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Reading Assignment Ch 9 And 11: Wundt, Titchner And James

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Baylee Ray Blanton – Reading Assignment Ch 9 and 11: Wundt, Titchner, and James
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According to the text, free will is synonymous with the term nondeterminism, in short, the opposite of determinism. Determinism, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary is a philosophical belief that “acts of the will” are causally determined by natural laws and preceding events. Expressed in another way, the text states that a determinist believes events to be due to a finite number of different causes, and that if these causes were known, once could predict anything with “complete accuracy.” Now free will is on the opposite end of the spectrum. Nondeterminism states that human actions are completely free of any antecedent events and therefor a person is solely responsible for his or hers actions. …show more content…

He did not believe in free will and posited that all actions are due to unknown and complex mentally unconscious laws. Any attempt to understand these laws can only be made after the fact. Wundt compared psychologists studying free will to historians. Just like historians, to understand mental laws one has to look back after an event has transpired, but through inspecting them closely a psychologist can determine why it happened and what had to transpire beforehand for it to take place.
William James asserted that the assumption of determinism was an integral part of science. Without the concept of events adhering to laws science could not be practiced. However, he thought using the assumption of free will could be helpful in studying humans. James believed in free will in the sense that “his will is free” He discussed how what we choose to think determines what we do, and in this sense we have free

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