Pragmatism by David Warren Bowen John K.

Roth
Context
Occasionally a book succeeds in giving influential expression to an attitude and a set of principles that eventually make up a historically important philosophical movement. This is the case with William Jamess Pragmatism. Borrowing the term from his philosophical contemporary Charles S. Peirce, James attempted in a series of published lectures to popularize and defend a number of tendencies that hitherto have lacked a collective name. Pragmatism came to dominate the American intellectual scene as well as to gain recognition as a uniquely American philosophical position. Jamess book still serves as a sympathetic if sometimes polemical introduction to the pragmatic movement. Its eight related essays discuss the origin and meaning of pragmatism as well as suggest how the pragmatic method can be applied to troublingly perennial problems in metaphysics and religion. The contents give evidence of Jamess belief that philosophizing, as a technical concern, must always involve consequences for the life of common sense and ordinary people.

The Need for Pragmatism

Given the question Can a philosopher settle all philosophical disputes disinterestedly?, James replies in the negative. The point is not that philosophers ought to ignore claims of logic and evidence. Rather, the point is that philosophical clashes involve more than logic and evidence. James insists that no philosopher can wholly sink the fact of his temperament, however responsibly one seeks to give impersonal reasons only for [ones] conclusions. A philosophical attitude necessarily becomes colored by a persons temperament. In The Dilemma in Philosophy, which opens Pragmatism, James argues that a fundamental opposition in temperament has marked the history of thought: that between rationalism and empiricism. The rationalist values abstract and eternal principles; the empiricist, facts in all their crude variety. Aware that so hard and fast a distinction can serve only a rough-and- ready use, James suggests that clusters of traits tend to distinguish the rationalist from the empiricist. Rationalists are tender-minded, intellectualistic, idealistic, optimistic, religious, free-willist, monistic, dogmatical. Empiricists are tough-minded, sensationalistic, materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, fatalistic, pluralistic, skeptical. This rule-of-thumb distinction between two attitudes James applies to his view of the existing philosophical situation. This situation is one in which even children are almost born scientific. Positivism and scientific materialism tend to dominate the scene, favoring the empirically minded outlook. Yet people also seek to preserve an element of religiousness. James insists that a philosophical dilemma arises that is unacceptable to his contemporaries: to adopt a positivistic respect for empirical facts that ignores religion, or to keep a religiousness that is insufficiently empirical. James will settle for neither alternative. He asserts that the common person as philosopher demands facts, science, and religion. Ordinary people cannot find what they need in the philosophical country store. Materialists

explain phenomena by a nothing but account of higher forms in terms of lower, while religious thinkers provide a choice between an empty transcendentalist idealism (whose Absolute has no necessary relation to any concretely existing thing) and traditional theism (whose compromising nature lacks prestige and vital fighting powers). Rationalist elements in idealism and theism emphasize refinement and escape from the concrete realities of ordinary, everyday life. The result is that for the common persons plight, Empiricist writers give him a materialism, rationalists give him something religious, but to that religion actual things are blank. For this dramatically staged intellectual predicament, James has a philosophical hero ready in the wings. It is the oddly- named thing pragmatism. Pragmatism is offered as a philosophy that can salvage the religious values of rationalism without perverting peoples many-sided awareness of facts. It can also take account of the way temperamental demands inevitably affect foundations of philosophical systems. What James promises for his generation is a kind of philosophical synthesis that locates personal ways of seeing things squarely in the heart of philosophical subject matter. What that involves he describes in two essays: What Pragmatism Means and Pragmatisms Conception of Truth.

