The specious present is the
time
Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, ...
duration wherein one's
perception
Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system ...
s are considered to be in the
present.
[James, W. (1893)]
The principles of psychology
New York: H. Holt and Company. Page 609. Time perception
The study of time perception or chronoception is a field within psychology, cognitive linguistics and neuroscience that refers to the subjective experience, or sense, of time, which is measured by someone's own perception of the duration of the ind ...
studies the sense of time, which differs from other senses since time cannot be directly perceived but must be reconstructed by the brain.
Description
The term was coined by E. Robert Kelly, better known under the pseudonym "E. R. Clay".
The concept was further developed by
philosopher William James
William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher, historian, and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States.
James is considered to be a leading thinker of the lat ...
.
James defined the specious present to be "the prototype of all conceived times... the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible".
C. D. Broad
Charlie Dunbar Broad (30 December 1887 – 11 March 1971), usually cited as C. D. Broad, was an English people, English epistemology, epistemologist, history of philosophy, historian of philosophy, philosophy of science, philosopher of sc ...
in "Scientific Thought" (1930) further elaborated on the concept of the specious present, and considered that the Specious Present may be considered as the temporal equivalent of a sensory datum.
Finally, the claim of what precisely is being affirmed, in affirming the 'existence' of the specious present, is difficult to clarify. Philosophical theories of time do not usually interpret time to be in any unique way a production of human phenomenology, and the claim that we have some faculty by which we are aware of successive states of consciousness is trivially true.
Notes
References
* Andersen, Holly, and Rick Grush,
A brief history of time-consciousness: historical precursors to James and Husserl, To appear in the ''Journal of the History of Philosophy''.
* Le Poidevin, Robin,
The Experience and Perception of Time, ''The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2004 Edition)'', Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
* Hodder, A. (1901). The adversaries of the sceptic; or, The specious present, a new inquiry into human knowledge
Chapter II, The Specious Present London: S. Sonnenschein &. Pages 36 – 56.
{{Time Topics
Philosophy of mind
Time in life
Perception