Metaphysics through metaphors: Towards an understanding of time in psychology with William James's "Principles of Psychology"

This thesis focuses on William James' s (1842-1910) conceptualization of Time in his seminal work, The Principles of Psychology (1890). On the surface, James's explicit statements concerning Time advance the temporal assumptions that were conventional for science. According to the conventional scientific idea, Time was exclusively quantitative, homogeneous, linear, and reductive; in other words, it was objective. An examination of James's metaphors, however, reveals another idea of Time that was implicit in his presentation of concepts such as the stream of consciousness, the fringe of felt relations, and the saddleback of the specious present. Historical evidence and recent discussions on the use of metaphor in science support the suggestion that metaphors function in James's work as literary bridges between philosophy and natural science. Through metaphors, James at once provides the philosophical underpinnings of his ideas, but without undermining his proposal that psychology should be treated as a natural science. The idea of Time that emerges out of his metaphors is one that is more inclusive, one that advocates the more subjective characteristics inhering in the experience of Time: such as its qualitative, heterogeneous, and irreducible characteristics. In effect, James accommodates the scientific approach to psychology by supplementing the scientific conceptualization of Time with one that is more inclusive, and thus more authenticating, of the psychological view of reality.