2. Do Experiences Represent Temporal Properties?

Things seem a certain way to us in experience because of the phenomenal properties of our experiences. According to the version of intentionalism I favour phenomenal properties are identical with impure representational properties, where an experience has an impure representational property by representing an intentional content in a certain manner.Footnote ¹⁰ My aim in this section will be to show that the events we experience do indeed seem to possess temporal properties because temporal properties enter into the intentional content of experiences. This will still leave us with the question of whether they do so because of the contents of our experiences, or because of our experience's manner of representation. This is a question I return to in the final two sections of my paper.

Susanna Siegel has recently devised a useful method for settling questions about which properties do and which properties don't enter into the contents of experience:Footnote ¹¹

The hypothesis we are currently assessing claims that temporal properties like change, persistence, succession and duration can enter into the contents of experience. To apply the method of phenomenal contrast to this case we must find an example of an experience as of a temporal property p, and an example in which the same property p doesn't figure in experience. This will generate the phenomenal contrast we are interested in. We must then consider whether the hypothesis that experiences represent temporal properties is the best explanation of this contrast. It will prove to be the best explanation if it satisfies the following three features:

Consider as a case of phenomenal contrast, C. D. Broad's example of seeing a second hand move around the face of a watch as compared with seeing that the hour hand has moved. In the first case we see the hand moving. In the second case we infer that the hand has moved, perhaps by comparing its position at different times and forming the perceptual belief that it has moved. This example seems to satisfy all three of the conditions we have just stated. There is a difference in what it is like to see the second hand moving and seeing that the hour hand has moved. Only in the first case do we see the smooth and continuous motion of the hand around the watch face. The hour hand moves too slowly for us to see it moving. The two experiences clearly have representational content: the first is accurate if the second hand really is moving, while the second is accurate if we look at the clock twice with an interlude of an hour or more. Finally both experiences represent movement, the temporal property in question.

I will assume that Siegel's method of phenomenal contrast does indeed give us a way of determining which properties enter into the contents of experience. On the basis of Broad's example we can conclude that temporal properties can enter into the contents of experience. Still, someone persuaded by Reid's reasoning might argue that our experiences can represent temporal properties, only because our experience of what is present to us at an instant in time is accompanied by a memory of the recent past. Obviously not just any kind of memory is going to do the job of securing an experience of succession, persistence and change. In order to contribute to my experience in the right way, memory must represent only events in the recent past. Just how far back in time the relevant memory reaches will depend on just how far back in time my experience seems to reach. Moreover the memory we are appealing to must represent events in the right order. If I experience a series of events A, B and C, at the time when I experience C my memory must also represent B and A in the order they happened. Finally the type of memory we invoke must be passive and involuntary in the same way as experience is passive and involuntary. This differentiates the type of memory involved in the experience of temporal properties from episodic memory, which is subject to voluntary control.Footnote ¹⁴ Assuming we can give an account of the memory that fulfils all these conditions,Footnote ¹⁵ we would be on our way to explaining how experiences restricted to a durationless instant could represent events that take time to unfold. A durationless experience could represent temporally extended events by being combined with a kind of sensory memory that possesses the features just enumerated. I'll call this the memory account. In the next section I'll argue that even supposing a memory account can be made to work it may still face a major difficulty in accounting for the difference between an experience of succession and a succession of experiences. The resolution of this difficulty will ultimately require us to reject the assumption that experiences are confined to durationless instants.

3. Experiencing Succession

Many a discussion of temporal experience has begun with James' observation that ‘a succession of feelings, in and of itself, is not a feeling of succession’.Footnote ¹⁶ To illustrate what James had in mind let us continue with the example of seeing movement. Some movements happen too fast for us to perceive them, as is the case with Locke's example of the ‘cannon-bullet’ passing through a room taking with it ‘any limb or fleshy part of a man’.Footnote ¹⁷ Other movements happen too slowly for us to see them, as is the case with Broad's example of the movement of the hour hand on a watch. Many movements of objects, however, happen neither too slowly nor too quickly for us to see them. In these cases we see one and the same object, say the second hand on a watch, occupy different positions at different times. Having an experience of the position the second hand occupies at each point in time is having a succession of experiences. This isn't the same thing as experiencing the second hand moving. When we see the second hand moving, we experience succession.

