Robert Burch
William James was born on the eleventh of January 1842, into a wealthy family in which intellectual endeavor was highly valued. From 1857 until 1860 his education took place in France and Switzerland. Upon returning to the United States at age 18, he undertook various studies. These included art (his first and possibly his greatest passion), science, and finally (in 1863) medicine. In 1865 he traveled with the notable paleontologist and zoologist Louis Agassiz to the mouth of the Amazon River to collect biological specimens. During this trip he began to experience a variety of health problems, which continued to plague him thereafter and which seemed to have the result that he was always very attentive to his own bodily sensations and perhaps also somewhat prone to hypochondria. James continued his medical studies, going to Germany to do so in 1867 and 1868; there he studied physiology with Herman Helmholtz, and became friends with psychologist Carl Stumpf. James discussed with Stumpf many of the ideas of Wilhelm Wundt, who was widely regarded at the time as the greatest of all of the contemporary psychologists.
After returning to the United States, James received his medical degree from Harvard in 1869. Soon after receiving his degree, James experienced (in 1869 and early 1870) a serious case of major depression. He ultimately recovered from this depression, and he associated his recovery with acquiring a new way of thinking about three philosophical problems: the problem of monism, the problem of determinism, and the problem of pessimism versus optimism. James’s depressive episode and his recovery from this episode will be looked at more closely in the following section of this article.
In 1871 and 1872 James took part in philosophical discussions with a group of exceptionally able graduates of Harvard, including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Chauncey Wright, and Charles Sanders Peirce. The group called themselves “the Metaphysical Club.” Many of James’s later ideas had an origin in one way or another amidst the Metaphysical Club’s discussions. For example, Darwin’s theory of evolution was a major focus of interest of the Club. So also was Peirce’s novel account of cognition and scientific research, which James later called “pragmatism.” James always regarded Chauncey Wright’s careful analytic criticisms of monism to be some of the most acute thinking he ever encountered.
In 1873 James became instructor in anatomy and physiology at Harvard, but his main focus of attention was already turning in the direction of psychology and philosophy. In 1875 he offered his first course in psychology at Harvard and established the first psychology research laboratory in America (1875 was also the year that Wundt established the first psychology research laboratory in Europe). In 1876 James became assistant professor of physiology. He married Alice Gibbons in 1878, and over the following years the husband and wife raised five children. In 1878 also James wrote a treatise on psychology. In 1879 he offered his first course in philosophy. It was also in 1879 that he published the paper, “The Sentiment of Rationality” in which psychology and philosophy are closely intertwined. After 1879 James’s attention was totally absorbed by psychology and philosophy. In 1880 he became assistant professor of philosophy at Harvard. By 1885 he had become full professor of philosophy.
In 1890 James’s first major published work appeared: The Principles of Psychology. In 1892 he published Psychology: the Briefer Course, which soon became known as “the Jimmy” on account of its ability to open up the meaning of the earlier and much larger book. Soon James was as hard at work on philosophy as was on empirical psychology. The Will to Believe and Other Essays on Popular Philosophy was published in 1897. In 1899 his interest in education resulted in Talks to Teachers. In 1901 and 1902 James gave the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh. These lectures were published as The Varieties of Religious Experience. In 1906 he gave the Lowell Lectures at Harvard; these were published as Pragmatism. In 1908 at Oxford he gave the Hibbert Lectures, which were published as A Pluralistic Universe. In 1909 he attempted to clarify his much criticized – and in James’s view much misunderstood – ideas about truth in Pragmatism by publishing a new work on truth called The Meaning of Truth.
James died of heart disease on August 26, 1910.
As a philosopher James is widely regarded, along with Peirce, as one of the founders of American pragmatism. James in particular is regarded as putting forward his own novel, but still pragmatic, theory of truth. Beyond these general assertions, however, there is not universal agreement as to what exactly and in detail James’s pragmatic theory involves. It is not unusual to find almost opposite interpretations of James. There are those who consider James’s pragmatism a relativistic position, and there are those, including James himself, who deny that his position is relativistic. There are those who consider that James had a “coherence theory” of truth, somewhat akin to theories of truth often found in German and English idealists (for which truth is a matter of the internal coherence of a system of ideas). There are those, including James himself, who assert that he had a “correspondence theory” of truth, according to which truth is a matter of a correspondence between thoughts or assertions on the one hand and facts on the other hand. Interpretations of James have thus varied widely. A number of factors have contributed to this situation.
One factor that contributes to making James not always easy to pin down in detail is his writing style, which is more typical of a novelist than of a philosopher. Like David Hume, James exercised a strong literary bent in writing philosophy, which makes him, like Hume, usually easy to read at a casual level but often difficult to grasp in precise detail.
Aside from the literary flavor of James’s writings, a second factor in much of his philosophical writings contributes to the difficulty of getting at a precise account of James’s doctrines. Before saying what this second factor is, we can take note that the immediate effects of this second factor are prominent in much commentary on James’s thought. From the time of publication of Ralph Barton Perry’s comprehensive, two-volume work The Thought and Character of William James (1935) to the present day, scholarly commentary on William James has often exhibited the following special property: in it discussion of James’s philosophical thought and discussion of James’s personal biography are extremely closely intertwined with each other. The philosopher’s doctrines and arguments, on the one hand, and the man’s psychology, character, and life history, on the other hand, appear almost as one and the same thing. Thus, it is difficult to separate in this commentary the doctrine from the man.
The aforementioned “second factor” that makes it difficult to pin James down exactly – and which has the result that man and doctrine are often merged in commentary on James – is James’s own tendency, especially in the decade or so following 1870, to write essays that essentially, if not always formally, were to some extent self-referential. This self-referential character of his writings was connected with the previously mentioned period of major depression into which James had fallen and from which he had then subsequently recovered. Accordingly, it is useful to look further into this period.
Several years before his entering medical school James had struggled to find his own path in life and had ardently wanted to become a painter. His father, however, went to extremes to prevent James from pursuing an artistic vocation and urged upon him a career in science and engineering. Medicine was perhaps a compromise, and James received his MD degree from Harvard in 1869 at age twenty-seven. The depressive episode followed shortly afterwards. It was connected in James’s mind with his attachment at the time to the philosophical ideas of monism, determinism, and pessimism. The depression lasted several months before it began to resolve itself. The lifting of the depression in February of 1870, moreover, was connected in James’s mind with his reading of the French philosopher Charles Bernard Renouvier (1815–1903). It was Renouvier who led James to become increasingly convinced of the genuine reality and efficacy of human free will. Many of James’s Renouvier-influenced writings in the decade or so after this episode were efforts to describe the personal attitudes and beliefs that contributed both to his recovery and to the sustaining of it. These writings took the form of general and somewhat abstract discussions of the relation between the individual human will and the constitution of reality. They had on the whole an optimistic note: there is some relation of “congeniality” between the world and the human will. In fact, the writings describe patterns of thinking that led James into recovery, but they do so in a rather disguised way, as philosophical points that on the surface of things have the appearance of being far removed from James himself.