Pragmatism as Method
Pragmatism is both a method and a theory of truth. The method can be used by widely different philosophical persuasions. Its function is chiefly that of settling metaphysical disputes. Metaphysical arguments involve notions about which one can always ask whether the notions lead to any practical consequences. Such notions must be shown to make a difference in human conduct if they are to prove meaningful. Two Jamesian examples can illustrate what is meant here. One example concerns an argument about whether, if a person circles a tree around whose trunk a squirrel is also moving, one can say the person goes round the squirrel. James shows how the answer depends on what is meant by round. If one means by going round that the person is in successive places to north, east, south, and west of the squirrel, then he does go round the animal. If one means, on the other hand, that the person is behind, then to the right of, then in front of, and then to the left of the squirrel, then the person may not actually go round the squirrel, since the animal may move simultaneously with the persons movements. James concludes that an argument of this kind, if analyzed, turns out to be a verbal one. Another example illustrates how the pragmatic method is compatible with many possible results. James asks his readers to view the method as being like a corridor in a hotel, whose doors open into many rooms that contain thinkers involved in a variety of intellectual pursuits. These pursuits may be metaphysical, religious, or scientific. Metaphysically, one room may harbor a person working out an idealistic system, while another may shelter a thinker attempting to show that metaphysics is an impossibility. James insists that the pragmatic method is neutral regarding the kinds of thought going on in the rooms. Nevertheless, he insists that as a theory of truth, pragmatism favors the nominalists preference for particulars, the utilitarians stress on what is useful, and the positivists dislike of metaphysical speculations and merely verbal solutions of problems. James believes that when people employ words such as God, Matter, the Absolute,

Reason, and Energy, they should use the pragmatic method in seeking to show how such notions can have practical effects.

Pragmatism as Theory
As an instrumentalist theory of truth, pragmatism views sharp distinctions between logic and psychology with great suspicion. Ideas are instruments that help to dispel doubt when inherited bodies of opinion no longer produce intellectual ease. Belief means the cessation of doubting. However, what makes a belief true? James asserts that an idea is true if it permits the believer to attain satisfactory relations with other parts of our experience. This genetic conception of truthinfluenced by Darwinian biologysees ideas as true for specified situations, always in principle subject to change and reevaluation. Some critics interpret Jamess emphasis on the contextual truth of an idea as meaning people may believe whatever happens to make them comfortable. James rejects any wish-fulfilling conception of pragmatic truth. He states conditions that any idea must satisfy to qualify as workable. These conditions are quite conservative: Ideas must prove consistent with other ideas (including old ones) conformable to existing facts, and subject to experiential corroboration and validation. James is mostly critical of rationalistic metaphysical ideas leading to no observable differences in domains of human conduct. He rejects claims about the Truth. Nevertheless, he will consider even theological ideas as possibly true as long as their proponents can show them to affect some actual persons behavior. Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Truth concerns matters of fact, abstract things and their relations, and the relations of an idea to the entire body of ones other beliefs. Ideas unable to conform to mens factual knowledge simply cannot have what James calls cash-value. Jamess relevant essays about truth sometimes raise questions that they do not satisfactorily answer. Some critics accuse him of advocating a subjectivist theory of truth. Elsewhere, James defends his views by suggesting two kinds of criteria for testing the meaning of any proposition. First, a proposition has meaning if it leads to observable consequences in experience. Second, a proposition is meaningful if someones belief in it leads to behavioral consequences. James seems to employ the first view when he writes about scientific and factual knowledge. He uses the second view when discussing certain moral and religious beliefs. It is the second view that worries some critics, who think that, if taken literally, it can justify as true any psychologically helpful belief.

Applications of Pragmatism
Most of the remaining essays in Pragmatism seek to illustrate how the pragmatic method and theory of truth may be applied to specific problems. These are predominantly philosophical rather than scientific problems. In Some Metaphysical Problems and The One and the Many, James applies his generous theory of meaning to such problems as the meaning of substance, the relative values of materialism and spiritualism, the problem of evil, the debate about freedom of the will, and the merits of monism and pluralism as cosmological notions. Pragmatism and Common Sense discusses three kinds of

