History of philosophy

JAMES, WILLIAM

James, William: translation

American pragmatismJamesJ.E.TilesTHE BERKELEY LECTUREPragmatism was introduced to society in a lecture given by William James1 to thePhilosophical Union at the University of California in Berkeley on 26 August 1898.2 Inhis lecture James acknowledged that this brainchild was that of his friend CharlesS.Peirce, and that Peirce had first introduced him to it in the early 1870s ([13.11], 410).The child had not been appropriately christened—James indicated a preference for‘practicalism’—and needed ‘to be expressed more broadly than Mr. Peirce expresse[d]it’, but it offered ‘the clue or compass’ by which James believed ‘we may keep our feet’on ‘the trail of truth’ (412).James began his exposition of the principle with a formulation drawn from an 1878article, ‘How To Make Our Ideas Clear’ ([13.36], 5:388–410) in which Peirce had firstallowed his progeny to appear in public, although not under the name ‘pragmatism’. Toattain clearness in our thoughts about some object we need to consider the effects of ‘aconceivably practical kind which the object may involve’ and reckon our conception ofthese effects to be the whole of our conception of the object, ‘so far as that conceptionhas positive significance at all’ ([13.11], 411). Peirce had formulated his principle with aview to its application in science and in the metaphysics of science and had consequentlyillustrated its application with the concepts ‘hardness,’ ‘weight’, ‘force’ and ‘reality’ inhis 1878 article. But he had not hesitated to apply the principle also to the theologicaldispute over transubstantiation ([13.36], 5:401).In the Berkeley lecture James drew his illustrations mainly from philosophicaltheology. Some of the traditional attributes of God—aseity, simplicity, felicity—could bejudged by Peirce’s principle to be ‘meaningless and verbal’ ([13.11], 425). ‘What theword “God” means is just those passive and active experiences of your life’ (428).Compare this to Peirce: ‘The idea which the word ‘force’ excites in our minds has noother function than to affect our actions, and these actions can have no reference to forceotherwise than through its effects’ ([13.36], 5:405).And as Peirce had insisted that thedispute over transubstantiation was empty unless it could be referred to a difference insensible effects, James urged that such disputes as that between monists and pluralistswere barren unless definite practical consequences turned on the outcome.Although James suggested that the principle needed to be ‘expressed more broadly’ itis not easy to see from his lecture alone how, or how far, he thought it necessary todeviate from Peirce’s understanding of the principle. He offered as his preferredformulation, ‘the effective meaning of any philosophic proposition can always be broughtdown to some particular consequence, in our future practical experience, whether activeor passive’ ([13.11], 412). The important point is not that he shifted the formulation fromconcepts to propositions—he was not grinding the axe which Frege, Russell andWittgenstein were about to add to the logician’s tool kit—the stress, rather, was to beplaced on the word ‘particular’.Peirce had formulated his doctrine in the context of a conception of practice as acomplex of habits, that is asgeneralpatterns of responding to experience. James citedPeirce’s doctrine that the function of thinking is to produce habits of action (411), butwhere for Peirce ‘what a thing means is simply what habits it involves’, for James themeaning of a proposition had its bearing on conduct through foretelling some particularturn in our experience. Differences in ‘sensible effects’ were differences in sensoryexperiences rather than (as for Peirce) differences in habits of response to sensoryexperience (see [13.36], 5:494). James glossed his preferred formulation with the words,‘the point lying rather in the fact that the experience must be particular, than in the factthat it must be active’ ([13.11], 412). He thereby departed in a significant way fromPeirce, who rejected as a candidate for meaning ‘any unity among our sensations whichhas no reference to how we act’. For, having tied meaning to habits, Peirce tied theidentity of a habit to ‘how it might lead us to act, not merely under such circumstances asare likely to arise, but under such as might possibly occur, no matter how improbablethey may be’ ([13.36] 5:400).How this difference affected the way the two men applied the pragmatist principle canbe seen in their respective treatments of the concept of God. Apart from reservationsabout the wording, Peirce would have endorsed James’s claim that, ‘the principle ofpracticalism says that the very meaning of the conception of God lies in those differenceswhich must be made in our experience if the conception be true’ ([13.11], 424). Jamesindicated the sort of thing he meant here by ‘differences in our experience’:‘conversations with the unseen, voices and visions, responses to prayer, changes of heart,deliverances from fear, inflowings of help, assurances of support, whenever certainpersons set their own internal attitude in certain appropriate ways’ (428). When in 1908Peirce offered what he called ‘A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God’ he made itclear that his understanding of ‘experience’ placed far more stress on what a believer wasprepared to do than on what happens to a believer: ‘to be deliberately and thoroughlyprepared to shape one’s conduct into conformity with a proposition is neither more norless than the state of mind called Believing that proposition’ ([13.36], 6:467).Another sign that James and Peirce were moving in significantly different directionsoccurred at the end of James’s Berkeley lecture, when he commended Peirce’s principlefor expressing the ‘English spirit in philosophy’ and heaped scorn on the ‘ponderousartificialities of Kant’ ([13.11] 436). James concluded by urging that ‘the true line ofphilosophic progress lies not so muchthroughKant asroundhim to the point where wenow stand’ (437).3 Important elements of Peirce’s philosophy—his doctrine that athought has meaning only through its connection to subsequent thoughts ([3.36], 2:289)and his stress on habits—had taken shape in (come‘through’) a Kantian framework.In the course of a long review of an edition of the works of Bishop Berkeley publishedin 1871, Peirce had appealed to what with hindsight may be seen as an early formulationof his principle. ‘Do things fulfil the same function practically? Then let them besignified by the same word. Do they not? Then let them be distinguished’ ([13.36], 8:33).The main thrust of this article, however, was to trace the character of British philosophyback to Scotus and Occam and to condemn the nominalism of late Scholasticism, whichhad persisted and flourished in the works of Hobbes, Locke and Berkeley. Peircecontinued to define his position partly through his opposition to nominalism, which heconceived to encompass the main currents of British empiricism, although heacknowledged that in the early 1870s his ‘ideas were acquiring an Englishaccent’ ([13.36], 5:13). He could not have been entirely pleased at James’s move to enlisthis brainchild in the ranks of ‘the English-speaking philosophers’ ([13.11], 434).In time Peirce felt constrained to dissociate himself from the movement which wasinitiated by James’s lecture and its subsequent publication and dissemination. He sawJames as ‘pushing the method to such extremes as must tend to give us pause’ ([13.36],5:3) and claimed that ‘the most prominent parts’ of the doctrine James was presentingwere ‘opposed to sound logic’ ([13.36], 6:482). It was not his child but a changelingwhich his friend was sponsoring and Peirce moved to rename his doctrine‘pragmaticism’—a name ugly enough, as he put it, to keep it safe from kidnappers([13.36], 5:414).MIND AS GOAL-DIRECTEDThe philosophic distance between James and Peirce not only reveals how remarkable wasthe genuine respect and admiration each expressed for the other,4 it raises the question ofwhat it was they had in common, which made it possible for James to appropriateanything of philosophic significance from his friend. The answer lies in the conception ofmind as goal-directed, which James and Peirce accepted in different forms. This placedboth men in opposition to the tradition of conceiving the essence of mind as lying in itscapacity to represent objects in such a way that the adequacy of the representation isindependent of its capacity to direct our action and help us to anticipate consequences.In hisPrinciples of PsychologyJames took ‘the pursuance of future ends and thechoice of means for their attainment[to be]the mark and criterion of the presence ofmentalityin a phenomenon’ ([13.1], I:8). Consistent with this criterion, a concept forJames was ‘really nothing but a teleological instrument.This whole function ofconceiving, of fixing, and holding fast to meanings, has no significance