William James and the philosophy of pragmatism

Pragmatism turned out to be a slippery enough concept that James, a writer with a well-deserved reputation for clarity, had to write a second book about it to address all the misconceptions. His version is all about making explicit the process that we all go through in weighing each new incoming experience or evidence for something against our mountain of collected experiences, which is how we individually decide whether or not something is true. It’s not as simple as “does this agree with what I have experienced before,” since some kinds of new information can radically change our perspective on past events.

The article mentioned that he coined the term “stream of consciousness,” which is so familiar now to us that we can gloss over the depth with which he treated it. For James, the idea of “a thought” was itself an abstraction: if consciousness is a stream then there is no hard separation from a thought that comes before or after the one raises up for examination. He makes mention of a “fringe” surrounding whichever thought has most of our attention, and these fringes are constantly expanding to become the center of our focus, only to be replaced by the next. This came to mind when I was reading about attention models in neural networks, and how accounting for attention improved their functioning for some classes of problems.

If you’re interested in William James, one of the best introductions to his work is not by James himself but by Jacques Barzun, entitled “A Stroll with William James.” Barzun quotes James extensively in it, and ties together the overarching themes of his various works with a deft hand. I may be slightly biased here because my jumping-off point for reading James was Barzun’s “From Dawn to Decadence,” a sprawling work that led me to investigate a number of references, but none turned out to be as rewarding as reading William James, who has become a personal hero.

An entire article about William James and pragmatism with nary a mention of Charles Sanders Peirce. Curious.

If I may excerpt from The Complete Idiot's Guide to Philosophy,

“ Peirce's pragmatism eventually became well known, thanks largely to the work of William James, who drew attention to Peirce's ideas. But Peirce objected to many of James' views and sought to distance his own thinking from that of James. At one point, he rejected the term, "pragmatism" for his own philosophy and proposed the term, "pragmatacism" in its place, joking that the new term was "ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers."† ”

† As has turned out to be the case!

"Pragmatism was a method for making decisions, testing beliefs, settling arguments. In a world of chance and incomplete information, James insisted that truth was elusive but action mandatory. The answer: Make a decision and see if it works. Try a belief and see if your life improves. Don’t depend on logic and reason alone, add in experience and results. Shun ideology and abstraction. Take a chance. “Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.”

"James insisted he was more of a popularizer and synthesizer than an originator. Aristotle and John Stuart Mill were pragmatists, exponents of empiricism. Of course, some philosophers were skeptical of pragmatism. Truth becomes whatever is useful, whatever has cash value. Bertrand Russell was terrified that pragmatism would dethrone the ideal of objective truth, calling it “a form of the subjective madness which is characteristic of most modern philosophy.” Pragmatism to these skeptics encourages relativism and subjectivity and leads to irrationalism.

"Not so, says contemporary historian James Kloppenberg. Pragmatism swept through the first half of twentieth-century America, encouraging the experimentation of Progressivism and the New Deal. Retreating, it is now returning, influencing legal realism and encouraging cultural pluralism and scientific government. According to Kloppenberg, it contributed to the worldview of Barack Obama. Pragmatism is the enemy of certainty, simplification, and fanaticism. It champions skepticism, experimentation, and tolerance."

Pragmatism is a misunderstood philosophy. Objective truth is objective truth and can't really be dethroned, but the major threat of pragmatism (as of most other philosophies that don't rely on received wisdom) is that many of the things that are held as truth aren't actually objectively true.

I'm always glad to see Articles about Pragmatist Philosophers and their works on HN. I'm also glad to see that this article at least touches on how James' work relates to contemporary politics and issues.

One of the defining features of American Pragmatism is it's optimism. I think it's fair to say that the currently widely held sentiment about the state of society is that we are on the decline. I find that reading James, and talking to others about the need to address the rising issues (immigration protection, environmental concerns, wealth distribution, etc), injects that same optimism. Things are bad, but we can DO things to change things for the better.

William James is widely credited as the progenitor of modern American psychology, and his "Principals" [0] one of the first widely disseminated textbooks on the subject of mental health. He had his own demons, and sought to share his experiences overcoming. I've just recently picked it up and hope to read it soon, as I've been told that it's still a book that reads quite well.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Principles_of_Psychology

"Varieties remains for most believers a powerful defense against Karl Marx, who criticized religion as the opiate of the masses"

That's not what Karl Marx said. He said: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people"

W. James was on the border of philosophy and psychology, and is probably better read as the former today.

Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/325

(Thanks to rusk) Internet Archive: https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22James%2C+W...