When1: 1884
When2: 1911
Who: William James [James, William]
What: psychologist
Where: USA
works\ What is an emotion? [1884: with Carl Lange]; Principles of Psychology [1890]; Psychology: The Briefer Course [1892]; Will to Believe [1897]; Human Immortality [1898]; Varieties of Religious Experience [1902]; Pragmatism [1907]; Pluralist Universe [1909]; Meaning of Truth [1909]; Some Problems in Philosophy [1911]; Essays in Radical Empiricism [1912]
Detail: He lived 1842 to 1910 and was pragmatist, radical empiricist, and Swedenborgian.
Epistemology
Things that people experience are real. Conjunctions {association, James} between perceptions and their parts organize experience. Ideal forms or categories do not organize experience.
Hypothesis is true if consequences of believing it lead to personal well-being, success, and satisfaction {pragmatism, James}. The best test of theory is what happens when using it. True beliefs have good practical effects in thinking and acting. They help people, are profitable, correspond to actual events, or are expedient in most situations.
Useful hypothesis makes prediction about experience or behavior.
Statements do not have objective truth.
Sshort-term memory can last from seconds to minutes and be in current experience. Long-term memory can last for days and require going back to the past.
Overt body behavior, especially in viscera, causes human and animal emotion, in response to internal or external stimulation or perception {James-Lange theory of emotion}.
Fear of loud noises is innate, but conditioning and stimulus generalization cause most fears.
Sense and motor systems interact {ideomotor theory}, so actions have representations about their effects, and the representations control further actions. Actions have predicted consequences.
Ethics
Will and attention seem to require effort, which indicates self-exerted force.
Will is active and purposeful consciousness. Belief requires effort of will {will-to-believe}. One then acts according to one's beliefs.
Free will is active attention to choose or maintain belief and choose behavior.
The will-to-believe allows one to choose belief in situations in which one must choose belief, and so action, without knowing consequences. Reason does not work in such situation.
Believing is good, because people might believe the truth, whereas avoiding error is not practical and cannot lead to truth. People choose not believing when they fear trickery or mistakes, but it is better to have false hope than false fear.
People should not reject hypothesis if results are good. Therefore, people should believe in God.
Metaphysics
Pure experience is the only reality {radical empiricism}. Experiences contain knower {consciousness, James}, known {perception, James}, and their relations. Living things both participate in pure experience and can reflect on it later. Experience is neither mind nor matter {neutral monism, James}. Experience is pluralistic. Soul, self, Ideas, and matter do not exist.
God is being and existence itself. Nothing else can determine God. Thus, God cannot not be, and so is necessary and sufficient. Because necessary and sufficient, God is perfect and absolute. Because limitation is non-existence, God has no limits from within or without and so is infinite. Because God is infinite, God is one and only one. Because God is one and only, God is indivisible. God has no potentiality, because potential can lose or gain, thus contradicting necessity and absoluteness. God contains all actuality already and is immutable. Because God has no limits, God is boundless. If God has bound, God is in space and thus is composite. God is omniscient, because God knows all causes as itself. God is pervasive and omnipresent, because God is present in all time. God is omnipotent for all things that do not have logical contradictions. If God has physical substances or anything inside, they have cause other than God, so God is non-physical and spiritual. If God is material, God has parts, which something not-God must combine, which is contradiction. Therefore, God must be simple. God's nature or essence and existence or being must be the same. Potential and actual, substance and accidents, being and activity, existence and attributes unite in God. Because God has all attributes of persons, God is a person. Because God is object and subject of its activity, God is a living self-sufficient person. Because people have will and intelligence, God has them, because cause must have more than effect. The object of those things in God is God itself. God wills itself, knows itself, and must do these things. God is eternal. If God does not exist from the beginning, God needs a prior cause. If God is not present at end, God is not necessary. If God has succession, God is mutable.
God can create being from non-divine substance or out of nothing. God can will to create, because everything outside God can change. God creates to exercise his freedom and manifest his glory. God creates out of love, to make rational creations that can know and love God. God implants the Ideas in us, but people perceive them from finite viewpoint.
Evil is negation, and so God cannot be evil. God permits evil in free beings but does not will it.
Mysticism is passive, transient, ineffable, and noetic.
Mind
Brain as whole makes continuous, personal, active, and changing experience {stream of consciousness, James}, which is about near past and near future. The stream of consciousness can affect brain.
Person's individual experience can interact with other's experiences.
Mind can use different means in different situations to reach fixed goals.
An "I" {subjective self} thinks and knows. A "Me" {empirical self} {objective self} is the body {material self}, social acts {social self}, and spirit or soul {spiritual self}, which has reasoning, will, goals, conscience, and sensory experiences. Spiritual self attends, judges, and acts {active element}. The "I" is whole set of Me's, holds thoughts, and is a special thought type that remembers, selects, unifies {unity, self}, and continues {continuity, self} into next such thought, making stream of consciousness. "...thought itself is the thinker..."
Consciousness can cause attention {cause theory}, or brain can direct it {effect theory}.
Social Sciences>Philosophy>History>Mind
Outline of Knowledge Database Home Page
Description of Outline of Knowledge Database
Date Modified: 2022.0224