apart from thefact that the conceiver is a creature with partial purposes and private ends’ (482). Peircehad advanced his ‘pragmatist’ principle in 1878 in the context of a doctrine that thoughtwas directed to the attainment of belief, where belief was a form of habit. Both mentreated thought as teleological—although they differed over the character of itstelos—and were thus attracted to the notion that meaning should be explained in functionalterms within a framework of goals and instruments.Their differences over thetelosof thought turned, we have seen, on the question ofwhether it should be conceived as particular (sensory experience) or general (habits ofresponse). There were other differences, more concerned with what should beemphasized, which obscured the nature of the conflict between their differentmetaphysical outlooks. Peirce tended to speak from the standpoint of ‘the community ofthose who enquired’ and of its long-term direction. James did not reject this standpoint,although it is not easy to say how far he would have agreed with Peirce about itscharacter or importance, for he tended to speak from the standpoint of individuals andtheir short-term achievements, a tendency which can be observed already in his earlywork.He had, for example, published a version of his views of concepts in 1879, where hecontended that essential qualities were nothing more than those of mostworth‘relative tothe temporary interests of the conceiver’ ([13.1], 86–8), and he quoted at length from thisarticle in hisPrinciples of Psychology([13.1], II:335n.). Peirce would have accepted thecontention which James added in his 1890 treatment of essential qualities,the only reason whyfor the chemist[water] is H-O-H primarily, and onlysecondarily the other things, is thatfor his purpose of deduction andcompendious definitionthe H-O-H aspect of it is the more useful one to bear inmind. (334n.)But Peirce would not have been comfortable with the suggestion that the chemist’sinterest was merely one of many ephemeral human interests with no claim to specialprivilege.Science for Peirce was a historical project which works to eliminate what is limited,arbitrary and accidental in the perspectives of individuals, and what is partial in theinterests, which drive them to inquire ([13.36], 8:12). The definition given by chemists isnot to be accepted as expressingtheessence of water, since this definition may requireimprovement, but it has an authority over definitions which select other properties ofwater in that it has arisen out of a context of inquiry in which private ends and partialpurposes have become—if not completely, at leastmore—public and impartial. Jameswould not have disputed this, but he said little that highlighted it and much that tended toobscure it.THE ANALYSIS OF TRUTHThis difference in emphasis contributed in large measure to the differences the two menhad over the treatment of truth. According to James, applying the pragmatist principle totruth results in the question, ‘What concrete difference will its [an idea or belief] beingtrue make in any one’s actual life?’ ([13.12], 97). The answer was that ideas we call‘true’ are those which we can ‘assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify’. All of thesewords were interpreted in conformity with the doctrine that ideas and beliefs function asinstruments. Where they do not interfere with the use of existing cognitive resources weare free to assimilate them to our existing stock of ideas. Where they serve to guide ourthought and action in a manner which is ‘progressive, harmonious, satisfactory’, they aretreated as validated, corroborated or verified (35). ‘“The true”, to put it very briefly, isonly the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as “the right is only the expedient inthe way of our behaving”’ (106). As a consequence truth became a property of an idea oran opinion, belief or statement on the occasion of our determining the instrumental valueof an idea, opinion, etc.By 1907, when James published this treatment of truth in a book titledPragmatism,‘pragmatism’ had become the name of a movement, which was stirring up considerablecontroversy, and the centre of dispute was the application of the pragmatist principle tothe concept of truth. James’s vivid and robust advocacy attracted attention, and inspiredtwo stalwart allies—F.C.S.Schiller at Oxford and John Dewey at Columbia—as well asnumerous hostile critics. But his failure to express himself with sufficient care andprecision, left his cause exposed to apparently easy refutation.The general problem he faced can be appreciated by exploring the analogy withinstruments. Instruments prove useful for certain purposes in specified circumstances,and when these purposes are superseded or circumstances change they are set aside. Incalling an idea or belief ‘true’, however, we seem to be making a claim with some kind offinality about its worth, a claim which is independent of purpose and circumstance.By appealing to a notion of science as an unending progressive enterprise, Peirce hadbeen able to apply his understanding of the pragmatist principle to the concept of truth insuch a way as to finesse this difficulty. Truth, Peirce held, was to be found in ‘the opinionwhich is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate’ ([13.36], 5:407). It iseasy enough to recast this formulation to remove the apparent requirement that there besome point in the future where ultimate agreement is reached: to say an idea, belief, etc.is true is to say that no cause for its rejection or substantial modification will arise for aslong as investigation might continue. Since reasons for rejecting an idea or belief includethe discovery that its worth depends on special circumstances (which can be eliminatedfrom its formulation) or partial purposes (which admit of being enlarged), Peirce’sanalysis of truth was able at least to address the finality and independence which appearto be implicit in a claim that something is true.It was, of course, an important part of Peirce’s position—his ‘fallibilism’—that wewould never be in a position to determine whether an idea or belief was true; the most wecould ever say would be that so far we have encountered no reason to reject or modify theidea or belief in question. Even before he pushed pragmatism into the limelight, Jameshad characterized this fallibilist outlook as the‘empiricist’form of dogmatism andcontrasted it favourably with ‘theabsolutistway of believing in truth’ ([13.3], 12).Absolutists claim to be able not only to attain truth but to know when it has been attained;empiricists claim it is possible for humans to attain truth but not to know infallibly whenthey have attained it. This meant that in one sense of the word, ‘truth’ designated an idealtowards which we would have to strive indefinitely, and inPragmatismJames explicitlyacknowledged that ‘truth’ did function, as Peirce insisted, as the name of an ideal. ‘The‘absolutely’ true, meaning what no farther experience will ever alter, is that idealvanishing-point towards which we imagine that all our temporary truths will some dayconverge’ ([13.12], 106–7). He did not suggest that what we imagine here was a form ofdelusion or even a pious fancy; he accepted this rather as a satisfactory account of themeaning of ‘absolute truth’.On the one hand there will stand reality, on the other an account of it which itproves impossible to better or alter. If the impossibility prove permanent, thetruth of the account will be absolute. Other content of truth than this I can findnowhere.(120)But James had little interest in what was not immediate. The second sentence to followthe last but one of the above quotations ([13.12], 106–7) reads, ‘Meanwhile we have tolive to-day by what truth we can get to-day, and be ready to-morrow to call it falsehood’.Peirce rejected any suggestion that it might be permissible to speak of truth as mutable([13.36], 6:485). To be sure we can and do change our minds about what we take to betrue. There are, moreover, ideas and beliefs which, prior to certain dates, were not evenentertained by human beings, let alone subjected to verification. This does not, Peirceheld, justify saying that beliefs or ideas become true or may cease to be true. One can see,nevertheless, why James wanted to stress what happens today and might happentomorrow: the long term, even on Peirce’s account, is not constituted independently ofwhat is done here and now. (Or, if it should turn out that we are thoroughly benighted inrespect to some matter, the long-term truth of that matter is still not independent of whatis done at particular times in the future.)It may, however, have been a tactical mistake to apply the word ‘true’ and its cognatesto what we embrace at particular times, even if that brought a special dignity to whatJames regarded as crucial to the concept of truth. It might have been wiser to adopt thecourse which Dewey eventually adopted: cease to use ‘truth’, following James’s