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5. Pragmatism: Corridor as “Latent” and “The Will to Believe”
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5 Pragmatism Corridor as “Latent” and “The Will to Believe” Like many of his other texts, James’s Pragmatism (Prag) contains both a manifest and a latent image. On the surface level, it is a “method only.” James describes it as a corridor with various topics leading to different rooms by our asking “What difference does it make?” if a given theory is true. It is a way of resolving issues rather than dissolving them. James’s pragmatism differed from that of his colleague Charles Sanders Peirce who saw pragmatism as a way of dissolving issues, that is, explaining them away. In suggesting that “an idea is true if it makes a difference ,” James offered a theory of truth fundamentally different from the paradigm offered by René Descartes, for whom knowledge was equated with certainty. Let us see how James develops his position. To begin with, we should note what pragmatism was supposed to do. In an era that had become one of scientific positivism, the place of the romantic in a theory of truth was indeed a perilous one. The division existed in philosophy between those who were tenderhearted and those who were hard-nosed, with the understanding that these were mutually exclusive. With the rise of positivism, James laments, The romantic spontaneity and courage are gone, the vision is materialistic and depressing. Ideals appear as inert by-products of physiology; what is higher is explained by what is lower and treated forever as a case of “nothing but”—nothing but something else of a quite inferior sort.1 Pragmatism 37 The reaction to this, on the other hand, “dwelt on so high a level of abstraction that . . . it is compatible with any state of things whatever being true here below” (Prag, 19). James’s answer to this dilemma was to “offer the oddly named thing pragmatism as a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds of demands” (ibid., 23). Important here are precisely the two things James is trying to put together (or better , refusing to allow being torn apart). Reductive materialism is almost synonymous with the impoverishment of experience, but it had the positive quality of being useful or “pragmatic.” Romantic idealism, however, had no cutting edge. It led nowhere—in short, it had no intensity. On the other hand, it was richer than a simple reductionism, although its richness can lead to dualism and to absolutes. Pragmatism, as offered by James, is an attempt to do justice both to richness and to intensity as they are found in everyday experience. What, then, is the pragmatic method, and how does it work? In Prag, James asserts that To attain perfect clearness in our thought of an object, . . . we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve—what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, whether immediate or remote, is then for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as the conception has positive significance at all. (29) Ideas are true if they have a “worthwhile leading.” They must be seen as hypotheses , as projections. As such, they point beyond themselves to verifications in experience . Because of this, ideas are not self-contained; they are interpenetrative with sensations: True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. . . . Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its vali-dation. (Prag, 97) This process of verifying consists in bringing out the concrete worth of an idea: You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed. Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest. (Prag, 31–32) [52.91.177.91] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:55 GMT) 38 William James in Focus Any given idea, then, is actually a process—it takes time. To formulate an idea is not to come up with a finished product but merely with a plan of action. An idea must agree, or it must lead to...