Book | Chapter

176923

Events are perceivable but time is not

James J Gibson

pp. 295-301

Abstract

For centuries psychologists have been trying to explain how a man or an animal could perceive space. They have thought of space as having three dimensions and the difficulty was how an observer could see the third dimension. For depth, as Bishop Berkeley asserted at the outset of the New Theory of Vision (1709), "is a line endwise to the eye which projects only one point in the fund of the eye." Space was its dimensions. It was empty save for a collection of objects or bodies. For an observer, the objects were in different directions at various distances and the question was how these distances could be detected. For two hundred and fifty years we have tried to answer this question and failed. The explanations have been controversial, contradictory, and confused.

Publication details

Published in:

Fraser J T, Lawrence Nathaniel (1975) The study of time II: proceedings of the second conference of the International society for the study of time, Lake Yamanaka-Japan. Dordrecht, Springer.

Pages: 295-301

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-50121-0_22

Full citation:

Gibson James J (1975) „Events are perceivable but time is not“, In: J.T. Fraser & Lawrence (eds.), The study of time II, Dordrecht, Springer, 295–301.