To see why these are not necessarily identical experiences, imagine a subject whose experience of the second hand is like our experience of the bullet. The second hand moves too fast for them to have an experience of succession. All sensory systems have what Ernst Pöppel calls a ‘window of simultaneity’, an interval during which temporally distinct events that happen successively are fused so that what we perceive is a single event.Footnote ¹⁸ In normal humans, distinct visual events that are presented with a gap (a ‘stimulus onset asynchrony’) of approximately 20ms or less are fused in this way. Let us suppose that the individual we are imagining has a window of simultaneity that is much larger so that any two events that are separated by intervals of a second or less are fused. Call this subject SLOW. We can suppose that SLOW has a perceptual system that produces representations of the position of the second hand at each second, but SLOW isn't capable of seeing the movement of the second hand from one position to the next. His perceptual system fuses the event of the hand moving from one position to the next. Thus SLOW undergoes a succession of perceptual states but he lacks an experience of succession when the second hand moves from one position to the next.Footnote ¹⁹ SLOW doesn't experience succession because he doesn't experience movement. To experience movement is just to experience an object at a succession of different positions at different times.Footnote ²⁰ To experience movement is to experience succession.

Now imagine a second subject with the opposite problem. Call this subject FAST. For FAST the second hand moves too slowly for him to be aware of it changing position from moment to moment. We can imagine that FAST has a window of simultaneity that is tiny compared to ours. He can distinguish between as many events in a second as we can distinguish in an hour. So for FAST, watching the second hand move around the face of the watch is indistinguishable from what it would be like for us to watch the hour hand moving round the face of the watch. FAST discerns no change of position. Again, FAST can be said to undergo a succession of experiences, but he doesn't experience succession.

At first glance the cases of FAST and SLOW would seem to be easily accommodated by a memory account. The memory account will say a person can see the motion of the second hand if at each moment when she sees the position of the second hand she can also recall where the second hand has just been. FAST and SLOW fail to see movement because at the time when the second hand changes position they can't recall its previous position. SLOW fails to recall the second hand's previous position because the events of the second hand first being at one position and then being at the next position aren't discriminated by his perceptual system. At the time when the second hand is at one position, he cannot recall where it has just been. FAST cannot recall where the second hand has just been because the temporal resolution of his experience is so fine-grained that by the time the second hand changes position too much has happened for his to recall where the second hand has just been.

While this certainly seems a promising line to take, still a puzzle remains. How can an experience combined with a co-occurring memory at a single instant in time make us aware of events that seem to be spread out across time? This trick must somehow be accomplished by the way in which sensory memories combine or are unified with co-occurring sensory experiences. When a sensory experience is added to a sensory memory the result must be that a subject can experience what seems to be an event, or a series of events, spread out through time. How could an experience and a memory taking place at a single instant in time make it seem to a subject as if she experiences events extended in time? How can a single experience present successive states of affairs as successive? If successive states of affairs were present in a single complex experience surely all we would see would be a blur, much as in a long exposure photograph taken with a slow shutter-speed. In a long exposure photograph a scene is captured in a single picture as it unfolds over time. All that we can see clearly are the static parts of the scene, and the changes are depicted as blurs. This is not what our ordinary visual experience of motion is like. We can normally see moving objects in sharp focus.

Let us suppose the contribution of memory to experience does indeed make it the case that an experience is no longer confined to a single durationless instant.Footnote ²¹ Once this has been conceded, it is hard to see just what it is the memory account is claiming the folk are mistaken about. Haven't we conceded that we can indeed experience events spread out through time just as the folk claim? If we allow that experiences present us with events that at least appear to have temporal properties, we must give up on the claim that experience is durationless. We must say instead that we can be conscious of whole intervals of time. This is to agree with William James that our experiences take place in what James (following E. R. Clay) referred to as the specious present. Just as we can experience objects that are spread out across three dimensions, so we can experience events that are spread out through time. We can experience change, persistence, succession, and so on because we can experience whole intervals of time in which events can instantiate these properties. This is to reject a memory account to the extent that such an account is motivated by the claim that all we can experience is what is present to us at a single instant in time. Rejecting such an account leaves us with as many questions as it does answers, not least of all how our experiences could be spread out across time.

