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William James & Pragmatic Thought
by
Kenneth Shouler, Ph.D.
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- James abridged & popularized pragmatic thought
- James was concerned with “open” questions
- James defines truth in terms of “what works”
William James (1842–1910) simplified and popularized pragmatic thought like no other thinker. “The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and to me, at definite times of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one,” he said. What “difference” beliefs made was more obvious—and in some ways more important—than whether those beliefs are true.
James was especially concerned with all of philosophy’s “open” questions. This included the issues of morality, God’s existence, free will and determinism, and immortality. He answered all of these in a pragmatic and personal way. He may not have answered them for everyone, but he answered them for himself in a manner that other found profitable.
Williams James earned his medical degree from Harvard at the age of twenty-seven. But medicine’s loss would become philosophy’s gain. When he published Principles of Psychology in 1890, the field was still in its infancy. He made philosophy his full-time occupation and taught with Josiah Royce, George Santayana, and C. S. Pierce.
“Pierce wrote as a logician and James as a humanist,” Dewey said. James looked at the value of philosophy in terms of its contribution to his life. For James, the consequences of a belief were to be understood in terms of the personal and practical impact it has in the life of an individual.
Of belief in God, he wrote: “On pragmatist principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is ‘true.’”
Similar to Dewey, truth for James is not correspondence, but involves asking, “What concrete difference will it make in anyone’s actual life?” James says that true beliefs have the characteristic that “they pay” or have practical “cash value.” He defines truth in terms of “what works,” or “gives satisfaction,” or the “practical consequences” of a person’s beliefs. “The true is whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief” and “Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.”
In response to his critics that his view is too subjective, he tries to provide criteria for truth: “True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those we cannot. . . . . In addition, as humans are constituted in point of fact, we find that to believe in other men’s minds, in independent physical realities, in past events, in eternal logical relations, is satisfactory.”
…from The Everything Guide to Understanding Philosophy.
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