A third factor that makes James’s thought hard to grasp in detail and that also contributes to the merging of James the philosopher and James the man is the ongoing attention James himself gave to empirical and introspective psychology. As was mentioned earlier in this article, although James was professionally trained as a medical doctor, specializing in anatomy and physiology, his attention quickly turned to psychology as his area of special interest. As was also said: James established a psychology laboratory at Harvard in 1875; his earliest writings (c. 1878) were concerned with psychology; and his first major published work was The Principles of Psychology (1890). Many commentators have considered The Principles to be James’s masterpiece; and, indeed, it made James the premier psychologist of the time in American and perhaps also – along with Wilhelm Max Wundt (1832–1920) – in the world. James’s theory of sensations and emotions as being felt bodily conditions is even nowadays still cited as “the James (or: James-Lange) theory of the emotions.” (For a while at Harvard even James’s professional title was Professor of Psychology. Philosophy and psychology at the time were not clearly demarcated from one another in the university.) The Varieties of Religious Experience is almost purely a work in descriptive psychology of religion, and in particular it contains lengthy discussions of the psychology of religious conversion, which according to James are convulsive revolutions in opinion that appear suddenly but that are nevertheless quite long in preparation.
James the psychologist will be looked at further in the fifth section of this article. For now the point is merely to note that from the outset James was as much empirical psychologist as philosopher, and that in some ways, perhaps, he was even more empirical psychologist than philosopher. Now, this fact – especially when it is coupled with his introspective approaches to psychology of the sort that are associated (rightly or wrongly) with the name of Wundt – had a powerful influence on the details of many of James’s philosophical arguments. In particular this fact, conjoined with James’s flair for literary narrative, made James appreciative of concrete and down-to-earth exposition and examples. In almost all of his writings, James tends to distrust abstract and general philosophical doctrines; he prefers to avoid excessive reliance on “ism” words. As the point is put in Pragmatism, along with (James) Clerk Maxwell James’s desire was to understand “the particular go” of things. (It was, by the way, James’s down-to-earth concreteness that made him one of the very few philosophers of whom the mature Wittgenstein had anything positive to say.) But the avoidance of abstract doctrine in favor of concrete examples often makes it difficult to say, abstractly and generally, exactly what James was thinking.
In addition to the three aforementioned factors, which make it hard to pin James down in detail, and which often lead commentators to identify doctrine and man, there is a fourth such factor. Indeed, in connection with the issue whether James was or was not a relativist, it is perhaps the most important factor of them all. This factor is the peculiar nature of one of the central philosophical problems with which James wrestled throughout his career. The present article submits, prior to specifying exactly what the problem is, that this problem is at the core of much of James’s philosophy; it is a problem by reference to which most of James’s philosophical and psychological writings can be, in one way or another, clarified.
A title for this problem is not easy to provide. One would be tempted to call it something like the problem of “epistemic ethics,” or the problem of “the ethics of belief,” or some such phrase with the word “ethics” in it. But the problem in question is not exactly an ethical problem, for reasons that will be specified in the material to follow. Most generally this problem is an offshoot from the trunk of the general problem of epistemology, but it is not any straightforward part of epistemology. It is also an offshoot of ethics but not a part of ethics. Clearly, it is concerned with some sort of evaluation, and clearly this sort of evaluation is connected with justification in epistemology. But it is not the same thing as the problem of justification in epistemology. Most generally, it is the problem of what a person has a right to believe; or perhaps more accurately: it is the problem of what a person does not have an obligation not to believe. It is the problem of determining one’s epistemic responsibilities and rights. It concerns what is intellectually to be allowed and what is intellectually respectable in connection with belief. It is the problem of determining to what extent one is free of some or other kind of “culpability” for arriving at one’s beliefs as one does arrive at them and for believing what one does believe. This kind of culpability is not the same thing as ethical culpability, but it opens the possessor of it to certain kinds of negative evaluations. It is not to be reduced to believing-without-justification, for issues other than purely epistemic ones of justification are involved in it. For lack of any other suitable name for the problem, let us call it the problem of “epistemic responsibility.”
This problem that herein is being called the problem of epistemic responsibility is hardly a new problem, even though it seems not to be discussed as a separate theme nowadays by either epistemologists or ethicists. One must admit that tangential or glancing references to it are sometimes made in epistemology in the course of discussions concerning the role in knowledge played by justification, but the subject is not taken up in its own right. The problem, nevertheless, traces at least to Plato’s metaphor in the Republic of the mutiny on shipboard, where the mutineers are clearly presented as being epistemically culpable. The problem is involved in St Paul’s argumentation in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans that non-believers have no excuse for themselves. The problem is connected with doctrines of the medieval period, when certain sorts of refusal to accept what was put forward as rationally compelling argumentation were classified as “invincible ignorance,” which was attributed to a person as a severe epistemic criticism of a quasi-moral sort. In the early modern period Descartes took up the problem of epistemic responsibility vigorously in several much-neglected passages in the Meditations, especially in the fourth Meditation. There, Descartes does not treat the problem as merely one more of the problems of epistemology. Rather, he treats it as an epistemic analogue of the classical problem of evil. Descartes considers the question of how it is possible that God, who is not a deceiver, made human beings with epistemic faculties that so often lead them into false judgments. His answer is that God made human beings not only with epistemic faculties but also with will; and that when the will is allowed to overpower the epistemic faculties and lead them to overhasty judgment, then the case resembles sinful behavior. The resultant evil of false judgment is not owing to any deceptiveness or any other sort of imperfection in God, but rather is owing to the culpable failure of human beings to control their own wills in an epistemically responsible manner. Human beings, when they fall into error, are thus culpable in some sense of “culpability” that, though it is not the very same thing as moral culpability, is still more or less like the sin involved in falling into temptation.
Even a short reading of James’s autobiographical accounts will show the great extent to which this problem that is here being called the problem of epistemic responsibility was involved in James’s depressive episode of 1869–70. Having long been deeply committed to what he conceived of as the highest standards of rational appraisal of reality, James found himself in 1869 unable to avoid the conclusions that the world, along with us in it, is totally determined by causal laws. Freedom of action and moral endeavor, then, appeared to James to be nothing but an illusion. To believe in free will, contrary to all the deliverances of rational appraisal and contrary to the highest standards of epistemic justification, would have been an abrogation of epistemic responsibility: a sin against rationality. The resultant conflict in James’s inner life, and the accompanying pessimism of his deterministic ideation, were both intricately involved in the depression he experienced in his emotional life.
