The 10 Best Phrases Of William James
William James’ contributions, whether in the field of philosophy or psychology, have given rise to a large amount of theories and explanatory models of the two disciplines. He is considered the father of American psychology because of his pragmatic and functionalist approach. Here are some of William James’ sentences that sum up his conception of psychology.
W. James was born in the United States into a well-to-do family. The 1970s were a crucial turning point in his life. He experienced a deep emotional crisis, got married and began his activity as a professor at Harvard University in 1872. From then on he studied in depth the relationship between consciousness and emotional states.
His first book, “The Principles of Psychology”, elevated him to the rank of a very influential thinker. It is also his greatest contribution to the field of research in psychology. This author therefore left as a legacy a series of great quotes full of meaning and wisdom.
The mind as an object of knowledge
William James founded a psychology lab at Harvard, where he began the school of functionalist psychology. This model aims to study the mind as a functional and essentially useful part of the human organism.
He defines consciousness as if it were a river, something that looks like a continuous flow of thoughts, ideas and mental images. Therefore, there is nothing in the mind that can be isolated or stored for study because everything is related to a context.
With these quotes from William James, we see the place that functionalism occupies in psychology when consciousness is understood as a whole.
The inaccessibility of our thoughts
William James considers that beliefs, ideas and thoughts belong to everyone and that this would make them inaccessible to others. This idea of privatization or hermeticism had a great impact on the philosophical conception of psychology.
In a way, this implied the recognition of a limitation: to admit that experimental psychology could not manage to comprehend in its entirety the functioning of the human thought. This means that when we study the human mind, we are studying an abstract construct, the “me”.
Pragmatic point of view: the function of the mind
The main idea behind this model is that whatever is real is what actually works. Its concept of truth is therefore based on that of utility. That is, in pragmatic terms, what is real is what is useful. It’s the consequences, repercussions, and what we get from something that allows us to categorize it as true or false.
This is one of William James’ sentences that, although seemingly bombastic, reveals his conception of the truth. For him, there is no such thing as an absolute truth; there are as many truths as there are points of view.
This pragmatism refers to the fact that we modify or elaborate the senses of experiences or behaviors based on the results. In other words, thanks to the judgments issued later, which give us an idea of the relativity of the elaboration of this meaning.
William James proposed one of the main psychophysiological theories on emotions
It is more concretely the theory of James-Lange. A theory that was proposed simultaneously by Carl Lange and William James but independently, in 1884. It is based on the idea that emotion is the result of internal perception of physiological changes. In other words, we don’t cry because we are sad, we are sad because we perceive that we are crying.
His model is mechanistic because it emphasizes a direct relationship between bodily changes and the perception of stimuli caused by emotion. This is how we close this page full of sentences from William James, which symbolize the most notable facets of his thought. For many, he is the true father of psychology.
Our thoughts We have all wondered once what emotions are. We could define them as the “glue of life” and of reality.
