Abstract

The general problem as to the intrinsic nature of the states of consciousness is what these are in themselves, what intrinsic properties they have as the occurrences that they are. William James later holds them to be “pure experiences”; they are intrinsically neutral, not mental or physical, though they are commonly taken as such. This is part of a major ontological revision of James’s well-known earlier approach, since he now holds everything extant is pure experience. In “Does Consciousness Exist?” — on which my article focuses — James applies his new approach to the topic of consciousness, and he proposes that this amounts to the function of knowing, which pure experiences instantiate with respect to other pure experiences, erroneously taking the latter to be as they are not: subjective or objective depending upon a context of associated experiences. Their intrinsic properties are held not to be mental or physical or any combination of such; and James seems to want to conceive of pure experiences as lacking in every property, except as they are interpreted at the moment, or in retrospect, in terms of a group of experiences to which they belong. James’s revised account of the states of consciousness is closely considered in the present article, his new account is contrasted with the one which he advocated in The Principles, and objections are here developed to the thesis that the states of consciousness are actually pure experiences