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G. Franck:
"Time, actuality, novelty and history";
in: ": Life and Motion of Socio-Economic Units", A. Frank, J. Raper, J. Cheylan (ed.); Taylor & Francis, London, 2001, ISBN: 0-7484-0845-2, 111 - 123.

Time is a fundamental dimension of experience. The experience we have of time itself is a notorious source of confusion, however. It proves extraordinarily hard to distinguish between the objective and the subjective part of this experience. Evidence of this difficulty is the fact that, in the sciences, there are as many concepts of time as there are distinct bodies of knowledge. It depends on the phenomena a theory is accounting for which concept of time it works with. The concept of time appropriate to account for motion is not rich enough to account for life, the concept of time rich enough to account for biological life is too poor to account for conscious life. A classification of the sciences according to the definition of time implied renders a hierarchy of increasing experiential concreteness and decreasing formal rigour. The richer a theory's account of what we experience as time, the looser become its definitions. The higher the standards of precision in a field of theorising, the narrower becomes its notion of time. This trade-off throws a new light on reductionism. When looked at from the perspective of time perception, reduction to physical reality proves to abstract from an entire dimension of existence. The dimension disregarded by reductive methods is that of actual time as opposed to the dimension of real time.

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