A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time by Bardon Adrian;

Author:Bardon, Adrian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2013-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

TEMPORAL PASSAGE AS ADAPTIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL PROJECTION

The solution I would like to propose* is that A-series change and the passage of time are mind-dependent in the sense of being merely matters of psychological projection; however, it is a projection of a special kind, in that it is conceptually indispensable to any coherent representation of the world. To say a manner of representing the world is indispensable is to say that no genuinely thinkable description of the world without it is possible. This, I shall suggest, gives us a certain entitlement to include passage in our description of the world, without contradicting the conclusions of science and logic that the passage of time is a merely subjective phenomenon.

‘Psychological projection’ refers to a loose collection of phenomena in which one represents an internal, subjective feeling or sensation as an objective feature of the world—or, more broadly, in which one’s commitment to some state of affairs being the case is explained by psychological facts about oneself, rather than by the world really being that way. An example of projection is our everyday attribution of color properties to things around us, say, a green umbrella or the blue sky. ‘Greenness’ is not really a property that the umbrella has; rather, the umbrella is reflecting light at a certain wavelength, and our brains are constituted to respond to that wavelength of light in a certain distinctive way. Greenness is a feeling, not a property of things. It is similarly so when we use adjectives like “loud” or “soft”: Things can seem loud to us or engender a soft feeling, but, strictly speaking, it is nonsensical to propose that something literally is loud or soft. In contemporary philosophical parlance, properties like greenness, loudness, and softness are called “secondary properties.” Such properties are not real properties of things around us, nor are they mere illusions or falsehoods: They are predictable responses to something real. Our attribution of such properties to the things causing these responses is a case of projection, in which a mind-dependent sensory response is understandably, but erroneously, attributed to things independent of the mind. As we have seen, arguments are stacking up to the effect that dynamic change isn’t really a property of events around us. To explain why we so characteristically represent things around us as undergoing dynamic change, would a comparison to the projection of secondary sensory properties be helpful?

Philosopher Richard Gale says no, because A-series temporal determinations are not sensible qualities like color or sound. True enough, but Robin Le Poidevin replies that the perception of passage might be fruitfully compared to other sorts of projection, such as the projection of non-sensible qualities like virtue and vice. There is no real characteristic, describable by natural science, corresponding to what we call virtue; there are only sympathetic emotions that arise when we see patterns of behavior that we associate with pleasant results for ourselves or others. The ascription of virtue as a characteristic to persons is thus an example of psychological projection in the broader sense mentioned above.

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