Throughout his life, William James was concerned about the sources, limitations, and uses of human knowledge. Even the time he spent reading works of literature, viewing and producing artistic representations of nature and human experience, and reflecting on religious matters was aimed ultimately at the advancement of knowledge in the service of life. His devotion to science – and to making psychology scientific – was no chance or aberrant commitment. Nor were his deep interest and sustained efforts in philosophy. They all flowed from his quest to learn anything that could make a difference, whether in understanding or improving the human situation.
James began as an empiricist who privileged facts but remained open to any ideas, whatever their origin or novelty, so long as they gave the slightest promise of helping to make sense of empirical evidence. He ended, as we have seen, as a radical empiricist, having enlarged the range of the factual to include the realm of subjectivity, including perceptions of relation and value. He ardently believed that humans can attain approximate truth, in some instances almost unassailable truth, yet he “disbelieved,” as he put it, that “we or any other mortal men can attain on a given day to absolutely incorrigible and unimprovable truth.” He was “no lover of disorder and doubt as such,” he said, but rather he feared “to lose the truth by…pretension to possess it already wholly.” He hastened to insist, however, that he believed “as much as anyone” that “we can gain more and more of it [truth] by moving always in the right direction” (VRE 268).
This notion of moving in the right direction – of following “the trail of truth” – was central to James’s view of human knowledge, as expressed throughout his works and especially in his formal statements on pragmatism, or more precisely on the pragmatic method of attaining ever clearer, more adequate, and more useful concepts about experience and reality (see PCPR 258). These more explicit statements began in 1898 in a talk that he gave at the University of California at Berkeley. Speaking of “the trackless forest of human experience,” James suggested that the philosopher’s task, like the poet’s (and we can add, like the scientist’s or common person’s), is to blaze trails that others can follow, improve, and extend. The “path-finder” knows “there is a center in truth’s forest” and sets off to “track it out,” subsequently offering to others “the freedom of the trails” that she or he has made, even though these trails do not yet reach that center. Ever not quite! So “to-morrow it must be,” ever “to-morrow,” that we will get there (258). In the meantime, truth grows bit by bit, as many individuals build upon the accomplishments of those who went before, thus helping to advance humanity toward the trail’s ultimate destination.
James’s image of a trailblazer’s “trackless forest” (in 1898) shares with his earlier image of a sculptor’s “block of stone” (in 1890) the common assumption that nature awaits human intervention. Truth, for James, is the result of human experience and effort in the natural world, the practical outcome of human mentality working in “pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for their attainment,” as he expressed it (PP 21). His sculptor analogy, from The Principles of Psychology, was cited in an earlier chapter of this book. The full passage is worth quoting here, just as it appeared in James’s summing up of the selective nature of consciousness and of the “simultaneous possibilities” offered within “the stream of thought”:
The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest. Just so the world of each of us, howsoever different our several views of it may be, all lay embedded in the primordial chaos of sensations, which gave the mere matter to the thought of all of us indifferently. We may, if we like, by our reasonings unwind things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world. But all the while the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply rejecting certain portions of the given stuff. Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! My world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttle-fish, or crab!
(277)
This remarkable passage is as successful as any in James’s entire corpus of work in conveying his fundamental vision of reality, experience, and knowledge. Its echo can be heard in James’s later statement, in Pragmatism (1907), that “we carve out everything, just as we carve out constellations [from the sky], to suit our human purposes.” (See PR 122 for the full and very effective passage from which this short quotation comes. It deals with the conceptual creation of “things” and their “predicates.”) The argument embodied in James’s “carving” metaphor depends upon James’s acceptance of a Darwinian belief in the overabundance of nature. Nature offers more than we can possibly take in or use at any given time, hence the necessity of selectivity.