The problem of epistemic responsibility explicitly appeared early in James’s philosophical writings; indeed it was the central theme in one of his earliest papers. This paper was written in French in 1878 for the journal Critique philosophique and it was entitled “Quelques considérations sur la méthode subjective.” The paper’s second paragraph states (as here translated) the crucial problem to be considered in the paper: “It treats of knowing whether one has the right to reject a theory that is apparently confirmed by a very considerable number of objective facts, simply because it does not at all answer to our interior preferences.” The central question, then, of the essay is “whether one has the right” to believe the opposite of something that is strongly supported by empirical evidence, and for no other reason than that this something fails to harmonize with one’s inner preferences. In the essay James allows that in some cases one does have that right. In those cases in which it is possible to settle matters by reference to empirical data, by empirical data the matters should be settled. But there exists a kind of issue that is different from one that can be clearly settled by empirical evidence, and this kind of issue is exemplified strikingly in the problem of monism, the problem of determinism, and the problem of optimism and pessimism. Such problems as these are not of a nature to admit anything like clear settlement on the basis of empirical data. Doctrines concerning them are not empirical. Rather they are of the nature of fundamental principles: postulates in terms of which we choose, subsequent to adopting these postulates, how to interpret all of our empirical experience. James argues in connection with such problems and doctrines that a person has the epistemic right to adopt or not adopt philosophical positions concerning them solely on the basis of what responds to that person’s interior preferences. That is to say, James argues that believing in certain principles, just because one deeply wants to believe in them, is sometimes within a person’s sphere of epistemic right. Quite apart from the acceptability of James’s arguments for this point, James clearly identifies the question of epistemic responsibility as central to philosophy in general. And he clearly allows much greater latitude for being within one’s epistemic rights than most other philosophers would allow. (It seems to be this great latitude of allowance that is largely responsible for the tendency of some readers of James to consider James a relativist.)
One of the critical features of epistemic responsibility is that evaluating it is placing a value on neither a belief nor a process of arriving at a belief; rather, it is evaluating, either negatively or positively, a person who has a belief or arrives at a belief by using a given process. But evaluating epistemic responsibility is evaluating a person insofar and only insofar as that person has a certain belief or engages in a certain process of arriving at that belief. Evaluation of epistemic rights and responsibilities, then, is always epistemic evaluation of persons in their epistemic context. (Later in this article it will be noted that James the philosopher’s wide latitude of allowance for belief is, then, connected with James the man’s wide tolerance of and respect for persons.)
It is interesting that, when James did finally begin to pull out of his depression, he made remarks to the effect that he had simply chosen to believe in free will, completely independently of any evidence. As his depression lifted, James wrote in his diary that his first act of free will would be to believe in free will. A remarkable jotting this was, and one that has not failed to capture the attention of virtually every James scholar. It and many more like it in the course of James’s career have urged upon many readers of James the question whether James was what we might call an “epistemic voluntarist.” An epistemic voluntarist, in the sense here intended, is someone who holds that in general, if a person’s sole or main reason for believing in a doctrine is that believing in it will make that person happy or prosperous or otherwise in some felicitous and desirable state, then that person is within his or her epistemic rights. If James is an epistemic voluntarist in this sense, then, it is hard to see how he could not also be some sort of relativist. If merely wanting to believe something were always sufficient grounds for epistemic non-culpability, then it is difficult to see how anyone, believing anything for any reason, could be epistemically culpable in any way at all. In other words epistemic voluntarism seems not to allow one to make any substantial distinction between conditions of epistemic culpability and conditions of epistemic non-culpability. In epistemic voluntarism, then, epistemic responsibility would seem to be abrogated altogether.
Those who do see James as an epistemic voluntarist are also quick to associate this view with a specific understanding of James’s theory of truth. That is to say, they are likely to understand his theory of truth, which is that truth is what in some sense “works,” to mean that truth for a person is what makes that person, or perhaps all of us, happy, prosperous, and successful. This doctrine, that truth is simply what works for us, in the sense of what makes us happy or prosperous, has often been associated with James. Clearly, however, this is a doctrine that is pretty wide of the mark of the notion of truth as we ordinarily understand it. Bertrand Russell called it the doctrine of “transatlantic truth,” attributed it to James, and dismissed outright both the doctrine and James. The notion that truth for James is what makes us prosper is thus an interpretation of James’s view that is at least problematic.
James himself, however, was adamant that Russell did not in the least understand his theory of truth; he also wrote a whole volume (The Meaning of Truth) to explain his theory of truth and to insist that he did not hold that truth is what makes us happy and prosperous. James also tried to detach himself totally from the relativist label. The sixth (“James’s Pragmatism”) and especially seventh section (“James’s Theory of Truth”) of this article will attempt to show that James’s theory of truth is indeed very different from the “transatlantic truth” that Russell was talking about. In these sections it will also emerge that James is far from being an epistemic voluntarist or relativist. But we can already see one thing that has gone wrong in the philosophical motivation for interpreting James in these common ways. James argues forcefully that we sometimes have the epistemic right to believe a proposition merely because it accords with our inner preferences. Very fundamental and overarching propositions of the sort that he called “postulates,” can be believed on this basis without the believer being epistemically culpable. Now, if one holds that what James had to say about postulates (like monism, pluralism, determinism, and free will) applies as well to every doctrine of every kind, then the result is epistemic voluntarism and relativism. James, however, did not hold that what one can say about postulates can also be said about propositions in general.
As was mentioned previously, the earliest formations of James’s mature ideas are connected with his depressive episode of 1869 and 1870 and with the relation between his recovery and his study of Renouvier. Moreover, James cited Renouvier approvingly throughout his career, and it is hard to overestimate the importance of Renouvier for understanding James’s so-called “radical empiricism.” For this reason it is important for understanding James to have a good idea of Renouvier’s philosophy.
However much James’s depression might have been caused in its full concreteness by his troubled relation with his father or by James’s exhaustion after the completion of a difficult education, this depression – as we have seen – was animated by ideation connected with James’s having accepted a monistic metaphysics whose deterministic implications were inconsistent with human free will. James was intellectually too honest not to see that compatibilism – the view that causal determinism is after all consistent with human free will – was no genuine way out and was in fact a cheat as a doctrine. (In his later essay “The Dilemma of Determinism” he would call compatibilism “soft determinism” and characterize it as nothing but a “quagmire of evasion.”) In James’s view there was always a clear dichotomy: either the doctrine of determinism is true and there is no real human freedom, or human freedom is real and the doctrine of determinism is false. James’s intellectual problem during his depression was that he could see no way to avoid monism and determinism. It was at this point in his intellectual development that James turned to Renouvier.
Renouvier was what he himself called a “neo-critical” philosopher. By this label Renouvier meant that his point of departure was the Kantian philosophy, but that his intent was to transform significantly the standard doctrines of Kant as they were at the time often understood. Effecting such a transformation became Renouvier’s lifelong work.
Renouvier took extremely seriously Kant’s insistence (in the later editions of the Critique of Pure Reason) that the notion of the noumenal (as introduced in the first edition) had no positive content and was purely a “boundary concept” (Grenzbegriff), correctly usable only to set strict limits to all possible empirical thought. For Renouvier, then, there is no noumenal/transcendental self or noumenal/transcendental reality that presents itself or “gives” itself in experience (Erfahrung). There is only the phenomenal. There is merely the presentation, and not also something else beyond it that the presentation presents. The presentation presents merely itself and nothing more. It follows that phenomenal experience is all there is. The existence of experiences, of presentations: this is the ultimate metaphysical bedrock. The world is a world of pure experience. Nothing more. James would come to develop the epistemic and metaphysical implications of this sort of thoroughgoing phenomenalism under the heading of “radical empiricism.” James’s radical empiricism will be discussed further in the ninth section (“James’s Radical Empiricism and Pluralism”) of this article.
