Great Ideas of Philosophy

III. What figures in the human imagination in a reliable way must be dealt with on its own terms. This is the core ofJames’s famous critique of associationist thought and philosophy.A. The associationist theory of mind is based on the notion that corpuscular and elemental mental entities aresomehow held together as a result of repetition and, thus assembled, stand as real ideas.B. In so many words, he asks, “How did philosophy ever come to a view like that?”1. It surely could not be on the basis of experience. Nobody has ever had an experience of that kind.2. Give each of seven men one word of a sentence, none of them knowing words assigned to the othersix, and not one of them will have the meaning of the sentence itself.C. James refused to make “consciousness” into a palpable entity or a “substance,” but he insisted that, as aprocess, it introduced something new into the ontological realm.1. Every idea is someone’s; it is owned. Mental life is not an empty container filled with experiencesagglomerating with one another. A thought is not a thought; it is my thought.2. The external world is chosen for the content that will be experienced and associated. Selection is at thecore of experience.IV. Where does this consciousness come from?A. Evolution offers a kind of progressive, associational sort of theory. On the matter of mental life, James issatisfied that it, too, has followed an evolutionary course in the animal kingdom.B. But we now have to consider whether this settles or even recognizes the problem of the origin ofconsciousness.1. Darwin’s is a continuity theory, according to which what we find at the level of human psychology isapproximated to some degree further and further down in the phylogenetic series.2. If we find some creature that has a bit less consciousness and then another with even less, have weexplained or settled the problem of consciousness?3. James knows that we do not explain consciousness by pointing to earlier manifestations that are smallconsciousnesses. The small consciousness is as difficult to explain as the larger ones.C. There are two ways we can consider survival of the fittest, or evolutionary pressures conducing to adaptivebehavior.1. It can be seen from the outside, as a natural process working on attributes, selecting the more usefulones and eliminating the lesser.2. In the realm of experience, it appears very differently: as an intention to survive.D. James asks us to consider what happens when we consult again the authoritative realm, which is the realmof experience:We treat survival as if it were an absolute end, existing as such in the physical world, a sort of actualshould be... We forget that in the absence of some such superadded commenting intelligence... thereactions cannot be properly talked of as “useful” or “hurtful” at all.… The moment you bringconsciousness into the midst, survival ceases to be a mere hypothesis. No longer is it “if survival is tooccur....” It has now become an imperative degree: “Survival shall occur....” Real ends now appear for thefirst time upon the world’s stage.V. James was among the first of the scientific community to accept the criticism that the Hegelian camp hadassembled an associationist psychology and atomist science, but James put it to constructive use.A. James exposed a dangerous and overlooked connection in scientific work between the phenomena to bestudied and the method of investigating it.1. James called “the psychologist’s fallacy” the fallacy of assuming that the mental process to be studiedoperates in the same manner as the experiment works.2. Methods that study memory by giving subjects repeated exposure to materials, then testing how muchis retained after certain frequencies of repetition, assume that repetition is what forms memories.B. What is called for is the adoption of experimental modes of inquiry able to accommodate mental processesas they actually take place. Don’t abandon the laboratory; make it sensible!©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 27