Later in life he called this overabundance the “much-at-onceness” of “the perceptual flux” (SPP 32). It is this overwhelming flux that is narrowed down through the process of selective attention, perception, and conception, a process of continual “translation” that gives coherence and meaning to the “wilderness” of facts that we initially confront. (In addition to “wilderness,” James spoke of “the rich thicket of reality,” in PR 39, thus recalling Darwin’s figuration of untamed nature as an overgrown “entangled bank” in an equatorial jungle. The notion of following a trail through such nature – and James’s related notion of establishing “ambulatory relations” between concepts – call to mind Wordsworth’s depiction of a “tour” of countryside and mountains undertaken by an “excursive mind.” See Darwin 1859, Ch. 14; MT 79; Wordsworth 1814; and Leary 2017.) The nicely ordered “conceived world,” as we have seen in previous chapters, is very different from the original, disordered, chaotic, and undifferentiated pre-perceptual world, according to James. “The conceptual scheme” that we use to make sense of the latter is “a sort of sieve in which we try to gather up the world’s contents,” though “most facts and relations fall through its meshes” (PP 455). What remains is akin to the statue that has been extricated from an initially unshaped block of stone – or the constellations abstracted from the otherwise chaotic array of night-lights in the sky. This process of ongoing sifting, shaping, and translating of the perceptual into the conceptual is conducted, James insisted, “for the sake of some subjective interest,” thus serving our “partial purposes and private ends” (455–456). If a conceptual scheme is found to conflict with those purposes and ends, and if we find some other scheme that will serve us better, a conceptual change will take place and a new set of cognitive assumptions will come to guide our thought and action. This basic psychological process underlies James’s pragmatism: Knowledge is constructed, according to James, with concepts that help us deal with aspects of reality in ways that satisfy our needs, whether they be intellectual, aesthetical, moral, or practical. Ideally they will satisfy all these needs simultaneously (940). The psychological function of concepts is to allow us to understand and hence to anticipate experience and to direct our conduct accordingly. If two concepts have the same consequences in these regards, leading to the same anticipation and action, they are functionally identical and redundant (“PR”). Thus consideration of the practical consequences of our concepts allows us to simplify as well as clarify our conceptual frameworks.
James arrived at this approach to knowledge long before writing Principles, prompted in part by Charles S. Peirce’s endorsement of Alexander Bain’s notion that belief is “that upon which a man is prepared to act” (Peirce 1998, 399). He embedded this approach within Principles and then elaborated upon it in a series of talks and articles over the subsequent decades, leading up to the publication of Pragmatism (1909) and The Meaning of Truth (1909). These latter works constituted his last, but still not quite finished statements on knowledge, how it is acquired, and how it can be expanded. He died before he could say more.
Our knowledge is thus dependent upon the concepts that we use in dealing with “the perceptual flux” of our experience. These concepts come originally from someone’s interest-driven selective attention, progressively affirmed and modified by “slowly cumulative strokes of choice,” as he put it in presenting his sculptural analogy (PP 277). Once adopted, concepts direct subsequent attention to the same aspects of experience, thus habituating certain ways of understanding so long as they continue to work for us, which is to say, so long as they pay off in some way. (Using a monetary metaphor, James spoke of the “cash-value” of our concepts in PR 32.) The majority of the concepts we use have been given to us by others rather than created by ourselves, James noted. From the beginning of life, parents, teachers, and others “name” things for us, thereby focusing our attention on particular aspects and potential uses of things, and drawing it away from others. These individuals, in turn, typically got these names and related concepts from yet others. And so on, back into the shadows of the past. As a result of our shared inheritance, James wrote, “in my mind and in your mind the rejected portions and the selected portions of the original world-stuff are to a great extent the same. The human race as a whole largely agrees as to what it shall notice and name, and what not” (277).
