Alasan Mengapa Perjalanan Pulang Terasa Lebih Cepat Dibandingkan Perjalanan Pergi

Liputan6.com, Den Haag: Kebanyakan orang yang pulang dari liburan merasa
bahwa perjalanan pulang ke rumah jauh lebih cepat daripada perjalanan pergi.
Padahal jarak keduanya sama, namun perjalanan pulang tampak terasa lebih
pendek.

Para ilmuwan percaya efek perjalanan pulang ini tidak disebabkan oleh
rute perjalanan pulang yang sudah dikenal, seperti yang diduga sebelumnya.
Tetapi karena harapan yang berbeda. "Orang-orang sering meremehkan berapa lama perjalanan yang
dibutuhkan untuk pergi keluar dan ini alasan pengalamannya terasa
panjang," kata Peneliti Niels van de Ven, dari Tilburg University di
Belanda.

"Berdasarkan pada perasaan itu, pelancong mengharapkan perjalanan pulang
juga terasa lama juga, dan ini kemudian ternyata lebih pendek dari yang
diharapkan".

Sebuah estimasi waktu perjalanan yang terlalu optimis mengarah ke ilusi
perjalanan pulang yang lebih pendek, kata para peneliti. Kesimpulan ini didasarkan pada tiga studi singkat terhadap 350 orang yang
berlibur dengan bus, dengan sepeda, atau menonton video orang yang naik sepeda.
Penelitian ini diterbitkan dalam Buletin Springers Psychonomic Bulletin &
Review.

Ketika perkiraan durasi dibandingkan, responden berpikir bahwa perjalanan
pulang rata-rata 22 persen lebih cepat daripada perjalanan pergi. Efek
perjalanan pulang itu sangat besar bagi peserta yang melaporkan bahwa
perjalanan awal yang panjang terasa mengecewakan. Selanjutnya, ketika satu kelompok peserta diberitahu bahwa perjalanan
mendatang akan tampak panjang, efek perjalanan pulang menghilang. Ironisnya,
memberitahu peserta bahwa perjalanan mendatang akan menjadi sangat lama
memimpin mereka untuk mengalami perjalanan yang memakan waktu sedikit.

Sampai sekarang, penjelasan populer untuk perjalanan pulang yang terasa
pendek adalah lebih dikenal dan lebih mudah diprediksi daripada perjalanan
pergi. Namun dalam penelitian mereka, para peneliti menunjukkan bahwa
penjelasan ini tidak mungkin. Asisten penulis Michael Roy, dari Elizabethtown College di Pennsylvania,
mengatakan: "Efek perjalanan pulang juga ada ketika responden mengambil
rute kembali yang berbeda, namun jarak yang sama". "Anda tidak perlu
mengenali rute untuk mengalami efek". Para peneliti berharap dapat menjelaskan lebih dari sekadar efek
perjalanan pulang. "Temuan pada efek perjalanan pulang ini dapat membantu
kita membuat prediksi baru tentang bagaimana orang mengalami durasi itu,
meskipun mereka tidak berhubungan dengan perjalanan." kata Profesor van de
Ven.(Dailymail/MEL)

Sumber : Kaskus

The History of Philosophy as Philosophy: (8). Philosophical Pay-Offs

In section 1 I alluded to various
philosophical pay-offs from ‘historical’ history of philosophy. Taking philosophy of mind as
my object, I will sketch examples
of two sorts of pay-off: understanding landmark positions and questioning embedded assumptions or platitudes. The examples involve
early modern and nineteenthcentury texts, which are often used to set ‘standard’ problems or positions in contemporary
philosophy. In such cases, historically sensitive readings are directly relevant to contemporary work.

In recent philosophy of mind,
terms such as ‘intentionality’, ‘introspection’,
and ‘naturalism’ are frequently employed. Often, such
terms are introduced and defined with a glance back at a historical figure. Thus, in discussing
introspection and self-knowledge, it is
common to speak of a ‘Cartesian model’ of the mind, and to invoke
the ‘introspective psychology’ of Wilhelm Wundt. This Cartesian
model maintains that the contents of the mind are ‘transparently’
and ‘incorrigibly’ known. Transparency
means that there can be nothing in the mind
that is hidden or unavailable to
direct inspection and cognitive apprehension. Incorrigibility means that we cannot make mistakes about
what is present in our own mind. The defeat of these
two theses is often linked with rejecting
a notion of phenomenal content as something more than the bare
representation of physical objects or bodily states. Allegedly, these epistemological theses were the
main support for the notion that
there is an ‘inner’ domain of phenomenal content. Here, Wundtian
introspection may be invoked as a last gasp of the Cartesian
model.

