Pragmatism (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading): A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking

By Bryan Vescio and William James

The word "pragmatism" is used everywhere today, from business to sports to politics. Although the word hadnt yet entered everyday language when William James published Pragmatism in 1907, the philosopher believed its doctrine had virtually become common sense in twentieth-century America. For James, pragmatism was a specific philosophical alternative to essentialism and foundationalism and argued that ideas are meaningful only insofar as they have practical consequences in concrete human experience; however today pragmatism has come to denote merely a general willingness to compromise principles, even to the point of selfishness or irresponsibility. Written in an engaging and accessible style, Pragmatism is a valuable corrective to modern uses of the word, since the voice that speaks in its pages embodies precisely the opposite values from the pejorative senses the word has acquired.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411428881

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

WHEN WILLIAM JAMES PUBLISHED REVISED VERSIONS OF HIS LOWELL lectures under the title Pragmatism in 1907, he added the subtitle, A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. James believed that for his audience of common readers, the philosophical doctrine that ideas are meaningful or valuable only insofar as they have practical consequences in concrete human experience had virtually become common sense in twentieth-century America, though the word pragmatism itself had not yet entered into everyday language. For twenty-first-century readers, the situation is almost exactly reversed. The words pragmatism and pragmatist are used everywhere today, from business to sports to politics. But it has come to denote merely a general willingness to compromise principles, even to the point of selfishness or irresponsibility, not the specific philosophical alternative to essentialism and foundationalism that James articulated. Written in an engaging and accessible style, Pragmatism is still a superb introduction to a set of enormously influential philosophical ideas, particularly at a time when the radical implications of those ideas have largely become invisible to the common reader. It is also a valuable corrective to modern uses of the word pragmatism, since the voice that speaks in its pages embodies precisely the opposite values from the pejorative senses the word has acquired.

William James may well have been born into the nineteenth century’s most interesting family. His father, Henry, was the wayward son of successful Irish immigrants in New York State who ultimately found religion, albeit the anti-institutional religion of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. William, born in 1842, was the first in a remarkable series of children that included Henry, Jr., who would become a famous novelist, Alice, a talented diarist in her own right who was victimized by her father’s sexist attitudes about education, and Wilky and Robertson, two somewhat less talented brothers who met rather tragic ends. The children were moved from school to school, and even from America to Europe and back again, in their father’s relentless quest for the ideal education. William initially wanted to be a painter, but partly because of his father’s disapproval, he turned to medicine instead. His interests gradually shifted from physiology to psychology, which he began teaching at Harvard in 1875. There he established the first ever psychology laboratory, and in 1890 he practically invented the modern discipline of psychology in his two-volume Principles of Psychology, considered by many to be his most important achievement. But in the meantime, his interests were shifting again in the direction of philosophy. The seeds of this shift had been sown back in 1869, when he battled a deep depression, brought on in part by numerous physical ailments, but also, he claimed, by doubts about the existence of free will given the modern scientific picture of the world that he, along with the rest of the nineteenth century, was beginning to find irresistible. James claimed to have found his cure in the philosophy of Charles Renouvier, and during the 1890s James elaborated his own response to Renouvier’s ideas about belief in a series of lectures and articles that culminated in the publication of Pragmatism in 1907. This event also proved to be the culmination of James’ career; he retired from teaching that same year and died only three years later.

Pragmatism consists of eight lectures that he had delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston in November and December of 1906, and then repeated at Columbia University in January and February of 1907. But he had begun working out the ideas contained in them at least a decade earlier. In 1898, he delivered a lecture entitled Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results at the University of California, and much of this lecture was incorporated into the essays that comprise Pragmatism after further trial runs in lectures at Wellesley, the University of Chicago, Stanford, and James’ courses at Harvard. The purpose of the lectures and the book they became was at once to popularize contemporary trends in philosophy and to offer a new position to mediate its disputes. The book’s rhetorical strategy is entirely in keeping with the anti-institutional bias James inherited from his father, appealing to a lay audience for a resolution to the squabbles of professional philosophers. This strategy, which characterized the present dilemma in philosophy as a clash between the personal temperaments of tender-minded idealists and tough-minded empiricists, had more or less predictable results: wild popularity among lay readers and resentment among professional philosophers. But the book’s strategy and its ideas are ultimately of a piece, since James’ pragmatism holds that the foundations of ultimate beliefs are generally non-rational and demands that theory be answerable to concrete experience.

