Being conscious, in the sense in which this state is associated with being awake as opposed to dreaming or sleepwalking, has a distinctive experiential character and epistemic role. The former is reflected in the experience of waking up, the latter in traditional problems about perceptual knowledge. I outline a conception of being wakefully conscious which identifies this state in terms of its role in explaining knowledge about one’s environment and oneself. I suggest that this dual epistemic role may be grounded, (...) in part, in the control of attention. I argue that this conception has some advantages over Matthew Soteriou’s account of the state in question in terms of a temporal point of view. These advantages are brought out by examining the experience of waking up, a traditional problem about perceptual knowledge, and folk attitudes to sleepwalking and infant consciousness. (shrink)

This article provides a conceptual account of causal understanding by connecting current psychological research on time and causality with philosophical debates on the causal asymmetry. I argue that causal relations are viewed as asymmetric because they are understood in temporal terms. I investigate evidence from causal learning and reasoning in both children and adults: causal perception, the temporal priority principle, and the use of temporal cues for causal inference. While this account does not suffice for correct inferences of causal structure, (...) I show it to serve as a preliminary understanding of causal concepts as asymmetric, that later incorporates other types of evidence. This approach supplies causal models with an asymmetric concept of causation that underlies hypotheses about causal structure, as I will illustrate from the framework of the knowledge-based causal induction model. I further argue for an integrating perspective, showing how the understanding of causes as preceding their effects underlies both psychological models and philosophical debates over time and the causal asymmetry, particularly regarding problem cases such as simultaneous causation or backwards causation, and the conceptual connection between causation and action. (shrink)

Recent influential accounts of temporal representation—the use of mental representations with explicit temporal contents, such as before and after relations and durations—sharply distinguish representation from mere sensitivity. A common, important picture of inter-temporal rationality is that it consists in maximizing total expected discounted utility across time. By analyzing reinforcement learning algorithms, this article shows that, given such notions of temporal representation and inter-temporal rationality, it would be possible for an agent to achieve inter-temporal rationality without temporal representation. It then explores (...) potential upshots of this result for theorizing about rationality and representation. (shrink)

Episodic memory—memory for personally experienced past events—seems to afford a distinctive kind of cognitive contact with the past. This makes it natural to think that episodic memory is centrally involved in our understanding of what it is for something to be in the past, or to be located in time—that it is either necessary or sufficient for such understanding. If this were the case, it would suggest certain straightforward evidential connections between temporal cognition and episodic memory in nonhuman animals. In (...) this paper, I argue that matters are more complicated than this. Episodic memory is memory for events and not for the times they occupy. As such, it is dissociable from temporal understanding. This is not to say that episodic memory and temporal cognition are unrelated, but that the relationship between them cannot be straightforwardly captured by claims about necessity and sufficiency. This should inform our theoretical predictions about the manifestations of episodic memory in nonhuman behaviour. (shrink)

We spend much of our adult lives thinking and reminiscing about particular events of the past, which, by their very nature, can never be repeated. What is involved in a capacity to think thoughts of this kind? In this paper, I propose that such thoughts are essentially connected with a capacity to communicate about past events, and specifically in the special way in which events of the past are valued and shared in our relationships with one another. I motivate this (...) proposal by way of the claim that such thoughts are practically useless: there are no practical, forward-looking tasks that require information which is specific to particular past events. Thus I suggest that thoughts of this specific kind have a home only in the cognitive economy of a creature who finds past events to be of interest for their own sake, and that this interest in the past is a peculiar feature of human social life. (shrink)