The historical attributions
to Descartes and Wundt are at best caricatures,
at worst grossly in error. Quotations can indeed be produced
from Descartes’s works that seem to affirm both positions. But in
fact Descartes admitted—or insisted—that people can be
mistaken about the content of their own minds: e.g. about whether
they are having a clear and distinct perception. He also allowed
that activities may occur in the mind that are so rapid or so dim as to go unnoticed. Similarly, Wundt
did not suppose that, when introspecting a sensory
state, a subject is aware of some inner state
that is unrelated to the perception of an external object. Rather,
he saw such introspection as a special attitude taken toward the perception of an external object. If
someone who is looking at an object is asked to
report its colour or match its colour to a set of
standard colours, Wundt took these acts to yield introspective reports of current experience. At the
same time, he acknowledged that the
perception of colour involves a special sensory quality
that depends on the perceiving subject. Physical objects are presented by means of subjectively
conditioned sensory experiences. The
introspective attitude focuses on the subjective character of
sensation, rather than seeking to abstract from it, as in physical observation.

This is not the place to
develop these interpretations of Descartes and
Wundt in detail, and I certainly do not mean to imply that there are no problems with the positions they
take. But if the alleged positions
of these figures are used in contemporary philosophy of mind as
objects to be criticized, or as examples of positions that have
been surpassed, then a difficulty arises if they did not hold the positions attributed to them. Of course,
one may be able to find someone else who held the
position targeted. But if Descartes or Wundt
held positions that are less implausible than the ones being shot down, then today’s philosophers
would be in danger of choosing the weaker
opponent—an ineffective procedure
at best. By offering an easily refuted
caricature, a contemporary philosopher claims a
comparative advantage. But the refutation of a straw
position leaves open the possibility that the ‘advantage’ is spurious. This outcome can derail the
study of live alternatives, by enshrining
the common ‘knowledge’ that a particular position has been
decisively set aside.

A similar situation arises
with the term ‘intentionality’, frequently invoked
in contemporary philosophy of mind but rarely discussed in
systematic fashion. The term is introduced, often with a reference to Brentano, and is said to denote a
relation of ‘aboutness’ or ‘representation’,
or a ‘directedness’ of the mind to its object. In recent
‘intentionalist’ theories of sensory qualities, intentionalism is alleged to do away with qualia or
intrinsic features of phenomenal states.
Brentano held no such doctrine, and found no incompatibility between his notion of the intentional
and the distinction, commonly held in the
nineteenth century, between primary and secondary
qualities. Here, historical work might well enrich contemporary
discussions of intentionality, and augment the surprisingly small amount of direct discussion of the
notion, even by those who label themselves
‘intentionalists’.

Finally, in contemporary
discussion, ‘naturalism’ about the mental is
frequently assumed to imply physicalism or materialism, so that offering a naturalistic account of the
intentional is considered as tantamount
to reducing that notion to non-intentional terms (usually,
to physical or material terms). Are mentalistic notions such as (unreduced) intentionality non-natural?
They have not always been regarded as such. Many
early modern authors, even dualists, saw mind
as a part of nature, as did major nineteenth-century physiologist-philosophers.
Some twentieth-century philosophers, including
John Dewey and Ernest Nagel, have distinguished naturalism about
the mental from materialism. Again, this is not the place to
argue for such a distinction, but historical investigation of the notion of the natural as it has been
applied (or not) to the mental (and to
the mind–brain relation) could help to sort out these matters philosophically.

Most philosophers grant that
past philosophical texts demand philosophical
skills from their interpreters. Many would allow that there is
plenty of work to be done in interpreting past philosophy and
comprehending its history. However, across the twentieth century,
philosophers disputed whether historically oriented interpretations have their own philosophical value. I
would urge that such interpretations are essential to
the health of ongoing philosophy. Philosophy
without history may not be completely blind, but it is
likely to be extremely near-sighted, bumbling about as it attempts
to orient itself in its own evolving problem space. It is not required, for philosophy to get its
bearings, that every philosopher become a
historian. But all of us may need to draw from the work of our
historically oriented colleagues. Which makes it all the more desirable for historians of philosophy
to take pains to render the interest
and the results of their work readily accessible to other philosophers.