Although growing up in an atmosphere of religious speculation must have laid the foundation for James’ forays into philosophy, his mature thought was prompted by the particular issue that led in part to his depression of 1869-72. James was an early and enthusiastic supporter of Darwin’s theory of evolution, but that theory and the scientific culture it helped create seemed to place human beings at the mercy of vast, impersonal laws and contingencies, leaving no room for any notion of free will. This was especially troubling for a deeply individualistic and iconoclastic thinker, an intellectual heir to Emerson (whom his father had known), and James only began to grope toward a solution to the problem when he read the work of Renouvier. Renouvier argued that the ability to hold a thought or belief when others are available proves the existence of free will, and this idea inspired James’ famous declaration that his first act of free will would be to believe in free will. But this solution was not entirely satisfactory to James, as evidenced by the fact that he spent the rest of his career filling in the details of his own post-Darwinian account of the human mind.

He found an important clue in the work of his friend Charles Sanders Peirce, who had coined the term pragmatism in the course of meetings of The Metaphysical Club, an informal group that existed briefly in the early 1870s and that also included such figures as Chauncey Wright and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. According to James, Peirce was the first to use the word to name the view that the meaning and value of a thought lie in its practical consequences. This view of cognitive activity appealed to James in part because it promised an account of the mind that squared with Darwinian naturalism, making the mind and its products tools for coping with the world, weapons in the struggle for survival. It offered a compromise between the tough-minded empiricist notion that an objective world commands and adjudicates thought and the tender-minded idealist notion that subjective thought constructs the world, because it argued that thought was indeed a way of manipulating the world, but a world that is constantly pushing back. At the same time the idea appealed to James’ profoundly anti-authoritarian sensibility, making the abstract, high-minded flights of philosophers answerable to the banal, everyday toils of common people. While Peirce was inspired primarily by Kantian rationalism, James found his philosophical precursors in the more down-to-earth British tradition of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Mill. In his book, he cites these thinkers as forerunners of pragmatism, along with even earlier thinkers, like Socrates and Aristotle, who tested their theories against ordinary experience. The existence of this tradition is what James meant when he called pragmatism a new name for some old ways of thinking, but James was notorious for giving others too much credit for his own original ideas. In spite of the fact that the name was borrowed from Peirce, James’ book was the first self-conscious, thorough, and consistent attempt to explore the implications of pragmatist thinking.

One of James’ earliest developments of the ideas espoused in Pragmatism occurs in an 1878 article entitled On Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence. Many passages in the book suggest that one of the primary motives for his version of pragmatism is the general abandonment of the idea that truth and knowledge consist of a subjective mind accurately representing or corresponding to an objective reality. It is the positive accounts of truth and knowledge with which James replaces the correspondence theory that have proven most controversial. In his book, James gives the word pragmatism two distinct senses: it names a method for solving metaphysical disputes, and it also names a theory of truth. The pragmatic method, James tells us, finds solutions to metaphysical dilemmas by comparing the practical consequences that would result from adopting the alternative views, in itself, he says, it proposes no new metaphysical theses. The pragmatist theory of truth, however, is itself a metaphysical thesis. James begins famously by defining the true as the good or the expedient in the way of belief, and his entire sixth lecture is devoted to an explanation of these ideas. Here he identifies truth with verification, arguing that beliefs are true insofar as they can be made consistent with both existing beliefs and new experience. This theory appears to hold both that truth is made by human beings and that it can be changed over time. It is indeed the basically static relation between mind and world to which James objected in the correspondence theory, and his goal seems to have been to make truth a process—to make it more consistent with the world in flux described by Darwin’s theory of evolution.

James thought that his chief antagonists would be tender-minded idealists, and he spends much of his book arguing against the rationalism of philosophers like F. H. Bradley and his Harvard colleague Josiah Royce. But the most devastating criticisms of his work came rather from the more tough-minded school of logical positivism that was emerging at the time. The logical positivists objected most strenuously to James’ pragmatist theory of truth. To them, his notion that truth is made by human beings and measured by coherence among beliefs sounded like another version of the idealist notion that human beings construct reality. G. E. Moore criticized the identification of truth with utility by citing beliefs that are true though not at all useful to those who hold them. The pragmatic method was also suspect, because what counts as beneficial practical consequences of adopting a belief always depends on other beliefs. Such a method could never provide the neutral ground it promised for adjudicating metaphysical disputes. Bertrand Russell famously dismissed pragmatism as a power philosophy. These criticisms carried the day, and the logical positivists were able to establish their own method of analysis as the dominant mode of philosophy in the English-speaking world for the rest of the century. In this tradition of analytic philosophy, James’ pragmatism has largely been neglected, often classified merely as a version of relativism.

