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Dissolving an epistemological puzzle of time perception

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Abstract

Robin Le Poidevin (2007) claims that we do form perceptual beliefs regarding order and duration based on our perception of events, but neither order nor duration are by themselves objects of perception. Temporal properties are discernible only when one first perceives their bearers, and temporal relations are discernible only when one first perceives their relata. The epistemic issue remains as to whether or not our perceptual beliefs about order and duration are formed on the causal basis of an event’s objective order and duration. Le Poidevin raises this issue in the form of an epistemological puzzle of time perception, from which he derives the claim that the order and duration of events do not causally contribute to our perceptual beliefs about them. Since his view is motivated by a causal truthmaker principle for grounding knowledge, it also holds that perceptual beliefs about temporal features must be caused by the features themselves in order to count as knowledge. Given these theoretical commitments, there is a puzzle concerning how such perceptual beliefs could constitute knowledge of temporal properties. In response to Le Poidevin, I argue for an account according to which order and duration are objects of perception, causally contribute to our perceptual beliefs about them, and such beliefs are capable of counting as knowledge. I conclude by showing that, on my alternative account, the epistemological puzzle dissolves and his own solution to it fails.

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Notes

  1. Henceforth, whenever I use the term ‘order’ I will be referring to temporal order, i.e. the relation of temporal precedence and subsequence that events stand in to each other, not any other ordering relation (e.g., alphabetical order).

  2. Bonjour (1985) calls this type of perceptual belief ‘cognitively spontaneous’.

  3. Cf. (Hatfield (2002), pp. 115–140).

  4. “To see one event as following on from another, I have to be aware of the events themselves. The relation by itself cannot be an object of perception as pure colour can. Similarly with duration: I cannot be aware just of the duration of an event, independently of my awareness of the event itself. Somehow, the awareness of order and duration emerges from a perception of the events that exhibit them.” (Le Poidevin 2007, p. 99)

  5. The term ‘objective’, in this context, denotes independence from a particular perspective. As such, the objective duration of, say, a sound is the temporal boundary of that sound, whether or not someone hears the sound lasting that long. If one grants the reality of events, then it is natural to assume that events are occurents that have a objective temporal extent.

  6. Le Poidevin uses the example of an apple’s shape, but a baseball is a better example for raising the issue of bodily momentum perception.

  7. I am using ‘immediate awareness’ to denote the way in which Le Poidevin is purposely limiting the scope of direct perception, “perception has temporal limits, and if we draw these very tightly, certain things cannot be objects of (at least direct) perception.” (2007, p. 98). This is also why I have stipulated that perceptual belief, for our purposes, only concerns spontaneous non-inferential beliefs, i.e. those that concern direct perception and immediate awareness.

  8. For detailed treatment of the ADSHR temporal envelope theory, see Gordon (1987), Bregman (1990), Jensen (1999), Jensen and Marentakis (2001)

  9. This view directly opposes accounts that treat sounds as properties or secondary qualities, e.g. Locke (1690/1975); Locke (1823) and Pasnau (1999). It should also be noted that my endorsement of O’Callaghan’s account is neutral with respect to the ontological status of events; it is, in principle, compatible with any of the candidate views about events, e.g., Davidson (1970/1980), Kim (1973), Galton (1984), Lewis (1986), and Bennett (1988).

  10. Le Poidevin calls this the ‘psychological puzzle of time perception’, which is a separate problem but related to the epistemological puzzle of time perception.

  11. Le Poidevin, “The Wider View: Precedence and Duration” in his The Images of Time (Oxford: 2007), pp. 97–122

  12. I label the first claim ’E0’ because Le Poidevin does not include it in his presentation of the puzzle, but it is required in order to explicitly generate the inconsistency.

  13. Le Poidevin’s formulation of CTMP is, “Perceptual beliefs that qualify for the title ‘knowledge’ are caused by their truthmakers” (100). The phrase ‘qualify for the title knowledge’ is equivalent to my ‘count as knowledge’ in (E1). My formulation of CTMP clarifies what Le Poidevin’s means by ‘Perceptual beliefs...are caused by their truthmakers’, viz. that a subject \(A\) knows the perceptual belief \(p\), where \(t\) is the truthmaker of \(p\), only if \(t\) causes \(A\) to believe \(p\). I think making an instance of \(p\) the object rather than “perceptual beliefs” in the abstract makes the principle more concrete and more clearly shows the relation between \(t\) causing the perceptual belief that \(p\), and knowing that \(p\). I am grateful to Ben Goodney for pressing this clarification.

  14. See (Le Poidevin (2007), p. 29), cf. Nozick (1981) for the dispositional component of this form of process reliabilism.

  15. See Goldman (1979); Goldman (1986) and Dretske (1981); Dretske (1995) for defenses of externalist accounts of justification.

