Epistemology ,
Pragmatism Pragmatism is a philosophical approach that seeks to both define truth and resolve metaphysical issues. James created a
pragmatic theory of truth, which was a synthesis of
correspondence theory of truth and
coherence theory of truth, with an added dimension. His book of lectures on pragmatism is arguably the most influential book of
American philosophy. James demonstrates an application of his method in the form of a simple story:A live squirrel supposed to be clinging on one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree's opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this:
Does the man go round the squirrel or not?James solves the issue by making a distinction between the
practical meanings of 'round'. On the one hand, 'round' can mean that the man occupies the space north, east, south, and west of the squirrel; and on the other 'round' can mean that the man occupies the space facing the squirrel's belly, back and sides. Depending on what the one means by 'going round', the answer would be clear. From this example James derives the definition of the
pragmatic method: to settle metaphysical disputes, one must simply make a distinction of practical consequences between notions, then, the answer is either clear, or the "dispute is idle". He argued that a belief is considered true if it functions for everyone. To further detail this idea, both James and his colleague,
Charles Sanders Peirce, coined the term "
cash value", i.e. that the meaning of something is the "entire set of its practical consequences" and a single truth "must somehow be capable of being related to some sort of collection of possible empirical observations under specifiable conditions."
Truth, fact and verifiability In "What Pragmatism Means" (1906), James describes the relationship between truth and fact: This is multilayered: truth is both verifiable to the extent that thoughts and statements correspond with actual things and to the extent to which they "hang together", or cohere (as pieces of a puzzle might fit together); these, in turn, are verified by the observed results of the application of an idea to actual practice. In other words, a statement's truthfulness is verifiable through its correspondence with reality and its observable effects of putting the idea to practice. As such, a true idea or belief is one that we can blend with our thinking so that it can be justified through experiences. James gives the example of God: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.In other words: "The problem is to build it [theology] out and determine it so that it will combine satisfactorily with all the other working truths."
Will to believe doctrine In his 1896 lecture titled "The Will to Believe", In
The Meaning of Truth (1909), in response to critics of pragmatism, James seems to speak of truth in relativistic terms: "The critic's trouble...seems to come from his taking the word 'true' irrelatively, whereas the pragmatist always means 'true for him who experiences the workings.'" However, James rejected his critics who accused him of
relativism,
skepticism, or
agnosticism, and of believing only in relative truths, and supported an
epistemological realism position. A criticism of pragmatism is that the best justification for a claim is whether it works. On the other hand, a claim that does not have outcomes cannot be justified, or unjustified, because it will not make a difference. As James states: "There can be no difference that doesn't make a difference." Whether James means the greatest number of positive consequences (in light of
utilitarianism), a consequence that considers other perspectives (such as his compromise of the tender and tough ways of thinking), or a completely different take altogether, it is unclear what consequences truly fit the pragmatic standard. The closest James comes to explaining this idea is by telling his audience to weigh the difference it would "practically make to anyone" if one opinion over the other were true, and although he attempts to clarify this, he never specifies the method by which one would weigh the difference between one opinion over the other. Describing how everything is derived from perception, Peirce uses the example of the
doctrine of transubstantiation to show exactly how he defines practical consequences.
Protestants interpret the bread and wine of the
Eucharist is flesh and blood in only a subjective sense, while
Catholics would label them as actual, and divinely mystical properties of flesh via the "body, blood, soul, and divinity", even with the physical properties remaining as bread and wine in appearance. But to everyone, there can be no knowledge of the wine and bread of the Eucharist unless it is established that either wine and bread possesses certain properties or that anything that is interpreted as the blood and body of Christ is the blood and body of Christ. With this Peirce declares that "our action has exclusive reference to what affects the senses", and that we can mean nothing by transubstantiation than "what has certain effects, direct or indirect, upon our senses". In this sense, James's pragmatic influencer Peirce establishes that what counts as a practical consequence or effect is what can affect one's senses and what is comprehensible and fathomable in the natural world. James's emphasis on diversity as the default human condition—over and against duality, especially
Hegelian dialectical duality—has maintained a strong influence in American culture. James's description of the
mind-world connection, which he described in terms of a "
stream of consciousness", had a direct and significant impact on
avant-garde and
modernist literature and art, notably in the case of
James Joyce.
