Attensity was an early-twentieth-century term abandoned when introspection lost to mechanist psychology.

Evidence

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

• DEFINE: Defines ‘attensity’ as attention, not its effects — the abandoned possibility of studying attention itself.
• XREF: The defeat of introspection by input-output psychology is the same scientific turn that produced the monocultural, mechanomorphic attention in 488.