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Reading group: William James, The Principles of Psychology, three chapters

Dana Whitfield Fellow
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Psychology & the mind sciencesAmericanPragmatism#introspection#principles-of-psychology#reading-group#stream-of-thought
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William James published The Principles of Psychology in 1890, after twelve years of work. It is two huge volumes, and nobody should read it straight through. But three chapters are among the best things written about the mind, and they read like letters from a clever friend.

Plan (three weeks; any edition, the text is freely available online):

  • Week 1: Chapter VII, "The Methods and Snares of Psychology." Introspection, experiment and comparison, and the "psychologist's fallacy", James's name for confusing your own standpoint as an observer with the mental state you are describing.
  • Week 2: Chapter IX, "The Stream of Thought." Thought as a continuous stream rather than a chain of separate ideas; the "substantive" and "transitive" parts of the stream.
  • Week 3: Chapter X, "The Consciousness of Self." The material, social and spiritual selves, and his long argument with older theories of the soul.

I'm a community organiser in Chicago and I came to James through his essays on democracy and belief, so I'll be reading for how his psychology connects to how people actually live together. Join whenever.

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  1. Derek Hollis

    Fellow

    Week 1. The psychologist's fallacy deserves to be better known outside psychology. I see it every day in my field: we look at a machine's output, read our own understanding into it, and report that the machine understands. James had no machines in mind, but his description fits exactly: the observer's knowledge gets smuggled into the description of the thing observed.

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  2. Moon Ha-eun

    Fellow

    Week 2, from a cellist. James's point that we should speak of a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, as truly as a feeling of blue or cold, is the best description of hearing music I have read in a philosophy book. A melody is mostly transitive parts: the leaning of one note towards the next. Analyse it into separate notes and you've lost what you were hearing.

  3. Aiko Tanabe

    Fellow

    Week 2. I read this chapter alongside Nishida, who borrowed heavily from James's idea of pure experience for his first book. What James calls the stream, before it is cut into subject and object, is close to Nishida's starting point. The difference is that James stays a psychologist, describing, while Nishida makes it the ground of a metaphysics.

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  4. Rowena Abellana

    Fellow

    Week 3. I teach the social self to Filipino teenagers every year: James's claim that a person has, in effect, as many social selves as there are groups whose opinion they care about. They recognise themselves instantly. The harder part is his "spiritual self", the inner core he finds most intimate yet hardest to catch in the act.

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  5. Dana Whitfield

    Fellow

    Thanks, everyone. My takeaway as an organiser: the social self chapter explains why people's sense of who they are changes when they join a movement. They acquire a new group whose recognition matters to them. James got there in 1890.

    Helpful · 3