Temporal Experience and Metaphysics

Visual Phenomenology

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the narrative nature of organizational spaces and how these narratives influence human action. The study introduces a notion of “narrating space” that emphasizes a narrative construction of space that is dynamic and performative. The study joins the recent material and spatial turn in organization studies where spaces are not considered merely as a container or a context to organizational action, but as a dynamic and active force.Design/methodology/approachThe study draws on the triadic conception of space of Henry Lefebvre (1991). Lefebvre developed three interconnected dimensions of space: conceived, perceived and lived space. Space can be conceived as an abstract architectural plan or perceived through the practice of space. The dimension that integrates these two is the lived space. Spaces are experienced through emotions, imagination and embodied sensations. Instead of being a passive object, spaces become active and performative through the human engagement. They carry narratives that change their form as time passes by. The study embraces aesthetic, embodied epistemology where sensuous perceptions are considered as valid knowledge.FindingsThe study applies an aesthetic and dynamic approach to space and illustrates how spaces carry performative and processual narratives. These narratives are based on lived experience through personal, embodied experience, memories and sensuous perceptions. The illustrations also show that narratives change over time.Research limitations/implicationsA narrating space concept is characterized by being subjective, dynamic and temporal. Furthermore, it is pointed out that space is constructed through sense-based experiences. A metaphor of an amoeba is offered to depict the nature of the phenomenon. The amoeba metaphor points out that space narratives are dynamic and changing. The study adds to a better awareness of space as a sensuous narrative. Beyond being an isolated personal experience, the study and the illustrations enhance a material view to organizational narratives.Practical implicationsThe study suggests that managers, architects and designers should take notice of spaces as narratives that involve temporal and sensuous experiences when planning and (re)designing work environments. Due to the subjective and temporal nature of organizational spaces they are manageable only to a limited extent. Therefore, to appreciate an active narrating nature of organizational spaces, employee involvement in planning and (re)designing spaces is encouraged.Originality/valueFirst, the paper enhances the awareness of organizational spaces as sensuous narratives. Second, it adds a material aspect to narratives. Third, it advances an aesthetic and embodied approach to narrative organization research.

Time is a core aspect of psychopathology with potential for clinical use and early intervention. Temporal experience, perception, judgement and processing are distorted in various psychiatric disorders such as mood (depression and mania), anxiety, autistic, impulse-control, dissociative and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorders. Can these disorders of time be used as early diagnostic or predictive markers? To answer this question, we develop a Transdiagnostic Taxonomy of (disordered) Time (TTT) that maps on to the symptomatological, phenomenal, perceptual and functional descriptions of each underlying disorder in a 2 × 2 × 2 state space. Temporal distortions may precede functional decline, and so assist efforts at early detection and intervention in at-risk groups. Firstly, this article integrates a psychological model of how time is processed with a subjective or phenomenological model of how time is experienced or perceived. Secondly, the integrated combined model of time is then used to heuristically map major psychiatric disorders on to the basic elements of temporal flow and integration. The TTT systematically describes the basic temporal nature of eight diagnostic categories of psychiatric illness. It differentiates between diagnoses primarily associated with distorted "macro-level" phenomenal temporal experiences (i.e. anxiety, dissociation/PTSD, depression, and mania) from those primarily related to distorted 'micro-level' temporal processing (i.e. psychotic, impulse-control, autistic and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorders). The TTT allows differential diagnostic classification of various psychiatric disorders in terms of a possible underlying time disorder, making it useful for future diagnostic and predictive purposes using novel techniques of temporal processing, time perception, passage of time, and time perspective.