Experiences, however, in their most immediate phenomenal nature have both a subjective and an objective aspect. On the one hand experiences are experienced; on the other hand experiences have an experiential object of some sort. From this bedrock we move to a somewhat orderly but still complex picture of the world and of ourselves as experiencing it. But never in the whole process is there any leap into any noumenal realm. Renouvier maintained an absolutely strict phenomenalism. From this basic premise two points follow. First, the validity of all individual human experiences as genuine experiences of something is not to be denied: if experiences are the bedrock of all knowledge, there is nothing more basic than experiences by which the content of experiences can be negated. Second, the self and all its aspects are phenomenal and not noumenal. This point implies that freedom itself is phenomenal and not, as Kant thought, noumenal. We experience ourselves as free, and when there is no phenomenal experience to the contrary, the experience of ourselves as being free implies that we are genuinely free. In general, then, freedom of the will is not to be denied. Most especially, freedom is not to be denied on the basis of some abstract, philosophical line of argumentation that is divorced from actual, phenomenal experiences.
Experiences, moreover, do not come as already metaphysically interpreted. They most certainly do not display any kind of metaphysical monism. In themselves and as experienced, they are inherently diverse: “plural” in nature. No form of monism, then, is a direct deliverance of experience. In fact the immediate deliverance of experience is that the world is a vast plurality of things that are related to one another but not on that account unified into one substance. In the experiences, the relations among things are as fully given as the things themselves. Thus relations are as real as the things related, and they are as diverse as, or even more diverse than, the things related. Relations cannot, then, all be collapsed into the identity relation. What experience serves up is a metaphysically diverse world, a (to use James’s words) “pluralistic universe.”
Since all individual human experiences are basic in the way above indicated, it follows for Renouvier that each human being is unique and is of unique value; each human being has free will. Each human being is thus free to develop himself or herself in a process of dynamic self-determination and self-creation. As James later elaborated this idea, it came to have clear affinities with themes in what would later appear as, for example, the existentialism of Albert Camus.
These are the new doctrines that James juxtaposed against his former, deterministic monism; and, not surprisingly, the new doctrines simply swept away James’s previous view with a mighty whisk. What James saw in Renouvier was that he, James, had a perfect epistemic right to believe in free will and to engage in his own process of dynamic, even Promethean, self-determination. This was a sea change in James’s intellectual life and in his psychological wellbeing. And, as we shall see, James came to endorse heartily most of the other major points of Renouvier’s philosophy. The ninth section of this article will focus on James’s radical empiricism and pluralism.
It was emphasized in the foregoing material of this article that James was as much a psychologist as he was a philosopher. We are now in a position to begin to appreciate the fact that for James being a psychologist and being a philosopher essentially amounted almost to one and the same thing. For if the unsurpassable bedrock of metaphysics and epistemology is pure experience, and if experience is always a plurality of diverse experiences, then the investigation of metaphysics and epistemology just is the investigation of experiences in all their concrete detail. But such concretely detailed investigation is what James understood to be the business of psychology. So the fact that psychology and philosophy were combined in James’s thinking was much more than a mere artifact of the arrangement of academic departments in James’s day. It was a matter for James of the proper methodology of philosophy. When coupled with James’s pragmatism (to be discussed in the following section of this article), James’s commitment to the idea of a pluralistic universe of pure experiences makes psychology an indispensable part and the chief tool of philosophy.
Before looking more closely at any features of James’s psychology that are related to James’s philosophy, let us very briefly consider (again) James simply as an empirical psychologist, quite apart from any special philosophical implications of his psychology.
In the topics they explore, James’s psychological studies in The Principles of Psychology, The Varieties of Religious Experience, and other psychological works are extraordinarily wide-ranging. Habit, emotion, exertion, religious conviction and conversion, all figure prominently and are deeply explored. But we also find James exploring virtually everything imaginable: the sentiment of rationality, the sense of dizziness, the sensation of extension, the feelings of effort and relaxation, sensations from “phantom” limbs, and so on and on. Nothing in conscious life seemed to be alien to James’s interest. And consciousness itself, which James described as an onrushing stream with a center and a periphery rather than as a static container with sharp boundaries, was a major focus of his psychology. In this stream, not only individuals are directly experienced but also relations among individuals. It would not be incorrect to describe consciousness itself as the main focus of James’s psychology.
Aside from a few specific doctrines that divided James and Wundt, James’s psychology is remarkably similar to that of Wundt. Both men were trained in physiology and both viewed psychology as causally continuous with physiology. Neither, however, was a reductionist of the psychological to the physical: both held that psychology deals with the world of consciousness and that consciousness is metaphysically sui generis. Mind is intimately connected with body, but the two are not the same thing. Wundt’s psychology of consciousness and its properties is not unlike James’s discussions of consciousness in The Principles of Psychology. Both Wundt and James championed the use of experimental method in psychology, and both considered the right experimental method to be based on the examination of consciousness by means of introspection. By “introspection,” however, both meant something very different from the ideas later promulgated by the extreme introspectionist Edward Bradford Titchener (1867–1927). Titchener, an Englishman who had studied with Wundt and had come to the United States to teach at Cornell, represented himself as merely spreading Wundt’s ideas. But by “introspection” Titchener meant little more than private internal mental examination of oneself. This understanding of “introspection” is not the understanding of either Wundt or James. For both Wundt and James, “introspection” was understood to be examination of consciousness by any possible legitimate means, including but certainly not limited to private internal mental examination of oneself. Among other things, “introspection” for them meant investigating the causal origins and effects of mental events and states.
Indeed, without this wide understanding of the meaning of “introspection” for both Wundt and James, it is impossible to understand one of the well-known points of disagreement between them: the disagreement concerning the causal relationships between the “external” world and our emotions. For Wundt an emotion is the intermediary between a perception of something and the bodily manifestations of that emotion: perception immediately causes emotion, and emotion causes bodily manifestations. But for James perception immediately causes bodily manifestations, which in turn are felt as emotions: perception causes bodily manifestations, which cause emotion. In this so-called “James-Lange” theory of the emotions, emotions are the third link in the causal chain, not the second or middle link. One should note here once again that neither Wundt nor James held that emotions are identical with bodily manifestations.
In The Principles of Psychology, James is concerned with a wide variety of phenomena that cannot be “introspected” at all in Titchener’s sense, because these phenomena are not merely internal mental objects, states, or events. For example, one of James’s most prominently investigated psychological phenomena is the phenomenon of “habit.” James understands habit, not as anything internal to consciousness, but rather as a certain sort of dispositional relational property that is connected with action toward an external world. The investigation of habit, then, cannot be accomplished by any internal peering at some entity, state, or event that is a content of one’s own consciousness. Rather, it is unavoidably the investigation of the relations between the self and the world. For James psychology is typically an investigation of such relations, a study not merely of internal objects of the mind but also and most importantly of the total set of relations between a conscious self and the world. For James, such relations are central in both psychology and epistemology; they must be investigated in all their concrete detail both by the psychologist and by the philosopher. More accurately, they must be investigated by the psychologist-philosopher.
