William James

William JamesWelcome to our topic on William James! William James was an American thinker in and between the disciplines of physiology, psychology and philosophy. His masterpiece, The Principles of Psychology (1890), is a rich blend of physiology, psychology, philosophy, and personal reflection that has given us such ideas as “the stream of thought” and the baby’s impression of the world “as one great blooming, buzzing confusion” (p. 462). It contains seeds of pragmatism and phenomenology, and influenced generations of thinkers in Europe and America, including Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

“The truth of an idea depends on how useful it is.” ~ William James

Who is William James?

Born in New York City, William James was brought up in a wealthy and intellectual family; his father was a famously eccentric theologian, and his brother Henry became a well-known author. During his childhood he lived for several years in Europe, where he pursued a love of painting, but at the age of 19 he abandoned this to study science. His studies at Harvard Medical School were interrupted by the ill health and depression that were to prevent him from ever practicing medicine, but he eventually graduated and in 1872 took a teaching post in physiology at Harvard University. His increasing interest in the subjects of psychology and philosophy led him to write acclaimed publications in these fields, and he was awarded a professorship in philosophy at Harvard in 1880. He taught there until his retirement in 1907.

Key philosophical woks

  • 1890 The Principles of Psychology
  • 1896 The Will to Believe
  • 1902 The Varieties of Religious Experience
  • 1907 Pragmatism

The philosophy of William James

William James Earth is flatCentral to Peirce’s pragmatism was the theory that we do not acquire knowledge simply by observing, but by doing, and that we rely on that knowledge only so long as it is useful, in the sense that it adequately explains things for us. When it no longer fulfills that function, or better explanations make it redundant, we replace it. For example, we can see by looking back in history how our ideas about the world have changed constantly, from thinking that Earth is flat to knowing it to be round; from assuming that Earth is the center of the universe, to realizing that it is just one planet in a vast cosmos. The older assumptions worked perfectly adequately as explanations in their time, yet they are not true, and the universe itself has not changed. This demonstrates how knowledge as an explanatory tool is different from facts. Peirce examined the nature of knowledge in this way, but James was to apply this reasoning to the notion of truth.

For James, the truth of an idea depends on how useful it is; that is to say, whether or not it does what is required of it. If an idea does not contradict the known facts—such as laws of science—and it does provide a means of predicting things accurately enough for our purposes, he says there can be no reason not to consider it true, in the same way that Peirce considered knowledge as a useful tool irrespective of the facts. This interpretation of truth not only distinguishes it from fact, but also leads James to propose that

“the truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process.”

Any idea, if acted upon, is found to be true by the action we take; putting the idea into practice is the process by which it becomes true. James also thinks that belief in an idea is an important factor in choosing to act upon it, and in this way belief is a part of the process that makes an idea true. If I am faced with a difficult decision, my belief in a particular idea will lead to a particular course of action and so contribute to its success. It is because of this that James defines “true beliefs” as those that prove useful to the believer. Again, he is careful to distinguish these from facts, which he says “are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.”

The right to believe

Every time we try to establish a new belief, it would be useful if we had all the available evidence and the time to make a considered decision. But in much of life we do not have that luxury; either there is not enough time to examine the known facts, or there is not enough evidence, and we are forced to a decision. We have to rely on our beliefs to guide our actions, and James says that we have “the right to believe” in these cases.

James explains this by taking the example of a man lost and starving in a forest. When he sees a path, it is important for him to believe that the path will lead him out of the forest and to habitation, because if he does not believe it, he will not take the path, and will remain lost and starving. But if he does, he will save himself. By acting on his idea that the path will lead him to safety, it becomes true. In this way our actions and decisions make our belief in an idea become true. This is why James asserts “act as if what you do makes a difference”—to which he adds the typically concise and good-humored rider, “it does.”

Reality as a process

James was a psychologist as well as a philosopher, and he sees the implications of his ideas in terms of human psychology as much as in the theory of knowledge. He recognized the psychological necessity for humans to hold certain beliefs, particularly religious ones. James thinks that while it is not justifiable as a fact, belief in a god is useful to its believer if it allows him or her to lead a more fulfilled life, or to overcome the fear of death. These things—a more fulfilled life and a fearless confrontation of death—become true; they happen as the result of a belief, and the decisions and actions based upon it.

Along with his pragmatic notion of truth, James proposes a type of metaphysics that he calls “radical empiricism.” This approach takes reality to be a dynamic, active process, in the same way that truth is a process. Like the traditional empiricists before him, James rejected the rationalist notion that the changing world is in some way unreal, but he also went further to state that “for pragmatism, [reality] is still in the making”, as truth is constantly being made to happen. This “stream” of reality, he believes, is not susceptible to empirical analysis either, both because it is in continual flux and because the act of observing it affects the truth of the analysis. In James’s radical empiricism, from which both mind and matter are formed, the ultimate stuff of reality is pure experience.

References

  • Dorling Kindersley. (2011). The Philosophy Book. New York: DK Publishing.
  • Stumpf, Samuel Enoch. (2008). From Socrates to Sartre and Beyond. New York: McGraw Hill Publishing.
  • Palmer, Donald.(2006). Looking at philosophy:The unbearable heaviness of philosophy made lighter 4th Edition. New York: McGraw Hill Companies.
  • Gaarder, Jostein. (2004). Sophie’s World. Great Britain: Phoenix House.
  • William James. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed on September 19, 2017 at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james/
  • William James: The Basics of Philosophy. Accessed on September 17, 2017 at www.philosophybasics.com

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