The neural representation of concepts is a focus of many cognitive neuroscience studies. Prior works studying concept representation with neural imaging data have been largely limited to concrete concepts. The use of relatively small and constrained sets of stimuli leaves open the question of whether the findings can generalize other concepts. We share an fMRI dataset in which 11 participants thought of 672 individual concepts, including both concrete and abstract concepts. The concepts were probed using words paired with images in which the words were selected to cover a wide range of semantic categories. Furthermore, according to the componential theories of concept representation, we collected the 54 semantic features of the 672 concepts comprising sensory, motor, spatial, temporal, affective, social, and cognitive experiences by crowdsourcing annotations. The quality assessment results verify this as a high-quality neuroimaging dataset. Such a dataset is well suited to study how the brain represents different semantic features and concepts, creating the essential condition to investigate the neural representation of individual concepts.

The debate between Einstein and Bergson is a salient episode in the history of modern physics and a telling example of the interaction between science and philosophy. This paper initially discusses five reasons why Bergson criticised Einstein for giving up absolute time. The most important one was Bergson’s commitment to an intuitionist, anti-Kantian metaphysics informed by common sense. Apart from that, he knew that the theory of special relativity permits “duration” (durée) in the form of the passage of proper time, to which Bergson referred as “real time”. Neither static eternalism (which excludes temporal passage) nor dynamic eternalism (which, like the former, claims the existence of the future) are acceptable from Bergson’s philosophical perspective, which acknowledges the role of temporal experience and everyday thinking in addition to science and metaphysics. He understood temporal passage as creation of new existence, anticipating what later became known as the growing block theory of time. The pointy relativistic variant of this theory, which divides the universe into blocks of growing past light cones, does justice to large parts of his philosophy, including the distinction between the actual and the virtual. Supporters of Bergson’s account of duration should adopt this theory of time.

Our perceptual experiences as of change over time seem to be accompanied by the sense that time flows. The sense of flow is widely regarded as one of the most elusive aspects of temporal experience. In this paper, I develop a novel account of its nature. I give an initial characterization of the sense of flow as the sense that the present changes—in short, as the sense of replacement. Further, I specify the type of account of the sense of replacement to be developed: since the sense that the present changes will be assumed to be grounded in the perceptual representation that the present changes, my focus will be to explain the perceptual representation that the present changes. I develop an account of the synchronic perceptual representation of the present. Finally, I develop an account of the diachronic perceptual representation of the present as changing.

The author has spent much of the last 10 years investigating variation in the perceived passage of time. In this article, the author reflects on the conduct of that research and discusses 5 principles that are pertinent to issues of validity, truth, and method in the study of temporal experience: intellectual curiosity, systematic empiricism, analytic induction, pragmatic orientation, and commitment to progress. The article concludes with a call for a revitalization of these principles in social research.

The article refers to the theory of colour, the theory of perception, contemporary media morphosis and the postulates of multimedia stylistics. The author undertakes the presented deliberations for two reasons. Perception, remembering and learning are important for the teaching process at the university regardless of the passage of time. Both the lecturer and the student are interested in the effective acquisition of content. Multimodality as an attribute of the prevailing products of contemporary culture should be the subject of interest for discourse linguistics. The author’s research goal is to examine the effectiveness of font colours used in academic Power Point slides. In a multimedia presentation as a form of a lecture, a public reception takes place, alongside listening with reading and watching. The synergy of the spoken word and the bit-based text occurs. The author puts forward the claim that colour can be a factor in supporting or losing the listener’s directional attention. The second claim is that a colourful area, or a background for a printed text, is different from the colour of the font used in a text that students are required to read and watch from a distance. When the lecturer stands in front of the audience, they can manage its attention through various means. One of them is visualization in the form of the font colour choice within the slide. The article is a proposal of a certain type of research, but the author also presents the results of an experiment. Its results allow to reject the dominant role of the text placed on the slide. Some students correctly recalled the information conveyed only in the spoken form.

