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.
The first process of knowing, perceiving, gives us percepts. Seen as a process of selectivity, perceiving is simply a direct pick up of relevant patterns and structures from within the raw and immediate flux of pure experience. If pure experience provides us with the 'basic material' from which potential knowing or experiencing, perceiving, then is the process of selecting pre-existing structures from this 'basic material', and from which we get the first product of knowing (i.e., percepts). Note that the percept and the object being perceived are made of the same thing (i.e., pure experience). This contrasts with dualistic theories that posit the real object in the world (i.e., the thing) is metaphysically distinct from the mental representation of that object (i.e., the perception of the thing).
The second process of knowing, thinking, gives us concepts. Seen as a process of selectivity, thinking involves the selection and fixing of the perceptual flow (of percepts). From an inception-eqse perspective, then, concepts are derived from the selection and abstraction of percepts, which are in turn derived from the selection of structures from pure, undifferentiated experience. From my reading, I think that the concept of concepts (haha...) is important because 1) it clearly shows that James was not in the business of denying mentality, and 2) it accounts for the significant experience of having a 'mental world'. Remember that experience should not be limited to sensory (much less visual) experiences. From a phenomenological perspective, it is equally important to account for the rich mental experiences individuals have. And one final thing to note, while concepts are useful, James warns that they can mislead and result in false conclusions if they become disconnected from percepts. It is hence important to regularly ground concepts in real experience, else it might lead to what James calls the 'psychologist's fallacy', where we treat abstract ideas and concepts as if they were reality itself.
Crucially, how James framed percepts and concepts distinguishes it from Cartesian approaches. While the Cartesian tradition saw perceiving as precognitive (i.e., not a form of knowing), James saw both perceiving and thinking as cognitive processes of selective knowing. Also, unlike rationalist approaches, which tended to place more importance on cognitive thinking processes over perceptual ones, James seemed to do the opposite in arguing that concepts lose value once detached from percepts.
Pragmatism
If concepts are abstracted and derived from the percepts of immediate experience, how might we verify the truth-value and meaningfulness of these concepts? Heft reminds us that concepts, like any product of knowing processes, should serve the functional needs of individuals by allowing one to better adapt to their environments. To do this, the use of concepts must continually be assessed against immediate experience. This is the gist of James's pragmatism, which provides an alternative program to the more traditional approaches. In these approaches, truth and meaning are assessed as a function of correspondence between what is really out there and what is perceived. This implicitly maintains the distinction between the physical world and the psychical mind, one that radical empiricism rejects.
Instead of viewing truth and meaning as a mapping between the external world and the mind, pragmatism seeks to establish these by asking whether abstracted concepts pragmatically or practically help to link up different parts of experience. One example provided by Heft is that of wayfinding. Imagine trying to find your way from your home to your office. This idea or experience of an idea you're having now is a concept abstracted from your past experiences of getting from home to office. What is the validity of this concept, then? From a correspondence perspective, we would establish this by mapping what you imagined to the path that is actually out there. From a pragmatic point of view, the concept of wayfinding is valid so long as it eventually leads you to your office. In this view, concepts can be conceived as tools in immediate experience that function to guide one's behaviour. And like other tools, they work in some situations, don't work in others, and sometimes can even be replaced by better tools/concepts in guiding behaviour.
To summarise this section, Heft notes how James saw the purpose of concepts. Rather than using concepts to uncover universal truths that map perfectly to the external environment, concepts are simply tools that hold meaning when they help us adapt and function to the ever-changing structure of our ecological niches.
Concluding remarks
And that does it for the first chapter! The rest of the chapter goes into detail on other nontrivial topics, including viewing the material world as a concept or the dynamic and temporal nature of experience, but I'll leave these out for now. On to the next chapters!
References
Heft, H. (2001). Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the Legacy of William James’s Radical Empiricism. Psychology Press.
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