Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract We remember William James for his colorful descriptions of subjective experience, perhaps above all. But in Consciousness Is Motor, Alexander Klein shows that James sculpted his phenomenal descriptions around an armature of empirical details. Klein reconstructs James’s models of consciousness and volition, uncovering results from animal experimentation and clinical observation on which those models were built. James’s early work on consciousness engaged the 1870s automatism controversy. The controversy was triggered, Klein argues, by experiments demonstrating that living, decapitated frogs are capable of goal-directed action. One side regarded goal-directedness as evidence of spinal consciousness; the other espoused epiphenomenalism, reasoning that consciousness must play no role in producing even purposive action since the latter is possible for brainless creatures. James intervened, Klein shows, by arguing that consciousness has a likely evolutionary function—behavior regulation—and so cannot be a mere epiphenomenon. It accomplishes this function by affording a capacity for evaluation, on Klein’s reading. As evidence, James appealed not just to introspection, but also to experimental facts, such as that hemisphere-less vertebrates have a diminished capacity for evaluating different available means to pursue goals. James’s “ideo-motor” model of action demonstrated precisely how an evaluating consciousness could help regulate behavior. Klein excavates key clinical observations James designed the ideo-motor model to accommodate. James’s models of consciousness and action would later feed into his distinctive philosophical outlook, Klein concludes, soon to be known as pragmatism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".