Even though the majority of our concepts are handed down to us in a more or less passive manner, their origin in yesteryear came about, James argued, in an entirely different way: as the creations of individual humans. Again using a Darwinian analogy, this time regarding the random variation of progeny, James referred to novel concepts as being “random” insofar as they are either “spontaneous” and “accidental” (“lucky fancies” that are simply “brain-born,” as he put it) or idiosyncratic and contingent (thus neither necessary nor predictable), in that they are products of complex interactions among the diverse interests, discriminative abilities, and comparative associations of unique individuals (see 1216, 1228, and 1278 as well as 276, 400–401, 500, 754, 972–974, 984–985, and 988). In fact, new ideas are formed in the same random ways today as in the past, as certain brains and certain individuals spontaneously generate distinctive ways of looking at and talking about experience. (With explicit nods to James, Campbell 1974 codified a similar, Darwinian “evolutionary epistemology,” which Richards 1987, also cognizant of James, elaborated into a “natural selection model” for the historiography of science.)
James wrote appreciatively of those “geniuses” who come up with new ways of seeing things. When their concepts strike us as interesting and useful – when they withstand the winnowing effects of success versus failure as they are applied in particular situations – they may become “foundation-pillars” of our “intellectual life” (500; also see 276, 754, 968–973, and 984–988). Even though we didn’t personally generate these concepts, and “not one in a thousand” of us “could ever have discovered” them, any one of us – once they have been “pointed out” to us – can adopt and use them, thereby facilitating the perception of phenomena that had previously escaped our notice (420). Knowledge is thus social at its core. As James expressed this later in Pragmatism:
Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs ‘pass,’ so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them…You accept my verification of one thing, I yours of another. We trade on each other’s truth. But beliefs verified by somebody are the posts [the undergirding] of the whole superstructure.
(PR 100)
And again:
We exchange ideas; we lend and borrow verifications, get them from one another by means of social intercourse. All truth thus gets verbally built out, stored up, and made available for everyone.
(102)
James discussed the “psychogenesis” of our basic common-sense “mental categories” and our enduring scientific, mathematical, logical, metaphysical, aesthetic, and moral concepts in the final chapter of Principles, entitled “Necessary Truths and the Effects of Experience” (Ch. 28). In this chapter, he rejected what he called the “front door” explanation of concepts (that experience impresses sensations and their related percepts and concepts into our brains through purely mechanical impact and repetition) and presented his argument for the “back door” theory (that random ideas simply appear in individual minds through some surreptitious brain event or inscrutable interaction within the mind). He focused his discussion on the evolution of concepts that seem most abstract and ineluctable, arguing that whatever factors may have been involved in their initial appearance through the “back door,” their subsequent evolution depended upon an empirical process of comparative thinking, and more precisely, the comparison of concepts and their effectiveness by particular individuals (see 1253 and 1269 for summary statements). The concepts that survived the winnowing process over long, long periods of time – concepts of space, time, number, cause, substance, logical relation, aesthetic harmony, moral rightness, and the like – are now firmly established as templates for our experience and knowledge. “To what effect?” he asked in The Meaning of Truth (1909): “That we may the better foresee the course of our experiences, communicate with one another, and steer our lives by rule. Also that we may have a cleaner, clearer, more inclusive mental view” (MT 42). But we have to realize, he insisted, that the conceptual order they impose upon our experience is not the order of purely sensory experience. With regard to moral principles, for instance, “rightness is not mere usualness,” nor does the sense of “wrongness” come from “mere oddity.” Indeed, “no more than the higher musical sensibility can the higher moral sensibility be accounted for by the frequency with which outer relations have cohered” (PP 1265). Otherwise the status quo would always seem most right and the sounds of daily life would always seem the most harmonious. The same caveat applies to our principles of measurement and logic. Even our notions of space, time, and causality are human inventions, albeit so old and so indelibly inculcated that they can be considered “a priori” (1269). In sum, it is not “the way things are” in some absolute way that causes our experience and generates our conceptual framework. Experience, like truth, is “not duplication, but addition; not the constructing of inner copies of already complete realities, but rather the collaborating with realities so as to bring about a clearer result” (41). Reality as we experience and come to believe in it is the result of both mind and matter, of conceptual supposition and material conditions. It may be hedged in by physical sensation, especially as represented in scientific thought, but it is also shaped by mental formulation.
