William James and the Humanistic Implications of the Neuroscience Revolution: An Outrageous Hypothesis

Abstract

William James anticipated that his views on a science of consciousness would have an impact even decades after he had passed away in 1910. His evolving model of consciousness is reviewed as it developed between the 1860s and the early 1900s. As a result of these investigations, James developed a metaphysics of pragmatism, pluralism, and radical empiricism to answer the question of how waking rational consciousness can understand states of consciousness beyond itself and to address the larger problem as to whether or not a science of consciousness is even possible. His answer led him to an investigation of the primary presuppositions underlying how consciousness is actually conducted and an alternative epistemology to reductionistic positivism. His view influenced subsequent developments in personality—social psychology in the 1930s and 1940s, and the birth of existential-humanistic psychology in the 1950s. Though emphasis on the person as the central focus of psychology has virtually disappeared in the era of the cognitive neurosciences, new developments in the area of neurophenomenology that draw on James’s ideas suggest the new focus of a person-centered science will be on the phenomenology of the science-making process itself, and the experimenter as the new confounding variable in the conduct of experiments. Humanistic psychologists are encouraged to turn their attention to the humanistic implications of the neuroscience revolution in order to answer aspects of the relationship between the brain and the mind that the reductionistic neuroscientists still cannot fathom.

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