It is ironic to the point of tragedy that, by progressive indirection and everincreasing distortion, James’s emphasis on experimentalism and the investigations of the conscious self’s relations with the external world would lead, in the 1930s and thereafter, to the dominance in American academic psychology of the doctrines (and by the practitioners) of “behaviorism,” such as the behaviorism of B. F. Skinner. Behaviorism is the doctrine that psychology can dispense altogether with any concern for understanding consciousness and should simply attend to the physical inputs to and the physical outputs from behaving organisms. The behaviorist understands the organism as nothing more than a kind of “black box” which accepts physical inputs and in response to them generates physical outputs, which the behaviorist calls “behaviors.” For the behaviorist, then, consciousness simply disappears from the field of psychology. In ignoring consciousness altogether, behaviorism is virtually the opposite of any doctrine that James ever held or to which he would be sympathetic. Behaviorism is not (as it is often wrongly represented to be) an extension of James’s views.
Nowadays, behaviorism has fallen out of vogue among academic psychologists. Indeed, behaviorism seems to have been relegated almost entirely to the wayside or wastebasket of the subject of psychology, and a new understanding of psychology has taken center stage in academic life. This new psychology makes cognition, in the broadest sense that relates to all the acts and states of conscious life, its special topic of investigation. The new psychology goes by the name of “cognitive psychology.” Not at all surprisingly, in large measure it simply represents a return to the older, pre-behavioristic ideas of Wundt and James. Psychology is all about consciousness once again. James’s style and methods in psychology are back in business again.
Coming so soon after James’s recovery from depression, being so much in accord with themes in the thinking of Renouvier, and being so clearly concerned with proper methods of inquiry in the empirical sciences, the discussions of the Metaphysical Club must have struck James like great flashes of light. Abundantly obvious is the fact that the deterministic monism that had led James’s into his painful depression had been the polar opposite of the views favored by the Metaphysical Club. That sort of monism had been motivated only by empty a priori metaphysical considerations, as Chauncey Wright argued forcefully. That sort of monism had prevented James from seeing his own way out of his dilemma of depression; it had blinded him to the powerful case for human freedom; it had led him prematurely to block the path of inquiry. Not surprisingly, James would always remain heavily influenced by the discussions of the Metaphysical Club.
In particular the thought of his close friend Charles Sanders Peirce had an enormous influence on the philosophy of James. One feature of Peirce’s thought played a special role for James: James adopted this feature with enthusiasm but then molded it in ways so that it diverged significantly from Peirce’s own understanding. For this feature James seems to have introduced the name “pragmatism” in the 1890s, attributing the original ideas to Peirce. Pragmatism, though without use of the word “pragmatism,” appeared in Peirce’s earliest thought as a method of clarifying concepts and thus of clarifying the meanings of judgments that involve the use of these concepts. At the end of the second section of his famous paper “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878) Peirce expressed in the following way the basic maxim of pragmatism for achieving the highest possible grade of clarity about a “conception”: “Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.” By “conception” here Peirce meant to include both concepts and judgments.
The core idea in the pragmatic maxim is the idea that meaningful concepts and judgments must have genuine empirical content, which for Peirce consists of real and concrete empirical manifestations, specific discernible “effects,” when the concept applies or the judgment is true. The maxim as understood by Peirce has often been likened to the verifiability principle of the logical positivists and to “operationalism” in the philosophy of science. Such assimilations are not entirely wide of the mark, but they are far too strong to be accurate. (Peirce vehemently attacked the operationalism of Karl Pearson’s philosophy of science as expressed in The Grammar of Science, for example, and vigorously defended the reality of “hypostatic abstractions,” which are metaphysical constructs.) Peirce’s pragmatism does not in the least try, as logical positivism did try, to rule out all judgments involving metaphysical notions.
What pragmatism, whether that of Peirce or that of James, insists upon is that a meaningful concept should not be some mere bag of metaphysical wind; it may be a metaphysical construct, but it should have at least some concrete empirical criteria by which it may be judged applicable or inapplicable in particular circumstances. An alleged concept, for the application of which no empirically determinable conditions exist, is simply no meaningful concept at all. In addition to the idea that meaningful conceptions must have empirically determinable “effects,” there is also the idea of pragmatism that exact meaning depends on a multitude of empirical details that are fully concrete and not mere abstractions. Pragmatists are happy enough to allow metaphysical concepts like “mass” and “force,” and they can accept (with certain reservations about alleged deterministic implications) judgments like Newton’s laws, along with a host of other metaphysical notions and propositions. But what they insist upon is that there should always be some well-specified relation of concepts and judgments to clearly specifiable, empirically determinable conditions if the concepts and judgments are to be accepted as meaningful. These conditions are what is meant by the “practical bearings” of (the effects of) the concept. (It is to be strenuously emphasized that having practical bearings does not mean – as some distorters of pragmatism have alleged – the same thing as having effects that make someone wealthy, happy, or powerful.) One philosophical consequence of the requirement of “practical bearings” for meaningful conceptions is the rejection by both Peirce and James of all rationalist a priori methods and of all a priori metaphysical systems – in the style for example of Descartes – for totally determining the contents of the world. This rejection does not involve renouncing mathematics or metaphysical conceptions as scientific tools, but it does involve eschewing any procedure that involves nothing other than reasoning de more geometrico. Pragmatism, then, is a strict and rigorous form of empiricism. James labeled it “radical empiricism.”
It should not be thought that James’s exact idea of the practical bearings of a concept is identical with Peirce’s. Peirce and James came at experience from almost opposite starting positions. Peirce approached experience as a mathematician and physical scientist. James approached experience as an artist and descriptive psychologist. Naturally, what each emphasized as being practical bearings differed somewhat from what the other emphasized. For Peirce what is paramount is fertility for the sort of physical experimentation that one finds in the chemistry laboratory or the site of geodesic investigation. For James what is paramount is fertility for infusing life with meaning and meaningful action. Peirce relished the quantitative and mathematical. James relished the qualitative and aesthetic. This is not to say that Peirce ignored the qualitative and aesthetic: indeed, he placed aesthetics as the most basic of all cognitive areas. And this is not to say that James ignored the quantitative and mathematical: indeed, in a late chapter of The Principles of Psychology he discusses with admiration the Peano axioms for arithmetic. The point is that Peirce and James have different emphases in their notions of the practical bearings of concepts.
Peirce developed his earliest pragmatic ideas into a full-blown philosophy of science, elaborated along mathematical lines with relentlessly rigorous mathematical logic. James developed his earliest pragmatic ideas into a tendency toward exact and concrete narrative description of experiences: into, that is to say, his radical empiricism. By 1905 Peirce realized that his own views were so sharply different from the pragmatism of James (and of others who were calling themselves pragmatists) that he insisted on using the word “pragmaticism” to label his own highly technical position. James continued to use the word “pragmatism.”