preferredgloss, as ‘a collective name for [the current results of] the verification-process’ ([13.12],104)5 and instead allow that ‘whatever we will not find reason to correct, so long as we goon enquiring’ is an adequate account of what we mean by ‘truth’.James may not have been open to such counsel. He preferred at crucial points to placesevere strains on the ordinary meanings of words in order to secure the attention of hisaudience, even at the risk of being misunderstood. The interpolation made in thequotation in the previous paragraph points to a further example of this. The officialstatement of James’s doctrine held that the truth of an idea (belief, etc.) is ‘the process…of its verifying itself ([13.12], 97). This is not the way the word ‘truth’ is commonly used.Events in which ideas, beliefs, etc. are validated by experience are known collectively as‘verification’; ‘truth’ is applied as a collective noun for whatever can successfullyundergo verification. Within a few pages James acknowledged the strain his definitionwas placing on our habits of usage. We allow to pass as true a great many ideas andbeliefs (‘the overwhelmingly large number of truths we live by’ (99)) which we do noteven attempt to verify. These are not ‘abortive’ truths; indirect verification—evidence thatother people expect experience to bear out the utility of these beliefs—allows us to countthem as truths. ‘Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system’, although ‘beliefsverified concretely bysomebody’ are what preserves this cognitive economy fromcollapseA few pages further James appropriated the scholastic distinction between habit and actand acknowledged that to be worthy to be counted a ‘truth’, a belief does not have to beactually(in actu)guiding our practice, just as a person does not have to be lifting weightsto be reckoned strong. ‘All such qualities sink to the status of ‘habits’ between their timesof exercise; and similarly truth becomes a habit of certain of our ideas and beliefs in theirintervals of rest from their verifying activities’ (106). So why define truth as a process if,within James’s pragmatism, truth can have a sense in which it applies not to the processof verification but to what is able to withstand the process? What James appears to bedoing with his definition is drawing attention to what he believed to be crucial, just as hisfrequent use of financial metaphors (‘cash basis’, ‘cash value’) called attention to thesame need of a practical foundation for our cognitive practices. But calling truth aprocess made it easier for opponents to suggest that the doctrine was riddled withconfusion, just as financial metaphors and words like ‘expedient’ allowed opponents toinsinuate that behind James’s doctrine were crass commercial values.6ANTI-REALISMAlthough expressing the doctrine of truth with more care might have enabled James to gosome distance toward placating Peirce, it is not clear that this would have resolved all oftheir differences over the concept of truth. There remains James’s fondness for the claimthat ‘Truth ismade’ ([13.12], 104) as opposed to ‘discovered’ and the evidence that notall of what he meant by this is contained in the claim that truth arises out of the process ofverification (and re-verification). Part of this claim appears to have been intended byJames to reflect the degrees of freedom which we have in fashioning representations ableto function cognitively as instruments. What truths we embrace here and now (and hencein the long run) depend on how we carve out and carve up the objects of our experiencein order to fashion representations. And how we do that is a function of our purposes(121, 206).Having come to his philosophythroughKant, Peirce would not have found alien theidea that objects, and our classifications of them, are in important respects the products ofour cognitive activity. But this raises the question whether (within whatever constraintsmight be imposed by our cognitive constitution) we can adopt different systems ofrepresentation, systems which would if adopted lead subsequent enquiry in such differentdirections that we could not plausibly regard them as taking us to the same ‘finalopinion’, the same ‘truth’. This is one way to read the implications of James’s doctrinesthat our means of representation are instruments serving concrete purposes and that truthis made. This implication, however, requires that it makes sense to suppose that we arefree at one or another stage in our history to adopt one set of purposes, to which one setof cognitive instruments would be well adapted, and eschew another set of purposes, towhich a different set of cognitive instruments would be better suited. If the thought ofmaking such a choice is coherent, we would not be able to say that the beliefs framed inone system were more true than those of the other because beliefs in each system wouldbe established as true through serving a different set of purposes.The issue in other words is how much freedom does a pragmatist doctrine of truthleave us? It needs to be emphasized that no pragmatist suggested that our freedom is inany sense absolute. We are constrained in what we do by what our environment willpermit us to do—by what means it affords for realizing our goals. We do not even haveabsolute mastery over the most immaterial of our cognitive instruments, ‘We can no moreplay fast and loose with these abstract relations than we can do so with our sense-experience. They coerce us; we must treat them consistently, whether or not we like theresults’ (101). But it remains possible to ask whether it would make sense to say thatlong-term truth might not be uniquely determined, because at crucial stages we mightmake choices that would lead to one long-term truth rather another. Did James allow thiswhen he said ‘absolute truth will have to be made…incidental to the growth of a mass ofverification-experience’ (107)?There seems little doubt that Peirce assumed there would be what is now called‘convergence’ if scientific enquiry were indefinitely prolonged. Phrased to avoid theimplication that there will be a time when scientific enquiry is complete, this means thatshould there emerge two or more ways of treating a phenomenon scientifically, the taskof reconciling and integrating these theories will not remain impossible indefinitely. DoesPeirce’s assumption that enquiry will converge amount to anything more than an articleof faith?For one important alliance of anti-pragmatists, Peirce’s assumption needs no defence.According to the opponents whom James addresses as ‘rationalists’ (as well as mostphilosophers who nowadays profess to be ‘realists’) representations of the world can beadvanced independently of, indeed‘have nothing to do with[,] our practical interests orpersonal reasons’(109). There has to be convergence amongst the descriptions offeredby all who seek an adequate representation oftheworld; two representations could notfail to be reconciled unless there were two different worlds. Truth resides in the one idealrepresentation regardless of whether anyone will ever ascertain it. For James, ‘Therenever was a more exquisite example of an idea abstracted from the concretes ofexperience and then used to oppose and negate what it was abstracted from’ (109). Buthaving tied truth to ‘practical interests or personal reasons’ did James have any groundsfor the expectation that our ‘verification-experience’ will converge?Although James did not address this specific question, his instrumentalism does appearto have definite anti-realist implications. His admonition against thinking that reality is‘literally’ made of ether, atoms or electrons (103) does not appear to reflect mere cautionregarding the ultimate utility of theories phrased in these terms. He claimed that ‘Theterm “energy” doesn’t even pretend to stand for anything “objective”. It is only a way ofmeasuring the surface of phenomena so as to string their changes on a simpleformula’ (103). Peirce’s response to this is likely to have been that if the concept ofenergy continues adequately to guide our interactions with what James here calls ‘thesurface of phenomena’ there is no point in denying that the term stands for somethingobjective. Any object represented in an opinion which continues to be accepted by allwho investigate is by Peirce’s criterion real and objective.James accepted that in choosing our ‘man-made formulas we cannot be capricious withimpunity’ (104), but, consistent with his sympathy for nominalism, he suggested therewas a certain latitude in our choice. This expectation may well have been linked to theway he wanted to tie truth not only to ‘practical interests’ but also to ‘personal reasons’.Dewey viewed this appeal to the personal with some suspicion. He was content if it wasto be analysed and defined in biological and ethical (social) terms, but not if it were (as inthe humanism of F.C. S.Schiller) treated as ‘ultimate and unanalyzable, themetaphysically real’, in order to underwrite