In this study I have attempted to present a linguistic investigation into the nature and structure of time, based on proposals developed in Evans (2004). Accordingly, as linguistic structure and particularly patterns of elaboration reflect conceptual structure conventionalized into a format encodable in language, this study presents an examination of the human conceptual system for time. Indeed, an examination of the ways in which language lexicalizes time provides important insights into the nature and organization of time. That is, given the widely held assumption that semantic structure derives from and reflects, at least partially, conceptual structure, language offers a direct way of investigating the human conceptual system. However, how time is realized at the conceptual level, that is, how we represent time as revealed by the way temporal concepts are encoded in language, does not tell the whole story, if we are to uncover the nature and structure of time. Research in cognitive science suggests that phenomenological experience and the nature of the external world of sensory experience to which subjective experience constitutes a response, give rise to our pre- conceptual experience of time. In other words, as Evans (2004) says, time is not restricted to one particular layer of experience but it rather “constitutes a complex range of phenomena and processes which relate to different levels and kinds of experience” (ibid.: 5). Accordingly, while my focus in this study is on the temporal structure, which is to say the organization and structuring of temporal concepts, at the conceptual level, I have also attempted to present an examination of the nature of temporal experience at the pre-conceptual level (prior to representation in conceptual structure). In this regard, I have examined the results of research from neuroscience, cognitive psychology and social psychology. More specifically and with respect to evidence from neuroscience, it is suggested that temporal experience is ultimately grounded in neurological mechanisms necessary for regulating and facilitating perception (e.g., Pöppel 1994). That is, perceptual processing is underpinned by the occurrence of neurologically instantiated temporal intervals, the perceptual moments, which facilitate the integration of sensory information into coherent percepts. As we have seen, there is no single place in the brain where perceptual input derived from different modalities, or even information from within the same modality, can be integrated. In other words, there is no one place where spatially distributed sensory information associated with the distinct perceptual processing areas of the brain, are integrated in order to produce a coherent percept. Rather, what seems to be the case is that the integration of sensory information into coherent percepts is enabled by the phenomena of periodic perceptual moments. Such a mechanism enables us to perceive, in that the nature of our percepts are in an important sense ‘constructed’. Put another way, perception is a kind of constructive process which updates successive perceptual information to which an organism has access. The updating occurs by virtue of innate timing mechanisms, the perceptual moments, which occur at all levels of neurological processing and range from a fraction of second up to an outer limit of about three seconds. It is these timing mechanisms which form the basis of our temporal experience. As Gell says, “perception is intrinsically time-perception, and conversely, time-perception, or internal time-consciousness, is just perception itself...That is to say, time is not something we encounter as a feature of contingent reality, as if it lay outside us, waiting to be perceived along with tables and chairs and the rest of the perceptible contents of the universe. Instead, subjective time arises as inescapable feature of the perceptual process itself, which enters into the perception of anything whatsoever” (1992: 231). In other words, our experience of time is a consequence of the various innate ‘timing mechanisms' in the brain which give rise to a range of perceptual moments, which are in turn necessary for and underpin perceptual processing. In this way, time exists into the experience of everything as it is fundamental to the way in which perceptual process operates. […]
The experience of time: neural mechanisms and the interplay of emotion, cognition and embodiment
