The Sense of Movement: An Intellectual History by Roger Smith

Author:Roger Smith [Smith, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781899209231
Publisher: Process Press Ltd
Published: 2019-08-11T21:00:00+00:00

‘Consciousness is essentially motor or impulsive’ — this made sensory awareness of movement of central significance. It made it part of a reorientation of psychology, for which Dewey was a leading spokesman, escaping from a sterile (overly intellectual) interest in what people know into a brave new world of (practical) understanding of what people do. New experimental studies of perception, cognition, attention and action alike had to take account of kinaesthesia, the sensory process inherent to coordinated ‘doing’. Arguing in this vein, Charles H. Judd, in 1905, stated: ‘Some of the most promising constructive work in recent psychology has been along the lines of substituting a thorough-going recognition of the importance of the motor conditions of consciousness for the one-sided sensation theories of earlier days.’10

There was significant experimental research on volition early in the twentieth century.11 It was not the case that ‘the new psychology’ simply threw out volition as a category belonging to an unscientific age. If there was a decline in references specifically to volition in the psychological literature, this was evident only in the United States.12 Even in this setting, though, the interest in understanding cognition as activity, a ‘doing’, evident in psychology in the first two decades of the century, sustained a way of talking about kinaesthesia and effort in connection with ‘willful’ subjects.

It is necessary to say something about the topic of attention in order to understand this connection. The attempt to construct approaches to volition in terms open to disciplined experimental research and analytic study (in philosophical psychology) was responsible, at least in part, for the great contemporary interest in attention. As the influential US psychologist, W. B. Pillsbury, stated in 1908, this was a route by which psychologists hoped to do justice to the active psychological world while escaping from the metaphysical conundrums references to will summoned up. Surveying the topic, he attributed what he perceived as ‘the present chaotic condition of attention theories’ to widespread, popular confusion of notions of willful effort with attention.13 Bain, for example, had posited an elementary awareness of activity in movement, but was this a reference to attention, effort, strain, volition or sensed movement?14 Pillsbury cited researchers who aimed to render attention ‘something more definite than the will of popular speech or its scientific counterpart the will of a faculty psychology’ but who nevertheless were ‘left with an indefinite idea of a force of an unknown kind’.15

This was the challenge to science: to specify the nature of mental activity without reverting to what was felt to be the pre-scientific language of ‘the will’ or to ‘an indefinite idea of a force’. Pillsbury roundly criticized personifications of active consciousness (which, he wrote, are ‘rooted in the anthropomorphic tendencies of the human mind’) and looked to the study of factors focusing a person’s attention, that is, to social norms and habits, to explain volition: ‘Will is no thing or force, but merely a convenient term to designate the fact that the early and general social influences hold attention, thought and action toward the things that are permanent rather than to those things that are transient.

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