Interpretation (1) of the specious present (as short-term memory retention) does not adequately explain the experience of presentness

If James means the first of these, that would certainly explain his suggestion that it could last up to a minute. But this does not seem to have much to do specifically with the experience of presentness, since we can certainly hold something in the short-term memory and yet recognise it as past. James may be thinking of cases where we are listening to a sentence: if we did not somehow hold all the words in our conscious mind, we would not understand the sentence as a whole. But it is clear that