Pragmatism

Overview

Pragmatism is a hundred and thirty pages and it was spoken before it was printed. James gave the eight lectures at the Lowell Institute in Boston in late 1906 and repeated them at Columbia in early 1907, to audiences of over a thousand. That origin shows everywhere: the prose is direct, funny, full of images, and pitched at people who are interested but not trained. James was probably the best writer among modern philosophers, and this is the most readable book of philosophy in English.

Its readability is also the standing complaint against it. James argues by analogy and example, he restates rather than defines, and the central claims about truth are put several different ways across two lectures without being nailed down. The technical objections came immediately, and he spent his last three years answering them in The Meaning of Truth.

He is also explicit that he is not inventing anything. The pragmatic method comes from Charles Sanders Peirce, who had published it in 1878 to no attention. When James made it famous, Peirce concluded that his own idea had been distorted and renamed his position pragmaticism, a word he said was ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers.

The argument

Lecture I: the present dilemma in philosophy. James begins with temperament rather than argument. Philosophers, he says, divide into the tender-minded, who are rationalist, idealistic, optimistic, religious and dogmatic, and the tough-minded, who are empiricist, materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious and sceptical. Most people want what the first offers, a world with moral meaning, and also respect what the second delivers, the hard facts of science, and the schools give them no way to have both. Pragmatism is offered as the mediator.

Lecture II: what pragmatism means. The famous opening is about a squirrel. A party of campers argue about whether a man who circles a tree, with a squirrel on the trunk keeping the tree between them, goes round the squirrel. James asks what they mean by round, gets two answers, and shows that on one the answer is yes and on the other no, and that there is no further question.

The method generalises: to settle a dispute, trace its practical consequences. What experiences would differ if one side were right? If none, the alternatives mean the same thing and the dispute is idle. Pragmatism, he insists, is a method and not a doctrine; it has no results of its own and no dogmas, and stands for no particular conclusions.

Then the application to truth, which he introduces briefly here and develops later. Truth is not a static property that an idea either has or lacks. An idea is true so far as it helps us get into satisfactory relations with other parts of our experience: it works, it leads somewhere, it can be verified. The formula that caused the trouble is here, that the true is the name of whatever proves itself good in the way of belief.

Lecture III: some metaphysical problems. The method applied. Substance: if a substance can never be detected apart from its properties, what difference does asserting it make? Materialism against theism: James argues the dispute is idle about the past, since the facts would be the same either way, and real about the future, since the two offer different prospects for the world’s outcome. Design: the fact of order proves nothing about the designer’s character, so the traditional argument is useless, and what matters is whether it supports hope. Free will: he sets aside the metaphysics and treats it as a doctrine of relief, which says the future may be better than the past.

Lectures IV and V: the one and the many, and common sense. Whether the world is fundamentally one or many is examined by asking what kinds of unity it actually has, and James finds several partial ones, and concludes for a pluralistic universe in which things are connected in some ways and not others. Lecture V argues that our common-sense categories, thing, kind, cause, are not discoveries about reality but successful inventions, ways of thinking that worked, and that science’s categories are later inventions that work better for other purposes.

Lectures VI and VII: truth. The centre of the book and the part to read most carefully. True ideas are those we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. Truth happens to an idea; it is made true by events. Most of our true beliefs are never directly verified, and we hold them on credit, which the system honours because they are verifiable in principle and because they fit with the rest.

James then meets the obvious objection, that this makes truth whatever is convenient. His reply is that an idea must also cohere with the enormous mass of beliefs we already hold and with the facts we run into, and that these constraints are severe. Lecture VII answers named critics, and it is here that the argument becomes most technical and least conclusive.

Lecture VIII: pragmatism and religion. The final lecture, and the most personal. James rejects both the absolute idealism that guarantees a happy outcome and the materialism that forbids one, and proposes meliorism: salvation of the world is neither certain nor impossible but possible, and it depends in part on what people do. Religious belief, on his account, is legitimate for someone whose life is genuinely changed by it, where no evidence contradicts it. He ends by asking why a philosophy should not be judged by whether it makes a difference to how a life is lived.

How to read it

Read lectures I, II, VI and VIII. That is the method, the theory of truth and the religious conclusion, and it is about sixty pages.

Watch the slipperiness in the truth lectures. James uses works, useful, satisfactory, verifiable and expedient almost interchangeably, and the objections all live in the gaps between them. Try to state his position precisely and you will see the problem the critics saw.

Read the preface to The Meaning of Truth if your edition has it. James is much sharper when he is defending himself, and he denies flatly that he ever meant truth is whatever you like.

Read some Peirce on how to make our ideas clear, which is where the method comes from and which is far more austere. The difference between the two men is the best way to see what James added and what he lost.

Notice the tone. James is trying to be useful, he addresses the audience’s actual worries, and he thinks philosophy that makes no difference to anyone is not worth doing. That conviction is the book’s real content, more than any of its doctrines.

Questions it raises

• If an idea is true because it works, what about beliefs that are useful and false, and false beliefs that once worked very well?
• James says the dispute between materialism and theism is idle about the past and real about the future. Is that a distinction the facts support?
• Theories are instruments, not answers. Does that account for why some instruments keep working in situations nobody designed them for?
• Is pragmatism really a method with no doctrines of its own? The lectures reach a number of substantive conclusions.
• The account of religious belief allows what makes a difference to a life and contradicts no evidence. Is that a defence of faith or a dilution of it?
• Meliorism says the world’s salvation is possible and depends partly on us. Is that a philosophical position or a temperament, and did James think there was a difference?