The Stream of Consciousness: II. William James's Specious Present

Abstract

In this second article of a series that examines from various perspectives the phenomenon that James called “the stream of consciousness,” I continue to argue that James's implicit account of the stream was not consistent with how he advertised it in The Principles. 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. I argue that his account is not perceptual, that time perception amounts to a kind of inner (second-order) consciousness. When engaged in “perceiving” time, we repeatedly have inner (second-order) consciousness 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 inner (second-order) consciousness.