Attensity is a reclaimed scientific term for direct study of attention itself

Evidence

We call for ATTENSITY in this spirit! Like “ecology,” our term hails from the sciences. Back at the start of the twentieth century, attensity was used by a group of early “introspective” psychologists, who believed that they could, working together to study the experience of their minds-in-action, learn to “see” the actual dynamics of human cognition. (Interestingly, their leader, Edward B. Titchener, not only came up with the term “attensity,” he also coined the word “empathy” in English; happenstance? Maybe…but maybe not! After all, true attention and authentic fellow feeling go hand in hand.) These folks did some beautiful and quixotic work—but their program eventually lost out to more mechanistic experimentalists, who decided thinking about thinking was too unreliable to be actual “science” (the new guard stuck to treating brains like input-output systems). “Attensity” was abandoned—a terminological orphan from a short-lived world in which it seemed possible to explore attention itself, rather than just its track-and-trigger operations or effects. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 484

Categorization

• QUESTION: Did Titchener actually coin ‘empathy’ in English? Worth verifying — the term’s claimed coinage by an introspectionist psychologist strengthens the etymological bridge between attention and fellow-feeling.
• XREF: Connects to the chapter’s central ‘attensity’ concept the reader is reading for; also echoes prior modernist/introspectionist critiques of mechanistic psychology elsewhere in the corpus. — connects to: Attensity names the free, shared movement of attention treated as transformative good. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 596
• DEFINE: Pins down the core coined term ‘attensity’ the manifesto runs on, traced to introspective psychology and abandoned when behaviorism won.