knowledge whose truth-claims are perennial. Pragmatism and Humanism and Pragmatism and Religion indicate how pragmatism can mediate in disputes among hardheaded empiricists and abstract rationalists. Taking the traditional puzzles about substance, design in nature, and free will, James argues that such metaphysical issues often lead to no genuine consequences for action if treated in solely intellectual terms. In every genuine metaphysical dispute some practical issue, however conjectural and remote, is involved. Metaphysical arguments thus concern something other than what seems the case. Influenced by the thing- attribute aspect of grammar, people worry about substance because they suppose a something must support the external and psychological objects of our perceivable world beyond what these objects are experienced as. James asks us to imagine that a material or spiritual substance undergoes change without altering our perceptions of its supposed attributes. In such a case, our perception of the properties would be the same as before. It follows that the notion of substance as standing for something beyond perceived qualities of objects can add nothing to our actual knowledge of the things in the world. Only in the Catholic claims about the Eucharist can the notion of substance have any practical usea religious one. Similarly, arguments whether God or matter best explains the origin and development of the universe are unimportant so far as the observable facts go. Only ones expectations about the future can make the theist-materialist issue important. The pragmatic method leads to a slight edge for theism, according to James, since the belief in God guarantees an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. What the world is like, even if God created it, remains a matter for patient scientific labors to discover. The theistic conception of the worlds origin permits people a kind of enjoyment that materialism excludes. Morally, theism is preferable since it refuses to take human disasters as the absolutely final word, while materialism denies the eternity of the moral order.

The Design Question

The question of whether there is design in the world is also pointless if raised with scientific intent. The design issue is really a religious one. It is not open to purely rational solution. The significant aspects of the issue concern what that design may be, as well as the nature of any possible designer. James applies a similar treatment to the determinismversus-free- will controversy. To decide in favor of free will means to accept a faith that the universe can be improved through human effort. James calls this faith in improvability meliorism. In turn, such a belief requires rejection of any absolute monistic conception of the cosmos. It requires belief in the notion that reality is a multiverse. The universe is neither simply one nor an absolute randomness. It is a pluriverse that contains specific kinds of unity as well as directly experienced gaps. It is not now an absolute unity in light of our experience, but we may hope for such a completed unity as a possible future cosmic event. James insists on the misleading nature of traditional metaphysical disputes. Metaphysical arguments seem to concern problems that human intellect can solve if only that intellect gets them right. Yet, they are really practical problems. They are significant only when found to express hidden religious and moral issues. The pragmatist favors a decision for free will, belief in Gods existence, faith in an increasing unity in a pluralistic universe, and

hope that elements of design exist as grounds for ones belief in meliorism. Faith may rightfully decide when human reason proves insufficient. The reason is that such faith expresses confidence in the promise of the future and results in beneficial consequences for our present living. James rejects metaphysical monism for moral and religious reasons. Monism implies a certain completedness about the universe even now. This completedness requires the denial of free will and, if God exists, of a worthwhile God. Nevertheless, Jamess pluralism includes the view that many kinds of unity compose the universe. Intellect aims neither at variety nor unity, but at totality. The world contains important unities but is not a total unity. Some parts of the world are continuous with others, as in spacetime; practical continuities appear (as in the notion of physical gravity); and there are systems of influence and noninfluence which indicate existence of causal unities. Furthermore, there are generic unities (kinds), unities of social purpose, and aesthetic unities. These are experienced. Yet, James says, we never experience a universe pure and simple. Pragmatism therefore insists on a world as containing just as many continuities and disjunctions as experience shows to exist. The only ultimate unity may be an absolute knower of the system. Even the system may not always be considered to be a necessary unity, since the world may exist as eternally incompleteactually subject to addition and loss. Our knowledge of such a world grows slowly, through scientific criticism, common sense, and philosophic criticism. No one can demonstrate conclusively which, if any, of these ways of knowing is the truest. Common sense builds up customary ways of organizing the materials of experience. It uses such concepts as thing, same or different, kinds, minds, bodies, one time, one space, subjects and attributes, causal influences, the fancied, the real. Scientific criticism adds more sophisticated notionssuch as atoms and ethercasting some doubt on the adequacy of commonsense concepts. The philosophical stage gives no knowledge quite comparable to the other two. Philosophical criticism does not make possible description of details of nature. Our decisions about which philosophical views to adopt must turn on practical rather than theoretical criteria. On the other hand, choice between common sense and scientific notions will rest on existence of kinds of corroboration which, in principle, will always be lacking in the cases of competing philosophical claims. The essays in Pragmatism express a loosely stated yet consistent philosophical viewpoint. Through them runs the excitement of discovery that, if only the pragmatic method be adopted, many old and perplexing issues can be translated into practical ones. James seems eager to help people discover the metaphysical views that will conform to their experienced needs. On the other hand, he wants to insist on binding tests when the pragmatist handles common sense and science. He is less insistent on such tests in religious and moral domains. His major thesis is that all true processes must lead to the fact of directly verifying sensible experience somewhere, which somebodys ideas have copied. His generosity remains attractive even to some critics who reject his philosophical conclusions.