Along with the radically empiricist nature of James’s version of pragmatism is its insistence on the tentativeness, fallibility, and non-finality of all inquiry. Although James and Peirce agree as to the fallibility of all inquiry, still with regard to the extent and implications of this fallibility the opinions of Peirce and James differ from one another.
For Peirce, empirical evidence will tend in the long run to converge toward some one cognitive limiting point, which Peirce calls “the truth.” This one limiting point is never actually and finally reached for Peirce: it exists only as an ideal point of convergence. There is not and cannot be any guarantee that the empirical evidence that has been obtained up to some particular point in time in an inquiry, and which indicates powerfully a certain direction of convergence toward the truth, will continue in the future to steer in the same direction. At some point in the future the facts might simply begin to veer off and indicate another direction of convergence. Nevertheless, even though knowledge is only something that exists at an ideal limiting point and is a goal that is continually sought but never finally attained, there is still for Peirce a single limiting point at which inquiry strives. Peirce’s only requirement, in order that the convergence of inquiry toward that single point be guaranteed, is what Peirce called “the first rule of reason”: Do not block the path of inquiry.
By contrast with Peirce, James’s understanding of the implications of fallibility is much more diffuse, diverse, and open. James does not insist that there is one single point of epistemic convergence that is valid for everyone. Indeed, because James allows that two inquirers might have different postulational starting points in their inquiries, James seems to be sympathetic to the idea that there might be various points of convergence for various inquirers. What is certainly the case is that James did allow for the possibility that multiple inquirers might reach differing results and all of them still might be well within their epistemic rights. In connection with the issue of inquiry’s converging, we might say that James’s theory is more like W. V. O. Quine’s theory than like Peirce’s theory.
Peirce’s first rule of reason, however, was a cornerstone of James’s philosophy. James considered that the lowest ebb of epistemic irresponsibility is prematurely or arbitrarily to close off epistemic possibilities and epistemic rights: with a priori dogmatism, with the closed-mindedness of unexamined presuppositions, with refusal to be open to novel experiences. By contrast, a chief epistemic duty of any person who is committed to epistemic responsibility is to be open to and even to seek out the widest possible diversity of experiences: the new, the novel, and even the unusual. The highest standards of rational appraisal of reality require for James that a person allow himself or herself maximum access to experience. Any procedure that stops short of such openness to experience fails to do justice to all the possibilities that have not yet been sufficiently explored. Such a procedure refuses to allow access to areas of experience that might provide refutations of cherished intellectual possessions. Such a procedure for James amounts to little more than cowering in a redoubt of dogmatism. It fails to live up to the highest standards of epistemic responsibility. It blocks the path of inquiry.
James’s tenacious rejection of dogmatism and his extraordinary openness to the widest variety of experiences is one of the features of James’s thinking that have led some very able commentators on James to regard James as some kind of relativist. As we have seen, with regard to the fundamental postulates by which we interpret all experiences, James is akin to an epistemic voluntarist. In a very restricted sense of the word “relativist,” then, the claim that James is a relativist is correct. The position of the present article, however, is that “relativist” in the usual and unrestricted sense is not the right concept to apply to James, because in its usual signification “relativism” involves a general abdication of standards of epistemic appraisal – that is to say appraisal that is relevant to the truth of doctrines. James’s openness to experience, however, was not at all a stance in the service of dispensing generally with epistemic standards; rather, it was in the interest of embracing, wherever applicable, the strictest possible standards for epistemic appraisal, as James understood them. When his colleague Hugo Münsterberg and others accused James of being a relativist, James strenuously rejected this interpretation of his views.
Probably no area of James scholarship has been so much vexed as that concerned with James’s theory of truth, as James first put it forward in Pragmatism (1907) and then, in order to try to clarify his ideas and respond to objections, as he elaborated it in The Meaning of Truth (1909). Almost immediately upon the publication of Pragmatism, James’s theory came under withering attack from all quarters. Already mentioned has been Bertrand Russell’s characterization of it as a theory of “transatlantic truth,” which characterization assimilated it to everything philistine that some Englishmen are apt to find so abundantly displayed in American culture. An American Russell, John E. Russell, kept up a debate with James on the theory of truth, a debate somewhat more respectfully maintained than the criticism of the English Russell but still highly critical. John Russell thought that James’s theory confused the quality of truth that is possessed by some propositions with the activity of verifying propositions that are performed by some persons. Even into the present, the discussion about what exactly James’s theory of truth is has continued. Some commentary on James even holds that James has two different notions of truth – one being the ordinary notion of truth and the other being a special “pragmatic” notion of truth not unlike the notion of “transatlantic truth” that Bertrand Russell had in mind. Some detractors claim that James’s whole account of truth is just confused. Certainly it must at least be admitted that a number of James’s assertions about truth, for example his claim that truth is something that happens to an idea, are very difficult to deal with and are perhaps open to a diversity of interpretations.
As with so much in James scholarship, however, part of the general difficulty of pinning down James’s theory in detail seems to be attributable not to James’s own lack of clarity but rather merely to James’s lively and artistic writing style. In the case of the theory of truth, this general difficulty in James scholarship seems to have inflated to huge proportions for this reason. It is submitted in this article that, although James did have a clear theory of truth, a theory that might have been (and perhaps should have been) expressed precisely, James did not do so mainly because he did not like to write dryly and technically.
Another and more important source of difficulty in connection with James’s theory of truth has already been mentioned. This has to do with a contrast between types of theories of truth that by James’s time had gained such a toehold in philosophical discussions of the difference between realists and idealists that it might well be called something like “the canonical contrast” between theories of truth. This canonical contrast is that between so-called “correspondence” theories of truth and so-called “coherence” theories of truth. Correspondence theories of truth are often associated with realist metaphysical positions, whereas coherence theories of truth are often associated with idealist metaphysical positions. Crudely put, correspondence theorists hold that the truth of a proposition consists of some sort of correspondence or agreement between that proposition and reality. By contrast, coherence theorists hold that truth of a proposition consists of its being a part of a system of propositions among which there is some sort of special mutual logical coherence. Now, pragmatists are often contrasted with realists and, although they are not exactly identified with idealists, they tend to be somewhat more assimilated to idealists than to realists. An unfortunate conclusion commonly drawn, then, has been that there must be a sharp contrast and mutual opposition between a correspondence theory of truth and a pragmatic theory of truth.
But if we think along these lines, we shall immediately fall into confusion about James’s theory of truth. For James, who is avowedly and without doubt a pragmatist, nevertheless explicitly describes himself as a correspondence theorist of truth: truth, he holds, is indeed an agreement between a proposition and reality. But, James argues, to say this much and no more is not to give a theory of truth but rather is merely to begin it. For, as the agreement formula stands without further explication, it is so devoid of content as to be virtually meaningless pragmatically. The pragmatic content of the notion of agreement of a proposition with reality still remains to be given. The issue for James, then, is what the pragmatic meaning is of “agreement” in the context of a correspondence theory of truth.
