Skip to main content

Forming a sentence? Part One


The italicized passage below is part of a well-known passage in William James's Principles of Psychology. 

He is discussing the idea of consciousness as mental chemistry, whereby ideas considered as atoms, or as specks of mind dust, can be said to combine into larger compounds, complicated systems of thought and conclusion. To the believers in such a mental chemistry, the brain is a sort of petri dish where these combinations take place, but the brain doesn't make the connections, it simply allows them. 

The underlying system of thought, which owed something to Leibniz' monadology, was expounded in earnest by some now mostly forgotten figures such as Adolf Fick and Hippolyte Taine. James credits (?) Fick with being the first to argue clearly that (in James' paraphrase) "bits of mind-stuff [grow] into distinctly sensible feelings," and perhaps by extension into the whole of a mind. 

So James comes to express in the following striking manner, why this idea seems so odd. 

 "Take a sentence of a dozen words and take twelve men and tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch and let each think of his word as intently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence."

Indeed.  The compound sentence exists nowhere, in that situation.  Of course, they could each shout out their one word in the proper order and then each would recognize it as a sentence. But unless someone told them what order to shout in, it is only by a very odd happenstance that this turns out to be the right sentence. 

And even if it does, it in that case is being presented to the twelve minds through their twelve brains and the attached sensory equipment. That is a synthesizing of data by a mind, not any contribution to the creation of a mind through the compounding of data. 

So: James was taking on a bad idea, and since the bad idea is no longer prevalent amongst us, we tend to see James' whole chapter on this subject as an oddity, even if in some passages strikingly expressed. Is there any other reason why this is even worth a blog post in 2023? 

Yes: and it will occupy us tomorrow. It involves another old friend of this blog: Herbert Spencer. In the Anglosphere, Spencer is a larger name with which to conjure spirits than either Fick or Taine.  

[By the way, that is Taine portrayed above.] 


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more