Mary Whiton Calkins

1863-1930 · American · Psychology

There is never perception without a somebody who perceives, and there never is thinking unless some one thinks.

Mary Whiton Calkins completed every requirement for the Harvard doctorate, and the faculty — William James among them — judged her examination the finest they had seen. Harvard refused to grant a woman its degree. She declined the Radcliffe degree offered in its place, built one of the country's first psychology laboratories at Wellesley instead, and became the first woman elected president of both the American Psychological Association and the American Philosophical Association.

Questions to put to Mary Whiton Calkins

Self-Psychology and the Science of Consciousness

• What do you mean when you say every conscious experience is the experience of a self?
• How do you respond to the view that the self is just a bundle of perceptions with no real unity?
• What's wrong with analyzing consciousness into elementary sensations and feelings?
• Why do you think the self is persistent rather than constantly changing?
• How can you study the self scientifically if it's not just another mental element?

The Paired-Associate Method and Memory Research

• How does the paired-associate technique work?
• What did your experiments show about frequency, recency, and vividness in memory?
• Why is frequency more powerful than recency or vividness in strengthening associations?
• How did you measure what previous psychologists could only guess about?
• What makes pairing items together a better way to study how ideas recall each other?

Against Behaviorism and the Denial of Consciousness

• What's your main objection to behaviorism's approach to psychology?
• How can you claim consciousness is certain when we can't observe it in others?
• Why isn't studying behavior alone enough for a science of the mind?
• What do we lose if psychology stops talking about conscious experience?
• Can behaviorism and self-psychology study different aspects of the same thing?

Personalism and the Metaphysics of Selves

• What do you mean by calling yourself a personalist?
• How do you get from psychology to the claim that reality itself is personal?
• What is the all-inclusive self you think the universe is?
• How does your personalism differ from other forms of idealism?
• Why think reality is mental rather than physical at bottom?

The Self in Relation to Its Objects

• What do you mean when you say the self is always in relation to an object?
• How does the self relate to objects differently than objects relate to each other?
• Can there be consciousness without an object of consciousness?
• What makes the self-object relation the fundamental structure of experience?
• How do you distinguish the self from what it's conscious of?

Converse with Mary Whiton Calkins on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Mary Whiton Calkins's own writing, cited to the page.