| FORM: | ARTICLE |
| Author: | Natsoulas, Thomas |
| Affiliation: | U California, Davis, USA |
| Title: | The stream of consciousness: II. William James’s specious present. |
| Source: | Imagination, Cognition & Personality, 1992-1993. 12 (4): p.367-385 |
| Language: | English |
| Subjects: | Thesaurus terms: Consciousness States James (William) Time Perception |
| Added Keywords: | specious present approach to time perception as illustration of inconsistency between W. James’s account of stream of consciousness & “The Principles of Psychology” |
| Classification Code: | Consciousness States (2380) |
| Population Terms: Human | |
| Abstract: | Contends that W. James’s (1890) implicit account of “the stream of consciousness” was not consistent with how he advertised it inThe Principles of Psychology.James’s stream was more analogous to a train, with tightly adjacent successive components, than to a stream of water. Additional material supporting this contention comes from James’s account of time perception, specifically the specious present and how it is intuited. It is argued that James’s account is not perceptual, that time perception amounts to a kind of inner consciousness (IC). When engaged in “perceiving” time, individuals have IC whose objects are durations comprised of a set of successive instances of consciousness intuited to occur in the present. They then become past one or more after another, depending on the frequency of IC. ((c) 1999 APA/PsycINFO, all rights reserved) |