4. The Puzzle of Temporal Experience

Prima facie, any account of the specious present would seem to be vulnerable to the very same problem we have just raised for memory accounts. For it is indeed compelling to think that at each point in time what we experience is fully determined by the state of mind we are in that time. If we are to experience change, persistence and succession, we must do so at the time our experience occurs. Izchak Miller dubbed this claim the Principle of Simultaneous Awareness (PSA).Footnote ²² We can accept that the contents of our experiences may not be confined to a single instant in the way Reid argued they were. What we experience from moment to moment must however surely be based on the state of mind we are in at a given point in time. How could a state occurring at a single point in time somehow spread out through time to make us aware of a whole temporal interval?

Perhaps the solution to this difficulty lies in an even more thorough-going rejection of the claim that states of mind occur at particular points in time. Our perplexity about temporal experience is generated by the natural seeming idea that it is an experience occurring at a single instant in time that must somehow embrace change, persistence or succession. If we were to allow that experiences (and not only their contents) extend through time perhaps this would relieve our sense of puzzlement. We could say that when we experience a temporally extended event, there is a succession of perceptual experiences that runs in parallel with the successive phases of this event. If I hear a sequence of notes C-D-E, for instance, I undergo acts of awareness that coincide in time with the representation of notes C, D and E. Maybe the solution to our puzzlement lies in signing up to what Miller has called the Principle of Presentational Concurrence (PPC). PPC claims that the ‘duration of the content being presented is concurrent with the duration of the act of presenting it’.Footnote ²³

Timothy Sprigge seems to have endorsed PPC.Footnote ²⁴ He conceived of a person's consciousness as made up of short pulses each of which is a single entity ‘whose earlier and later phases are not genuine particular realities’.Footnote ²⁵ Within a particular pulse of consciousness we can experience change or movement: we can hear a C followed by an E. While Sprigge allows that pulses have temporal spread, he denies that the different aspects of a pulse are units of experience in their own right. Each pulse is both temporally extended and simple in the sense of not allowing for the possibility of further decomposition. These two properties of pulses seem to imply that the different phases of experience within a given pulse must run concurrently with the contents they present. The phases of a pulse aren't experiences in their own right that could possess temporally extended content. If each pulse can embrace change in the way Sprigge argues they must do so by running concurrently with changing contents.

Sprigge denied that we ever experience the transitions from one pulse to the next:

There is however something phenomenologically off-key about Sprigge's denial that we can experience transitions between different moments of experience. Sprigge allows that we experience transitions between events when these transitions occur within a single pulse of experience, but he denies we experience such transitions across pulses of experience. Dainton has pointed out that if this were right we should be able to find evidence for these two kinds of transitions when we reflect on our experience.Footnote ²⁷ We should be able to differentiate between transitions between events that are sensibly present to us, and transitions that can only be recollected, but this is something we don't seem to be able to find. Consider the following example:

There are no obvious boundaries separating one phase of consciousness from the next in the way we would expect there to be if consciousness were composed of momentary pulses. Based on these sorts of phenomenological considerations, a proponent of PPC ought to hold that experiences are never momentary. Instead different phases of consciousness can overlap in a way that forms the basis for the continuity of consciousness. Different phases of consciousness overlap by sharing common parts.Footnote ²⁹ I'll follow Dainton in calling this the overlap account.

According to the overlap account, we can be directly and sensibly aware of events that take place within a short duration of time lasting perhaps a second or less. By ‘directly aware’ I mean awareness without the mediation of any kind of memory or recollection. This interval of time is what we referred to earlier as the specious present. Just as with Sprigge's pulse theory, our awareness extends a short distance through time. Moreover all events occurring within a specious present are experienced with the same maximal force and vivacity. However unlike the pulse theory, memory isn't introduced to provide links between distinct specious presents. Instead it is claimed that distinct specious presents can come together by sharing common parts. If two events are separated by an interval longer than the duration of a single specious present, this will preclude the sharing of common parts with the consequence that the two events cannot be experienced together. At best we will be able to remember one of the events while experiencing the other. Here is Dainton explaining the basic idea:

How do events occurring within a single specious present come to be experienced together? When we hear notes C, D and E succeeding one another we hear them together as parts of a single experience. This is part of what it is for us to experience each note as succeeding its predecessor as opposed to merely undergoing a succession of experiences. Bayne and Chalmers introduce the term ‘phenomenal unity’ to refer to what it is like to occupy two or more conscious states together.Footnote ³¹ Consider the experience of seeing a person's lips move at the same time as hearing what they say. These two experiences are phenomenally unified insofar as we undergo a single state that subsumes our individual experiences of seeing the person's lips moving and hearing the words they are saying. When we experience notes C, D and E succeeding one another, I suggest we are also in a single complex state that subsumes our individual experiences of first hearing note C, then D and finally E. There is something it is like to undergo this single complex state that is different from what it would be like to undergo each experience individually and separately. This phenomenal difference lies in the relation of phenomenal unity that holds when we experience succession. Phenomenal unity is a relational property of the individual experiences that combine to form the single complex state. Recall again our individuals FAST and SLOW seeing the second hand move around the watch face. Their successive perceptions are not phenomenally unified. The distinct perceptions they undergo of the second hand are not subsumed by a single state, and this is why they do not experience succession.

Dainton has introduced a special kind of experiential relation he calls co-consciousness to account for phenomenal unity. Co-consciousness is a relation that binds together a brief phase of consciousness with its adjacent phases so that the different phases are experienced together. The relation co-consciousness holds both at a time and over time. Moreover it is a relation that obtains equally within a single experience and across distinct experiences. All the parts that make up a spatial field of view are, for instance, mutually co-conscious. According to Dainton, the same is true of the parts that make up a temporal field of view where the parts of a temporal field of view will be the phases of experience that make up a given specious present.

Dainton tells us: ‘Co-consciousness is a basic experiential relationship, one about which there is nothing more to be said, at least while we confine ourselves to describing how things seem.’Footnote ³² His arguments for this conclusion are complex, imaginative and elaborate in ways that I cannot rehearse here. The question I want to press is whether a phenomenological account of temporal experience can satisfactorily settle for the conclusion that co-consciousness (or phenomenal unity) is a basic relation that can't be given any further analysis?

I've argued that the difference between experiencing succession and undergoing a succession of experiences lies in the relation of phenomenal unity. One of the challenges an account of temporal experience faces is to explain phenomenal unity, or so I've been arguing in this section. It is therefore rather unsatisfying to be told that the relation of phenomenal unity is a relation ‘about which there is nothing more to be said’. In what remains of this paper I consider whether an intentionalist account of temporal experience might be able to do better.

I begin with a version of the intentionalist account recently defended by Michael Tye.Footnote ³³ Tye argues that the tangles philosophers have got themselves into in thinking about phenomenal unity may be born of flawed assumptions. Once we set aside these mistaken assumptions, Tye suggests a path will open up to a rather simple and elegant account of phenomenal unity.

5. Phenomenal Unity: a Spurious Problem?

I have defined phenomenal unity as a relational property of experiences or phases of experience in virtue of which their contents are experienced together. This definition, at least upon first hearing, seems to imply the existence of two levels of experience. On the one hand there is a first-order level of experience at which individual experiences or phases of experience occur that can exist independently and separately from other experiences or phases of experience. A second level of experience is responsible for combining or unifying these different experiences so that there is something it is like to undergo them together.