Source : Sorell, Tom and
G. A. J. Rogers.(2005), Analytic Philosophy
and History of Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon
Press).

The History of Philosophy as Philosophy: (7). Shapes Of History

The positions and arguments
of major philosophers are understood within a
framework of assumptions, often tacit, about the larger shape of
philosophy’s past. These assumptions concern the motivating problems, aims, and also the
achievements of past philosophers or
‘schools’ of philosophers. Evaluation of achievements may be
expected to vary as the present philosophical climate varies. None the less, historians of philosophy,
in pursuing contextual methodology, should seek as
much as possible to work upward from
past philosophers’ own statements in establishing the aims or philosophical motives of individuals or
schools. They might also seek, in
the first instance, to gauge their evaluations by contextually appropriate standards.

Often, philosophical history
has been given shape by dividing philosophers
into competing schools, characterized as responding to one
or more central problems. Kant divided the philosophers before
himself into ‘intellectualists’ (like Plato) and ‘sensualists’ (like Epicurus) with regard to the
primary object of knowledge, and,
with respect to the origin of knowledge, into ‘empiricists’ (Aristotle and Locke) and ‘noologists’
(those who follow nous, or the
intellect: Plato and Leibniz). These dichotomies were to be overcome by, or synthesized in, his own
critical philosophy. Others in Kant’s time added a
‘sceptical’ school. In late-nineteenthcentury histories,
the period from Descartes to Kant was variously categorized,
in terms of nationality; metaphysical versus critical approaches
(with Locke, Berkeley, and Hume among the latter); systematic,
empirical, and critical approaches; and rationalist, empiricist,
sceptical, and critical ones.

In more recent historical
narratives, the theme of scepticism has been
used to characterize the development of early modern philosophy within a framework of rationalism,
empiricism, and critical philosophy.
In this shaping of history, Descartes raised a sceptical challenge
that he was unable to answer adequately; Locke, Berkeley, and Hume
pursued it further, in successive steps; and Kant sought to
answer Hume’s sceptical challenge with his first Critique. As an organizing theme for early modern
philosophy, scepticism has obvious
limits, since Spinoza, Leibniz, and Locke paid scant attention
to it, Descartes used scepticism as a tool but was not seriously
threatened by it, and Kant had little interest in discussing scepticism about the external world
until he was accused of it in early
reviews of his first Critique.
Further, Berkeley’s classification as an
empiricist, proto-Humean sceptic can be challenged, notwithstanding
his use of certain Lockean principles and Hume’s subsequent
use of Berkeleyan arguments. Berkeley affirmed a ‘notion’
of spirit as an active substance, upon which he sought to
establish an immaterialist metaphysics—not a particularly ‘empiricist’
project.

Given the renewed interest in
history of philosophy, there has in fact
been surprisingly little explicit discussion of periodization, classification, and narrative themes. If
the sceptical master narrative for
early modern philosophy is abandoned (as it should be, while acknowledging various sceptical
traditions), new themes and shapes
will need to be developed. These should take into account the
early modern penchant for investigating the power and scope of human understanding (which doesn’t
require sceptical motivation), the
relations between philosophy and the sciences, and developments in value theory.

The shape of philosophy’s
history from the late nineteenth to the end of
the twentieth century has yet to be formed. In anglophone scholarship,
efforts toward creating this history include work in the history
of ‘analytic’ philosophy and the history of the philosophy of science. The task is large, and the
surface has barely been scratched. In the
history of analytic philosophy, beyond the emphasis on logic

and language as pursued by Michael Dummett and others,
further themes need investigating. These should
address the widespread philosophical interest, in
the first half of the twentieth century, in sense
perception, knowledge, and mind. Perhaps as a result of the ensconcement of behaviourist attitudes
within later analytic philosophy, little
attention has been paid to early-twentieth-century theories
of mind and the mind–body relation. One context for these topics
is the writings of the neo-Kantians on the distinction between the Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften. Thus
far, work on the history of the philosophy of
science in the twentieth century
has focused mainly on the Vienna Circle and its surroundings. The topic might be widened to include
American approaches initiated before 1930 and
carried on afterward, French work in history
and philosophy of science, and the ongoing relation between science and metaphysics. Sufficient
critical distance from the reflexive
charge of ‘psychologism’ may have been attained by now to
permit the extensive turn-of-the-century relations between philosophy and psychology to be studied on their
own terms, and in a way that recognizes the many
influences of the new psychology on philosophy
at this time.

