Experiencing Change: Extensionalism, Retentionalism, and Marty’s Hybrid Account

Abstract

As a preliminary, I shall follow Marty and many others by adopting the common view that short episodes of change through time, such as the movement of a falling leaf or the frequency shift of a tone over the period of a second or less, can be experienced ‘immediately’. In order to motivate this view, compare looking at a falling leaf and looking at a wilting leaf. It seems that in the case of the falling leaf we can see the leaf’s movement just by looking at it, whereas we cannot just see the wilting leaf’s change in shape and colour.