Consciousness and Cognition 9, 629–637 (2000)

doi:10.1006/ccog.2000.0491, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

Beyond ‘‘the Fringe’’: A Cautionary Critique of William James

Dan Lloyd

Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut 06106E-mail: dan.lloyd@mail.trincoll.edu

Introduction

William James titled Chapter VII of The Principles of Psychology ‘‘The Methodsand Snares of Psychology.’’ In it, he warned against ‘‘the Misleading Influence ofSpeech.’’ The ‘‘vocabulary of outward things,’’ James cautioned, either lacked theterms to describe subjective life or (worse) invited the misapplication of objectivelanguage to the psychic realm:

Naming thought by its own objects, we almost all of us assume that as the objects are, so thethought must be. (p. 195—all James quotations are from The Principles of Psychology, Vol.I (1950), originally published in 1890)

Psychological atomism, especially as developed by empiricist philosophers, is per-haps James’s favorite example of the snare at work:

If, for example, the thought be ‘the pack of cards is on the table,’ we say ‘‘Well, isn’t it athought of the pack of cards? Isn’t it of the cards as included in the pack? Isn’t it of the table?And of the legs of the table as well? The table has legs—how can you think the table withoutvirtually thinking its legs? Hasn’t our thought, then, all these parts—one part for the pack andanother for the table? And within the pack-part a part for each card, as within the table-parta part for each leg? And isn’t each of these parts an idea? And can our thought, then, beanything but an assemblage or pack of ideas, each answering to some element of what itknows?’’(p. 278)

‘‘Not one of these assumptions is true,’’ he continues, but are common enough to benamed the Psychologist’s Fallacy. Psychologists and philosophers commit the fallacywhen they confuse their own standpoint with that of the consciousness they are study-ing. As the example lampoons, the fallacy is a case of metaphysical smuggling. Inmodern terms, it is the mistake of imputing properties of objects into properties ofrepresentations of the objects. Psychological atomism is just one instance of the fallacy.

James’s fine ontological scruples led to his wonderfully rich, still state-of-the-artphenomenology, scaffolded by his state-of-the-art (ca. 1890) neuroscience. But I ar-gue here that James is not entirely free of his own fallacy. Ontology still leaks acrosslevels in the Principles: Into his phenomenology he imports two significant ‘‘influ-ences of speech,’’ metaphysical assumptions reflected in linguistic distinctions. Themissteps are not obvious, however, and their diagnosis and correction will involvea reconstruction of James, a side-trip with Husserl, and a sojourn with some of thenewer ideas of neural network modeling. At issue is the existence of a real distinctionbetween ‘‘nucleus’’ and ‘‘fringe’’ in human consciousness.

Commentary on W. James (1950). The principles of psychology. New York: Dover. (Reprint of 1890text.)

6291053-8100/00 $35.00

Copyright 2000 by Academic PressAll rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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The tale to follow is a cautionary one. If James, the granddaddy of the unifiedstudy of consciousness and cognition, lapsed into the fallacy that he himself identifiedand decried, then who among us can be confident in our own hypotheses and results?

Damming the Stream

James unleashes the stream of thought metaphor to make three points: that con-sciousness is always changing, that change is continuous, and that every state ofconsciousness is a rich and highly specific representation of its object. For example:

Every thought we have of a given fact is, strictly speaking, unique, and only bears a resemblanceof kind with our other thoughts of the same fact. When the identical fact recurs, we must thinkof it in a fresh manner, see it under a somewhat different angle, apprehend it in differentrelations from those in which it last appeared. And the thought by which we cognize it is thethought of it-in-those-relations, a thought suffused with the consciousness of all that dim con-text. (p. 233)

But even in this passage, the dimness of context is preparing the way for a verydifferent (and no less famous) metaphor:

As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikesus first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird’s life, it seems to be made of an alternationof flights and perchings. (p. 243)

From here flow a series of distinctions, somewhat loosely bundled: The perchings,James will also call the ‘‘substantive parts’’ of the stream; flights are ‘‘transitiveparts.’’ The latter are transitive toward the former, ‘‘flights to a conclusion’’ (p. 243).Being flighty, these feelings are hard to introspect. But the flights are nonethelesspart of consciousness, characterized by ‘‘feelings of tendency’’ (p. 249). The perches,accordingly, are thoughts and sensings of objects, while the flights are cognitions ofrelations. This multiple distinction condenses ultimately into yet another metaphor,the distinction between nucleus and fringe. In a note, James pulls it all together:

[T]he fringe, as I use the word, . . . is part of the object cognized,—substantive qualities andthings appearing to the mind in a fringe of relations. Some parts—the transitive parts—of ourstream of thought cognize the relations rather than the things; but both the transitive and thesubstantive parts form one continuous stream. . . . (p. 258)

In short, a distinction between two kinds of conscious content—consciousness ofobjects vs consciousness of relations—is aligned with a distinction in phenomenol-ogy—stable, focal states vs the elusive, unstable, vague, ‘‘dim,’’ ‘‘penumbral’’‘‘fringe.’’

