Teresa Pedro

“Postdictive phenomena” are phenomena, in which a stimulus presented later affects the perception of an initial stimulus presented earlier. Drawing on postdictive phenomena such as the “cutaneous rabbit”, Dennett and Grush  (Dennett 1991, Grush 2005, 2007, 2009) claim that the brain processes temporal information in a non-passive manner. Despite these empirical data, the so called “naïve view” of time perception has known a recent and very well sustained defense (Phillips 2014). According to this view, the temporal structure of experience matches the temporal structure of its objects. In my talk, I argue that the “naïve view” fails to accommodate the postdictive phenomena and faces serious objections.

D. C. Dennett (1991). Consciousness Explained. Boston MA: Little Brown & Co.

R. Grush (2005). Brain Time and Phenomenological Time. In Cognition and the Brain. The Philosophy and Neuroscience Movement, ed. A. Brook and K. Akins, 160-207. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

— (2007). “Time and Experience. In Philosophie der Zeit, ed. T. Müller, 27-44. Frankfurt: Klosterman.

— (2009). Some Recent Directions in the Philosophy and Psychology of the Temporal content of Perceptual Experience. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology, ed. J. Symons and P. Calvo, 592-606. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

I. B. Phillips (2014). The Temporal Structure of Experience. In Subjective Time: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Temporality, ed. D. Lloyd and V. Arstila, 139-158.Cambridge/MA: MIT Press.