The 10 best quotes by William James

William James’ contributions to both philosophy and psychology have given rise to a large number of theories and explanatory models of both disciplines. He is considered the father of American psychology, due to his pragmatic and functionalist approach. These are the phrases of William James that summarize his conception of Psychology.

He was born in the United States into a wealthy family. The 1970s were a crucial turning point in his life. He experienced a deep emotional crisis, got married and began teaching at Harvard University in 1872. Since then, he dedicated himself to study in depth the relationship between consciousness and emotional states.

His first book, “Principles of Psychology,” established him as a very influential thinker. In addition, it became his greatest contribution to research in psychology. Likewise, this author left for posterity a series of great quotes with great meaning and wisdom.

The mind as an object of knowledge

William James founded a psychology laboratory at Harvard, where he began the school of functionalist psychology. This model focused on study the mind as a functional, essentially useful part of the human organism.

He defined consciousness as if it were a river, something similar to a continuous flow of thoughts, ideas and mental images. Therefore, there is nothing in the mind that can be isolated or stored for study, since everything in it is linked to a context.

These phrases from William James show how functionalism embraces the principles of the psychology of the act, understanding consciousness as a whole.

The inaccessibility of our thoughts

William James considers that Beliefs, ideas and thoughts belong to each person, something that would make them inaccessible to others. This idea of ​​privatization or hermeticism had a great impact on the philosophical conception of psychology.

In some way, it represented the recognition of a limitation: admitting that experimental psychology could not fully understand how human thought works. This presumes that, at To study the human mind, we are studying an abstract construct, the “I”.

Pragmatist approach: the function of the mind

The main idea of ​​this model is that what is true is what really works. Hence its concept of truth is based on that of utility. That is to say, In pragmatic terms, what is true is what is useful. It is the consequences, the repercussions and what we get from something that allows us to categorize it as true or false.

This is one of William James’s great phrases that, although bombastic, makes his conception of truth clear. For him, there is no single absolute truth, but as many as there are points of view.

This pragmatism alludes to and defends that we modify or elaborate meanings of experiences or behaviors based on the results. That is, thanks to the judgments made subsequently, which in turn give us an idea of ​​how relative the elaboration of this meaning can be.

He proposed one of the main psychophysiological theories about emotions

Specifically, the James-Lange theory. A theory that was proposed simultaneously by Carl Lange and James himself, but independently, in 1884. It is based on the idea that emotion is the result of the internal perception of physiological changes. That is to say, We do not cry because we are sad, we are sad because we perceive that we are crying .

His model is mechanistic because it postulates a direct relationship between bodily changes and the perception of the stimuli that cause emotion. In this way we close the review of the phrases of William James that symbolize the most notable of his thought; the thought of what for many is the father of psychology.

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