The influence of James’ work has continued to be felt in more subtle ways, however. John Dewey, whose work has made significant contributions to fields from epistemology to education, continued to develop the main threads of James’ pragmatism into the 1950s. The contemporary philosopher Richard Rorty has argued that the analytic tradition itself has been moving closer to pragmatism throughout the century. James’ views about the interdependence of our beliefs have certainly influenced the holist theories of belief and meaning developed by Willard Van Orman Quine, who has in turn influenced such prominent contemporary philosophers as Donald Davidson. Some analytic philosophers, like Hilary Putnam, have begun to acknowledge their debt to James and Dewey by calling themselves pragmatists. Rorty himself is the leading figure associated with this neo-pragmatism, and he has suggested that James be read not for his problematic positive views about the pragmatic method and theory of truth, but rather for his objections to traditional philosophical views like the correspondence theory of truth. In this light, James’ pragmatism bears strong affinities with postmodernist ideas that derive mainly from a Continental tradition of philosophy running from Friedrich Nietzsche through Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida.

Undoubtedly, though, what continues to bring readers back to Pragmatism is the remarkably genial way in which it presents its rather contentious ideas. The unmistakable personal style of William James is everywhere in the book, from its homey metaphors and examples drawn from ordinary experience to its pleas to its readers for indulgence to its often exultant celebration of human potential. This is telling in a book that describes a philosophy as a revelation of how intensely odd the personal flavor of some fellow creature is. The mind that lies behind Pragmatism is thoroughly tolerant and pluralistic, relentlessly curious and adventurous, and unfailingly frank, a very far cry from the qualities of narrowness and resignation that are currently associated with the word. Not coincidentally, the qualities that characterize James’ personal temperament are also the qualities of American culture at its best. It is for this reason that pragmatism has been described as the quintessential American philosophy. The stylistic flavor of William James is the intellectual flavor of pragmatism, and modern readers will find the style, like the ideas that are its subject matter, intensely odd yet intensely familiar.

Bryan Vescio teaches in the Department of Humanistic Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

PREFACE

THE LECTURES THAT FOLLOW WERE DELIVERED AT THE LOWELL Institute in Boston in November and December, 1906, and in January, 1907, at Columbia University, in New York. They are printed as delivered, without developments or notes. The pragmatic movement, so-called—I do not like the name, but apparently it is too late to change it—seems to have rather suddenly precipitated itself out of the air. A number of tendencies that have always existed in philosophy have all at once become conscious of themselves collectively, and of their combined mission; and this has occurred in so many countries, and from so many different points of view, that much unconcerted statement has resulted. I have sought to unify the picture as it presents itself to my own eyes, dealing in broad strokes, and avoiding minute controversy. Much futile controversy might have been avoided, I believe, if our critics had been willing to wait until we got our message fairly out.

If my lectures interest any reader in the general subject, he will doubtless wish to read farther. I therefore give him a few references.

In America, John Dewey’s Studies in Logical Theory are the foundation. Read also by Dewey the articles in the Philosophical Review, vol. xv, pp. 113 and 465, in Mind, vol. xv, p. 293, and in the Journal of Philosophy, vol. iv, p. 197.

Probably the best statements to begin with however, are F. C. S. Schiller’s in his Studies in Humanism, especially the essays numbered i, v, vi, vii, xviii and xix. His previous essays and in general the polemic literature of the subject are fully referred to in his footnotes.

Furthermore, see J. Milhaud: le Rationnel, 1898, and the fine articles by Le Roy in the Revue de Métaphysique, vols. 7, 8 and 9. Also articles by Blondel and de Sailly in the Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne, 4me Série, vols. 2 and 3. Papini announces a book on Pragmatism, in the French language, to be published very soon.

To avoid one misunderstanding at least, let me say that there is no logical connexion between pragmatism, as I understand it, and a doctrine which I have recently set forth as radical empiricism. The latter stands on its own feet. One may entirely reject it and still be a pragmatist.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY, April 1907

002 LECTURE ONE 003

THE PRESENT DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY

IN THE PREFACE TO THAT ADMIRABLE COLLECTION OF ESSAYS OF HIS called Heretics, Mr. Chesterton writes these words:

There are some people—and I am one of them—who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy it is important to know the enemy’s numbers, but still more important to know the enemy’s philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether in the long run anything else affects them.

I think with Mr. Chesterton in this matter. I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you