"What will remain of philosopy will be a series of problemsIn 1905, troubled that the popularizers of pragmatism - including William James - had turned it from a theory of meaning to a theory of action, Peirce renamed his own doctrine of meaning "Pragmaticism," a name, he said, that was "ugly enough" to be safe from kidnappers. Peirce had adapted the term "pragmatism" (from the Greek word pragma ["thing, fact, matter, affair"]) from Immanuel Kant (1734-1804). Kant had distinguished the practical - relating to the will and action - from the pragmatic - relating to consequences of action. Peirce had derived his theory of meaning from this idea. The criterion of meaning was the pragmatic maxim:
capable of investigation by the observational methods of the true sciences." [1]
"Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings,Peirce made this theory of meaning central to his whole philosophy.
we conceive the object of our conception to have.
Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object."
"The meaning of any proposition can alway be brought downIn his application, it was clear that the criterion applied to truth as well as to meaning, having the power at least to eliminate somme hypotheses.
to some particular consequence in our future practical experience,
whether passive or active."
The philosophy of William James emerged from the tension between the commitment to science and the attractiveness of religious faith. This is indicated by the fact that his first two books concerned the science of psychology which helped to found, while his next two books had to do with religious belief. In his remaining publications, he was seeking the philosophical perspective in which these two focii of experience can be affirmed jointly and respectably.
His The Principles of Psychology (two volumes, 1890) has long been recognized as a classic. In method, the work is empirical, combining a functional, biological approach to man with intense introspection. Metaphysical issues were postponed until his later works. He thought of consciousness as a stream or flow whose later moments are able to grasp and own their predecessors. Thus, he adopted the term "specious present" to refer to that real duration we are able to grasp at once and which contains in it part the past and part of the future. But this suggests an organic relatedness although the scientific view at the time recognized only separate molecules. At this time, James also developed what has come to be known as the James-Lange theory of the emotions. On this theory, an emotion is the feeling of a bodily state; therefore it must follow rather than produce this state. We do not run because we are afraid; on the contrary, we are afraid because we run. This view clearly supports a functional theory of consciousness. James exprssed this theory in essay of 1914, "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?" He answered that the term does not stand for an entity but that it does most emphhatically stand for a function.
The religious aspect of James' thought pulled him in a different direction. In the Will to Believe (1897), he argued that when the options of life are forced, living and momentous, neutrality is impossible, and that in such cases we have a right to believe beyond the evidence. Indeed, since not to decide is to decide in the negative, and since our choice is itself part of the evidence, it is necessary to go beyond the evidence. We are asked to have recourse to indirect evidence. His The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) is a careful, sensitive, and concerned study of the religious life based upon the experience both of mystics and ordinary believers. His analyses of the twice-born, of the function of belief in "sick souls," led him to view the religious perspective as relying something beyond, or other than, reason. At the same time, the unity of the religious testimony is sufficient to provide some evidence that the religious hypothesis may be true.
The attempt to find the unity of these interests occupied James' thought increasingly. His adoption of pragmatism as a method is in line with the functionalism of his psychology, while his extension of pragmatism to indirect consequences agrees with his interest in religion and ideality. Taking from Peirce the pragmatic maxim and stating it more broadly, James no less than Peirce wished ideas to be interpreted in terms of their consequences. This meant that some ideas would not pass muster; the element of reform was in his mind when he urged that ideas be taken in terms of their "cash value." At the same time, however, he related the doctrine of meaning to the doctrine of truth:
"The true is only the expedient in the way of thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in way of our behaving."Truth is a matter of degree. Truth "happens" to an idea. Truth changes and develops through time. In his most defensible devopment of this doctrine, James holds that for a doctrine to be regarded as true it must pass three tests:
As to the world in which we live, James combatted monism with his doctrine of pluralism. The world is not absolutely unified. There is looseness in it, sufficient looseness to keep the future open and to allow freedom on the part of man. The relations of the world are not all internal - for example, relations of entailment. Ours is not a block universe. The basic fact is that of external relatedness; and the approach to knowledge is "radical empiricism," an approach which requires no trans-empirical connective support. Mind and matter are merely two of the different ways in which reality gets organized. James held that the stuff which gets organized is "pure experience." This decision gave him a number of advantages. He could avoid the mind-body dualism; he could see how an object in one person's world could become an object in another's, and how "our minds can meet in a world of objects which they share in common."
James was troubled, also, by the dualism of the sense-datum theory, where objects are duplicated in perception. He suggested that it might be possible to avoid this dualism if we follow out the paradigm case where one item can be part of two realities; for example, the point situated at the intersection of two lines is on both lines. Let us apply this to the problem of perception. Think of your life as a line extended through space and time; and think of any object of perception, such as a tree, as constituting a similar line. At the moment of perception, the two lines cross, and there is no need of a sense-datum to duplicate the fact of one's perceiving of the tree. At most, the sense-datum is needed to explain erroneous perceptions, the seeing of something that isn't there.
The possibility of a meeting of minds also suggests to James the manner in which our awareness might relate to a divine awareness. There could be a "compounding of consciousness." Indeed "pluralistic panpsychism" attracted him ever more strongly. Beyond our awareness there could be wider awareness of which we were part. God must be the "deeper power" in the universe, "a power not ourselves" which makes for righteousness and "means" it, and which recognizes us. He must include us, but not in such a fashion as to rob us of freedom; He must be somewhat less than all-inclusive, in order that He not be responsible for evil; and He must participate in a real history in order that our temporal conerns not be drained of their significnce.
Dewey characterized his philosophy as naturalism, quite as often as he called his view Instrumentalism. Believing that value, as well as facts, can be discovered in, and sanctioned by, experience, he is a naturalist in ethical theory. Ethical naturalism holds that questions of right and wrong can be settled by aducing of evidence. He believed that in the process of inquiry the "better" can emerge. Dewey believed that it is not untowaard to retain the idea of God if the term is redefined to stand for that relation between the actual and the ideal. If one is to mean no more than this by the term, its use, Dewey recognizes, will lead to understanding; but he did not himself favor the term in his own writings.
[1] Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (eds.),
The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce
(Harvard University Press, 1931-1935), vol. 5, paragraph 423.