Tye has argued that an account of phenomenal unity along these lines faces a regress problem.Footnote ³⁴ Consider again our auditory experience of notes C, D, and E. I have argued there is something it is like to experience the notes together that is different from what it is like to experience them separately. Suppose there is a second-order experience we undergo when we are aware of the contents of these individual experiences together. Now we have our original three experiences of notes C, D and E plus a second-order experience, which is supposed to make it the case we experience the notes together. Surely this just leaves us back where we started. Do we not need a further experience that unifies our original three experiences and the second-order experience of unity? Tye summarises the difficulty as follows:

Even supposing there was some way around the regress problem, Tye claims that any account of phenomenal unity in terms of an experience of unity will face a further serious difficulty. When we introspect our auditory experience of C-D-E, we don't seem to find anything like an experience of unity. Indeed Tye insists that we don't find anything at all over and above the notes C-D-E. When we introspect, our experience is like an invisible window onto the world. We look right through the window to the scene beyond. Of course, in reality windows aren't invisible and we can turn our attention to them, so the analogy isn't entirely apt. When we introspect our experience, the situation is supposed to be different. Experiences are supposed to figure in introspection like panes of glass that we just couldn't notice no matter how hard we looked.Footnote ³⁶

If we are not aware of our experiences when we introspect, it follows a fortiori that we couldn't be aware of our experiences as unified through introspection. Introspection grounds claims about what it is like to undergo a particular experience. The account of phenomenal unity we are currently considering introduces an experience of unity to account for what it is like to experience contents together. However we've just seen that introspection reveals no overarching experience of unity. What grounds do we have for positing such an experience of unity in our account of phenomenal unity if we find no such experience when we introspect?

In order to escape these two problems Tye is led to endorse what he calls the one experience view (OEV), an ancestor of which was advanced by Carnap.Footnote ³⁷ Consider the experience of a wine taster. He sees the colour of wine; takes hold of the glass and can feel it in his hand; swishes the wine around the glass and hears the pleasant sound it makes against the side of the glass, smells the wine, and finally tastes it moving it around in his mouth. Moreover, let us suppose the wine taster is in a hurry so that he manages to have all these experiences together in a single specious present. OEV claims that the wine taster doesn't have five separate modality-specific experiences one after the other. Rather he has a single complex multimodal experience that can be described in more or less complete ways by describing each of the modality-specific experiences and the properties they represent.Footnote ³⁸ When we experience different contents together this is not because there are different experiences with their own individual contents that must somehow be combined. Instead there is a single experience with a multi-faceted complex content that represents everything we are conscious of, from the moment we wake to the moment we fall into a dreamless sleep. We can distinguish within this single experience what it is like to undergo this experience at particular moments in time. In doing so we are distinguishing moments or ‘stages’ belonging to a single extended experience, not individual token experiences.

How does the OEV account for phenomenal unity? First off, it claims that phenomenal unity is a ‘relation between qualities represented in experience’ and not between experiences.Footnote ³⁹ The OEV denies that there exists a plurality of experiences from moment to moment that stand in need of unification. Unity instead is a relational property that attaches to the qualities experienced. It is the things and qualities we experience at different times that are experienced as continuing on from, or succeeding one another:

Tye distinguishes between two types of phenomenal unity, which he calls direct and indirect respectively. Direct phenomenal unity attaches to consciousness when the qualities that are represented in one specious present are experienced as ‘succeeding or continuing on from the qualities experienced in the immediately prior specious present’.Footnote ⁴¹ Indirect phenomenal unity obtains when the qualities represented in ‘nonadjacent specious presents are linked by chains of direct phenomenal unity’.Footnote ⁴² Both kinds of phenomenal unity describe relations that hold between specious presents. What about phenomenal unity within a particular specious present?

The OEV allows that a single experience has stages, and that each stage has a phenomenal character. What it denies is that experience stages are single experiences in their own right as opposed to parts of a single experience. However we can ask, for each stage of a single experience, in virtue of what is this stage phenomenally unified? The OEV cannot deny that from moment to moment the qualities that are represented at each time are experienced together. What, according to the OEV, is the difference between undergoing a succession of experiences and experiencing succession? Tye's notions of direct and indirect phenomenal unity don't seem to help us much with this question. Nor does it help to be told: ‘phenomenal succession is a relation between qualities that enter into the phenomenal content of the single experience of the subject for the given period of consciousness’.Footnote ⁴³ We knew there was some kind of relation between qualities that obtains when we experience succession, and that doesn't when we simply undergo a succession of experiences. What we were looking for from an account of phenomenal unity was an analysis of this relation. Tye's OEV doesn't seem to be much of an improvement on the overlap account in this regard.

