My own belief--for which the reasons will appear in subsequent
lectures--is that James is right in rejecting consciousness as an
entity, and that the American realists are partly right, though not
wholly, in considering that both mind and matter are composed of a
neutral-stuff which, in isolation, is neither mental nor material. I
should admit this view as regards sensations: what is heard or seen
belongs equally to psychology and to physics. But I should say that
images belong only to the mental world, while those occurrences (if any)
which do not form part of any "experience" belong only to the physical
world. There are, it seems to me, prima facie different kinds of causal
laws, one belonging to physics and the other to psychology. The law
of gravitation, for example, is a physical law, while the law of
association is a psychological law. Sensations are subject to both kinds
of laws, and are therefore truly "neutral" in Holt's sense. But entities
subject only to physical laws, or only to psychological laws, are not
neutral, and may be called respectively purely material and purely
mental. Even those, however, which are purely mental will not have that
intrinsic reference to objects which Brentano assigns to them and which
constitutes the essence of "consciousness" as ordinarily understood. But
it is now time to pass on to other modern tendencies, also hostile to
"consciousness."
There is a psychological school called "Behaviourists," of whom the
protagonist is Professor John B. Watson,* formerly of the Johns Hopkins
University. To them also, on the whole, belongs Professor John Dewey,
who, with James and Dr. Schiller, was one of the three founders of
pragmatism. The view of the "behaviourists" is that nothing can be known
except by external observation. They deny altogether that there is a
separate source of knowledge called "introspection," by which we can
know things about ourselves which we could never observe in others.
They do not by any means deny that all sorts of things MAY go on in
our minds: they only say that such things, if they occur, are not
susceptible of scientific observation, and do not therefore concern
psychology as a science. Psychology as a science, they say, is only
concerned with BEHAVIOUR, i.e. with what we DO; this alone, they
contend, can be accurately observed. Whether we think meanwhile, they
tell us, cannot be known; in their observation of the behaviour of human
beings, they have not so far found any evidence of thought. True, we
talk a great deal, and imagine that in so doing we are showing that we
can think; but behaviourists say that the talk they have to listen to
can be explained without supposing that people think. Where you might
expect a chapter on "thought processes" you come instead upon a chapter
on "The Language Habit." It is humiliating to find how terribly adequate
this hypothesis turns out to be.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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