Time

John Campbell, professeur de philosophie à l'université de Californie à Berkley, est le lauréat du Prix Jean Nicod 2017. Du 26 septembre au 5 octobre, il donnera les Conférences Jean Nicod à l'ENS sur le thème "How Language Enters Perception". 

Résumé :
Perceptual experience has a certain finality, in this sense:  when you see something happen, it’s happened, and it’s now beyond the reach of agency whether it happened or not.  In ordinary perceptual experience, the time-order of the world unrolls before us, and things in the past can’t be changed.  This seems to be an immediately recognizable and pervasive aspect of human experience.  I argue that this is not so for much of animal perceptual experience.  Consider for example a hypothetical animal the temporal structure of whose experience is grounded entirely in its possession of a circadian clock.  The clock can represent only phases; a honeybee, for example, might be able to represent only, ‘marmalade on the balcony at 10.00am’, without making any distinction between 10.00am on one day and 10.00am on another.  Here the time of day is a repeatable phase, and the animal could in principle act to affect whether there is marmalade at 10.00am; any limitation on its powers in this regard is not due merely to the temporal location of the marmalade.  The ‘finality’ of human perceptual experience is not shared by this animal.  I argue that this point is not affected when we consider other timing systems generally found in animals.  The finality of ordinary perceptual experience seems to be grounded in our grasp of a shared language in which temporally structured narratives of events can be generated.