Tye might reasonably respond to this objection that it is illicitly trading on the very view of experience that the OEV means to reject. It is guilty of thinking of stages of experience on the model of token experiences that can be unified both at a time and over time. The OEV is however committed to denying that perceptions and experiences succeed one another. Tye writes: ‘A succession of feelings is indeed not a feeling of succession. But a feeling of succession is not a feeling of the succession of feelings either’.Footnote ⁴⁴ The single experience that persists for a given period exhibits phenomenal unity, and does so by virtue of the relations of direct and indirect phenomenal unity. Certainly we can give all sorts of incomplete descriptions of this experience in terms of the relations that hold between the qualities experienced at different times. These descriptions however will exhaust what there is to say about phenomenal unity within a specious present.

Such a response depends upon Tye's commitment to a position I'll label strong intentionalism. A strong intentionalist identifies the phenomenal character of an experience with pure representational properties. A pure representational property is the property of having a certain intentional content or representing things as being a certain way.Footnote ⁴⁵ When we experience qualities together, these qualities are not qualities of experience. Rather they are qualities that belong to the things we experience, and that enter into an experience's intentional content. Do pure representational properties exhaust the phenomenal character of an experience?

Different states of mind can be directed upon one and the same object. We can remember or imagine tasting a particular fine bottle of cabernet, but we can also see, smell and taste this same cabernet. In all of these cases we are undergoing different experiences that have an intentional content directed upon the very same object. The difference lies in the experience's mode or manner of representation. Each sense-modality has its own distinctive manner of representation. In addition to the difference between the senses, there are also significant differences between the manner of representation characteristic of imagining or remembering, and that of the senses. Finally there are doxastic (belief-like) and non-doxastic (perception-like) manners of representation.

There is a lot more to be said about each of these manners of representation, and how to go about individuating them. What I have said, however, suffices to illustrate an important point that isn't, I think, easily accounted for by strong intentionalism. Whenever there is an object that the mind is directed upon, this object will always be represented in a particular manner or under a particular mode. For this reason we cannot identify the phenomenal character of an experience with its pure representational properties. In order to fully characterise an experience's phenomenal character we need to mention both its intentional content and its manner of representation. Chalmers calls this position impure representationalism. Footnote ⁴⁶ I'll refer to it as weak intentionalism, so as to secure the contrast with what I've called strong intentionalism of the kind endorsed by Tye.

I admit I've provided nothing in the way of an argument for the weak intentionalist view I favour over Tye's strong intentionalism. It is possible that the differences I've characterised as differences in manner of representation could be explained as differences in pure representational properties. I won't attempt to argue against this possibility here, since this paper is not intended to be a defence of weak intentionalism in general. In what remains of this section I'm going to simply assume the truth of weak intentionalism and ask where this leaves the OEV?

What makes weak intentionalism attractive is that it opens up the possibility of providing an account of phenomenal unity within a specious present in a way that the OEV fails to. The strong intentionalist argues that phenomenal unity can be fully explained in terms of the relations between the properties of external objects that enter into the contents of experience. The weak intentionalist sees another possibility: phenomenal unity may be something that can be explained in terms of an experience's manner of representation. It is this possibility that I take up in the final section.

6. The Weak Intentionalist Account

Consider the following vivid example I've heard Dan Lloyd use in a talk. Imagine hearing a familiar song such as the Beatles ‘Hey Jude’. As you hear the opening lines you are already anticipating what is about to come next. You don't just hear ‘Hey Jude…’ by itself. At the very same time you hear this line, you are also anticipating hearing ‘…don't make it bad’. What you anticipate determines in part the character of your experience now. ‘Hey Jude…’ wouldn't sound like it does now if you didn't, at the time of hearing it, also anticipate hearing at the next moment ‘…don't make it bad’. Your anticipating what you are about to hear is, I propose, a part of your auditory experience's manner of representation. It is a part of your state of mind that is directed upon a particular intentional object. Correlated with your anticipation is a forward-looking dimension to the content of your experience: what you anticipate is what you are about to hear next.

