Readings :: Pragmatism

Pragmatism
By William James

The link goes to the free Kindle edition, but my copy is a 1986 print copy from Hackett Publishing Company that I picked up in a secondhand bookstore a while back. The original was published in 1907, based on a series of lectures that James gave in 1906.

As I mentioned, my copy is secondhand, with at least two intemperate readers making marginal comments such as "What the fuck are you talking about?" and "No! Live without illusions, you wuss!" as well as this summative comment at the end of Section II: "Idiot."

Going out on a limb here, I think that William James was not an idiot. Rather, the unnamed critic was having trouble allowing James' argument to unfold. This argument is that philosophy has an ongoing dilemma and that pragmatism can address it.

The ongoing dilemma, James argues in Ch.1, is between the rationalist and the empiricist (or the "tender-minded" and the "tough-minded"; see p.10). James summarizes these views in two columns, with contrasts such as "intellectualistic" vs. "sensationalistic," "idealistic" vs. "materialistic," etc. He asks us to postpone the question of whether these contrasting columns are "internally consistent or self-consistent" and instead think through some examples that we know (p.10), allowing that most of us identify with characteristics on both sides (p.11). Then he asks: "Now what kinds of philosophy do you find actually offered to meet your need?" (p.12)—a question that provokes an outraged "WHAT!?" scrawled in blue ballpoint in the margins.  James answers his own question a little later: "You want a system that will combine both things, the scientific loyalty to facts and willingness to take account of them, the spirit of adaptation and accommodation, in short, but also the old confidence in human values and the resultant spontaneity," but what we find instead is "empiricism with inhumanism and irreligion; or else you find a rationalistic philosophy that indeed may call itself religious, but that keeps out of all definite touch with concrete facts and joys and sorrows" (p.13). 

After a few pages fleshing out this divide, James positions pragmatism "as a philosophy that can satisfy both types of demand," bridging rationalists and empiricists (p.18; n.b., I can see what Vygotsky would like about this idea). 

So what is pragmatism? In Ch.2, James explains the pragmatic method via the illustration of a squirrel shifting its position so as not to be visible to an observer walking around a tree. "Does the man go round the squirrel or not?" (p.25). The pragmatic method is "to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences": if the consequences are the same, the dispute is not meaningful; if they are different, one can make a judgment (p.26). (Notice that he is talking about small-t truth here, i.e., drawing distinctions on which one can build knowledge.) Here he quotes Peirce as saying that beliefs are rules for action. James characterizes pragmatism as empiricist, but in both a more radical and a less objectionable sense than in standard empiricism (p.28). "No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts" (p.29, his emphasis). 

James contrasts pragmatism with instrumentalism, in which "ideas (which themselves are but parts of our experience) become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience" (p.30). 

Later, he adds that "If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. For how much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged" (p.36, his emphasis). That is, truths are interdependent, and "The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons" (p.37, his emphasis). This line of argument whips our unnamed annotator into a frenzy, perhaps understandably. James' approach is to make a strong and apparently radical statement like this one, then hedge it a bit to make it more acceptable. (The anonymous annotations heighten this pattern for me as I watch the annotator fall into the trap over and over again.)

Let's skip a bit. In Lecture V, James discusses common sense:

My thesis now is this, that that our fundamental ways of thinking about things are discoveries of exceedingly remote ancestors, which have been able to preserve themselves throughout the experience of all subsequent time. They form one great stage of equilibrium in the human mind's development, the stage of common sense. Other stages have grafted themselves upon this stage, but have never succeeded in displacing it. (p.79, his emphasis)

A couple of things here: (1) James illuminates the pragmatic relationship here with which our anonymous annotators have been struggling, recognizing that the great Truths and basic divisions on which we base our thinking were once invented or discovered themselves; in recognizing this state of affairs, pragmatism focuses on how such divisions are constructed. (2) James also establishes a relationship among philosophy, psychology, and culture, understanding the basic, currently unquestioned foundations of our thought as products of our cultural forebears. That is, our ways of thinking are a cultural heritage. The implications for genre in particular are obvious, of course. 

He carries this line of thought over to Lecture VI, on the notion of truth:

The moment pragmatism asks this question [the question of what consequences there are to accepting an idea as true], it sees the answer: True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we can not. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known-as. (p.92, his emphasis)

This definition fits pretty well as scientific or empirical truth. But it also plausibly works with religious truth, as William James' namesake argued (James 2:17). William James goes on to argue that for pragmatism, "The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation. (p.92, his emphasis). He goes on to discuss verification and validation in pragmatic terms. 

In Lecture VII, regarding pragmatism and humanism, he acknowledges that audiences do not like the view of truth he sketched out in Lecture VI. They want and expect "the Truth"—and "All the great single-word answers to the world's riddle, such as God, the One, Reason, Law, Spirit, Matter, Nature, Polarity, the Dialectic Process, the Idea, the Self, the Oversoul, draw the admiration that men have lavished on them from the oracular role," offering the Truth (p.109, his emphasis). But James says that speaking about the Truth is like speaking about the Latin Language or the Law: "an abstraction from the facts of truths in the plural, a mere useful summarizing phrase" (p.109). Instead, he says, when we add knowledge, "we humanly make an addition to some sensible reality, and that reality tolerates the addition. ... Which may be treated as the more true, depends altogether on the human use of it" (p.114). He goes on to emphasize that even our distinctions of things from their environment is arbitrary: depending on our purpose, we might discuss an audience, a collection of individuals, organs, cells, or molecules and atoms. "We create the subjects of our true as well as of our false propositions" (p.114).

There's much more to this book, but that's where we'll stop. James is really trying to think through how we make distinctions and what that implies for how we understand truth in the world. If you're interested in pragmatism—or ontology, or truth, or cultural psychology—definitely take a look.