The psychophysics of order and anisotropy: Comment on Riemer.

Riemer’s paper discusses a neglected yet important topic in the psychological literature: the consequences for psychology (and psychophysics) from the ‘anisotropy’ of time. The paper presents an argument that there are unique kinds of challenges for psychophysics from such temporal anisotropy: (a) Challenges because the psychological experience of time has temporal anisotropy and the physical concept of time does not have temporal anisotropy. (b) Challenges for experimental research which are unique to temporal anisotropy. Although it is important to consider temporal anisotropy, I think there are reasons to deny the force of both kinds of challenges. With respect to ‘a’, the problem for physics is not so much with temporal anisotropy as it is with temporal order. Although temporal order is a kind of anisotropy, it is significantly different to others with respect to the physics of time. It is global and absolute and irreducible to differences in non-temporal physical structure. Further, the problem of such temporal order is not obviously applicable to psychological phenomena nor, if applicable, particular to it. It is found between fundamental physics and other non-psychological scientific theories (such as thermodynamics). With respect to ‘b’, it is not clear that the problems Riemer raises for experimental research are unique to temporal anisotropy. There are analogous problems with other kinds of anisotropy -for example, spatial anisotropy. However, I think that Riemer’s reasons are justified if one considers them as coming from intuitive metaphysical positions on time which hold that there is temporal order rather than just temporal anisotropy. Yet, one need not hold these positions on time. And, further, philosophers of time and physicists who accept the physical time assumed in this paper do not accept these positions.