Our attention and beliefs are the same fact – did william james say this and if so, where
William James, a prominent American philosopher and psychologist, did write about the relationship between attention and belief. However, he did not express the idea that “our attention and beliefs are the same fact” in those exact words.
In his book “The Principles of Psychology,” James discussed how attention and belief are intimately connected. He argued that our beliefs influence what we attend to, and what we attend to influences our beliefs. In his words, “What we attend to is what we believe in.”
He also emphasized that attention and belief are both active processes that shape our perception of the world. As he put it, “Belief and attention are motor phenomena, and only through the study of their motor consequences can we get at their nature.”
So, while James did not explicitly state that attention and belief are the same fact, he did see them as closely intertwined and mutually influencing.