ABSTRACT

Temporal experiences are perceptual experiences of temporal relations between perceived events, such as the succession and order of notes in a melody, the duration of an awkward silence, and a sudden change in facial expression. Like other experiences, temporal experiences themselves instantiate temporal properties: occupying a certain interval and occurring before or after other experiences. This chapter discusses some of the considerations which can serve to support the snapshot conception, and explains why skeptical concerns like those just alluded to are misguided. The line of argument is abductive and purports to suggest that the snapshot view constitutes a viable account of temporal experiences and their phenomenology, one perhaps superior to its rivals. The mereological structure of experience is key: each temporal part of a longer experience is unified with adjacent temporal parts in an overlapping structure of larger, more encompassing, temporal parts. The snapshot theorist takes experiences to reduce to successions of their temporal parts.