Free will James was prompted to believe his will was free by reading
Charles Renouvier, whose work convinced James to convert from
monism to
pluralism. In his diary entry of April 30, 1870, James wrote: James argues that the question of free will revolves around chance, the idea that some events are possibilities, things that could happen but are not guaranteed. 'Chance' is a neutral term (it is neither inherently positive nor "intrinsically irrational and preposterous"); the only information it gives about the events to which it applies is that they are disconnected from other things – they are "not controlled, secured, or necessitated by other things" before they happen. Chance in regards to our actions is possible because our amount of effort is subject to change. If the amount of effort we put into something is predetermined, our actions would be predetermined. Free will in relation to effort also balances "
ideals and
propensities—the things you see as best versus the things that are easiest to do". Without effort, "the propensity is stronger than the ideal". To act according to your ideals, you must resist the things that are easiest, and this can only be done with effort. James states that the free will question is therefore simple: "it relates solely to the amount of effort of attention or consent which we can at any time put forth". In other words, if there were no regrets or judgments then all the bad things would not be considered bad, but merely as predetermined because there are no options of 'good' and 'bad'. Pragmatically, the idea of free will is truer, as "it better accommodates the judgments of regret and morality." In this talk he defined the common terms
hard determinism and
soft determinism (now more commonly called
compatibilism): Old-fashioned determinism was what we may call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom. Chance, on the other hand, is indeterministic, and pertains to possibilities that could happen but are not guaranteed. James was an advocate of
theistic finitism, which he used to explain the
problem of evil.
Mysticism James devoted much of his career to the psychological investigation of
mysticism. This led him to experiment with
chloral hydrate (1870),
amyl nitrite (1875),
nitrous oxide (1882), and
peyote (1896). Inspired by a report by Benjamin Paul Blood in 1874, James experimented with inhaled nitrous oxide, upon which he experienced a "tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination" in which "every opposition ... vanished in a higher unity" and "the ego and its objects ... are one." Having been an ardent anti-Hegelian, James claimed that it was only when he was under the influence of nitrous oxide that he was able to understand
Hegel. He concluded that while the revelations of the mystic hold true, they hold true only for the mystic; for others, they are certainly ideas to be considered, but can hold no claim to truth without personal experience of such. He was powerfully affected by the event and struggled greatly to interpret it. His journey of self discovery instigated by the experience is largely what inspired his later in-depth investigations of mysticism. James provided a description of mystical experience in
The Varieties of Religious Experience. He posits four criteria as "sufficient to mark out a group of states of consciousness" which may be called the "mystical group". These criteria are: • Ineffability – no adequate report of the contents of the experience can be given by words. This was the "handiest" of descriptors for James, and illustrates the necessity of direct, first-hand experience to actually understand a mystical state of consciousness. • Noetic quality – "...mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge." Mystical consciousness generates a feeling of insight into truths inaccessible to ordinary reasoning. These intuitions or insights are often felt as authoritative both during and after they are experienced, but are necessarily confined by the first criterion of ineffability, and are thus inexpressible in words. In viewing mysticism from a psychological perspective, he acknowledged that the limits of our being extend far beyond what is ordinarily accessible by our sense perception, and that our finite beings are affected by unconscious forces, "But that which produces effects within another reality must be termed a reality itself, so I feel as if we had no philosophic excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world unreal." The lending of his name made
Leonora Piper a famous medium. In 1885, the year after the death of his young son, James had his first sitting with Piper at the suggestion of his mother-in-law. He was soon convinced that Piper knew things she could only have discovered by supernatural means. He expressed his belief in Piper by saying, "If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, it is enough if you prove that one crow is white. My white crow is Mrs. Piper." However, James did not believe that Piper was in contact with spirits. After evaluating sixty-nine reports of Piper's mediumship he considered the hypothesis of
telepathy as well as Piper obtaining information about her sitters by natural means such as her memory recalling information. According to James the "spirit-control" hypothesis of her mediumship was incoherent, irrelevant and in cases demonstrably false. James held séances with Piper and was impressed by some of the details he was given; however, according to
Massimo Polidoro a maid in the household of James was friendly with a maid in Piper's house and this may have been a source of information that Piper used for private details about James. Bibliographers
Frederick Burkhardt and
Fredson Bowers who compiled the works of James wrote "It is thus possible that Mrs. Piper's knowledge of the James family was acquired from the gossip of servants and that the whole mystery rests on the failure of the people upstairs to realize that servants [downstairs] also have ears." James was convinced that the "future will corroborate" the existence of
telepathy. Psychologists such as
James McKeen Cattell and
Edward B. Titchener took issue with James's support for
psychical research and considered his statements unscientific. Cattell in a letter to James wrote that the "Society for Psychical Research is doing much to injure psychology".
Psychology Instincts Like
Sigmund Freud, James was influenced by Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. At the core of James's theory of psychology, as defined in
The Principles of Psychology (1890), was a system of "instincts". James wrote that humans had many instincts, even more than other animals. These can be overridden by experience and by each other, as many of the instincts are actually in conflict with each other.