Experiences also have a backward-looking dimension to their content, and they do so, I claim, because of their manner of representation. Consider G. F. Stout's example of hearing the postman's ‘rat-tat’ at the door.Footnote ⁴⁷ By the time you hear the ‘tat’ the postman's ‘rat’ is in the past. Yet the current ‘tat’ you are hearing wouldn't quite appear as it does had it not just been preceded by a ‘rat’. You don't just hear the ‘tat’ sound in isolation all by itself; you hear it as following on from the ‘rat’. You can hear the ‘tat’ as following on from the ‘rat’ because your auditory experience includes as part of its manner of representation a constituent that keeps hold of experiences from the recent past for a short duration of time. Again this constituent is a part of your state of mind that is directed upon a particular intentional object. In this case the intentional object is the sound you've just heard.

The view I've just outlined is based on ideas that can be found in Husserl's lectures on internal time consciousness dating from 1893–1917. Husserl called the forward-reaching (anticipatory) aspect of an experience's manner of representation, protention, and the backward-reaching aspect retention. He argued that every conscious episode includes as a part of its manner of representation a retentional component that keeps hold of experiences from the recent past, and a protentional component that anticipates what might be experienced next. The contents of consciousness are being continually renewed at each instant as the perceptual systems receive new sensory inputs from the world. However, experience can encompass more than what we sense from moment to moment.Footnote ⁴⁸ Our experience is never exhausted by sensory impressions (what Husserl called primal impressions) that pertain to a single instant in time as Reid argued. Sensory impressions never occur in isolation, but always within a broader temporal context of what has been retained from the recent past, and what is anticipated about the near future.

The weak intentionalist account differs from memory accounts insofar as it denies that experiences are punctuate. This, it seems to me, undermines the motivation for a memory account, since the latter tend to be explicitly premised on a view of experience as punctuate.Footnote ⁴⁹ There are also important phenomenological differences between retention and memory. William James captures one such difference when he tells us that an ‘object which is recollected, in the proper sense of that term, is one which is absent from consciousness altogether, and now revives anew’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Retention is by contrast introduced in order to explain how our experiences of now can extend beyond a point in time to embrace whole intervals of time of a short duration. When a note E is presented in experience as following on from C, note C forms a part of what we are hearing in the present, but it does so as something that is just past. C isn't absent from consciousness in a way that requires it to be dredged up from memory. Rather C is still present in consciousness but it is present as an event that has just passed.

Husserl is commonly represented as subscribing to the principle of simultaneous awareness (PSA): the claim that experiences are confined to single points in time, but they possess contents that are temporally extended. I agree with Shaun Gallagher that Husserl probably would have endorsed a version of PSA: he would have allowed that in order for a subject to experience succession, continuity and change she must be continuously aware of at least some part of a temporally extended event at any given instant.Footnote ⁵¹ A subject can be continuously aware of a temporally extended event because each experience includes, as a part of its manner of representation, retention and protention. We can find within any episode of experience a tripartite structure composed of a sensory impression, retention and protention. This tripartite structure makes it the case that every event will appear in the context of a recently experienced past and an anticipated future.

Weak intentionalism must however reject the principle of presentational concurrence (PPC), the claim that experiences are temporally extended in a way that allows for experiences to coincide in time with their contents. Retention and protention are not a part of what we are aware of in experience. We are aware of the contents of retention and protention. Retention presents a note we have just heard as recently past. It follows that there is from moment to moment an aspect of our awareness, namely retention, that doesn't coincide in time with the content of our awareness. The retentional component forms a part of ongoing experience at each moment, but what is retained is an event or a part of an event represented as just past.

Weak intentionalism would reject PPC for an additional reason. According to PPC events occupying an interval of time of up to a second can be sensibly present to a subject of experience. When we hear the postman's ‘rat-tat’ at the door, both sounds are sensibly present to the subject in a single auditory experience. At the time the ‘tat’ is heard the ‘rat’ is still sensibly present in experience. The weak intentionalist by contrast holds that the recent past is present in experience intentionally. Whenever a subject undergoes a sensation there is something present to the mind to which the subject stands in a relation. This is of course a standard claim that is made in discussions of sense data; Howard Robinson has called it the phenomenal principle. Footnote ⁵² Intentionalists reject the phenomenal principle: a state of mind S can be intentionally directed upon an object X even when X does not exist. Relations however entail the existence of their relata. It follows that intentionality cannot be conceived of as a relation that holds between a person and the object of their state of mind. If intentionality is to be understood as a relation at all it must be a relation that holds between a person and an intentional object, where an intentional object is conceived of as the content of an intentional state.Footnote ⁵³