We touched upon James’s views regarding these matters when we considered his treatment of perception and conception, cognition and emotion, and belief and reality. Indeed, all of the topics covered in Principles, in one way or another, prepared the way for his later discussions of knowledge, truth, and the practical conduct of life. Everything that is known and unknown, according to James, relates to the ways that humans have chosen to interact with their surrounding world. As John Wild (1969) approvingly put it, knowing according to James’s pragmatic approach is “a way of being-in-the-world, which may be phenomenologically described and analyzed” (348). James’s approach established him, in this regard, as a predecessor of later phenomenology. Far from representing a form of untethered relativism, Wild insisted, James’s approach reveals that the “being” of the world is a “hard resistant fact” that “shows itself to us” in the course of living. What James was getting at, Wild said, is the same thing that the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty subsequently pointed toward in speaking (in his distinctive jargon) of “the in-itself for us” (149). It is also related, as Russell B. Goodman (2002) has shown, to the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s assessment of language, experience, and knowledge – not surprisingly, given Wittgenstein’s “long engagement with William James” (172).
James’s way of approaching knowledge and truth had even broader and more significant ties to the grand historical trajectory of human thought. “Up to about 1850,” as James observed,
almost everyone believed that sciences expressed truths that were exact copies of a definite code of non-human realities. But the enormously rapid multiplication of theories in these latter days has well-nigh upset the notion of any one of them being a more literally objective kind of thing than another. There as so many geometries, so many logics, so many physical and chemical hypotheses, so many classifications, each one of them good for so much and yet not good for everything, that the notion that even the truest formula may be a human device and not a literal transcript [of how nature is in itself] has dawned upon us. We hear scientific laws now treated as so much ‘conceptual shorthand,’ true so far as they are useful but no farther. Our mind has become tolerant of symbol instead of reproduction, of approximation instead of exactness, of plasticity instead of rigor.
(MT 40)
In this context, it made sense to James – and later to others – to consider “the main forms of our thinking, the separation of subjects from predicates, [and] the negative, hypothetic and disjunctive judgments” that we make as “purely human habits” (41). For articulating such insights, for seeing “the interrelations of all questions” about matter and mind, and for being ever-mindful of “the ever-present complexity and possibility in human experience,” the great British mathematician, philosopher, and historian of science Alfred North Whitehead placed James among the four major thinkers in the entire Western tradition, along with Plato, Aristotle, and Leibniz, and credited him with being well prepared to deal with the “shock” of the “explosion” created by Alfred Einstein and others at the turn of the twentieth century – an explosion that destroyed the illusion that “the physical and mechanical aspects of the world were…all known and settled” and thus caused “the [intellectual] death of many others” (see Whitehead 1938, 3–4, and Whitehead 1954, 338). Expanding upon Whitehead’s observations, we can say that from the earliest days of so-called “modernism,” James earned the considerable cultural eminence that he still enjoys. His acceptance of “humanism” as an alternative term for the wider possibilities associated with the pluralistic worldview stemming from his radical empiricism, as well as for the open-minded and eminently practical attitude associated with pragmatism, suggests the continuing relevance of his thought (MT 38). For James, as now for “post-modernist” Western culture, it is no longer science versus humanism or versus belief or versus religion, but science as one among other key components of a well-rounded, if often fractious human enterprise. This is a humanism that can still ask, as James did, “Why should anywhere the world be absolutely fixed and finished?” (MT 56). Believing that it is not fixed and finished, we are more likely, James felt, to apply our additional strokes or take our additional steps…even though they will inevitably be “ever not quite” the final strokes or steps in human history.
