Specious present

The specious present is the time duration wherein one's perceptions are considered to be in the present.

Description

The term was coined by E. Robert Kelly, who wrote under the pseudonym "E. R. Clay". In The Alternative: A Study in Psychology (1882), he wrote:

The relation of experience to time has not been profoundly studied. Its objects are given as being of the present, but the part of time referred to by the datum is a very different thing from the conterminous of the past and future which philosophy denotes by the name Present. The present to which the datum refers is really a part of the past—a recent past—delusively given as being a time that intervenes between the past and the future. Let it be named the specious present, and let the past, that is given as being the past, be known as the obvious past. All the notes of a bar of a song seem to the listener to be contained in the present. All the changes of place of a meteor seem to the beholder to be contained in the present. At the instant of the termination of such series, no part of the time measured by them seems to be a past. Time, then, considered relatively to human apprehension, consists of four parts, viz., the obvious past, the specious present, the real present, and the future. Omitting the specious present, it consists of three ... nonentities—the past, which does not exist, the future, which does not exist, and their conterminous, the present; the faculty from which it proceeds lies to us in the fiction of the specious present.

The concept was further developed by philosopher William James. 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 in "Scientific Thought" (1930) further elaborated on the concept of the specious present, arguing that it may be construed as the temporal equivalent of a sensory datum.

The specious present can be classed as a 'thick' conception of time perception, to be contrasted with 'thin' conceptions that see the present as instantaneous.

The concept raises some seemingly paradoxical problems. For example, Robin Le Poidevin notes that the specious present amounts to a duration in which events are both simultaneous and successive: "What we perceive, we perceive as present—as going on right now. Can we perceive a relation between two events without also perceiving the events themselves? If not, then it seems we perceive both events as present, in which case we must perceive them as simultaneous, and so not as successive after all."

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.

External links

• Media related to Specious present at Wikimedia Commons