| While the received view is that William James abandoned psychology after 1890, a reexamination of his career during this later period, especially between 1890 and 1902, suggests that, far from abandoning the discipline, James was, in fact, busy on two fronts directly relevant to defining the legitimate perview of scientific psychology. First, he developed his metaphysic of radical empiricism, which he self-consciously intended to be an effective metaphysical critique of positivist experimental rhetoric. Second, believing he had legitimate epistemological justification for doing so, he pushed the boundaries of psychology beyond mere rational and empirical analysis of laboratory data through his contributions to experimental psychopathology, psychical research, and the psychology of religion. The implications of his effort clearly promote a definition of psychology as a person-centered science, and show as wholly inadequate a definition of psychology based on radical materialism and naive positivism.; James's most vocal detractors were among the first generation of American psychologists returning from Wundt's laboratory, including G. Stanley Hall, James McKeen Cattell, Hugo Munsterberg, and Edward Titchener. Each one tried to debunk the prevailing uniquely American (and thoroughly Jamesean) psychology of functionalism and to replace it with an overt or implied standard based on some varient of German psychophysics and laboratory measurement.; James withstood the criticism by extracting from his triune concepts of pragmatism, pluralism, and radical empiricism two important messages for psychologists. First, they should study the rise and fall of the threshold of waking conscious awareness. Second, the passage of time will show that no one grand theory is possible. Rather, a noetic pluralism will be the rule.; But his call for psychology as a person-centered science has been largely ignored by succeeding generations of academic psychologists, with distinguished exceptions. Given some of the more humanistic implications of the present scientific revolution having to do with the problem of consciousness, however, it is possible that James's metaphysical critique of experimental science may still have pragmatic implications for a psychology of the future. |
