Abstract
‘Let us not forget this: when “I raise my arm”, my arm goes up. And the problem arises: what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from that fact that I raise my arm?’1
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Notes and References
L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, (Oxford: Basil Backwell, 1953) vol. I, 621.
William James, Principles of Psychology (London: Macmillan, 1891) vol. II, p. 105.
For instance, J. D. Spillane, Lancet, i, (1942) p. 42;
J. Purdon Martin, Lancet, i, (1949) p. 51.
George Riddoch, Brain, vol. 64, (1941) p. 197.
J. P. Guilford, General Psychology (New York: Harper, 1935) pp. 265–9.
William McDougall, Outline of Psychology, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923) pp. 290–1.
For a revival of this theory, see Professor C. A. Campbell, ‘Self-activity and its modes’, in H. D. Lewis (ed.) Contemporary British Philosophy, Third Series (London: Allen & Unwin, 1956) p. 93. Campbell holds that if a person has somehow forgotten what are the specific sensations associated with moving his leg, he cannot will to move it. His ground for the belief is his conviction, based on introspection, ‘that the immediate object of our willing is not the movement of our leg but certain kinaesthetic and other sensations upon which, we have learned from experience, the movement of our leg normally supervenes’.
Voluntary Control of Movement’, in E. G. Boring, H. S. Langfeld and H. P. Weld, Foundations of Psychology (New York: Wiley, 1948) p. 50.
J. A. V. Butler, ‘Pictures in the Mind’, Science News 22 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951).
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© 1991 Godfrey Norman Agmondisham Vesey
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Vesey, G. (1991). Volition. In: Inner and Outer. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21639-0_3
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