This alignment strikes me as a misleading conflation. James’s discussion of fringephenomena contradicts his own phenomenological claims. The tip-of-the-tongue andfeeling-of-knowing cases are neither fleeting nor vague. Rather, they are focal anddownright nagging, as James himself describes:

[T]he absence of an item is a determinant of our representations quite as positive as its presencecan ever be. The gap becomes no mere void, but what is called an aching void. (p. 584)

More generally, the phenomenal distinction between flights and perches does notmatch any content distinction at all. One can dwell on relations, tendencies, and

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‘‘gaps’’ with obsessive intensity, just as the most rock-solid of external objects canmake the vaguest and most fleeting walk-on in the sphere of awareness. What doesmap onto the flights-and-perches metaphor is the world itself: Real objects tend to-ward stability; their manifold relations are comparatively shifty. It appears that Jameshas fallen prey to the psychologist’s fallacy after all, allowing a general fact aboutobjects and relations in the world to seep into his phenomenology. It is in all probabil-ity the ‘‘misleading influence of speech,’’ which influence can be seen in the manylinguistic examples James uses to illustrate his distinctions. He failed to heed hisown admonishing against compartmentalizing the stream (‘‘The traditional psychol-ogy talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful,quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water,’’ p. 255). Taking thiswarning to heart, then, overturns all but one metaphor—the stream itself. Conscious-ness is flux. It is all (to use James’s phrase) ‘‘free water.’’

Time Unleashed

The flow of consciousness is a phenomenological fact: we feel it. To experienceflow entails that we also feel change and that in turn seems to require a fundamentalawareness of the temporality of objects of awareness and of consciousness itself.Thus, ‘‘time is of the essence,’’ or so argue the European phenomenologists, espe-cially Husserl and Heidegger. For James, time is slightly less central, one chapteramong many in the Principles. In it, James nonetheless makes several phenomenolog-ical observations and arguments that parallel later claims by Husserl. Yet, in the end,Husserl extends his analysis one step beyond James. Using Husserl as a foil, then,reveals again an erosion of ontology, the Psychologist’s Fallacy, in James.

James grasped the fundamental point that any perception of temporality must occurin the psychological present, and so that present consciousness must contain tracesof the past and future, perceived as past and as future.

Objects fade out of consciousness slowly. If the present thought is A B C D E F G, the nextone will be of B C D E F G H, and the one after that of C D E F G H I—the lingerings ofthe past dropping successively away, and the incomings of the future making up the loss. Theselingerings of old objects, these incomings of new, are the germs of memory and expectation,the retrospective and prospective sense of time. (pp. 606 and 628)

With these phenomenological observations, however, he blends a second set of obser-vations, concerning the abilities of subjects to make comparisons of short durationsand simultaneity in the present. The psychological present is not the instantaneouspresent of objective time. Rather, it is a ‘‘specious present’’ (p. 609), perhaps asmany as 12 ‘‘real’’ seconds in duration. Regarding the specious present, James writes:

Its content is in a constant flux, events dawning into its forward end as fast as they fade outof its rearward one, and each of them changing its time-coefficient from ‘not yet,’ or ‘not quiteyet,’ to ‘just gone’ or ‘gone,’ as it passes by. (p. 630)

But what of events outside of the specious window?

Longer times are conceived by adding, shorter ones by dividing, portions of this vaguelybounded unit, and are habitually thought by us symbolically. (p. 642)

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Once again James makes the crucial distinction with familiar ideas of nucleus andfringe:

The specious present has, in addition, a vaguely vanishing backward and forward fringe; butits nucleus is probably the dozen seconds or less that have just elapsed. (p. 613)

Husserl begins his discussion in the Phenomenology of Internal Time-Conscious-ness with observations very similar to James:

When we see, hear, or in general perceive something, . . . what is perceived remains presentfor an interval although not without modification. Apart from other alterations, such as thosein intensity and richness, which occur now to a lesser, now to a more noticeable degree, thereis always yet another and particularly odd characteristic to be confirmed, namely, that anythingof this kind remaining in consciousness appears to us as something more or less past, as some-thing temporally shoved back, as it were. When, for example, a melody sounds, the individualnotes do not completely disappear when the stimulus or the action of the nerve excited bythem comes to an end. When the new note sounds, the one just preceding it does not disappearwithout a trace; otherwise, we should be incapable of observing the relations between the noteswhich follow one another. . . . On the other hand, it is not merely a matter of presentationsof the tones simply persisting in consciousness. Were they to remain unmodified, then insteadof a melody we should have a chord of simultaneous notes or rather a disharmonious jumbleof sounds. . . . (p. 30—all Husserl quotations are from The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, translated by James Churchill (1964), originally published in 1928, based onHusserl’s lectures of 1904–1905.)