a ‘pluralistic, voluntaristic idealism’ ([13.18],325–6).Peirce for his part would have accepted the link to practical interests; these werewritten into the pragmatist principle. Those who enquire are looking for practicalguidance for establishing stable habits of action, and realists and rationalists are mistakenin offering an account of truth which pretends otherwise. Peirce, however, would nothave included ‘personal reasons’ alongside ‘practical interests’; these generate thelimitations and partialities which scientific enquiry is supposed to eliminate from ourrepresentations. The purpose of science includes transcending the personal at least in thesense linked to individualism.7 If convergence involved an article of faith for Peirce,what rested on faith was the belief that it is possible for humans to transcend the personalin this sense. It was not a matter of faith that science should converge; if our enquiries donot converge it will be because we have not conducted our enquiries in the right spirit.THE RIGHT TO BELIEVEThat one might rest science on faith of this sort—on a set of beliefs regarding thepossibility and supreme worth of working towards a common goal, which is specifiedonly schematically—was endorsed by James even before he publicly adopted Peirce’sprinciple as his protégé. In the title essay (first published in 1896) of a collection,TheWill to Believe,dedicated ‘to my old friend Charles Sanders Peirce’, James had defendedthe right8 to believe in facts where belief might well be something needed to help createthe fact ([13.3], 25). The actuality of pragmatism’s truth is indeed dependent in this wayon the beliefs of those who enquire and the cognitive posture, which pragmatists thusrequire of scientists, would be scorned by those—James cites (T.H.) Huxley and (W.K.)Clifford—who insist we must not ‘believe anything upon insufficient evidence’ (7–8).James was not at this point advancing the doctrine that truth is made—‘in our dealingswith objective nature we obviously are recorders, not makers, of truth’ (20)—but heinsisted on the status of truth as an object of common endeavour, ‘Our belief in truthitself…that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other,—what is itbut a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up?’ (9). Toinsist that we as individuals have sufficient grounds for believing in the attainability oftruth, before taking steps to attain it, could well, James argued, stand in the way of ourattaining it (24–5).Thus the issue James took with Huxley and Clifford was over their suggestion that abelief system could be based entirely on intellec-tual grounds without resting at any pointon commitment or, as James put it, on our ‘passional tendencies and volitions’ (11). Notonly does ‘our passional nature’ influence our beliefs, there are cases in which thisinfluence ‘must be regarded both as inevitable and as a lawful determinant of ourchoice’ (19). What Huxley and Clifford were doing, James insinuated, was foisting onothers the predilections of their own particular ‘passional natures’ under the pretence ofhaving put all emotional involvement aside.‘The Will to Believe’ although pre-pragmatic in some respects was read as a documentof the movement.9 Thus its attack on Clifford contributed to the accusation thatpragmatism encouraged people to believe whatever would prove convenient or wouldlead to success measured in terms of personal satisfaction. For James had quoted Cliffordas claiming, ‘Belief is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statementsfor the solace and private pleasure of the believer’ (8). And inPragmatismJames said anumber of things, which taken on their own might also be interpreted as embracingprecisely what Clifford condemned.In the final chapter James declared that ‘On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesisof God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true’ ([13.12], 143).Earlier he had quoted from a Christian Science leaflet and said of it, ‘beyond doubt sucha confession of faith has pragmatically an emotional value’ (74). A page later themystical teachings of Swami Vivekananda were said to be ‘a religion which, emotionallyconsidered, has a high pragmatic value’. Clearly ‘works satisfactorily in the widest sense’was meant toinclude‘generates emotional security’ but if James’s audience failed tobring to bear other things which James had said about the constraints operating on belief(to be discussed here shortly) they were likely to carry away the impression that thesolace or personal satisfaction offered by a belief were meant to be a sufficienttouchstone of its truth.If James had taken steps to forestall this impression, he might have stressed that theprimary consequences by which a belief or idea was to be tested were those bound up inwhat Dewey referred to as the ‘intent of the idea’. What Dewey meant to convey by thisphrase was that included in the conventions which determine the commonly acceptedmeaning of an idea or belief are quite specific conditions for the correct application of thewords which are used to convey it. Dewey thereby implied a criticism of James for hisillustrative example argued that the fatal consequences of drinking a liquid to test the ideathat it is a poison are very good indicators that the idea is true, and it is theseconsequences which are relevant to the question of its truth, not the bad consequences ofa painful death ([13.18], 320). By impli-cation the emotional consequences of believingsomething were not to be treated as relevant to its truth.James might well have replied that beliefs function in multiple ways and, whileaccepting that he should not neglect the ‘intent of an idea’, he clearly would have resistedexcluding the functions of solace and satisfaction in deciding how well they work. Theaccount, which he gave in his Berkeley lecture ([13.11], 415–24) and reproducedverbatim inPragmatism([13.12], 51–6), of the pragmatic difference between materialismand belief in God, rested entirely on the reassurance which could be derived from the waythe notion of God ‘guarantees an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved… Thisneed of an eternal moral order is one of the deepest needs of our breast’, because itsustained hope where the ‘materialist’ outlook meant ‘the cutting off of ultimatehopes’ ([13.12], 55). These needs were not universal but present in ‘superior minds’,while their absence was a sign of ‘the more shallow man’ (56).This account of the pragmatic meaning of belief in ‘God’ was said by James to havebeen deliberately phrased in terms of future consequences. He argued that if the universehad no future, if this were its absolutely last moment, it might well be that the‘materialist’ and the ‘spiritualist’ hypotheses were equivalent and there be nothing,pragmatically speaking, in the choice between them ([13.11], 414; [13.12], 50). But inreferring to future consequences James clearly had in mind our attitudes towards theindefinite future long after any of our actions (perhaps the actions of any human beings)have determinable practical consequences. In response Dewey claimed that this accountof the meaning of ‘God’ involved a considerable departure from what would appear to besanctioned by Peirce’s principle. If consistently applied, Peirce’s principle would ‘simplyabolish the meaning of an antecedent power which will perpetuate eternally someexistence’ ([13.18], 315). Dewey protested at what he saw as the ‘unpragmatic’procedure of determining the (emotional) ‘value of a conception whose own inherentsignificance pragmatism has not first determined’ (316).James, however, read the pragmatist principle as allowing consequences to be spelledout not only in terms of how we act but also in terms of how we feel. This wasunderscored when later he claimed that almost from the outset he had thought hisargument that the spiritualist hypothesis served only to guarantee an ideal order wasflawed. This was because, James believed, there would be for people an importantdifference if they could regard the universe as containing ‘a being who will [at everymoment does] inwardly recognize them and judge them sympathetically’ ([13.12],269n.). James’s retraction here leaves no doubt of the importance of private consciousexperience in the system of values by which he intended to judge whether beliefs worked.He reinforced his claim about the need for God’s sympathy and recognition of our innerexperience by means of a thought experiment involving a soulless robot woman whobehaved in a way indistinguishable from ‘an animated maiden’. ‘Pragmatically…belief inthe automatic sweetheart would notwork’, because such a creature would not satisfy aman’s craving for ‘inward sympathy and recognition, love and admiration’ (ibid.) Ourconsciousness requires recognition (by God) and men require conscious recognition (bywomen) of their qualities. Beliefs that fail to satisfy these requirements do not work.But this is not to say that the satisfaction