As philosophers, historians
of philosophy should be prepared to examine
their enterprise philosophically. Discussions in the earlier historiographical literature on the
methodology of interpreting particular
texts have continued in recent work. However, larger questions
about periodization and narrative themes, also raised in

the earlier literature, have not been vigorously pursued.
The recent bounty of work in the history of
philosophy should provide the materials
needed to support explicit reflection on the shapes of philosophical
history.

As philosophers, historians of philosophy should also be prepared to relate the positions of the past
(contextually understood) to the
positions of the present, and to offer to present-day philosophy insights gleaned from history on both
the structures of and solutions to philosophical
problems.

Source : Sorell, Tom and
G. A. J. Rogers.(2005), Analytic Philosophy
and History of Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon
Press).

The History of Philosophy as Philosophy: (6). Expanding contexts, seeking Historical themes

The ‘context’ for reading
early modern philosophy can be as narrow as the
text surrounding a passage (or the corpus containing a work),
and (in the limit) as broad as human history itself. Initial steps in expanding the context of early
modern philosophy came from taking seriously the
aims of philosophers as expressed in their works.
Such ‘internal’ contexts would have been sufficient (even if other evidence were not available) for
expanding the context of early
modern metaphysics and epistemology to include relations to mathematics, physics, and other
scientific areas such as biology, physiology,
or psychology. An internal context is also sufficient for
expanding consideration of early modern theories of mind to include theories of the senses, of
cognition more generally, and of the
passions and emotions. Further extension from within is in order.
Religion and theology are major presences in early modern philosophical
texts. Rather than seeing them as encumbrances to be overcome
(one common view), or as sources of arguments to be retrieved
by today’s believers (another trend), one might make the relations
among philosophy, religion, and theology an object of investigation
in its own right.

There is more to history of
philosophy than taking the contexts of individual
works or authors into account in reconstructing or explaining
their positions. Other units of investigation can be defined,
including ideas and themes. One sort of thematic investigation would follow key philosophical ideas or
subject areas over decades or centuries. These
might include basic philosophical notions,
such as conceptions of knowledge and its forms, technical notions,
such as ‘a priori’ and ‘a posteriori’ or ‘analysis’ and ‘synthesis’,
or general categories, such as ‘metaphysics’ or even ‘philosophy’.
Such basic work in ‘philosophical history of ideas’ is needed
to support contextual work in the history of philosophy. But it can be of interest in its own right,
in uncovering conceptual changes
and their philosophical significance. Louis Loeb’s examination of causation and substance in early
modern philosophy is a recent example of this sort
of thematic history.

Other work can attend to the
ways in which philosophers have
been read or ‘received’. To understand seventeenth-century Aristotelianism
and its opponents, an interpreter must distinguish the
local Aristotelianism from the historical Aristotle. The same goes for every major figure. Histories
of how the works of key figures were received,
initially and over the centuries, are of great interest.
Kant’s own presentation of his critical philosophy was altered
as he responded to its initial reception. His works have been constantly studied since their
appearance, with differing emphases. The
historical work of untangling these threads can provide distance from today’s locally received readings
of Kant, as well as presenting various
possibilities, live or not, for interpreting or adapting
his work.

Additional historical and
thematic connections should be sought across
the boundaries of traditional periods. The relation between early modern philosophy and
nineteenth-century philosophy might be taken
beyond obvious connections such as that between Kant and
German idealism, or between Locke and Hume and the two Mills.
By the early twentieth century, the gross structure of periods and themes used in presenting the
history of modern philosophy (into
the nineteenth century) had solidified. Looking back now from the early twenty-first century, we may
reconsider these received views
and ask how the story continues. The impact of Darwinism on
philosophy might be studied more fully. Links between the flourishing
American philosophy before 1930 and the philosophy and science of the preceding century
might be investigated. The development
of history of philosophy in America throughout the twentieth
century deserves further exploration.

In moving beyond contextual
readings of individual texts or authors,
the history of philosophy will develop historical accounts and
explanations of larger movements of ideas. As history of philosophy, these
accounts will focus on internal intellectual factors. As history of philosophy, they will, as
needed, relate these factors to wider
historical factors and trends.

Source : Sorell, Tom and
G. A. J. Rogers.(2005), Analytic Philosophy
and History of Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon
Press).