Chauncy Wright (1830-1875)
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914):
Physicist & Logician
Pragmatism: No certainty, only "practical significance"
Psychology
in America: James and Pragmatism
The
Social Context in United States
of America
Leahey (2001). Decribes the background of
:
Revolution, liberty, capitalism, "the American Dream", the "wild
west", civil war, Ripley, Fowler's Phrenology
Scottish "Common Sense" Philosophy: Logic and Morals
Benjamin
Franklin - Natural man -Enlightenment electricity
Jonathan
Edwards (1703-1758): American
Romanticism, transcendentalism
Ralph Waldo
Emmerson: Self reliance
Henry David
Thoreau: Waldon
The Boston
Metaphysical Club (1871-72)
Oliver Wendel Holmes (1841-1935)
Chauncy Wright (1830-1875)
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914):
Physicist & Logician
Pragmatism: No certainty, only "practical significance"
Thoughts function
to produce actions and "effects"
Meaning (& truth) are found in consequences
to living
William
James (1842-1910) The founder of American Psychology
|
Conway
(1992): Identity crisis and two worldviews 1875 Informal psychological laboratory |
|
The
Principles of Psychology (1890)
Methods and
snares of psychology: Language...
The Self
"a
man's Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his,
not only his body and his psychic powers, but his
clothes and his house, his wife and children,
his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works,
his lands and horses, and yacht and bank account"
Self
is both:
"I"
and "Me"
(Bodily, Social , Spiritual)
Subjective
vs. Objective
Knower vs.
Known
Process vs.
Content
Two
kinds of knowledge: Acquaintance & Knowledge About
Acquaintance
Knowledge About
Immediately intuitive Descriptively
conceptual
Phenomenology
Positivism
"Me"
Spiritual self:
Thoughts, hypotheses and conceptions of the world and the self
Social
self: Recognitions and reputations (fames and honours) and "club opinions"
Material
self: Feeling of "warmth" or intimacy for body
and possessions
Hierarchy
of conceptions of including moral ones
The "I": The stream of consciousness
Jame's Self still very relevant to contemporary theoretical psychology
Functions
for survival
Metaphor of flashlight (attention)
Emotions
"The
bodily changes follow directly the perception
of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the
same changes as they occur IS the emotion"
The
will to believe
(1892)
"an essay
in justification of faith, a defense of our right to adopt a believing
attitude"
Radical
Empiricism:
Facts as hypotheses revisable by experience
The
varieties of religious experience (1902)
"Religion...
shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in
their solitude,
so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to what ever they may
consider the divine"
Discusses topics
of: Religion and neurology, healthy mindedness, conversion, and mysticism
Pragmatism
(1907): Camping
with Squirrels and Philosophers
A method
for settling metaphysical disputes
whose orientation of attitude is "looking
forward
towards to last things, fruits, consequences, facts"
Note:
May have "conversion" of self through
letting go of "older truths" for new
ones (world order).
" . . . if
you should expose to a converting influence a subject in whom three factors
unite: first, pronounced emotional sensibility;
second, tendency to automatisms; third, suggestibility
of the passive type ... sudden conversion" (James, 1902, p.194, emphasis added).
Hugo
Munsterberg (1863-1916): Motor Theory of Consciousness
Consciousness
is an epiphenomenon to the physiological
process
Neo-Realism& the Motor Theory of Consciousness (Leahey, 2001) Represented a step
towards the loss of consciousness in psychology
Thaddeus
Bolton (1902): Mind is publicly observable through
bodily action
James Roland Angell (1869-1949): Adjustive Functionalism
Functionalism (3 meanings):
Mind as a biological function: Adapting
Consciousness as a physiological function: MTC
Socially
useful for education mental hygiene, abnormal states