of such needs was sufficient by itself tounderwrite the truths of beliefs. James made it abundantly clear in ‘The Will to Believe’that he did not think we could adopt just any belief at will, simply because it offeredpersonal satisfaction or solace. For any historically situated individual only certainhypotheses were ‘live’ and only certain choices between believing and not believing werein addition sufficiently important and unavoidable to be ‘genuine’ ([13.3], 2–4)The point about the need for new beliefs to cohere with existing beliefs, on whichJames placed considerable stress in his account of truth inPragmatism,was alreadyprominent in this article. Here it indicated how historical and cultural factors, along withempirical and logical constraints, circumscribe the proper sphere of will and emotion indetermining belief. We cannot pick and choose beliefs to suit our tastes. We cannot, afterall, just by willing, believe that we are well when ‘roaring with rheumatism’ or that thesum of two one-dollar bills in our pocket is a hundred ([13.3], 5). But the logical andempirical constraints which hold us to one or another of certain complexes of beliefshould not be expected to determine for us precisely one complex worthy of belief.Other of James’s examples illustrate well the cultural and historical factors which closeoff some options and open others to the will and emotions—which, in other words, makean hypothesis live and genuine for some people, dead or spurious for others. In the latenineteenth century belief in the Mahdi may have been among the mind’s possibilities foran Arab, but not for a North American (2). Whatever the force of the argument known asPascal’s wager, the option to heed or ignore its conclusion, ‘take holy water, and havemasses said’, is not alive for someone, e.g. Turk or Protestant Christian, who has no preexistingtendency to believe in masses and holy water (6).10PLURALISMThe shadow cast in James’s discussion, here and inPragmatism,by the notion of beliefsystems as to a large degree mutually impermeable cultural entities gives hisdevelopment of pragmatism a flavour which has become very familiar nearly a centurylater. There appears to be a tendency in James’s discussion towards what is now knownas ‘pluralism’ (identified in some quarters with ‘postmodernism’), that is resistance to theprinciple that we should expect one system of beliefs to prove superior to all others.There may be a number of viable systems no one of which can ever be declared superiorto the others. (In more radical versions pluralism merges with relativism: no system ofbelief can ever be declared superior to any other.)It is this tendency in James which allows some recent writers to enlist pragmatism inthe pluralist ranks. Whether this tendency is actually present in James or is merely asuperficial appearance, which would evaporate under careful reading, it is clear that it isnot pragmatism as such which brings pluralism in its train. Peirce expected applicationsof the pragmatist principle, including those to the concepts of truth and settled belief, togenerate in due course a single authoritative system. He wrote consistently as thoughthere was a single preferred method of stabilizing belief, directed at a single objective,with a single expected outcome. And there is nothing in this which is inconsistent withhis pragmatist principle.Nevertheless it should be acknowledged that fallibilism (which, although not thewhole, is an essential part of pragmatism) and the undermining of ‘rationalist’ orcognitivist conceptions of truth, together ‘create a space for pluralism. If, as James put it([13.3], 13), we cannot rely on anything to click inside us when we grasp the truth andthus should remain open to the possibility that our most strongly held beliefs may need tobe revised, who can (ever) claim to be in possession of the one truth?If, as the opponents of pragmatism insist, truth is a two-term relation of ‘agreement’ or‘correspondence’ which obtains between our representations (whether these be conceivedas physical entities or as mental states) and the world, it is difficult to allow that theremight be more than one relation of agreement. Once this ‘rationalist’ conception is setaside and it is accepted that ‘agreement’ has to rest on the functional role which arepresentation plays in some active intervention in the world ([13.12], 95–7, 216–17),what constitutes ‘agreement’ has to be taken as relative to the ends served by theintervention. Whether or not there is one truth (towards which we all can work) thendepends on whether there is a single end to some of our interventions—for example thoseinterventions which constitute our scientific enquiries—one that gives a special authorityto those representations which serve well the unitary end of those particular endeavours.In other words pragmatists can acknowledge one truth only if they assume (as Peirceassumed) that there is some one end to which (regardless of whatever other ends wemight have) our representations (theories) must serve. It is by no means as easy to specifysuch an end as it might at first appear. Notions in common use nowadays in analyticphilosophy of science, such as ‘empirical adequacy’, do not sufficiently specify an end.What counts as empirically adequate knowledge in different contexts depends on whyone wants to know.Although James characterized himself as a ‘pluralist’, it is not clear whether he stoodso far from Peirce as to have been prepared to embrace pluralism about truth. Thedifficulty determining where James stood on this matter arises because the monists,against whom James defined his ‘pluralism’, were not concerned about this sort ofquestion.James repeatedly took up the issue of ‘the one and the many’ to illustrate theapplication of the pragmatist principle.11 His interest in the question arose from a longrunningdispute, which he had with his friend and colleague, the idealist philosopherJosiah Royce. The issue was ostensibly whether the universe was one or many, and inapplying the pragmatist solvent, which in this case required spelling out the consequencesof the world being one ([13.12], 65–6), James first had to distinguish several senses inwhich the world could be said to be one. Did this mean spatio-temporally unified,causally unified, subsumed under a single genus, and so on? It was clearly not worthwhile applying the pragmatist principle to all eight of the possible senses identified inPragmatism,but even for the more interesting cases James concentrated less on whatdifference it made to say ‘one’ or ‘many’ and a good deal more on how we shouldrespond to the issue if we wish to be properly pragmatic about it.One of the more important issues which James flushed out of the unruly undergrowthdisputed by monists and pluralists was ‘Does the world have a unity of purpose?’Empirically minded pluralists observe different and often conflicting purposes in theworld. The most they would concede, James suggested, was that ‘our world isincompletely unified ideologically and is still trying to get its unification betterorganized’ ([13.12], 70). Idealists sought a unification and reconciliation of this manifoldin a single ‘purpose that every detail of the universe subserves’ so that ‘all evil in theuniverse is but instrumental to its greater perfection’ (70).Although James accepted this as a legitimate hypothesis, albeit one which it was riskyto dogmatize, he clearly viewed the long-suffering and complacent attitudes towards evil,which it encouraged, with profound distaste. His discussion at this point alludes to anearlier chapter where he castigated as ‘a little ghastly…the satisfaction with which a purebut unreal system will fill a rationalist mind’ ([13.12], 18). With a rare display of socialconcern, James cited personal experiences of oppressed working men, gleaned from abook by a radical (‘anarchistic writer’), Morrison I.Swift, as examples of what his friendsRoyce and F.H.Bradley (‘and a whole host of guileless thoroughfed thinkers’) treated asconditions of the perfection of the eternal order (21).But while James could thus ridicule the idea of an already existing unifying purpose tothe universe, he did not appear to reject the thought that ‘our world is…still trying to getits unification better organized’. Still less did he reject the idea that human beings shouldconceive their cognitive efforts as contributing towards a single goal, and suggest insteadthat they might expect it to fragment into multiple irreconcilable goals. Although ingeneral James resisted antecedently existing unities, he was prepared to tolerate suchunities as ends towards which things might move: ‘If such an hypothesis were legitimate,total oneness would appear at the end of things rather than at their origin. In other wordsthe notion of the “Absolute” would have to be replaced by that of the“Ultimate”’ ([13.12], 78). This statement implies a far greater tolerance of Peirce’sconception of truth as the end of enquiry than is harboured by