The relationship between philosophy and cognitive science (or cognitive psychology) has in recent years not been an easy one — to the extent that a prominent cognitive scientist claimed that “philosophy is to cognitive science what tin cans are to a wedding” (as reported by P. Thagard). The opinion of cognitive scientists regarding Kant’s philosophy is possibly even worse; most would consider it an example of the worst kind of armchair philosophical speculation. On the contrary, I believe that Kant’s philosophy - the “Critique of Pure Reason” in particular - provides deep insights into the relation between time perception, imagination, and causal inference. In light of evidence from cognitive psychology these insights are remarkably modern, and they could, I hope, form the beginning of a unified theory of time perception, causal reasoning and (sensorimotor) imagination.
In this talk I will attempt to flesh out the relevance of Kant's philosophy for the empirical study of time perception, causality and imagination as precisely as possible, keeping in mind, however, that this is all ongoing work. I shall in particular focus on the relation between the perception of asymmetries in the temporal order - in the “psychological arrow of time”, if you wish - and the perception of (asymmetric) causal relations. Can Kant’s philosophy illuminate the relation, perhaps of priority, between the two?
© 2017 K. Schulz