William James's Theory of Mind

Abstract

William James's Theory of Mind W. E. COOPER 1. INTRODUCTION I SHALLPRESENTan interpretation of William James's theory of mind which reconciles four plausible but apparently conflicting accounts of that theory. This extraordinary diversity of scholarly opinion represents just about every interpretive live option, construing James variously as a neutral monist, a naturalistic physicalist, a panpsychist, and a phenomenologist. The key to the reconciliation is to take seriously James's own distinction between scientific and metaphysical levels of enquiry, and to assign the four readings different roles within the two-level structure. The price of the reconciliation, that substantial tenets of these readings must be rejected, is offset by the prospect of interpretive consensus. I hope to show that The Reconciling View, as I shall call it, is securely anchored in the mature works where James directly addresses the nature of mind, namely, The Principlesof Psychologyand Essaysin Radical Empiricism. This view has the hermeneutic virtue of finding more coherence and good sense in James's theorizing than the interpretive alternafives ,' and at the end of this essay I suggest that The Reconciling View's claim to truth cannot be dismissed. A. J. Ayer presents the definitive reading of James as a neutral monist, who dissolved the mind-body problem by giving primacy to a single stuff which is metaphysically more fundamental than mind or body, and neutral with respect to the difference between them; this stuff, which James called pure experience, is the material out of which each of us somehow constructs the private, subjective world of one's mind and the public, objective world of body. Owen J. Flanagan's naturalistic reading of James, by contrast, gives primacy to the body: James ended the hegemony of Cartesian assumptions and initiated the reign, in twentieth-century psychology and philosophy, of ' The virtue I refer to is the one which Ronald Dworkin expresses in his "aesthetic hypothesis " that "an interpretation of a piece of literature attempts to show which way of reading (or speaking or directing or acting) the text reveals it as the best work of art" (a Matter of Principle [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985], 149). [571 ] 572 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:4 OCTOBER 1990 the naturalistic assumption that a person is a physical thing with no metaphysically odd, nonphysical properties. Marcus Ford, by contrast with Ayer and Flanagan, gives primacy to the mind, seeing in James a panpsychist who believed that every existent thing has mental attributes. Not only do persons have metaphysically odd properties, by Flanagan's lights, everythinghas them. And so there could be no primally neutral stuff which lacked them, as Ayer's James insists. Finally, there is Bruce Wilshire's James, for whom questions of metaphysical primacy are replaced by subtle descriptions of mental states, anticipating Husserl's case for a phenomenological science of the mind that would be autonomous and not dependent, in particular, on data drawn from the natural sciences. Wilshire's James is a protophenomenologist who emphasized the importance to psychology of introspection, especially for describing mental life in a vocabulary that does not distort it; whereas Flanagan finds James's reliance on introspection to be the least attractive aspect of his theory of psychology. Wilshire takes for granted that James was a naturalist in the sense that he sought psychophysical correlation laws, but he deplores this commitment as being at odds with James's protophenomenological insights. In short, there is a profound lack of consensus amongst James scholars about how to interpret his theorizing about the mind. I have chosen to discuss these four scholars because they represent, in clear and persuasive fashion, four current and often conflicting interpretive schools. Their statements are extreme , and more moderate ones would be less open to the criticisms I shall raise. The extreme statements are the best foils for The Reconciling View and, besides, they expose characteristic interpretive errors of each of the four schools. I shall argue that the Neutral Monist reading is fundamentally correct at the metaphysical level of James's theory, but it must concede to the Panpsychist account that pure experience is protomental; that is, although more basic than mind or body, pure experience is...