James makes clear that as a pragmatist he must apply the pragmatic criterion of meaning in order to spell out clearly the “cash value” of the concept of “agreement” here. In turn, doing so requires giving a detailed account of what the agreement in question comes to when it is described in concrete, empirically significant terms of direct experience. James wants to provide (what he calls) “the particular go” of truth. To this end James discusses a number of examples. In them the chief issue is not that of the nature of predication or that of the correctness of predication, both of which James tends to take for granted in the discussion. Rather, the chief issue is that of how a proposition can be about the world. The central problem, that is to say, that gradually emerges in James’s discussion of cases in giving a pragmatic account of the agreement between a true proposition and reality is the problem of the aboutness of judgments. How is it, for example, that we can use the phrase “the tigers in India” actually to talk about the tigers in India (and say about them things that are true)? How can we mean the tigers in India when we speak or think. The central focus of James’s pragmatic account, then, turns out to be the nature of reference.
James’s account of the nature of reference is given with many metaphors, and it is this fact, in part, that has made his intentions in regard to his theory of truth very hard to understand and all too easy for his detractors to repudiate or mock. James speaks of truth as involving “prosperous workings and leadings,” and such language is very suggestive of a special pragmatic notion of truth, in which the truth of a belief is understood as its ability to promote the happiness and success of its believer. The present article, however, submits that in so understanding James’s language, James’s actual thinking is seriously misrepresented. Rather than defining a special pragmatic notion of truth, James is offering, as the heart of his pragmatic theory of (the ordinary notion of) truth, a pragmatic theory of reference.
In what, then, for James does reference consist, when it is spelled out pragmatically, that is to say in full, concrete detail? James’s point is that reference to an item consists in a chain of concrete links – which are usually causal links – that lead in an unbroken manner from the act of intending to refer to an item (or to the vicinity or context of an item) that is the object of reference. When there exists such an unbroken chain, the referential intention succeeds and truth is then possible. When such a chain does not exist or when the chain is broken in certain ways, then the referential intention fails, and truth is not possible. In his 1895 essay “The Knowing of Things Together” James already makes his ideas abundantly clear: “The pointing of our thought to the tigers [in India] is known simply and solely as a procession of mental associates and motor consequences that follow on the thought, and that would lead harmoniously, if followed out, into some ideal or real context, or even into the immediate presence, of the tigers … [our mental images’] pointing to the tigers is a perfectly commonplace physical relation, if you once grant a connecting world to be there” (1975 [1911]).
James’s sort of theory is nowadays called a “causal theory of reference.” Specific causal theories of reference were defended in the latter parts of the twentieth century by philosophers like Saul Kripke and Keith Donnellan. The Kripke-Donnellan theory of reference, as it is usually called – rather than the James theory of reference (or perhaps the Peirce-James theory of reference) as it ought to be called – is difficult to describe briefly because of the many and various ways in which the referentially necessary causal chain may be constituted. The theory is difficult to describe in brief because of the many and various ways that such a causal chain can be constituted or broken. But James did an excellent job of laying out the general scheme and some of the details of such a theory. It is the core of his account of truth: the heart of his correspondence theory that is also a pragmatic theory. That his theory was and still is, so often misunderstood is in part owing to James’s language: but only in part.
The earliest presentations in the late 1970s of James’s theory of truth as basically being a pragmatic theory of reference tended to stress the temporally backward-looking nature of the causal chain connecting referring acts with referents and stressed the similarities between James’s account of reference and the Kripke-Donnellan account. Recent work along these same lines (Boersema 2009: Ch. 4) rightly argues that there is also in James’s account an important temporally forward-looking component. This forward-looking component has the potential to allow us to explain some of James’s otherwise puzzling metaphorical language. For example, it may allow us to interpret James’s point that truth is something that happens to an idea. (For example, we might say that for James truth is something like sustainable reference and predication in the court of all future inquiries.) The forward-looking component in James’s theory of truth may also provide ways in which James’s account of reference differs from the Kripke-Donnellan account and, indeed, might even be preferable to the latter.
Despite a century of hard work by scholars to understand in detail James’s theory of truth, there remains a great deal of work left to be done in making his theory more detailed and precise.
James’s thought is incomprehensible apart from his interest in science and consequently in the methodology of the sciences. He had turned initially away from studying art to studying medicine as a way into the study of general science. Many of his writings show him to have been in touch with the writings of the outstanding physical scientists of the nineteenth century, including James Clerk Maxwell, Charles Darwin, and others. The apparent determinism of the sciences was one factor leading to his depression of 1869 and 1870. The issue whether determinism is a guiding principle of science in general, and of the social sciences in particular, was one of the most-often debated issues of the nineteenth century. Renouvier had shown James the way out of determinism, and a way out moreover that is provided by a commitment to experience as the most basic element of all knowledge, including scientific knowledge.
It might seem, however, that James’s commitment to freedom and an open universe conflicts with his respect for science. For it might seem to be the case that actual scientific practice, especially in the really “hard” sciences of physics, astronomy, chemistry, and geodesy, showed that determinism must be the guiding principle of the philosopher who is respectful of science. Do the hard sciences reinstate the determinism that James so abhorred? The astonishing answer, coming initially to James perhaps from Peirce, but echoed by many others like Ludwig Boltzmann and perhaps also Josiah Willard Gibbs, was: Not necessarily. The long-known and constant experience of the physics laboratory and of the astronomical observatory is that many measurements of one and the same physical quantity, no matter how carefully these measurements may be taken, always yield values that are not simply duplicates of another but rather are values that are distributed throughout a range, usually in accord with the so-called “error curve” (which is now called the “normal distribution”). The “probable error” of such measurement results (the fraction .6745 of what is now called the “standard deviation”) can be reduced, perhaps, but never eliminated.
The idea behind calling the normal distribution the “error curve” is the idea that, independent of the actions of measuring a physical quantity, there exists some definite value that the physical quantity already really has; and that in taking measurements we are trying to ascertain this real value. According to this idea, the deviations from each other of individual measurement results are also indicative of deviations from this real value. Hence, according to this idea, the observed deviations from each other of measurement results indicate various errors in getting the right measurement.
But note: the idea that there is some single, definite, and “real,” physical quantity that is being measured (with errors) is not a direct deliverance of laboratory experience. Rather it is a postulate. This postulate is fleshed out by choosing to regard some statistical value of the distribution curve of measurement results – typically but not necessarily the so-called “mean” of the distribution – as the postulated real, exact value. Thus the idea of a single, real, exact physical value is not an immediate datum of experience at all: rather, it is only an intellectual construct that is based on interpreting in a special way many experiences. It is an intellectual postulate as to how we should interpret the many experiences. So also, then, the “laws” of physics and the precise differential equations that encode them (and which lead through the notion of Laplace’s Demon to determinism) are constructs, based on postulates. Determinism and realism themselves, then, are only postulates. Moreover, they are postulates with which science can dispense, at no harm to itself.