more recent pluralists.James’s response to another of the issues covered by the ‘monism/ pluralism’ blanketis also instructive in this connection. Idealist philosophers not only claimed that theAbsolute secured for the world a ideological unity, they also claimed that it provided theworld with ‘anall-enveloping noetic unity’ (71). In response to this ‘hypothesis’ Jamesrecalled how he had already credited the omniscience of God with the pragmatic value ofsustaining conceptually (for the satisfaction of our emotional needs) an eternal moralorder. This monist hypothesis was otherwise on a par with that of the pluralist, accordingto whom ‘there is no point of view, no focus of information extant, from which the entirecontent of the universe is visible at once’ (72).James was clearly prepared to recognize cognitive value (the grasp of some truths) inviewpoints which did not comprehend the whole. Idealists by contrast commonly arguedthat to grasp the truth of anything one had to appreciate its interrelations to every othertruth, and hence truth was accessible only to an infinite all-comprehending intellect.James reckoned it possible for ‘[e]verything to get known bysomeknower…but theknowers in the end be irreducibly many, and the greatest knower of them all may yet notknow the whole of everything’ (72). In this picture-puzzle universe known only through amultitude of overlapping pieces, there is room for the possibility that the pieces might notgo together to make one big picture but instead conflict irreconcilably so that the totalitywould have to be treated as several pictures of distinct realities. And this possibilityremains delicately counter-balancing the possibility of an ultimate truth.PRAGMATIST REALITYIt may well be that this balancing act was the only stable position for James to adoptgiven what he said about the extent to which truth is made and what he took to be theimplications of this for the concept of reality. James expressed the opinion ([13.12], 117)that his British ally, F.C.S.Schiller, had, in advancing ‘humanism’ (which was Schiller’spreferred label for his own philosophic position), pressed to misleading extremes theclaim that truth is made. In ‘making’ our truths, James emphasized, we have to takeaccount of reality in three different aspects. Sensations are forced upon us; certainrelations between our sensations (some of them fixed and essential) are facts; and we arealso constrained by what we have previously taken as truths (117–18). Within theseconstraints we still have a certain amount of freedom, for example to attend to somesensations and ignore others, and may ‘read the same facts differently’ depending on ourinterests (118).James happily embraced the doctrine that there is always a human contribution tohuman knowledge, that is to say our representations of reality will always reflect ourinterests and limitations—and that representing reality in a way wholly independent ofhuman thinking is at best an ‘ideal limit of our minds’ (119). If ‘humanism’ labelled thedoctrine that our beliefs about reality will always contain human elements, James wasprepared to recognize it as part of pragmatism. We encounter fresh experience with a setof beliefs which determine what we notice. What we notice determines what we do andthis in turn determines what we experience. So ‘altho the stubborn fact remains that thereis a sensible flux, what is true of it seems from first to last to be largely a matter of ourown creation’ (122). And if we add to this the thought that our actions and descriptionsare themselves additions to reality (123), we will come to see ourselves as qualitativegrowth points in reality itself.James’s rationalist opponents were, as he saw them, committed to a reality‘readymadeand complete from all eternity’. Reality for a pragmatist on the other hand is‘stillin the making’awaiting‘part of its complexion from the future’(123). Pragmatists heldthere was one edition of the universe, unfinished but growing ‘especially in places wherethinking beings are at work’, while the rationalists held out for a universe in manyeditions, ‘one real one, the infinite folio, orédition de luxe,eternally complete’ and manyfinite, distorted error-ridden editions (124). Although the image of one edition as opposedto many pointed numerically in the wrong direction, James saw this as another version ofthe opposition between the monist (rationalist, many edition) outlook and the pluralist(pragmatist, single edition) outlook. But even here the apparent commitment to unitysuggested by the image of a single (growing) pragmatist edition was balanced within apage by an expression of agnosticism: ‘For pluralistic pragmatism, truth grows up insideof all the finite experiences. They lean on each other, but the whole of them,if such awhole there be,leans on nothing’ (125, emphasis added).James contended (124) that this issue was not entirely a question of the theory ofknowledge. The issue indeed turns in part on how we locate human experience andcognition within reality. If these phenomena—together with the events, the outcomes ofwhich depend on the fact that humans think one way rather than another—are treatedwithout qualification as natural events, it is difficult to resist the claim that reality itself ischaracterized by growth. In practice epistemology is commonly undertaken with one orboth of two fundamental Cartesian presuppositions in place, presuppositions which areseldom made consciously or explicitly. Firstly, human experience and cognition, whichshape human representations of reality, are treated as transparent, unaffected by history orculture. Secondly, human thinking is treated as something which occurs outside (beyond,at the margin of) natural events. It is because our thought processes are thus on the onehand not part of nature and on the other known introspectively so that those which areclear and distinct may be taken as transparently true, that human thinking is not regardedas a part of what humans aspire to know. It is hardly surprising in the light of thesepresuppositions that James’s contention that our ways of representing reality alwaysreflect our interests and particular perspectives met with hostility and his contention thatour efforts to represent the world are themselves developments of the world met withincomprehension.12When disputes touch these presuppositions (as in debates between pragmatists and‘new realists’ shortly after James’s death as well as in more recent literature),13 it isclaimed that objectivity in knowledge requires us to suspend all our special (i.e. practical)interests just as objectivity requires us to suspend all personal involvement in judginglegal and ethical questions. The notion of objective knowledge, moreover, precludes usfrom claiming knowledge of anything which our own activity affects (interferes with). Inaspiring to know, we aspire to represent things as they are in themselves independently ofus. The idea that our own activities (let alone the perspectives shaped by our interests)contribute in important ways to the objects which we aspire to know counts as scientificheresy. The humanist claim about the inevitable human influence on our representationsand the pragmatist claim about the inevitable influence of our actions on the objects weaspire to know completely undermine, it is argued, objectivity as we understand it.The Cartesian presuppositions also appear clothed as a preference for logic overpsychology. When Bertrand Russell criticized James, he observed how ‘Mostphilosophies are determined by their initial questions and by the facts which habituallyfill the imagination of the philosopher’ ([13.28], 104). Pragmatists, he contended, werepreoccupied with ‘psychical facts’. Where the scientifically minded think of the facts andthe theologically minded think of God, pragmatists worry about scientifictheoriesandaboutbelief inGod—signs in Russell’s view that what filled the imaginations ofpragmatists were ‘psychological’ phenomena (104). This led pragmatists, Russellcontended, to confuse whatistrue with what isthought to betrue (111). It is the formerquestion which, he insisted, should be addressed.Characterizing one’s opponents as preoccupied with psychology came to be a familiarpattern of criticism in the early decades of this century. There were no doubt seriouserrors which deserved the stigma that was attached by means of the label ‘psychologism’.But the stigma also served to silence or marginalize those who, like James, wished totreat human experience as a part of nature. It in effect placed their concerns on the mentalside of the familiar body-mind dualism. Interests, satisfactions and perspectives could allbe treated as belonging to the way the world appears to subjects, to features of theirmental representations of things. Interests, satisfactions and above all the limitations ofhistorically situated perspectives did not consequently need to be located in the natural(physical, material) world. Logic could (and did in the early decades of the twentiethcentury) divorce itself from all these psychological conditions—as well as eventuallyfrom judgement, belief and even inference—and concentrate on how truth could bedistributed over the structure of representations, a structure conceived of as abstractedentirely from human thought processes.To sustain the pursuit of the question ‘what is true?’ without becoming entangled in thequestion ‘what is thought to be true?’ Russell had to insist not only that (as Peirce hadinsisted) science could pursue a unitary goal of truth but that it could rest its findings on abody of indisputable truths, in respect to which a fallibilist outlook would be unnecessaryand inappropriate. Russell clearly operated with a conception of science as seeking a kindof satisfaction—‘theoretic satisfaction’ (108)—which was quite independent of any otherkind of utility which might be derived from holding a belief. To achieve this satisfaction,he held, the empirical (‘inductive’) sciences tried to make all their statements agree as faras possible with observed facts.The ‘old inductive philosophy, as exemplified in Mill’s logic’ presupposed ‘that thereare truths of fact prior to the whole inductive procedure’ (104–5). In the empiricisttradition, which Russell represented, the most secure of these truths of fact were given insense experience. But, as Russell appreciated, James had sought to loosen the tie betweentruth and facts. Facts are indeed given to us in sense experience, but they are not truths;truths are what we say about facts (106) and, as noted above, James allows there to belatitude in how we respond to what is given in experience. Russell insisted that themeaning of ‘truth’ (what can be expected to be in the mind of a person employing theword ‘truth’, [13.28], 109–10) was tied to facts in the same way as the ‘theoreticsatisfaction’ sought in science. Pragmatists would in the end, therefore, be forced torecognize cases of ‘plain matters of fact’ about which there would simply be no doubt(134) and hence presumably no latitude in how we should respond to them.Pragmatism, however, had begun as a principle for achieving clarity about what we canpossibly mean by terms such as ‘true’ and ‘truth’. It recognized no obligation to remainfaithful to what ordinary people meant by such terms. Pragmatists could moreoverquestion the soundness of Russell’s inference that our ordinary conception of truth wouldunderwrite a class of statements as representing ‘plain matters of fact’. To arrive at such aclass Russell had to select statements whose implications were severely restricted.Russell’s candidates (bare reports of sense data) may well have seemed unquestionablyauthoritative, but only at the price of being uncommonly powerless to guide our practicalaffairs. Russell, of course, had professed more interest in what could be regarded as amatter of fact than in what might offer practical guidance, but ordinary people are asmuch interested in the latter as in the former. If Russell’s path to determinate matters offact led away from anything of practical consequence, it is not clear that ordinary usagewould be prepared to follow Russell.One might apply the pragmatist principle in the fashion of James and inquire whatbroader consequences turned on the specific dispute between James and Russell overwhether certain of ‘the facts’ of experience could or should be represented as uniquelyauthoritative ‘truths’. Russell’s doctrine had the effect of securing, at the crucial pointwhere experience impinges on our minds, a cognitive relationship to reality in which themind has no alternative but to reflect passively what is given to it. The logical structure ofour thought can then be relied upon to determine how the mind must conform if it is topossess a true, more comprehensive representation of reality. Russell thereby indicatesthe logical-empiricist route to the ready-made reality which James had opposed in therationalist (idealist) philosophies popular in his day.By stressing that there are degrees of freedom even at the experiential interfacebetween human minds and the world in which they are situated, James encouraged apicture of the mind as functioning actively rather than passively. He also stood as anobstacle to the total dominance of the conception of reality as something which imposeson us, requiring conformity from our minds and leaving no room for development inwhich we might play an essential part. Long before he became associated withpragmatism James had rejected any outlook which entailed determinism and deniedhuman beings the capacity to act freely.14 The libertarian or voluntaristic position whichJames favoured may not have followed strictly from pragmatic principles, butpragmatism, even when conceived narrowly as a method for gaining clarity throughspelling out practical consequences, rests on a conception of human beings as active andof their cognitive activities as making a difference to the world, rather than merelyreflecting the way it is.THE FORTUNES OF PRAGMATISMJames’s reply to Russell ([13.12], 312–19) concentrated on rebutting what James took tobe perverse misinterpretations of his position found elsewhere. He did not engage Russelldirectly over the issue of whether statements we choose to make about sensoryexperience could or should be treated as ‘plain matters of fact’. He did remark on what hesaw as the excessive ‘abstractionism’ in Russell’s procedure. These, as it transpired, werethe two most prominent features of the philosophy, logical empiricism, which during the1930s came to eclipse pragmatism. It was accepted (widely, but not universally) that thepossibility of empirical knowledge rested on sensory experience, which provided us witha class of statements which expressed ‘plain matters of fact’. These were commonlytaken to be observation statements reporting particular experiences, and more generalstatements (including scientific theories) which did not express plain matters of fact hadto answer to such ‘truths’. They did so through a structure represented abstractly in thenew (mathematical) logic, which Russell had helped to shape, and which held out thepromise of a sharp distinction between the empirical content of statements (where theyrest on indisputable fact) and the conventions governing the uses of words.In 1951 W.V.O.Quine challenged ‘two dogmas of empiricism’: one the belief that wecan sharply distinguish between synthetic statements, those with determinate empiricalcontent, and analytic statements, those true in virtue of the conventions governinglanguage; and the other the belief that the empirical content of statements could bereduced to (represented entirely in terms of) the observation state-ments which theyentailed. During the reign of these dogmas, pragmatism, although it had able supporters,was avoided by anyone who did not wish to appear out of fashion. Once the hold of thetwo dogmas had been broken, it became possible to speak without pejorative overtones ofthe work of Quine and Donald Davidson as continuations of the pragmatist tradition15and possible to proclaim a revival of that tradition. But the pragmatism of Peirce, Jamesand Dewey consisted in more than the denial of Quine’s two dogmas. It is far from clearyet whether the current modest fashion for pragmatism will lay sufficient stress on mindas goal-directed, on intellectual clarity as tied to practical outcome, on truth as the longtermproduct of our enquiries and on human experience as a natural phenomenon, for it tocount as a continuation of the tradition rather than a transmogrification into something allits founders would have regarded as quite alien.NOTESI am grateful to Ron Bontekoe, John Hodges and Mary Tiles for helping me to eliminateinfelicities from the penultimate draft of this chapter.1 Biographical note: William James was born in New York City in 1842, the eldest child ofMary Walsh and Henry James Sr. His independently wealthy father established a reputationas a man of letters and a somewhat eccentric theologian. The oldest of William’s threebrothers was the novelist Henry James, Jr, and his only sister Alice has recently beenacclaimed for the diaries which she left. After considering a career as a painter, James took amedical degree at Harvard in 1869 and in 1872 began a teaching career at Harvard whichmoved from physiology through psychology (1875) to philosophy (1879). He was appointedprofessor of philosophy in 1885, retired in 1907 and died in 1910. For a chapter-lengthaccount of James’s life and career, see [13.25].2 The lecture, titled ‘Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results’, appeared as the leadarticle in the University Chronicle for September 1898 and as a separately publishedpamphlet circulated by the Philosophical Union and by James himself ([13.19], 285). Withina year James’s address had been discussed by Dickinson Miller in the Philosophical Reviewand pragmatism had been the subject of an address (published in Mind in October 