Now consider how these familiar points apply to the case in hand. When retention keeps hold of some event from the recent past – the note that has just sounded in a melody – the subject doesn't continue to stand in a relation to this event. The event now forms a part of the past. It doesn't linger in consciousness in the form of a sensation. If it did, we would never hear melodies and only ever hear chords as we do when distinct notes are played simultaneously. We don't continue to hear the previous note. Rather I will argue it is the sense of the event that is just past (i.e. the note that has just sounded) that is retained.

We can think of the intentional content that is correlated with retention and protention in a Fregean way, as a mode of presentation.Footnote ⁵⁴ The thoughts ‘Hesperus is shining’ and ‘Phosphorus is shining’ are thoughts with different senses that refer to one and the same state of affairs. They differ in sense by differing in the mode of presentation under which they present Venus. In a similar way the same note in a melody can be present in experience in different ways at different times. When it is first heard, it is present under the mode of presentation now. When it is retained, it is present in experience as just past. As the note recedes further into the past it continues to be present in experience, but it does under a changing mode of presentation until it is no longer present at all. The contents of retentions and primal impressions are functioning here as different modes of presentation that refer to one and the same note.

Events or parts of events that are located in the past, present and future, are present in experience in different ways. This marks another important difference between the intentionalist account I favour, and views of temporal experience that endorse PPC. Proponents of PPC hold that events that are past can be present in experience with just the same degree of vividness as events that are happening now. Intentionalism by contrast holds that the recent past is present in experience in a different way from events that are happening now. Events that are recently in the past are intentionally present in experience as past. They are present under a different mode of presentation from events that are present in experience as happening now.Footnote ⁵⁵ I conclude then that weak intentionalism is multiply inconsistent with PPC.

I'll end by briefly explaining how weak intentionalism might account for phenomenal unity. If I'm right, this gives weak intentionalism an advantage over rival theories of temporal experience. I've argued above that a number of theories of temporal experience that are currently on the market fail to tell us anything informative about phenomenal unity.Footnote ⁵⁶ Since phenomenal unity is a core feature of temporal experience, these rival theories fail as accounts of temporal experience.

Retention and protention serve a dual purpose in a weak intentionalist account of temporal experience. They explain how we can be aware of temporally extended events, but also how our experiences come to be unified over time. What is retained isn't only the event from the recent past, but my experience of this event. In this way each phase of consciousness includes the retention of a previous phase. The previous phase will also have as part of its manner of representation a retentional component. Thus at each moment of experience a continuum of retentions will exist that make me aware both of a temporally extended event and of my ongoing experience. Something analogous is also true of protention. I don't just anticipate what sounds are going to come next in the familiar tune I'm listening too. I anticipate that I'm about to hear those sounds. What I anticipate is something about the future course of my experience, so that at the same time as I am aware of events that extend into the future I am also aware of my experience as it unfolds in the future.

I've characterised phenomenal unity as a property of experience whereby different contents are experienced together. If weak intentionalism is correct, and experiences do include retentions and protentions, we have an explanation ready to hand as to how different contents could be experienced together. Different contents come to be experienced together in a single state of mind because of retentions that stretch back a little way into the past, and protentions that reach a little way into the future.

Isn't such an account vulnerable to a regress of the kind we saw Tye describe in our earlier discussion of phenomenal unity? Haven't I appealed to an overarching ongoing experience that unifies different contents, making it the case that they are experienced together? If so, don't we then need another level of experience to explain how my ongoing experience comes to be unified? The weak intentionalist account isn't vulnerable to this regress objection since it doesn't appeal to two levels of experience. The unity of experience is explained by the continuum of retentions and protentions that form a part of the manner of representation. Manners of representation belong to first-order experiences. An experience unifies itself by means of its manner of representation. It doesn't require an additional level of experience or representation to bring about this unification.