Thus, for James, science need not be out of harmony with the idea of an open universe.
James labeled his own fundamental philosophical position “radical empiricism” for reasons that were described in the foregoing material: the radical empiricist takes as ultimate epistemic bedrock pure experiences, just as they are phenomenally given.
Radical empiricism, however, was never for James a precise, technical doctrine or set of doctrines. Rather, it was what he himself called an “attitude” or a “Weltanschauung.” Moreover, his descriptions of radical empiricism, and the emphases in his descriptions, varied somewhat (although not widely) over the years from 1897 to 1909. In his earlier descriptions he mainly associated his empiricism with the sort of fallibilism that characterizes Peirce’s pragmatism; and he defined its being radical as its refusal to presuppose any form of monism as either an axiom or first principle with which all experience has ultimately to square. Monism itself was regarded by radical empiricism as nothing but an hypothesis with which empirical evidence does not happily cohere. For prima facie the world of experience is inherently a plurality of presentations that display only here and there the possibility of reduction of different phenomena to one “thing.”
A few years later James took the main point of radical empiricism to be its opposition to “rationalism,” by which term he understood a philosophy that makes wholes and universals to be both logically and ontologically prior to parts and particulars. (By examples of “rationalism” James understood the philosophies of the absolute idealists, and in particular the idealism of Hegel and the idealism flourishing in England around such thinkers as F. H. Bradley.) Thus the main point of radical empiricism, as he described it in these years, is to insist on the ontological priority of parts, particulars, and individuals. Laying stress on parts and particulars as ontologically prior to wholes and universals means that wholes are to be regarded merely as classes of particulars and that universals are to be regarded merely as abstractions from particulars. Wholes have no existence except as collections of particulars, and universals have no existence except as abstractions from particulars. Radical empiricism is, James said, “a mosaic philosophy, a philosophy of plural facts.”
By 1904, however, James added a new dimension, or at least a new emphasis, to radical empiricism. This is a sharp distinction between radical empiricism and the traditional empiricism of the sort that we find, for example, in Hume. Traditional empiricism tended to fragment experience by failing to recognize within it real “conjunctive relations,” like causal or cause-like connections. Instead of recognizing such relations as real, traditional empiricism regarded them as non-existent. Causation in Hume, for example, is reduced to nothing but a certain species of constant conjunction, and so is not any sort of real nexus between cause and effect. The “incoherencies” of the unconnected world of traditional empiricism, James held, invited “rationalistic philosophers” (i.e. absolute idealists) to correct them by positing for the world “trans-experiential agents of unification” – like special substances or unique Selves – or by insisting upon special intellectual categories and powers. Radical empiricism, by contrast, recognizes that real, “conjunctive relations” are found in experience. Hence, it has no need for some sort of special unifying agent to bring experience together: experience is already together because it already contains the real relatedness of things. The relations are as real as the things related. Indeed, in some sense the relations constitute, or at least help to constitute, the natures of the things related. Radical empiricism still insists that experience is of a plurality, but it is a plurality of things and relations, of things that are necessarily genuinely interrelated.
In James’s descriptions of radical empiricism, one increasingly sees the influence not only of Renouvier and Peirce, but also of Rudolf Hermann Lotze, who like James opposed the absolute idealists for somewhat the same reasons as Renouvier. The idealists had ignored Kant’s understanding of the noumenal realm as being nothing but a boundary concept (Grenzbegriff). They had seized on hints in Kant’s third Kritik to the effect that some teleological principle of unity must underlie the phenomenal world, and then they had provided some principle (Geist, the Absolute, etc.) to provide once and for all for this unity. Lotze, like Renouvier, insisted that there was nothing but the phenomenal world. Additionally, he had argued vigorously for the reality and direct apprehensibility of relations. James’s account of relations in his later descriptions of radical empiricism is quite similar to the account of Lotze.
The pragmatic principle that philosophy should deal only with material that is definable in terms of concrete, direct experience meant from the outset of James’s adapting it that one should not admit into philosophical discussion anything that cannot be defined in terms that hook onto direct experience. But increasingly we find James extending this principle in an obvious way: James also holds that one should not exclude from philosophical relevance any element, term, or relation that is directly experienced. In this way James reached the conclusion that all genuine and direct experiences are philosophically important and cognitively relevant. This extension of the pragmatic principle provides another reason why the study of philosophy and the study of psychology are not to be separated: psychology provides evidence of the widest ranges of direct experience and thus cognitively significant data. We also can understand more deeply James’s interest in wide-ranging, unusual and even odd, experiences. It is not surprising that in his last great volume, The Varieties of Religious Experience, we find a compendious catalogue of human experiences connected with religious conversion and commitment.
This new twist on the pragmatic principle in James’s radical empiricism also allows us to understand a special kind of ethical quality that pervades all of James’s writings, but especially his popular essays on what makes a life worth living, what is good teaching, and the like. This ethical quality is what we might call “respect for persons.” James thinks that every person carries his/her own “inner candle,” so to say, which is what makes that person, at the deepest level, what he/she is. This inner light is the basic thing for judging any person’s epistemic rights and responsibilities. Seldom or never should a genuine philosopher say, “Thou fool,” to anyone; for everyone’s own direct experience has its own high dignity and its own cognitive worth. James cared greatly for good teaching, and he argued that the good teacher is not the person who is most knowledgeable; it is the person who most understands how to fan the student’s inner fire and, without deforming it, to make it grow.
A year before his death James wrote of radical empiricism as consisting of a postulate, a statement of fact, and a generalized conclusion. The postulate is essentially the expanded pragmatic principle that anything that is material for discussion and debate in philosophy must be definable in terms of actual experience, and that all actual experience is material for philosophical discussion and debate. The statement of fact is that relations, including “conjunctive relations,” are directly experienced and indeed are every bit as real as the things of which they are the relations. The generalized conclusion is that the directly apprehended universe does not need any sort of trans-experiential connective support; it hangs together on its own, in its own right. As directly experienced, it is already concatenated, conjoined, and continuous. The parts of experience are held together by relations that are themselves parts of experience. It follows that resorting to trans-empirical entities in order to obtain such unity as the world has is entirely unnecessary. What experience directly gives us is a pluralistic but still genuinely interconnected universe.
Boersema, David (2009) Pragmatism and Reference, Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2009).
James, William (1975 [1911]) “The Meaning of Truth,” in The Meaning of Truth, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Primary sources: The Works of William James (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975–88); The Correspondence of William James (Charlottesville, VA, and London: University Press of Virginia, 1992–). John J. McDermott (ed.) The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1977). Secondary sources: Gay Wilson Allen, William James (New York: Viking Press, 1967); Graham Bird, William James (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986); Gerald E. Meyers, William James, His Life and Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2 vols (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1935); Hilary Putnam, Pragmatism: An Open Question (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); Charlene Haddock Seigfried, William James’s Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990); H. S. Thayer, Meaning and Action: A Critical History of Pragmatism (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1981).