AN EMPIRICAL DEFINITION OF CONSCIOUSNESS
In beginning this final chapter I can but refer to certain recent articles which seek to improve our empirical accounts of perception and knowledge.[1] My own effort is in the spirit of the writers I refer to, and especially have I felt encouraged by the articles of Professor James.
Professor James explains at the outset that he does not deny the existence of everything we may suitably call consciousness. The function of knowing is not to be denied, and for this function the name consciousness can be retained. He does deny the existence of any 'entity' or 'aboriginal stuff or quality of being contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made.'[2]
Now, it is a merely verbal matter, but for my own present purpose I am going to call this function of knowing simply knowing or knowledge, and I am going to use the word consciousness to signify another fact or group of facts equally real. It is for the reader to decide whether my use is justified.
As creatures of habit we say that there are things and there is awareness of things, that there are objects and that there is consciousness of objects. Any fact to which I attend becomes straightway an object, and every object, we say, must have a subject. This subject can not be my body, for that is another object. The subject must be something far more subtile, namely, consciousness.
'Must be,' we say, not 'is.' The sincere empiricist may well be suspicious of *must-bes.' His first business is to see what the empirical situation contains, not what a definition implies. In what follows I try to report a strictly empirical content. leaviuLr (nit all 'must-bes.'
It sounds like an innocent and an intelligible proposition tu say that I see the chair on the other side of the room. If, however, I mean that an inspection of the situation as experienced reveals any detail of the content that can be called 'seeing' as distinct from the visual chair, and other objects in the shape of sensations of head,
- ↑ Professor William James in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, Vol. I., Nos. 18, 20, 21; Vol. II., No. 2. Professor Frederick J. E. Woodbridge, in the same journal, Vol. II., No. 5. Ralph Barton Perry, in The Psychological Review for July, 1904.
- ↑ Journal of Phil., Psy. and Sci. Methods, Vol. I., p. 478.
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