Had he stopped here, Husserl would have embraced the ‘‘time-coefficient’’taggingof James. But for Husserl the analysis is incomplete:

We cannot rest satisfied with this explanation, however, for everything said until now dependson the individual tone. Every tone itself has a temporal extension: with the actual sounding Ihear it as now. With its continued sounding, however, it has an ever new now, and the toneactually preceding is changing into something past. Therefore, I hear at any instant only theactual phase of the tone, and the Objectivity of the whole enduring tone is constituted in anact-continuum which in part is memory, in the smallest punctual part is perception, and in amore extensive part expectation. (pp. 43–44)

The two passages together deepen the problem of temporal consciousness andconstitute and implicit critique of James with respect to both the specious presentand the proposal of ‘‘time-coefficients.’’ On the first, Husserl makes clear that the‘‘shoving back’’ of a perceived object by ever-new nows is not bounded. He com-pares, for example, the temporally receding past to spatial perspective and distance(p. 47), suggesting a continually shading off, as opposed to the symbolic reconstruc-tion of past and future imagined by James (p. 642, quoted above). By zooming inon an individual sounded tone, Husserl also narrows the phenomenological boundaryof the present. A specious present, if there is one, cannot be the dozen seconds ofpsychological simultaneity posited by James. If so, any temporal process shorter thanthat window will be a ‘‘disharmonious jumble.’’ Rather, as a fact of phenomenology,the present is thin enough to keep even a grace note organized in its succession ofbeginning, middle, and end. Temporality itself is packed therein.

The phenomenological inadequacy of the time-coefficient is also implicit in Hus-serl’s analysis. On the possibility of ‘‘temporal signs’’ attaching themselves to mo-ments as they march through present consciousness, Husserl writes:

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But with this we have in the first place only coined a new expression. The consciousness oftime is not yet analyzed. We have not yet made it clear how consciousness of something pastis constituted on the basis of such signs, or in what sense, in what manner, and through whatapprehensions these lived and experienced moments function otherwise than as moments ofquality, and function in such a way that the reference of consciousness that a now is to becomes about through a not-now. (p. 39)

How then does Husserl untie the knot?

We must now examine more closely what we find here and can describe as the phenomenaof temporally constitutive consciousness, that consciousness in which temporal objects withtheir temporal determinations are constituted. We distinguish the enduring, immanent Objectin its modal setting [das Objekt im Wie], the way in which we are conscious of it as actuallypresent or as past. Every temporal being ‘‘appears’’ in one or another continually changingmode of running-off, and the ‘‘Object in the mode of running-off’’ is in this change alwayssomething other, even though we still say that the Object and every point of its time and thistime itself are one and the same. (p. 47, emphasis mine)

Husserl’s hypothesis is subtle, but simple: The phenomenal object itself is alwayschanging. This is not a trivial emendation. Temporality turns out not to be a tagattached to relatively stable presentations parading through a specious present.Rather, there is nothing stable on parade. Temporality appears in every detail of everyobject as endless, infinitely divisible and infinitely extensible, flux.

The stream indeed flows: James’s metaphor is still just right. But in contrast toHusserl it appears that James still sought to mould the free water of experience intosomething stable, to be tracked by awareness as it flowed downstream. Even thoughJames rejected sensations as the basic spoonfuls of consciousness, his more elaborate‘‘cognitions of objects’’ nonetheless had a fixed structure, independent of time. Andso, once again, ‘‘Naming thought by its own objects, we almost all of us assumethat as the objects are, so the thought must be’’ (p. 195). This is the conception thatHusserl also sought to dissolve.

Accordingly, the distinction of nucleus and fringe has taken its lumps twice overin this article. First, I challenged James’s claims that certain contents of cognitionwere always relegated to the suburbs of awareness, counterclaiming that the core isvariously occupied with a continuous mix of object-thoughts and relation-thoughts(and everything else!). Second, turning to the centrality of temporality, I challengedJames’s assumption that a thought of an object had a stable core to which a time-tag might attach. Instead, I suggest that Husserl’s ideas of radical flux are closer tothe phenomenal truth.