  16. For defense of truthmaker see Armstrong (1997), Cameron (2005); Cameron (2008a, b), Schaffer (2008, 2010), for an extended argument against truthmaker see Merricks (2007).

  17. See (Le Poidevin (2007), pp. 101–102)), cf. (Russell (1912), p. 56)

  18. For treatments of trope theory, see Armstrong (1989), Bacon (1995), Mormann (1995), and Simons (1994).

  19. For example, we might claim that the brownness trope of a piece of chocolate is distributed throughout the chocolate. We could alternatively claim that there are thousands of brownness tropes in the chocolate, one for each micro-particle of the chocolate. But, I am not endorsing one interpretation over the other, because I think both are adequate candidates for answering the location problem. I am grateful to David Ingram for pressing me to clarify this point.

  20. Namely, the problems of companionship and imperfect community, cf. Goodman’s Structure of Appearance (1951).

  21. In fact, humans are notoriously bad at estimating extremely brief durations (on the order of 1–400 ms) and longer durations (on the order of minutes and hours) without external reliable clock systems and memory, but medium-length estimations (on the order of seconds) can be accurately reported without aid. (Varela (1999), p. 277)) claims that, “subjects can estimate durations of 2–3 s quite precisely, but their performance decreases considerably for longer times; spontaneous speech in many languages is organized such that utterances last 2–3 s; short intentional movements (such as self-initiated arm movements) are embedded within windows of the same duration.” See also Varela (1999) for a more extensive treatment of the psychological and cognitive-neuroscience support.

  22. Libet et al. (1967, 1991), and Jensen (1999) offer studies that purport to show that reaction times to skin stimuli is around 500 msec. A delay does not entail that duration is not a causal part of the perception.

  23. Unless we are in Wonderland, where one can see properties without their bearers, e.g., “a grin without a cat.”

  24. See O’Callaghan (2010) for an extended defense of the sound localization against skeptical challenges.

  25. Mapping the sound event in 4-space, the duration would be located along the temporal dimension.

  26. Our perceptual beliefs about duration, probably, only rarely give numerical values. We can, however, ostensibly specify the duration by comparing it to a duration of equal magnitude. In fact, humans are quite good at this within the range of 500ms–3s, temporal reproduction tasks in experimental psychology test for precisely this ability to reproduce durations. For good examples of this experimental method and results, see Wittmann et al. (2007) and Ulbrich et al. (2007).

  27. Note, that on the view I am advocating, when you amplify and replay an audio recording you are creating a new sound event, that bears some ancestral relation to the original sound that was recorded. This has the interesting implication that the most replayed recordings have the most ancestors.

  28. It is like asking the question ‘when and where does the Earth revolve around the sun?’ The correct answer is that one revolution of the Earth around the sun occurs over an interval of \(\sim \)365 days and over the path of its elliptical orbit. Each time-slice along the Earth’s orbital path is a state that belongs to the revolution, but it is only the entire path traveled over a year which is identical to a revolution.

  29. I would claim instead that we normally outsource most of our timing to external reliable clock systems for three related reasons: (1) doing so frees up a lot of cognitive resources for other tasks; (2) our external temporal metrics are much more accurate over extended durations and extremely brief durations, thus grounding more true judgments about durations; and (3) there is likely an evolutionary advantage to cognitively outsourcing in this way (given 2 and 3). I think this claim would follow naturally from the Extended Mind thesis argued for by Clark and Chalmers (1998) and Clark (1997); Clark (2003); Clark (2008).

  30. Locating the order relations that obtain between two or more events may pose a more difficult task. Nonetheless, I think we can tell a plausible story, ceteris paribus, in which the objective orders of events cause corresponding perceptual beliefs about order.

  31. Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting the possible appeal to rate of change.

  32. See Lamarsh and Baratta (2001). Introduction to Nuclear Engineering for details and equations.

  33. Le Poidevin is certainly not an anti-realist, since his epistemological puzzle directly refers to ‘objective order and duration’.

  34. Cf. Nerlich’s (1994, p. 41) for a discussion of geometrical explanation, which Le Poidevin cites as having affinities to his proposal, and is likely the source of his idea since geometrical explanation is also stipulated to be a non-causal explanation.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Art Melnick, Dan Korman, Rob Cummins, Jon Waskan, Shelley Weinberg, Helga Varden, Ty Fagan, Chris Hendricksen, Andrew Higgins, Dan Estrada, and two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on earlier drafts. I would also like to express my gratitude to audiences at the Northwestern-Notre Dame Joint Epistemology Conference, Society for Exact Philosophy, and Philosophy of Time Society for helpful feedback in response to presentations of earlier versions of this paper, especially commentators Jared Peterson and David Ingram.

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    Adam J. Bowen

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Bowen, A.J. Dissolving an epistemological puzzle of time perception. Synthese 190, 3797–3817 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-012-0228-2

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