Perceiving Temporal Structure

Perceptual experience seems to present us with not only objects and their ‘static’ properties such as shapes, colours, and positions but also with events and their temporal structure: that is, their temporal relationships such as simultaneity and temporal order. This dissertation aims to defend the claim that we perceptually experience temporal structure from recently revived challenges, and to show how a theory of temporal perception bears on central issues in the philosophy of mind. Experience manifestly possesses its own temporal structure. If we have perceptual experiences of the temporal structure of external events, it seems natural to ask whether there is a deep explanatory connection between the temporal features of the experiences themselves and the temporal features that they are experiences of. Accordingly, much of the philosophical debate about temporal perception focuses on the matching thesis: the claim that the temporal structure of perceptual experience always matches the temporal structure that one experiences events as having. Debate between critics and proponents of the thesis can sometimes appear to be stuck in a clash between experimental results and strongly held introspective intuitions about experience. I do not directly argue against the matching thesis, but I show how we can improve upon existing experimentally-based arguments against it. I also show how its critics can explain (rather than simply disregard or deny) the intuitions that allegedly support it. Trying to explain these intuitions from the critic’s perspective suggests new ideas about temporal perception that are not only coherent but independently plausible. I develop these ideas and show how they can deepen our understanding of how temporal perception fits with other issues central to the philosophy of mind: our introspective awareness of our experiences, the connection between perception and the temporal present, and perception’s role in guiding action.Ph.D