William James' Principles of Psychology: a passage

From Dewey to James: his authority in these matters. In this and the next post, I'll talk about William James' view of concept formation.

Starting with Principles, Volume I, Chapter XII, Conception

Some conceptions are of events, some of things, some of qualities. Any fact, be it thing, event, or quality, may be conceived sufficiently for purposes of identification, if only it be singled out and marked so as to separate it from other things. Simply calling it 'this' or 'that' will suffice. To speak in technical language, a subject may be conceived by its denotation, with no connotation, or a very minimum of connotation, attached. The essential point is that it should be re-identified by us as that which the talk is about, and no full representation of it is necessary for this, even when it is a fully representational thing.

In this sense, creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hollo! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind.

Whitehead called him "the adorable William James" largely, I think, because of passages like this. Soon after warning us that he is going to be speaking in "technical language," he introduces us to the mindful polyp recognizing a thingumbob. The language didn't stay technical for very long.

A polyp, by the way, is a small, ball-like growth that protrudes from a mucous membrane, such as the inside of the intestines. See above, if you really need a picture.

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