Additional Reading

Allen, Gay Wilson. William James. New York: Viking Press, 1967. This reliable and readable biography situates James in his social and historical context. Barzun, Jacques. A Stroll with William James. New York: Harper & Row, 1983. Instructively discusses important subtleties surrounding the terms pragmatism and pragmatic in this readable introduction to Jamess intellectual world. Bauerlein, Mark. The Pragmatic Mind: Explorations in the Psychology of Belief. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997. A helpful treatment of Jamess views about the relationships among belief, consciousness, the human will, and knowledge, and claims about truth. Brown, Hunter. William James on Radical Empiricism and Religion. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2000. A study that argues for the consistency of Jamess philosophy of radical empiricism and his examination of religious experience in The Will to Believe. Cotkin, George. William James, Public Philosopher. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Cotkin explores the social and political context in which James worked and draws out Jamess contributions to the important debates of his day as well as the lasting implications of his work. Croce, Paul Jerome. Science and Religion in the Era of William James. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Assess how debates about science and religion informed Jamess philosophy. Moore, Edward C. William James. New York: Washington Square Press, 1965. An accessible overview, written by a philosopher, which includes a useful outline of the central arguments in Pragmatism (pp. 70-114). Myers, Gerald E. William James: His Life and Thought. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986. A well-written, carefully researched, comprehensive study of Jamess life and thought. Olin, Doris, ed. William James: Pragmatism, in Focus. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1992. Essentially a casebook, the complete text of Pragmatism is presented together with Olins succinct introduction and six discussions, including sophisticated philosophical commentaries by G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. Perry, Ralph Barton. The Thought and Character of William James. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996. A reprint of a classic by a well-respected philosopher, this book contains valuable information about Jamess life and work. Putnam, Ruth Anna, ed. The Cambridge Companion to William James. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Significant essays by well-qualified James scholars interpret and assess a wide range of topics and problems in his philosophy and psychology.

Roth, John K. Freedom and the Moral Life: The Ethics of William James. Philadelphia, Pa.: Westminster Press, 1969. Focuses on key themes in Jamess moral philosophy and evaluates the significance of Jamess ethics. Seigfried, Charlene Haddock. Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. An important interpreter of Jamess philosophy appraises continuities and discontinuities between American pragmatism and feminist theory. Simon, Linda. Genuine Reality: A Life of William James. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1998. A worthwhile account of Jamess life and his pioneering work in psychology and philosophy. Skrupskelis, Ignas K. William James: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977. Provides annotated references to reviews, articles, and doctoral dissertations on Pragmatism and Jamess other works. Suckiel, Ellen Kappy. Heavens Champion: William Jamess Philosophy of Religion. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996. A study of the themes and lasting significance of Jamess philosophy and its emphasis on religion. Taylor, Eugene. William James on Consciousness Beyond the Margin. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996. Explores Jamess interests in and theories about human consciousness, psychology, religious experience, and other forms of experience. Wild, John. The Radical Empiricism of William James. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969. Shows how Jamess psychology and pragmatism relate to European phenomenology and existentialism. David Warren Bowen John K. Roth