Interestingly, pragmatism seemed to have run its course by the 1940s and 1950s, but it was revived in the 1970s by Richard Rorty (1982) and Hilary Putnam (1995), two of the major philosophers of the late twentieth century. The neo-pragmatism that they spurred has sprouted a number of variants, so many in fact that one scholar of “pragmatism, old and new” has recommended, in a pluralistic Jamesian spirit, that the search for “authentic pragmatism” be abandoned in favor of piecemeal borrowing from “the riches of the classical pragmatist tradition” (Haack 2006, 58). This suits the tendencies reflected in Rorty’s and Putnam’s work and even in the work of a friendly critic like Joseph Margolis, who has been more measured in his assessment of James’s contributions. As Putnam (1995) put it, “William James is a figure who simply won’t go away” (5). He was “a powerful thinker, as powerful as any in the last century,” Putnam argued, and “his way of philosophizing contains possibilities which have been too long neglected” (6). Although the “answers” to “immensely hard issues” may not be found in James’s work, he said, “James’s way of thinking about them” is still “inspiring” (22). (For further elaborations and justifications of Putnam’s high regard for James, see Putnam and Putnam 2017.) Margolis (2010), meanwhile, has offered a less flattering portrait of James, suggesting that he was “more of a pop figure than a leading thinker.” Yet he too admits that James’s works – his later philosophical works as well as his Principles – remain “remarkably suggestive” (37).
James would have been pleased to think that his ideas were still inspirational and still worthy of consideration and possible development. In addition, he would be pleased that Charlene Haddock Seigfried (1996), despite criticizing his masculinist, ethnicist, and classist biases (as discussed at the end of Ch. 12), has recognized in his pragmatism – and in pragmatism in general – “exploratory efforts” that point very usefully toward forms of “cooperative intelligence” that could ameliorate the conditions that fostered such biases (4 and Ch. 11). And he would have been delighted – perhaps even surprised – to read Ellen Kappy Suckiel’s (2006) overarching assessment that
James’s immense contributions to philosophy are to be counted not only in terms of the subtlety, originality, and incisiveness of his observations and arguments, but also in terms of his unwavering commitment to the idea that it is the responsibility of philosophers to clarify, enrich, and add perspective and wisdom to the experience of ordinary life.
(42)
His surprise and delight would have focused on the implication that there are still philosophers who recognize and even endorse the commitment and responsibility to contribute to human welfare, despite the deadening effects of “the Mandarin disease” spawned by the professionalization of the field (see James’s criticism of this development in PHD 69 and 73).
Just as psychology has fractured and lost coherence since James’s time, philosophy has tended to withdraw from the sphere of lived experience. Trends in the opposite direction, in both disciplines, have been benefiting recently – and could benefit more – from James’s example. Even though his thinking has been said, with some justification, to be “wobbly” and “inconsistent” at times, its trajectory – as Morton White (2005) has insisted – was always in the right direction and often anticipated later developments, such as the erasure of the analytic/synthetic distinction, the recognition of the important and appropriate role of emotions in cognition, and the emergence of a gradualist approach toward truth, to cite only a few trends specified by White (326–329). And, it must be added, the perception of wobbliness and inconsistency in James’s thought has been unfairly magnified by a lack of appreciation of his insights into the intimate relations and overlaps between mind and body, habit and thought, perception and conception, cognition and emotion, and so on (and for that matter, between scientific and humanistic means of analysis). In emphasizing these relations and overlaps, thereby rejecting conventional dualistic modes of thought, James was forced to reach for new ways of expressing himself, sometimes trespassing the bounds of traditional logic and language. To put this in another way, some of the past criticism of James’s thought was spurred by inadequate comprehension as well as ungenerous allowances being made for the unusually innovative features of that thought, which have been central concerns of this book. But as these features have come to be more fully appreciated, as is occurring today and seems likely to continue into the future, assertions about the quality of James’s thinking will almost certainly be more uniformly positive.
In any case, despite the simplification and caricature to which it has been subjected at times in the past, James’s pragmatism has drawn “renewed and energetic attention” in recent years, and deservedly so according to Morton White (2005, 325, 329–330), since it provides a way of thinking and acting that can be of considerable service “in this real world of sweat and dirt,” as James put it (PR 40). This world of sweat and dirt is the one in which we actually live and desire, know and aspire, and try…and try…and try again and again to understand and to act in appropriate ways. After all, as James wrote just months before his death, “there is no where extant,” nor will there ever be, “a complete gathering up of the universe in one focus, either of knowledge, power or purpose” (CWJ 12: 407).