1994 Volume 65 Issue 2 Pages 150-155
This study examines the relationship between the process of cognition and solution in contradictory situations and evaluation of the span comprehended by “now” (Japanese ima) in it. Eighty-eight subjects were asked to express the span of “now” in each of 24 contradictory situations, selected for and graded according to degree of both contradictoriness and solvability. The subjects expressed their evaluation on a bi-directional cline, comprising 21 time categories: in this cline, “now” is positioned in the center, and the categories of second, minute, hour, day, week, year, generation, century, and infinity to both the left for the past and the right for the future. Three coordinates emerged from the data, applying Dual Scaling. The first indicated that future-oriented solutions in contradictory situations generate wider spans of “now” than did past ones, the second that negative solutions to contradictions generate a less realistic interrelation between its self and his outside world than did positive ones, and the third that the cognitive process and that by which contradictory situations are solved contain a third dimension, different from both a past-future dimension and a positive-negative dimension.
