James's Theory of Fringes

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to present a more thoroughgoing account of what James means by the fringes of perceptual objects. The first section presents James's account of fringes of objects of consciousness within the context of his celebrated analogy of the stream of the fringe phenomenon for perception. It concludes by proposing a preliminary "working" definition of the concept "fringe": fringes are active bridges of associations (logical, psychological, etc.) from what is perceptually immediate but ambiguous to what the perceptual process "analyzes" and make definite.