Theory of emotion James is one of the two namesakes of the
James–Lange theory of
emotion, which he formulated independently of
Carl Lange in the 1880s. The theory holds that emotion is the mind's perception of physiological conditions that result from some stimulus. In 1884, James published his article "What is an Emotion?" in
Mind. This article was important, not because it definitively answered the question it raised, but because of the way in which James phrased his response. He conceived of an emotion in terms of a sequence of events that starts with the occurrence of an arousing stimulus (the
sympathetic nervous system or the
parasympathetic nervous system); and ends with a passionate feeling, a conscious emotional experience. In "What is an Emotion?", James gave his oft-cited example of a bear. He asked the question: do we run from a bear because we are afraid or are we afraid because we run? He answered this saying that, it is not that we see a bear, fear it, and run; we see a bear and run; consequently, we fear the bear. I.e. we run because we are afraid, was
wrong, and instead argued that we are afraid because we run: Our natural way of thinking about... emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My theory, on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion (called 'feeling' by
Damasio).For James, our mind's
perception of our bodily responses, e.g. higher adrenaline level, racing heart, tight stomach, sweaty palms, tense muscles, and so on;
sympathetic nervous system, is the emotion. Emotions feel different from other states of mind because they have these bodily responses that give rise to internal sensations, and different emotions feel different from one another because they are accompanied by different bodily responses and sensations. The mental aspect of emotion, the feeling, is a slave to its physiology, not vice versa: we do not tremble because we are afraid or cry because we feel sad; we are afraid because we tremble and are sad because we cry. In each case, the physiological responses return to the brain in the form of bodily sensations, and the unique pattern of sensory feedback gives each emotion its unique quality. For example, the bodily experience of seeing the bear (fear), will be quite different from other experiences, such as experiencing elation or grief - each have their own physiological signature.
Legacy and consequences This way of thinking about emotion has great consequences for the philosophy of
aesthetics as well as to the philosophy and practice of education. Here is a passage from his work,
The Principles of Psychology, that spells out those consequences: A major goal of emotion research today is still to elucidate James' stimulus-to-feeling sequence—to figure out what processes come between the stimulus and the feeling. James' theory of emotion was also independently developed in Italy by the anthropologist
Giuseppe Sergi.
Theory of the self '''James' theory of the self''' divided a person's mental picture of self into two categories: the "Me" and the "I". The "Me" can be thought of as a separate object or individual a person refers to when describing their personal experiences; while the "I" is the self that knows who they are and what they have done in their life. James called the "I" the thinking self, which cannot be further divided. He linked this part of the self to the soul of a person, or what is now thought of as the mind. James further divided the "Me" part of self into: a material, a social, and a spiritual self, as below. James argued that it is not a substance and therefore cannot be examined by science. This association occurs on an atomic level. Small physical changes occur in the brain which eventually form complex ideas or associations. Thoughts are formed as these complex ideas work together and lead to new experiences.
Isaac Newton and
David Hartley both were precursors to this school of thought, proposing such ideas as "physical vibrations in the brain, spinal cord, and nerves are the basis of all sensations, all ideas, and all motions...". James disagreed with associationism in that he believed it to be too simple. He referred to associationism as "psychology without a soul" because there is nothing from within creating ideas; they just arise by associating objects with one another.
Spiritualism, on the other hand, is the view that mental events are attributed to the soul. Whereas in associationism, ideas and behaviors are separate, in spiritualism, they are connected. Spiritualism encompasses
innatism, which argues that ideas cause behavior. Ideas of past behavior influence the way a person will act in the future, and all these ideas are all tied together by the soul. Therefore, an inner soul causes one to have a thought, which leads them to perform a behavior, and memory of past behaviors determine how one will act in the future. James introduces a notion of receptivities of the moment. The societal mutations from
generation to generation are determined (directly or indirectly) mainly by the acts or examples of individuals whose genius was so adapted to the receptivities of the moment or whose accidental position of authority was so critical that they became ferments, initiators of movements, setters of precedent or fashion, centers of corruption, or destroyers of other persons, whose gifts, had they had free play, would have led society in another direction.
View on social Darwinism While James accepted Darwin's theories of biological evolution, he regarded
social Darwinism as propagated by philosophers such as
Herbert Spencer as a sham. He was highly skeptical of applying Darwin's formula of natural selection to human societies in a way that put the Anglo-Saxons on top of the chain. James' rejection of social Darwinism was a minority opinion at Harvard in the 1870s and 1880s. == Personal life ==