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ABSTRACT
This paper addresses three main concerns about William James’s understanding of attention. In the first section, I will consider the question whether or not James’s famous claim that “every one knows what attention is” should be understood as implying that his theory is a folk psychological theory of attention. After arguing against this interpretation, the second part of the paper spells out four main tenets in James’s theory: attention is presented as transcendental, active, structuring, and embodied. Particular emphasis will be laid on the key role of bodily movements. The third and final section draws some conclusions concerning the intentionality of agency. According to James, the genesis of the intentions to act has to be located in attentional movements and comportments towards the surrounding world. At variance with some readings of James as a full-fledged phenomenologist, I suggest to complement his essentially pragmatist approach with the aid of phenomenology as providing useful input for further inquiries.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 James, Principles of Psychology, 381.
2 In the following, I will not deal with the question of defining folk psychology, since this would be the topic of a paper on its own. I will instead embrace the definition given by Kelley: folk psychology includes “common people’s ideas about their own and other people’s behavior and about the antecedents and consequences of that behavior. These ideas are expressed in the labels and terms that we, common folk, use to describe people and in the familiar sayings and stories that we tell each other about individuals, kinds of people, and people in general. In short [… folk psychology] is embedded in and carried by our everyday language” (Kelley, ‘Common-Sense Psychology and Scientific Psychology’, 4).
3 James, Principles of Psychology, 18.
4 Ibid., 194.
5 De Freitas Araujo, ‘Psychology Between Science and Common-Sense’, 5; on this point, see also Sech, De Freitas Araujo and Moreira Almeida, ‘Williamd James and Psychological Research’, as well as Taylor, ‘William James on a Phenomenological Psychology of Immediate Experience’.
6 Watzl, ‘The Nature of Attention’, 842.
7 Hardcastle, ‘The Puzzle of Attention, the Importance of Metaphors’, 335.
8 Pashler, The Psychology of Attention, 4.
9 Ibid., 3.
10 Quoted in Pashler, The Psychology of Attention, 1.
11 James, Principles of Psychology, 381–2.
12 Ibid., 380.
13 James does not explicitly says who he means, but in the following he goes on by quoting Theodor Waitz, Christian Wolff, and Wilhelm Wundt.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid. Italics in the original.
16 An anonymous reviewer raised the question concerning feeling pain while doing something different: would James claim that, in this case, we don’t feel any pain at all? Since James does not claim attention to be a process necessarily directed to a single object or feature in our experience, I think he can admit that, while we try to focus on, say, the movie, still some part of our attention is directed to the pain: we still are attentive to it in some measure. This is also the reason why, firstly, we can remember that we where in pain while we were watching the movie, and secondly, why pain can be so unbearable as to attract all of our attention to itself, making it impossible for us to follow the movie.
17 James, Principles of Psychology, 381.
18 Ibid., 401.
19 Ibid., 380.
20 Ibid., 393.
21 Ibid., 381.
22 Ibid.
23 For a similar claim see Leary, The Routledge Guidebook to James’s Principles of Psychology, 213: “attention is a cause of what it brings about rather than the effect of some other causes”.
24 James, Principles of Psychology, 382.
25 Ibid., 383.
26 Ibid., 411; italics in the original.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.; italics in the original.
29 Cf. James, Principles of Psychology, 419.
30 Cf. Stanley, ‘Some Remarks Upon Professor James’s Discussion of Attention’. Since a discussion of Stanley’s objection would bring us too far away from the actual scope of the present inquiry, I just refer to this in order to stress how James is actually clearly leaving the field of folk psychology.
31 James, The Principles of Psychology, 412; italics in the original.
32 Ibid.; italics in the original.
33 On this point see James, The Principles of Psychology, 288, and the connected analysis in Krueger, ‘James on Experience and the Extended Mind’.
34 James, The Principles of Psychology, 287; italics in the original.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid., 415.
37 Ibid., 397; italics in the original.
38 Ibid., 398; italics in the original.
39 Ibid., 400.
40 Cf. Ibid., 402.
41 Ibid., 403.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid., 462.
44 Ibid., 1099.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid., 1100; italics in the original.
48 I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for helping make this point more clear.
49 James, The Principles of Psychology, 1131.
50 Ibid., 1167; italics and upper-case in the original.
51 In this way, the reading of James proposed here can be seen as supporting the externalist view of consciousness put forward by Joel Krueger in his own reading of James’s idea of consciousness as a selecting agency (cfr. Krueger, “James on Experience and the Extended Mind”).
52 Cf. Ryle, The Concept of Mind.
53 James, The Principles of Psychology, 380; italics in the original.
54 In a similar vein cf. Taylor, ‘William James on a Phenomenological Psychology of Immediate Experience’.
55 Wilshire, William James and Phenomenology, 119.
56 On this point, see Thomasson, ‘Introspection and Phenomenological Method’, and in general on James’s methodology see Seigfried, William James’s Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy.
57 The classical example would be Broadbent, Perception and Communication, but also more recent theories, such as those based on competition (see Bundesen and Habekost, Principles of Visual Attention), still tend to see attention as a purely cognitive capacity.
58 On this see Waldenfels, Phänomenologie der Aufmerksamkeit; Depraz, Attention et vigilance; Wehrle and Breyer, ‘Horizontal Extensions of Attention’, D’Angelo, ‘The Phenomenology of Embodied Attention’.
59 See D’Angelo, ‘The phenomenology of Embodied Attention’.