The concept of similarity plays an essential role in a wide range of application fields like pattern recognition, reasoning, data, and knowledge mining. Nevertheless, the formulation of a valid and general-purpose definition of the similarity concept cannot be easily and simply expressed by a formula and remains a challenging issue. An important concern is that often similarity judgments are based on partial matching and a consideration of the whole structure of the compared objects is missing. Nevertheless, and despite these criticisms, the fundamental place that similarity holds in different theories of perception, knowledge representation, decision-making, and reasoning cannot be denied. Generally speaking, similarity allows assessing how two objects are alike, classifying patterns into different classes, inferring knowledge in order to “categorize” objects into a higher semantic level (classes, categories, etc.), helping a decision-maker to deal with a new encountered situation by comparing it with similar previously encountered ones, etc. From an engineering point of view, several similarity measures have been proposed in order to mathematically express and measure the similarity. All these measures are derived from a set of assumptions, are tied to particular applications, and are strongly related to different forms of knowledge representation and the available information.

Berlin, writes one historian, aroused powerful emotions in everyone. It delighted most, terrified some, but left no one indifferent, and it induced, by its vitality, a certain inclination to exaggerate what one saw.'1 The pertinence of these remarks for an analysis of representation and theories of perception in Weimar cannot be underestimated. Indeed, for journalists, artists and intellectuals in Germany of the 1920s, Berlin served not only as a convenient short-hand for a number of technological innovations thought to profoundly alter perception and experience (trains, automobiles, and telephones as well as photography, photojournalism, and film); even more crucially, Berlin also served as the decisive metaphor for modernity, and modernity was almost invariably represented as a woman. There are, of course, historical grounds for associating Berlin of the 1920s with modernity: as the capital of the Reich and the most populated and industrialized of all German cities, Berlin was also the center for mass cultural entertainment, a fact which is hardly remarkable given that large scale urbanization was the precondition for the expansion and differentiation of the mass cultural audience in Germany.2 What is remarkable, however, is that contemporary observers repeatedly imagined the city to take a female form. For example, in a 1929 issue of Der Querschnitt, an Ullstein magazine for intellectuals, Harold Nicholson describes the particular charm of Berlin by invoking the figure of woman as metaphor for the enigmatic and, hence, desirable otherness of the city:

This chapter presents an overview of four outstanding problems about singular thought, together with an account of their development from theories of reference, perception, and representation. The first focuses on how to characterize singular (de re) thought, demarcating it from descriptive (de dicto) thought, and how this relates to singular propositions and general propositions. The second concerns the conditions on having singular thought, in particular whether acquaintance with the object of thought is necessary and sufficient, or whether singular thought may be generated from descriptive reference‐fixing of directly referential terms, in accordance with semantic instrumentalism. The third deals with the nature and scope of direct perceptual acquaintance and communication‐based acquaintance and their bearings on reference and reference‐preservation. The last addresses questions about the relationship between singular thought and fictional reference, mythical reference, and empty reference.

Speech perception consists of a set of computations that take continuously varying acoustic waveforms as input and generate discrete representations that make contact with the lexical representations stored in long-term memory as output. Because the perceptual objects that are recognized by the speech perception enter into subsequent linguistic computation, the format that is used for lexical representation and processing fundamentally constrains the speech perceptual processes. Consequently, theories of speech perception must, at some level, be tightly linked to theories of lexical representation. Minimally, speech perception must yield representations that smoothly and rapidly interface with stored lexical items. Adopting the perspective of Marr, we argue and provide neurobiological and psychophysical evidence for the following research programme. First, at the implementational level, speech perception is a multi-time resolution process, with perceptual analyses occurring concurrently on at least two time scales (approx. 20-80 ms, approx. 150-300 ms), commensurate with (sub)segmental and syllabic analyses, respectively. Second, at the algorithmic level, we suggest that perception proceeds on the basis of internal forward models, or uses an 'analysis-by-synthesis' approach. Third, at the computational level (in the sense of Marr), the theory of lexical representation that we adopt is principally informed by phonological research and assumes that words are represented in the mental lexicon in terms of sequences of discrete segments composed of distinctive features. One important goal of the research programme is to develop linking hypotheses between putative neurobiological primitives (e.g. temporal primitives) and those primitives derived from linguistic inquiry, to arrive ultimately at a biologically sensible and theoretically satisfying model of representation and computation in speech.