But How Is Cognition Possible?

If consciousness is flux to the very core, then two new problems surface: First,how do we ‘‘constitute’’ a stable world? How can we ever recognize that an objectendures as the thing it is throughout its convolutions in awareness? Why is our lifenot instead a ‘‘booming, buzzing confusion’’ (as James would say) of foam andwhitewater? And stemming from these phenomenological consequences, a secondmain problem: How can a psychology of infinitely variable instances of conscious-ness ever get off the ground? In short, if Husserl is right, we cannot track the flux

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from within, nor can we track it from without. Conscious life on this basis wouldbe one endlessly spinning, meaningless kaliedoscope.

To answer these questions one needs a way of thinking that has only emergedin the past 20 years, thanks to the rise of neural network models (also known as‘‘connectionism’’ or ‘‘parallel distributed processing’’). Central to connectionism isthe idea of ‘‘distributed representation.’’ What the early neural network researchersdiscovered was that complex computation could be accomplished by networks with-out an internal representation that was structurally similar to the inputs or outputs tothe network, nor to any aspect of the purported function being computed. Or in otherwords, the individual components of the network could not be assigned distinct repre-sentational or functional roles. Rather, each component contributed incrementally tomany or every representation or function.

The connectionists also unleashed their models on tasks that in small ways mir-rored the complexities of human cognition. In general, it was quickly discovered thatnetworks excelled at patterns—pattern recognition, completion, and association weretheir strengths. So, in general, distributed representations represent distributed (pat-tern) information. In an early manifesto of connectionism, Paul Smolensky referredto connectionism as the ‘‘subsymbolic paradigm’’ and the parts of a distributed repre-sentations as ‘‘subsymbols.’’ He expressed the relation between content and contextas follows:

In the symbolic paradigm the context of a symbol is manifest around it and consists of othersymbols; in the subsymbolic paradigm the context of a symbol is manifest inside it, and consistsof subsymbols. (Smolensky, 1988)

Context is internal to a distributed representation because everything is internal torepresentations of this type. They are ‘‘holistic.’’

Even as they relished the power of distributed representations, connectionists faceda problem not unlike the one stated above: Distributed processors are complex. Asnapshot of a distributed representation cannot be read like an X ray, nor (more tothe point) a computer program. As a result, connectionists borrowed techniques ofmultivariate statistics to read the manifold variables of their highly distributed repre-sentations.

An example may help. Imagine the pattern of ‘‘units’’ in a neural network as anarray of squares that light up or dim according to the degree of activity in each. Atany moment, the array could have a salt-and-pepper appearance. This is the (as-yet uninterpreted) distributed representation. Facing many of these, each with a dif-ferent pattern, the connectionist begins by comparing each pattern with all theothers. By various means, any two patterns can be assigned a ‘‘similarity score.’’(For example, one could simply compare the magnitudes of corresponding units andaverage the differences across all the units.) Once this comparison has been madefor every pairing of the set of distributed representations, one can use the similarityscores to locate each pattern relative to the others, situating it among its near neigh-bors (most similar representations). Depending on the type of analysis chosen, onecan visualize the set of patterns in its global arrangement with a variety of maps orgraphs.

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When these graphs have been constructed for specific neural networks, they reveala systematic connection between the ‘‘similarity space’’ of the distributed representa-tions and salient features of the input–output domain inhabited by the neural net inquestion. For example, in the well-known NETtalk simulation, input to the networkconsisted of letters in a limited context (six letters flanking the target letter). Therepresentational space traversed by the network grouped specific letters close to-gether, regardless of their context. Each ‘‘R’’ representation was more like the other‘‘R’’ representations than representations of any other letter. But the R representa-tions were not identical. Context continued to be incorporated in the representationsin that each letter-plus-context had its own distinct representation. And, as it hap-pened, the largest division in similarity space was that between vowels and conso-nants. In this way, each highly specific representation encoded equally specific infor-mation about its input domain by virtue of its global relationships to all the otherrepresentations. It would be difficult to sort out the contribution of any subpart ofthe representation, but this parsing turns out to be unnecessary. The whole representa-tion can be read as a whole, through multivariate analyses.

