Ecological Psychology in Context (Heft, 2001): Chapter 1.2

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. 

A world of (pure) experience

The first thing to note is that, while James was strongly opposed to Cartesian dualism (i.e., the world is composed of 2 distinct entities: mind and matter), this does not mean that he rejected the existence of thoughts and mental phenomena. As Heft points out from James's essay, "Does Consciousness Exist?" (1912), James simply denied that the mind was some special sort of substance, while still distancing himself from the position of later behaviourists who outrightly rejected the occurrence of mental events.

Rather than viewing the world from a dualistic perspective, James proposed an entirely new starting point: The world is made up of one "primal stuff or material", and this stuff is called pure experience. What exactly is pure experience? To quote Heft, pure experience is "that undifferentiated experience that is immediately and prereflectively encountered". In other words, pure experience can be viewed as the raw, immediate flow of experience encountered, importantly, before it is consciously reflected upon. In James's view, pure experience is the most basic unit of phenomenological knowing and experience, and hence, there is no need to assume anything more exists. 

Having identified pure experience as the key starting point to radical empiricism, Heft goes into further detail on James's metaphysics. To this end, I've identified three main points to discuss. Firstly, Heft attempts to describe the nature of pure experience. This turns out to be a tricky question to answer, because in trying to know something, we have inadvertently started a selective process of attending to certain parts of pure experience and differentiating them for our purposes. Here, Heft describes pure experience as the base material for the selective processes of knowing. To use an example from James, pure experience can be compared to the experience of a newborn baby, where every sensation and awareness is fully and indifferently encountered, serving as the basic material for future, potential knowing. 

Next, elaborating on the description of knowing processes above, knowing can be seen as a selective function that intrinsically involves a relation between a knower and the object known. Unlike dualistic frameworks, knowing is not something that occurs separately in the Cartesian mind. When we come to know something, we are selectively picking out a pattern or structure from the larger flow of pure experience. This revelation will be key to Gibson's conception of direct perception. Instead of having to impose structures on the world (through indirect perception), to perceive is simply to detect structures already out there. To conclude this point, Heft also highlights how James saw consciousness not as a 'thing' in the Cartesian mind, but rather as a part of the selective knowing processes described. Here, we see consciousness described as a dynamic process and activity, and not a static entity to possess. Incidentally, this reminded me of a short blog by Andrew Wilson, who argued that verbing our nouns can help us better frame the questions we ask in ecological psychology. 

Finally, Heft discusses how James made sense of a seemingly dualistic world fit into his radical empiricism monism. I will admit that I have not fully come to terms with the ideas introduced here, but I will nonetheless do my best to articulate what I think is being conveyed. The example given is that of a person reading a book in a room. On the one hand, the book and the room seem to be 'out there', whereas the experience and knowledge of the book and the room seem to exist as a representation in the person's mind. Rather than subscribe to this dualism, James argued that this was an example of a singular experience (of the room and the book) that happens to belong to two different contexts. To give a mathematical analogy, think about how a single point at the intersection of two lines exists as one thing, yet belongs to two different contexts (i.e., the two lines). Similarly, our experience of the world can exist as one thing, yet still function within the context of two different sets of relations (e.g., the constellation of relations that define the personal context and the environmental context). 

The historical context for radical empiricism

To summarise, James's metaphysics is called radical empiricism because 1) he only included as an explanation only what can be experienced (i.e., pure experience, and without assuming the need for intervening mental entities), 2) he argued that the relations between different facets of experiences are just as real and directly experienced as individual things themselves (this is the radical part of radical empiricism), and 3) he argued that these relations exist as directly discoverable structures in the world.

To better appreciate the second (and subsequently, the third) point, one only needs to look at the two dominant epistemological positions at the time James developed his radical empiricism. While empiricism sought answers from past learnt experience and idealism did the same via appeals to 'Absolute' a priori structures intrinsic to the mind, they both shared the same assumption that experience starts from separate, disconnected elements that must somehow be placed into the correct relations with each other. On the contrary, radical empiricism argues that these relations are already out there in the world. This means that they can be directly discovered, rather than indirectly constructed, as in empiricism or idealism. 

References

Heft, H. (2001). Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the Legacy of William James’s Radical Empiricism. Psychology Press.