The term realism has multiple meanings in the study of pictures. Roughly speaking, it concerns both what pictures depict—that is, “realism-what”—and how pictures depict, or “realism-how.” Realism-what reflects a particular interest in the selection of a picture’s subject matter, which is self-consciously championed by the 19th-century Realist school of painting but can also be found throughout the history of art. Realism-how, on the other hand, deals with a special way of depiction that is characterized by the accuracy and informativeness of pictures. Although both of these aspects of realism are of historical and theoretical interest, but it is realism-how that has received more attention in the philosophical discussion and is considered a central topic in the philosophy of pictorial representation within the analytic tradition. There are three widely accepted features of pictorial realism, as I shall call it. First, pictorial realism is a property that can be attributed to individual pictures, pictorial systems, styles, genres, and techniques. It makes perfect sense to say that the Mona Lisa is a realistic picture and color photography is a pictorial system that is realistic. Second, realism is comparative and a matter of degree. For example, arguably, Picasso’s last self-portrait (1972) is less realistic than his first (1896). Third, realism can be relative in the sense that the judgment of realism can vary due to different factors, such as cultural conventions, contexts of use, etc. In the contemporary literatures, there are at least three kinds of theories of pictorial realism: resemblance theories, information theories, and habituation theories. Both resemblance theories and information theories spell out pictorial realism in terms of the depiction of properties. The difference is that resemblance theories appeal to the concept of resemblance, or the sharing of properties between pictures and their subjects, whereas information theories focus on how the properties a picture depicts its subject as having can convey information about its subject. Nelson Goodman rejects both kinds of theories and proposes instead the habituation theory, which claims that realism is just a matter of familiarity or habituation. There are also accounts of pictorial realism that are hard to categorize which appeal to perception and make-believe theories but are closely related to one or other of these kinds of theories in various ways. (For theories of pictorial representation in general, which would shed light on the understanding of pictorial realism, see the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Philosophy entries “Depiction” and “Images.” For realism in film or photography, see the section “Film Realism” in the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Philosophy entry “Philosophy of Film”).

In the Treatise of Human Nature, Hume argues that, because we have adequate ideas of the smallest parts of space, we can infer that space itself must conform to our representations of it. The paper examines two challenges to this argument based on Descartes's and Locke's treatments of adequate ideas, ideas that fully capture the objects they represent. The first challenge, posed by Arnauld in his Objections to the Meditations, asks how we can know that an idea is adequate. The second challenge, implicit in Locke's Essay, asks how an empiricist can characterize an idea as inadequate, as both picking out an object and yet failing to capture it fully. In showing how Hume responds to these challenges, his theory of perceptual representation is explained and his treatment of space is related to his scepticism. His conclusion is shown not to be a characterization of space as it exists wholly apart from our powers of conception. Instead, in an adumbration of Kant, his claim is restricted to space as it appears to us.

This paper explores the accounts of conceptual thought of Peter John Olivi (1248-1298) and Peter Auriol (1280-1322). While both thinkers are known for their criticism of representationalist theories of perception, it is argued that they part ways when it comes to analyzing conceptual cognition. To account for the human capacity for conceptual thought, Olivi is happy to make a number of concessions to indirect realist theories of representation. Insofar as he criticizes a specific branch of indirect realism about conceptual thought, he does so for theological, rather than strictly epistemological reasons. This goes to qualify recent, philosophical interpretations of Olivi’s Tractatus de verbo. By contrast, Auriol’s account of conceptual thought is thoroughly direct realist. According to Auriol, the natures of external things themselves directly appear to us in conceptual cognition, without the mediation of inner images or other representational devices.