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flaw. The bad consequences develop themselves later on, and are irremediable, being woven through the whole texture of the work. The notion that sensations, being the simplest things, are the first things to take up in psychology is one of these suppositions. (1890, p. 225)

      Focusing exclusively on simple sensations, James argued, missed most of what a science of the mind should be about:

      Psychology is the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and of their conditions. The phenomena are such things as we call feelings, desires, cognitions, reasonings, decisions, and the like; and, superficially considered, their variety and complexity is such as to leave a chaotic impression on the observer. (1890, p. 1)

      The science imagined by James was thus much broader in scope than the studies of sensations being undertaken at Wundt’s institute in Leipzig. Although not mentioned in this quotation, habits, emotions, consciousness, instinct, perception, imagination, and memory receive explicit attention in the text, along with the mental lives of infants and non-human animals. Of course, James thought we should study sensations – he devotes a chapter to them – but not as the sole or foundational subject matter as Wundt did.

Because James was explicitly Darwinist in approach, he argued for understanding each of these aspects of the mind as an adaptation to the environment. Just as your lungs are a lifelong adaptation to our oxygen-rich atmosphere, your belief that you are holding a book is a temporary adaptation to your current situation. Aspects of our mental life, in other words, were to be understood in terms of what they are for. Because of this, Titchener (1898a) mockingly called the Jamesian approach “functionalism,” a name that stuck. Understanding the mind as a collection of adaptations makes the contrast with Wundtian psychology even starker. Particular adaptations must be understood in the context of the environment, and in the context of the whole animal. Lungs have their functions only in oxygen-rich environments, and only when paired with hearts and circulatory systems. Moreover, adaptations can only be understood historically, over developmental and evolutionary time. Understanding how lungs came to have the functions that they do requires understanding how our lungs develop and how they functioned in our evolutionary ancestors. While Wundt and his followers focused narrowly on instantaneous simple sensations, functionalist psychologists studied aspects of the mind in the context of the environment, over developmental and evolutionary timescales.

      James published his textbook at the time when psychology began to become a discipline separate from philosophy. He stayed with philosophy, and his own work became increasingly philosophical. He called his later philosophical views “radical empiricism.” He characterizes radical empiricism as consisting “first of a postulate, next of a fact, and finally of a generalized conclusion” (1909 p. xii). His postulate is that all and only things that are experienced exist. His fact is that relations are experienced. It follows, of course, that relations exist. His generalized conclusion is that the world is experienced directly. This last point is an explicit rejection of the Kantian distinction between the empirical world that we experience and the world-in-itself. James is claiming that there is only the world of what he calls “pure experience.” His view amounts to a sort of neutral monism – there is only one world, and it is neither material nor mental. The world experienced and the experiences themselves are the very same thing:

      As “subjective” we say that the experience represents; as “objective” it is represented. What represents and what is represented is here numerically the same; but we must remember that no dualism of being represented and representing resides in the experience per se. In its pure state, or when isolated, there is no self-splitting of it into consciousness and what the consciousness is “of.” Its subjectivity and objectivity are functional attributes solely, realized only when the experience is “taken,” i.e., talked-of, twice, considered along with its two differing contexts respectively, by a new retrospective experience, of which that whole past complication now forms the fresh content. The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the “pure” experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it is plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple that. (1904, p. 484)

      This passage is from “Does consciousness exist?” (1904). James’ answer to the question is that it does not exist, if what you mean by consciousness is something inside your mind and representing the external world. This view becomes very influential on the work of James Gibson (Chapter 10).

2.3 The structuralism–functionalism debate

      At the end of the nineteenth century, psychology was growing quickly as a discipline, as more and more universities opened new departments and research institutes. Because there were two importantly different versions of scientific psychology at the time, each university had to decide whether its psychology faculty would be Wundtian structuralists or Jamesian functionalists. This led to a fierce and often impolite debate between structuralists and functionalists in the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century. Because psychology was a new discipline at the time, much of the debate was published in what we now think of as philosophy journals (such as Mind and The Philosophical Review). Here we will consider three key entries in the debate: E. B. Titchener’s “Simple reactions” (1895) and “The postulates of a structural psychology” (1898a) and John Dewey’s “The reflex arc concept in psychology” (1896).

      The names “structuralism” and “functionalism” appear for the first time in Titchener’s “The postulates of a structural psychology” (1898a). Titchener uses these names to make a straightforward argument by analogy with research in biology. In biology, one must first do anatomy, to see what the parts of the organism are; then one does physiology, to see how those anatomical parts behave. Only after these two steps is it appropriate to speculate about the function of these parts and processes. Structural psychology, Titchener’s new name for Wundtian atomistic psychology, respects this ordering; functional psychology, Titchener’s new name for Jamesian descriptive psychology, does not – it starts by speculating about what psychological entities are for, before knowing what psychological entities exist.

The debate between these two positions precedes the invention of their names, however. In “Simple reactions” (1895), Titchener recounts and defends the experimental results of Ludwig Lange, a researcher in Wundt’s lab. Lange had gathered evidence that experimental participants have slower reaction times if they attend as much as they can to the sensory stimulus (e.g., a flashing light), rather than attending as much as they can to their behavioral response to it (e.g., pushing a button). Several of the later attempts to replicate the finding failed to do so. On its face, this does not seem to be the sort of claim that would attract criticism, or the need for defense from that criticism. In fact, however, the experiments stand in for the whole of the structuralist research program. “The simple reaction-time is the interval elapsing between the mental ‘receiving’ of a sense-impression and the execution of a movement in response to that impression” (1895, p. 74). In structuralist psychology, all of the basic atoms of conscious experiences, as well as all of the unconscious inferences that are involved in perception and thought, exist in that interval. In Lange’s findings, for example, the atoms required for the two tasks are the same, except for the object of attention. Therefore, any differences in timing that occurs is because of differences in temporal duration between attention to stimulus and attention to response. So experiments like Lange’s are investigations of the temporal properties of the atoms of conscious experience, in this case two different forms of attention. This kind of experiment is the foundation of the structuralist approach. “The reaction method has been extensively employed for the determination of the duration and for the analysis of certain complex mental ‘acts’: cognition, discrimination, association, choice, etc.” (1895, pp. 77–8).

      According to structuralists like Titchener, not just simple reactions but all mental activities have the following structure: first, there is a stimulus, caused by physical stimulation of receptors; then there is a linear series of mental acts; then there is a behavioral response. Suppose that there are two simple reactions, A and B, which differ only in that A requires the series of mental acts one, two, three, and four whereas

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