The pragmatic theory of truth
True ideas are those we can assimilate, validate and verify. Truth is an idea's cash-value, an event that happens to it in experience.
The Nineteenth Century · 1842 – 1910
William James
威廉·詹姆斯
Founder of American psychology and of pragmatism: truth is the cash-value of an idea, consciousness is a stream, and the will to believe may decide where evidence cannot.
PragmatismBirthplace: New York City
Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.
Source: Pragmatism, lecture 6
James was born in New York to a wealthy and eccentric family; his father was a theological writer and his brother Henry the novelist. The family moved constantly between America and Europe, and he attended school in five countries, studied painting, then chemistry, comparative anatomy and medicine at Harvard, went to the Amazon with Agassiz in 1865, and took his MD in 1869 without ever practising. Three years of severe depression followed, with thoughts of suicide, until in 1870 he read Renouvier on free will and resolved that 'my first act of free will shall be to believe in free will'.
He began teaching physiology at Harvard in 1872, offered America's first psychology course in 1875 and founded its first psychology laboratory, remarking that the first lecture on psychology he ever heard was the first one he gave. The Principles of Psychology took twelve years and appeared in 1890 in two volumes of fourteen hundred pages, describing consciousness as an indivisible stream, explaining emotion as the perception of bodily change (we do not cry because we are sad, we are sad because we cry), and calling habit the flywheel of society. It remains a classic.
In the 1890s he turned to philosophy and religion. The Will to Believe argues that when an option is living, forced and momentous and the evidence cannot decide, one has the right to choose by one's passional nature. His Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh in 1901 became The Varieties of Religious Experience, a psychology of conversion, mysticism and sainthood judged by fruits rather than roots. Pragmatism in 1907 became a best-seller: the truth of an idea lies in its working in experience; truth happens to an idea, it is the process of its verification.
He called his metaphysics 'radical empiricism': experience is the only stuff, relations are themselves within experience, there is no absolute split of subject and object, and the universe is an unfinished, pluralistic world. He opposed imperialism, supported psychical research and spoke for Philippine independence. He died of heart disease with his brother Henry beside him. Russell said his books 'more than anyone's read like a man talking', and Dewey, Husserl, Wittgenstein and Bergson all took something from him.
Key Ideas
The stream of consciousness
Consciousness is not a chain of ideas but a continuous, ever-changing, selective stream. Psychology stopped chopping experience into pieces.
The will to believe
In a genuine, forced, momentous option that evidence cannot settle, waiting for evidence is itself a choice. One has the right to believe by one's passional nature.
Radical empiricism
Nothing lies outside experience, and relations and connections are directly experienced. The world is a pluriverse of 'pure experience'.
The James–Lange theory of emotion
Emotion is the perception of bodily change: we are afraid because we tremble. Mind and body cannot be separated.
Influenced by
- Charles Sanders Peirce
He made Peirce's club maxim public under the name 'pragmatism' and stretched it from a theory of meaning into a theory of truth, at which Peirce disowned the extension.
- John Stuart Mill
Pragmatism is dedicated to Mill: 'whom my fancy likes to picture as our leader were he alive today'.
- David Hume
- Immanuel Kant
- Henri Bergson
Mutual admirers: he said reading Bergson was like 'opening a window', and the stream of consciousness and durée were one intuition.
Influenced
- Edmund Husserl
- Henri Bergson
Their correspondence ran ten years; James called Creative Evolution 'a marvel', and Bergson said James's stream of consciousness and his own duration were the same discovery.
- John Dewey
The Principles of Psychology pulled him from Hegel's Absolute back to the interaction of organism and environment; he called it the turning point of his thought.
- Alfred North Whitehead
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Hilary Putnam
In his last decades he returned to pragmatism, saying James and Dewey had long seen that fact and value cannot be separated and that philosophy cannot be done from the spectator's standpoint.
- Richard Rorty