Heft (2001): 1.3, Percepts, Concepts, and Pragmatism

One final bit I'd like to address in this very dense first chapter is the distinction between percepts and concepts, as well as James's more well-known philosophy of pragmatism. While the former is James's way of explaining cognition without the need for intermediary mental representations, the latter is an approach to verifying the 'truth' or meaningfulness of concepts with respect to percepts. Let's get right into it!

Percepts and Concepts

Heft starts this section by reminding us that knowing is a functional and selective process involving a knower and the object known. Knowing is functional in that it allows organisms to adapt to their environments, while it is selective in how in knowing, we specifically pick out certain parts of the 'quasi-chaos' (i.e., undifferentiated but with latent lines of structure) of pure experience. Here, James argued that this selective process gives us two outcomes: percepts and concepts. 

Heft (2001): 1.2, James's Radical Empiricism

In Heft's view, the issue with contemporary psychology is its (often) implicit and uncritical adoption of mind-body dualisms. Regardless of the variant, each theory of mind associated with the dualistic tradition faces insurmountable problems in addressing issues of causality, mental content, and consciousness (to name a few). Instead of attempting to solve these issues, perhaps we've simply been barking up the wrong tree. This calls for a drastically different philosophical approach that gives us permission to bypass the problems above. Enter William James's radical empiricism, which will be covered in this post. While I have encountered the term radical empiricism here and there over the past year, this represents my first sincere attempt to grapple with James's philosophy. Here, I aim to convey the main points that stood out to me. Hopefully, I'll come to appreciate the full extent of radical empiricism as I mature as an ecological psychologist. 

Heft (2001): 1.1, Psychology & Cartesian Dualism

In the prologue, Heft begins by describing the dominant perspective, the Cartesian perspective, that has guided psychology theories and methods for the past centuries. By highlighting some of its glaring weaknesses, Heft sets the stage for the more attractive, albeit unintuitive, philosophical alternative of radical empiricism developed by William James. Then, in the first part of Chapter One, we turn our attention to the counterintuitive argument that psychological behaviourism, despite rejecting any notions of the mental and nonphysical, actually played a significant role in keeping the Cartesian tradition alive. This serves to underscore the need for a radically different approach to studying psychological phenomena, one that avoids the same pitfalls as faced by a dualistic framework.

Heft (2001): Introduction

I'm starting a new blog series! Over the next few weeks (and probably months), I'll be covering Harry Heft's 2001 book "Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the Legacy of William James's Radical Empiricism". At least from the title and my reading of the first few chapters, Heft (2001) goes beyond the principles of Ecological Psychology and explicitly attempts to outline the historical context in which Gibson's ecological psychology was formed. Far from being an outright original conception, the first glimpses of an ecological psychology could be seen in William James's writing. One of the main goals of this book, then, is to trace out the historical evolution of ideas (i.e., from William James, to Edwin Holt, and finally to James Gibson) that led to the eventual thesis of ecological psychology.