William James and the problem of interests

William James attempted to refute automaton theory with the claim that consciousness is efficacious because it is selective, and selective because it possesses many varied and irreducible interests. But James's theory contains several major weaknesses. He never satisfactorily defined the interests in terms of their psychogenetic origins nor did he give them an explicit structure within consciousness itself. Therefore the evidence for the existence of interests may be no more than an empirical abstraction from the fact that any particular action is performed. From another viewpoint, the organism may behave as if it were interested but the interests themselves may have only an epiphenomenal status as mere “attachments” to a biologically determined organism, as part of the consciousness of conscious automata. The weakness of James's interest theory is important as an early example of the same flaw that occurs in many of his later and more systematic theories.

Abstraction · Action (physics) · Automaton · Biology · Cognitive science · Consciousness · Electromagnetic theories of consciousness · Epistemology · Organism · Sociology · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Embodied and Extended Cognition · Philosophy · Philosophy and History of Science · Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education · Psychology

• British Thought on the Relations Between the Natural Sciences and the Humanities, c. 1870–1910

  Roger Smith•Historical perspectives on…•2010

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