E. B. Holt\u2019s dissertation, The Motor Element in Vision, earned him the PhD in 1901 for empirical
\nresearch he conducted at Harvard\u2019s psychology laboratory under Hugo M\u00fcnsterberg. Later
\npublished in polished form as \u201cEye-Movement and Central Anaesthesia\u201d (Langfeld 1946), the
\nwork seeks to explain why visual awareness is suppressed during voluntary eye movement (more
\nprecisely, during what today would be called voluntary saccades; Holt 1903). A pointed
\nillustration of this phenomenon had already been documented in the psychological literature by
\nthe late 19th century: it is difficult, under normal conditions, to see your own eyeball move in a
\nmirror. Holt\u2019s dissertation project is to experimentally isolate this phenomenon and then explain
\nwhy it occurs.<\/p>\n
In this talk, I shall examine Holt\u2019s experimental work, which is interesting for several reasons.
\nHolt is a founding member of the New Realists, and an important influence (along with James)
\non Russell\u2019s neutral monism. Although philosophers often think of New Realism and Russellian
\nmonism as quite conceptual, we will find that these movements have at least one important root
\nin experimental psychology. In particular, I will show that Holt\u2019s philosophical thinking about
\nthe relationship between consciousness and the body (as exemplified in later works like Holt
\n1912, 1914) took early shape in the context of his experimental work. Second, Holt\u2019s
\ninterpretation of his own experiments explicitly appealed to M\u00fcnsterberg\u2019s \u201caction theory\u201d of
\nconsciousness, which is a step more radical than James\u2019s better-known work. In James\u2019s catch-
\nphrase, \u201cconsciousness is motor,\u201d the \u201cis\u201d is the is of predication, not identity (Klein 2025); but
\nM\u00fcnsterberg argued that contents become conscious in virtue of stimuli getting connected in the
\nright way with motor discharge. Hence Holt\u2019s experimental work can be understood as an
\nimportant step in the radicalization of philosophical and psychological views associated with
\nJames\u2019s early work on mind, moving such functionalist thinking down the path towards
\nbehaviorism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_tribe_events_status":"","_tribe_events_status_reason":"","footnotes":""},"tags":[],"tribe_events_cat":[465],"class_list":["post-6656","tribe_events","type-tribe_events","status-publish","hentry","tribe_events_cat-talk","cat_talk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philosophy-cognition.com\/cmc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/6656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philosophy-cognition.com\/cmc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philosophy-cognition.com\/cmc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/tribe_events"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philosophy-cognition.com\/cmc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/philosophy-cognition.com\/cmc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/6656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6658,"href":"https:\/\/philosophy-cognition.com\/cmc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/6656\/revisions\/6658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philosophy-cognition.com\/cmc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philosophy-cognition.com\/cmc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6656"},{"taxonomy":"tribe_events_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philosophy-cognition.com\/cmc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events_cat?post=6656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}