 There are two sources of ambiguity here. One is over whether ‘the specious present’ refers to the object of the experience, namely a duration in time, or the way in which that object is presented to us. The second is over how we should interpret ‘immediately sensible’. James’ words suggest that the specious present is the duration itself, picked out as the object of a certain kind of experience. But ‘ immediately sensible’admits of a number of disambiguations. So we could define the specious present as: