Dear Edwina,
I was glad to have your comment on the abstract of my monograph On the Nature of Time. A Biopragmatic Perspective on Language, Thought, and Reality. It would be most encouraging to find support for my model in the works by Koichiro Matsuno cited by you. I didn't know these works nor their author and will certainly check them as soon as I have a chance.
I very much welcome your spontaneous correlation of my hierarchical-processual steps summarized in the abstract, on the one hand, and Peirce's trichotomy of Universal Categories, on the other, but I'm afraid it does not quite match my analysis (developed in detail on pp. 226-230; se also pp. 185, 248). Accordingly, Firstness as immediate perception represents the unreflected and unstructured chaos of visual material before its subjection to Thirdness and, subsequently, its transition to Secondness. Thirdness as Law or Habit comprises, following my analysis, the primary metaphors assigning bodily extension and divisible continuity to space and motion. This homogeneous continuity is based on biological rhythmization. Secondness (and here we seem to agree) represents the cognitive level on which time as relational instrument is applied to homogeneously divisible motion for the purpose of perspectival differentiation. On this level continuity is changed into discontinuity by heterogeneous analysis. In my view, it is important to distinguish between the primary continuity (resulting from Thirdness) and the derived continuity of temporally ordered events resulting from the synthesis following discontinuation/analysis (i.e. Secondness; cf. Peirce's tentative distinction between a "perfect continuity" and an "imperfective coninuity, that is, a continuuum having topical singulatities, or places of lower dimensionality where it is interrupted or divides"; CP 4.642; see my book, p. 157, 172-173). Accordingly, I do not share Peirce's view that time is continuity and Third. Understood as temporal-perspectival analysis (by means of aspect, tense, taxis), time is essentially Second.
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Meanwhile I have had the time to read on the Web four different abstracts of Matsuno's articles (including the two referred to by you) treating to some extent the concept of time. You are right in pointing to the complex nature of time as a characteristic feature in common to our approaches, but this should not be a big surprise to someone who has had the opportunity to immerse himself/herself into the cognitive depths of temporal-perspectival distinctions.
Apart from that I have been able to establish tangible discrepancies in our methodical and theoretical outlooks. Matsuno, among other things, departs from the idea of "time flow", apparently unconscious of its superficially metaphorical nature. His view is constructive, like mine, but he speaks of time as "a linguistic construct". He thus discusses specifically the meanings of the present progressive and the present perfect without deriving them from a coherent hierarchical process of perceptual and cognitive distinctions. He is aware only of the category of tense and oversees the outspokenly perspectival nature of time evidenced by the linguistic category of aspect.
In Matsuno's article "The origin and development of time", however, I see the embryo of a genuinely cognitive understanding (although based merely on tense) correlated to Peirce's Universal Categories. He speaks of "a primordial present tense of pure duration", viz. as "primal Firstness", but, as I pointed out above, while Firstness (in agreement with Peirce) is immediate perception (cf. Peirce's "sheer wonder"), the idea of "primordial" continuity suggested by Matsuno is rather the result of Thirdness, i.e. the human habit of applying to chaos biological rhythmization in order to make it temporally analyzable, viz. by Secondness (associated, and I believe rightly so, by Matsuno with "processes of semantic concretization", that is, in the same spirit as this was foreseen by you).
Against this background I would consider it fertile to initiate a discussion with Koichiro Matsuno and therefore intend to send him my book. I'm grateful to you, Edwina, for having drawn my attention to his occupation with the concept of time. If you would like a copy of your own, please let me know your postal address.
Friendly regards,
Nils B.
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