ARTICOLI / 4 / Michela Bella
«Bundles of habits»: the physio-psychological perspective of William James
William James devotes Chapter IV of his Principles of Psychology (1890) to Habit. Parts of the chapter initially appeared a few years earlier as an article in the «Popular Science Monthly» (1887) and later, in condensed form, constituted the tenth chapter of the abridged version of his Psychology (Psychology: Briefer Course, 1892). Habit directly connects to James’s attempt to make psychology a natural science, thus binding it to cerebral physiology and definitively detaching it, at least in his original intentions, from metaphysics. Despite deterministic interpretations of James’s habits, his masterpiece’s more attentive reading allows acknowledging a different interpretation of habits. Within this broader framework, organic plasticity and the teleological aspect of consciousness are pivotal aspects of his biological and evolutionary characterization of living creatures as «bundles of habits». These indeterministic aspects are undergoing a recent rediscovery in cognitive science and neuroscientific studies.