1900) byWilliam Caldwell at the American Psychological Association ([13.19], 293).3 It is ironic that critics have detected distinctively Kantian elements in James’s thought.Kuklick ([13.22], 273–4) finds that James became more Kantian as his thought developed upto his death twelve years after delivering his lecture at Berkeley. Henri Bergson ([13.15],257) remarked on the Kantianism of James’s doctrines in an introduction to a Frenchtranslation of James’s Pragmatism published in 1911.4 See Peirce ([13.36], 6:182–4) for a moving tribute to James.5 Dewey [13.33] recommended ‘warranted assertibility’ instead of ‘truth’.6 Dewey ([13.18], 330) expressed frustration with this common misunderstanding. ‘Nomisconception of the instrumental logic has been more persistent than the belief that it makesknowledge merely a means to a practical end, or to the satisfaction of practical needs—practical being taken to signify some quite definite utilities of a material or bread-and-buttertype…. I again affirm that the term ‘pragmatic’ means only the rule of referring all thinking,all reflective considerations, to consequences for final meaning and test. Nothing is saidabout the nature of the consequences; they may be aesthetic, or moral, or political, orreligious in quality—anything you please.’7 Individualism was for Peirce one of the ‘daughters of nominalism’ ([13.36], 8:38).8 James referred to his thesis in terms of ‘right’ rather than ‘will’ and in various placesexpressed regret over his choice of title ([13.12], 124; see note to 124.13 on 164).9 Russell regarded it as foundation of the pragmatist theory of truth ([13.28], 89–97, 113).Peirce’s complaint ([13.36], 5:3) that James had pushed the pragmatic principle tounwelcome extremes mentioned this article together with the Berkeley lecture.10 James places this latter claim within an objection to Pascal and to the idea of exercisingvolitional control over our beliefs. He thus did not immediately endorse it, but he did nothingto rebut the claim that, without a pre-existing tendency, masses and holy water will donothing to ‘stupefy [one’s] scruples’ as Pascal was quoted as saying ([13.3], 6). Later Jamescredited Pascal’s argument with being ‘a regular clincher, and…the last stroke needed tomake our faith in masses and holy water complete’ (11, emphasis added).11 E.g. in the Berkeley lecture ([13.11, 430ff.), in a chapter of Pragmatism ([13.12, 63ff.) and ina chapter of the book Some Problems of Philosophy, on which he was at work when he diedin 1910 ([13.13], 61ff.).12 Peirce’s earliest published work had begun with a rejection of Cartesianism epistemologyand all of those, who subsequently enlisted under the banner of pragmatism, who repudiatedCartesian dualism. For James’s doctrine of ‘neutral monism’, his doctrine of a ‘primal stuff’consisting of ‘pure experience’, see [13.10], chapters 1 and 2.13 The New Realist manifesto and Dewey’s dispute with a representative of the group arereprinted in [13.34]. More recent articulations of the presuppositions are to be found in[13.38], chapter 2 and [13.35], chapters 1, 2, 6 and 8.14 During the period between receiving his medical degree and beginning his teaching careerJames suffered from severe depression in which determinism appeared to him a very realthreat to his moral interests. His diary for 30 April 1870 records how he was helped over thiscrisis by reading the French philosopher Charles Renouvier and also records a resolve whichsheds light on his doctrine of a will/right to believe, ‘My first act of free will shall be tobelieve in free will’ ([13.25, 43).BIBLIOGRAPHYMajor works published by James13.1The Principles of Psychology,2 vols, New York: Henry Holt, 1890; reprint NewYork: Dover, 1950.13.2Psychology (Briefer Course),New York: Henry Holt, 1892.13.3The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy,New York: Longmans,Green, 1897; reprint with [13.4] New York: Dover, 1956.13.4Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine,Boston: HoughtonMifflin, 1898.13.5The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature,New York:Longmans, Green, 1902.13.6Pragmatism: A New Name for some Old Ways of Thinking,New York: Longmans,Green, 1907; reprint with [13.7] as [13.12].13.7The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to ‘Pragmatism’,New York: Longmans Green,1909.13.8A Pluralistic Universe,New York: Longmans, Green, 1909.Works by James published posthumously13.9Some Problems of Philosophy,edited by Horace M.Kallen, New York: Longmans,Green, 1911, reprint as [13.13].13.10Essays in Radical Empiricism,ed. R.B.Perry, New York: Longmans, Green, 1912.13.11Collected Essays and Reviews,ed. R.B.Perry, New York: Longmans, Green, 1920.A complete edition of the works of William James edited by F.Burkhardt, F. Bowers andI.K.Skrupskelis, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, includes13.12Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth,1975.13.13Some Problems of Philosophy,1979.Works about James13.14 Ayer, A.J.The Origins of Pragmatism,London: Macmillan, 1968.13.15 Bergson, H. ‘On the Pragmatism of William James: Truth and Reality’, inCreativeMind,trans. M.L.Andison, New York: Philosophical Library, 1946:246–60.13.16 Bird, G.William James,London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.13.17 Bradley, F.H. ‘Truth and Practice’, ‘Truth and Copying’, ‘On the Ambiguity ofPragmatism’, ‘On Professor James’s “Meaning of Truth”’ and ‘On Professor James’s“Radical Empiricism”’, inEssays on Truth and Reality,Oxford: Clarendon Press,15 For an example of such a reading of the continuity of the tradition see Murphy, [13.24]. Thisposthumously published textbook was seen through the press by Richard Rorty, who hasbeen the prime mover behind the respectability which pragmatism has recently re-acquired.See [13.37].1914:65–158.13.18 Dewey, J. ‘What Pragmatism Means by Practical’, inEssays in ExperimentalLogic,Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1916:303–34; reprint New York: Dover,n.d.13.19 Fisch, M.H. ‘American Pragmatism Before and After 1898’,Peirce Semeiotic andPragmatism,Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986: 283–304.13.20 Haack, S. ‘The Pragmatist Theory of Truth’,British Journal for the Philosophy ofScience,27 (1976):231–49.13.21——‘Can James’s Theory of Truth be Made More Satisfactory?’,Transactions ofthe Charles S.Peirce Society,20 (3) (1984):269–78.13.22 Kuklick, B.The Rise of American Philosophy,New Haven: Yale University Press,1977, chapters 9, 14–17.13.23 Moore, G.E. ‘William James’ “Pragmatism”’, inPhilosophical Studies,London:Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1922:97–146.13.24 Murphy, J.P.Pragmatism: From Peirce to Davidson,Boulder: Westview Press ,1990:39–58.13.25 Myers, G.E.William James: His Life and Thought,New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1986.13.26 Perry, R.B.The Thought and Character of William James,2 vols, Boston: Little,Brown, 1935.13.27 Royce, J. ‘William James and the Philosophy of Life’,The Basic Writings ofJosiah Royce,vol. 1, ed. J.J.McDermott, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1969:205–22.13.28 Russell, B. ‘Pragmatism’ and ‘William James’s Conception of Truth’, inPhilosophical Essays,London: Allen & Unwin, 1910:87–149.13.29 Santayana, G. ‘William James’,Character and Opinion in the United States,NewYork: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920:64–96.13.30 Scheffler, I.Four Pragmatists,London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974: 95–146.13.31 Smith, J.E.Purpose and Thought: The Meaning of Pragmatism,New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1978.13.32 Thayer, H.S.Meaning and Action: A Critical History of Pragmatism,Indianapolis:Bobbs-Merrill, 1968:133–59.Other works cited13.33 Dewey, J.Logic: the Theory of Inquiry,New York: Henry Holt, 1938.13.34——John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899–1924,vol. 6, Carbondale: SouthernIllinois University Press, 1978.13.35 Nagel, T.The View From Nowhere,Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.13.36 Peirce, C.S.Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce,8 vols, ed by C.Hartshorne and P.Weiss, vol. 2 (1932), vol. 5 (1934), vol. 6 (1935); and ed.A.W.Burks, vol. 8 (1958), Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. (References tothis edition are given by volume and paragraph number.)13.37 Rorty, R.Consequences of Pragmatism,Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1982.13.38 Williams, B.Descartes: the Project of Pure Inquiry,Harmondsworth: PenguinBooks, 1978.

  1. james, william—James William translationAmerican psychologist and philosopher. James was born into a wealthy New York family and surrounded from an early age by a humanitarian literary ...Philosophy dictionary
  2. james, william—перс. псих. соц. Джеймс Уильям американский философ психолог и социолог один из основоположников философского прагматизма сторонник концепции радикального эмпирицизма не...Англо-русский экономический словарь