One additional innovation is particularly relevant here: In 1990, Jeffrey Elmanintroduced a new network design known as the Simple Recurrent Network (SRN).To the basic input-to-output flow of computation, Elman added a recurrent loop offeedback. SRNs, as a result, learn their tasks using a blend of two information sources:the current input (from the environment) and the most recent state of its own pro-cessing units (its ‘‘brain state’’ from the immediately prior step). This eddy in theflow gives the SRN the ability to behave in time, handling delay, succession, contin-gency, and other temporal properties in both the input and output domains. Eventhough the loop extends just one step into the past, it can in principle recycle informa-tion for long periods of time simply by keeping it active from cycle to cycle.

More important, when Elman analyzed his SRNs in the manner described here,he observed the coding of temporal context along with the categorical and patterninformation typical of nonrecurrent nets. That is, the network collected specific inputstogether in ‘‘representation space’’ but within the subspaces kept representationssorted by their temporal context.

The internal representations of the various tokens of a . . . type are very similar. . . . However,the internal representations also make subtle distinctions between (for example) boy in onecontext and boy in another. Indeed, as similar as the representations of the various tokens are,no two tokens of a type are exactly identical. (Elman, 1990)

James, I think, would have loved the idea of distributed representation. Neural net-works offer models that escape the need to box off the computational stream intomolded representations with subparts dedicated to subparts of the object cognized.In principle, they solve the deeper problem as well by showing how every representa-tion can be unique, but nonetheless overlap in content with related representations.Elman’s innovation takes us one step closer, offering a glimpse of the solution toHusserl’s problem as well. In a recurrent net, a representation can change continu-ously, its changes tracking the passing of time, while staying in the same neighbor-hood in representational space. This resolves the apparent paradox posed by our abil-

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ity to assemble and inhabit a stable world from building blocks that exhibit onlypervasive flux. It also solves, in principle, the psychologist’s problem: Connectionistapproaches to content can provide the psychologist with a stable view of the globalproperties of the stream of consciousness.

The Cautionary Moral

Of course neural network models are oversimplifications of a vastly more compli-cated human organ. Their import for the moment is heuristic. They offer an ‘‘exis-tence proof’’ of the possibility of distributed representations and the possibilities fortheir global organization. In this respect, they serve the same catalytic function ascomputers in the 1950s. Just as early digital computers demonstrated the possibilityof symbolic computation in a material medium and thereby suggested a new wayof thinking about cognition, so also contemporary neural networks demonstrate thepossibility of complex pattern processing in a more-or-less neural medium, and thistoo suggests new ways of thinking about cognition. A worthy research goal, accord-ingly, would be to examine the cognizing brain for evidence of parallel processingand distributed representation using real brains as the models on which to try variousmultivariate analyses. In other articles, I have taken some steps in this direction(Lloyd 2000a, 2000b).

In this article, however, parallel processing is promoted from another direction,namely phenomenology. The phenomenological analysis launched by James andelaborated by Husserl (among others) indicates an underlying neural substrate ofseamless flux. Phenomenology teaches that nothing less than the whole stream canbe the ‘‘unit of analysis’’ because there are no distinctions, no units, that are notsubject to the inflection of the whole. Furthermore, the seamless ever-shifting flowof consciousness seems to be just the kind of phenomenology a large recurrent net-work would enjoy. Accordingly, psychologists must be very circumspect about com-partments. If a model incorporates a black box (with or without an anatomical loca-tion), the information processed in the box should not be restricted to the box. Instead,all information, all processing, is part of the global process. That entails that no boxby itself is sufficient for producing any identifiable element or aspect of conscious-ness. (A particular box may be a necessary condition, however, and lesions provideevidence for many specific necessary conditions for aspects of awareness.) This con-sideration casts doubt on strong functional claims made about any component ofcognition, whether the component is identified psychologically or anatomically.

If the boxes are imagined instead as channels in the stream, changeable and chang-ing, subject both to the stream and the conditions of the riverbed and banks, we willachieve at least a more consistent metaphorical picture. Even with those channelscharted, however, the science of the eddies, whorls, gushes, freshets, plunges, mists,burbles, cascades, torrents, and trickles of consciousness will be difficult. Anythingless would fail to depict this fabulous subject.

REFERENCES

Elman, J. (1990). Finding structure in time. Cognitive Science, 14, 179–211.Husserl, E. (1964). In J. Churchill (Translator), The phenomenology of internal time-consciousness.

Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press.

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James, W. (1950). The principles of psychology, Vol. One (originally published in 1890). New York:Dover.

Lloyd, D. (2000a). Terra cognita: From functional neuroimaging to the map of the mind. Brain andMind, 1, 93–116.

Lloyd, D. (2000b). Virtual lesions and the not-so-modular brain. Journal of the International Neuropsy-chological Society, 6, 627–635.

Smolensky, P. (1988). On the proper treatment of connectionism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 11(1),1–23.