesia arguably still have a concept of time. Two possible explanations of their grasp of this concept are discussed. They take as their respective starting points abilities preserved in the patients in question: (1) the ability to retain factual information over time despite being unable to recall the past event or situation that…Read more
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966Episodic memory, autobiographical memory, narrative: On three key notions in current approaches to memory developmentPhilosophical Psychology 20 (5): 621-640. 2007.According to recent social interactionist accounts in developmental psychology, a child's learning to talk about the past with others plays a key role in memory development. Most accounts of this kind are centered on the theoretical notion of autobiographical memory and assume that socio-communicative interaction with others is important, in particular, in explaining the emergence of memories that have a particular type of connection to the self. Most of these accounts also construe autobiograph…Read more
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843Writing on the page of consciousnessProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 115 (3pt3): 187-209. 2015.I identify one particular strand of thought in Thomas Nagel's ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, which I think has helped shape a certain conception of perceptual consciousness that is still prevalent in the literature. On this conception, perceptual consciousness is to be explained in terms of a special class of properties perceptual experiences themselves exhibit. I also argue that this conception is in fact in conflict with one of the key ideas that supposedly animates Nagel's argument in ‘What …Read more
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519Causal reasoningPhilosophical Studies 152 (2): 167-179. 2011.The main focus of this paper is the question as to what it is for an individual to think of her environment in terms of a concept of causation, or causal concepts, in contrast to some more primitive ways in which an individual might pick out or register what are in fact causal phenomena. I show how versions of this question arise in the context of two strands of work on causation, represented by Elizabeth Anscombe and Christopher Hitchcock, respectively. I then describe a central type of reasoni…Read more
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689The perception of time and the notion of a point of viewEuropean Journal of Philosophy 5 (2): 156-171. 1997.This paper aims to investigate the temporal content of perceptual experience. It argues that we must recognize the existence of temporal perceptions, i.e., perceptions the content of which cannot be spelled out simply by looking at what is the case at an isolated instant. Acts of apprehension can cover a succession of events. However, a subject who has such perceptions can fall short of having a concept of time. Similar arguments have been put forward to show that a subject who has spatial perce…Read more
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306Perspectives on time and memory: an introductionIn Christoph Hoerl & Teresa McCormack (eds.), Time and memory: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, Oxford University Press. pp. 1-33. 2001.What is the connection between the way we represent time and things in time, on the one hand, and our capacity to remember particular past events, on the other? This is the substantive question that has stood behind the project of putting together this volume. The methodological assumption that has informed this project is that any progress with the difficult and fascinating set of issues that are raised by this question must draw on the resources of various areas both in philos- ophy and in psy…Read more
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1611Jaspers on explaining and understanding in psychiatryIn Thomas Fuchs & Giovanni Stanghellini (eds.), One Hundred Years of Karl Jaspers' General Psychopathology, Oxford University Press. pp. 107-120. 2013.This chapter offers an interpretation of Jaspers’ distinction between explaining and understanding, which relates this distinction to that between general and singular causal claims. Put briefly, I suggest that when Jaspers talks about (mere) explanation, what he has in mind are general causal claims linking types of events. Understanding, by contrast, is concerned with singular causation in the psychological domain. Furthermore, I also suggest that Jaspers thinks that only understanding makes m…Read more
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716”A succession of feelings, in and of itself, is not a feeling of succession’Mind 122 (486): 373-417. 2013.Variants of the slogan that a succession of experiences does not amount to an experience of succession are commonplace in the philosophical literature on temporal experience. I distinguish three quite different arguments that might be captured using this slogan: the individuation argument, the unity argument, and the causal argument. Versions of the unity and the causal argument are often invoked in support of a particular view of the nature of temporal experience sometimes called intentionalism…Read more
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336Cue competition effects and young children's causal and counterfactual inferencesDevelopmental Psychology 45 (6): 1563-1575. 2009.The authors examined cue competition effects in young children using the blicket detector paradigm, in which objects are placed either singly or in pairs on a novel machine and children must judge which objects have the causal power to make the machine work. Cue competition effects were found in a 5- to 6-year-old group but not in a 4-year-old group. Equivalent levels of forward and backward blocking were found in the former group. Children's counterfactual judgments were subsequently examined b…Read more
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839Tense and the psychology of reliefTopoi 34 (1): 217-231. 2015.At the centre of Arthur Prior’s ‘Thank goodness’ argument for the A-theory of time is a particular form of relief. Time must objectively pass, Prior argues, or else the relief felt when a painful experience has ended is not intelligible. In this paper, I offer a detailed analysis of the type of relief at issue in this argument, which I call temporal relief, and distinguish it from another form of relief, which I refer to as counterfactual relief. I also argue that existing discussions of the ‘Th…Read more
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889Seeing motion and apparent motionEuropean Journal of Philosophy 23 (3): 676-702. 2015.In apparent motion experiments, participants are presented with what is in fact a succession of two brief stationary stimuli at two different locations, but they report an impression of movement. Philosophers have recently debated whether apparent motion provides evidence in favour of a particular account of the nature of temporal experience. I argue that the existing discussion in this area is premised on a mistaken view of the phenomenology of apparent motion and, as a result, the space of pos…Read more
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413On being stuck in timePhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (4): 485-500. 2008.It is sometimes claimed that non-human animals (and perhaps also young children) live their lives entirely in the present and are cognitively ‘stuck in time’. Adult humans, by contrast, are said to be able to engage in ‘mental time travel’. One possible way of making sense of this distinction is in terms of the idea that animals and young children cannot engage in tensed thought, which might seem a preposterous idea in the light of certain findings in comparative and developmental psychology. I …Read more
Coventry, England, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Memory |
Time |