Epistemic Sensitivity and the Alogical: William James, Psychical Research, and the Radical Empiricist Attitude

Strange as it may seem today—especially given James’s reputation as a brilliant psychologist, an astute writer on religious life, and the eminent founder of pragmatism—no facet of James’s career received more ink in the general press than psychical research, at least during his lifetime.

—Paul Stob, William James and the Art of Popular Statement

in his masterful introduction to Essays in Psychical Research, Robert McDermott observes that 1896 was a significant year for William James. He writes of James as a “weaver of intellectual and experiential threads” who “labored for the removal of those ideas, beliefs, and habits of mind that block insight and imagination” and that, on this account, “[t]he year 1896 is instructive” (McDermott xxvii). This paper attempts to shed further light on the year 1896 by showing that McDermott’s claim digs deeper and is more instructive than his initial observations: it aims to historically and contextually establish a continuity of concern between James’s studies in psychical research and his first public announcement of radical empiricism.

What differentiates this approach from others is that it takes seriously James’s first comment regarding radical empiricism, that the essays in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy “shed explanatory light upon each other, and taken together express a tolerably definite philosophical attitude in a very untechnical way” (WB 6). To my knowledge, only a handful of scholars attend to James’s emphasis of the radical empiricist attitude as it is given in the 1896 preface.¹ In his study William James and Henri Bergson (1914), Horace M. Kallen identifies James’s radical empiricism as “metaphysics which is expressible in an attitude, not in a system” (Kallen 29). However, his brief discussion does not differentiate between James’s early radical empiricism, for example, as articulated in the 1896 preface to The Will to Believe, and his mature radical empiricisms as per the 1904–1905 essays, posthumously published as Essays in Radical Empiricism. While Kallen’s description is troubling to the postmodern mind insofar as he characterizes James’s radical empiricist attitude as a “neutral-starting point,” he does capture an important component when he states that “[i]t keeps throwing ever-new data into the focus of philosophical attention, emphasizing against the compensatory prejudice innumberable neglected contents of experience” (29–30).

More recently, D. Micah Hester and Robert Talisse identify this attitude as a melioristic meta-philosophical attitude that attempts to navigate various intellectualisms, both philosophical and practical (Hester 24–25). Francesca Bordogna also attempts to capture this attitude by associating it with James’s “boundary work,” which sought to revise the “social and moral economy of science,” by shifting back and forth between the epistemological and the methodological to the moral and social, in an attempt to challenge “the prevailing epistemological regimes, reshaping the existing disciplines, and changing the geography of knowledge” (Bordogna 58). For Bordogna, the attitude in question constitutes “a spirit of inner tolerance” that gets to the heart of what “James took to be essential to the practice of good science and good philosophy: open-mindedness, modesty, tolerance, respect for other people, and pluralism” (Bordogna 119).

While Kallen, Hester, and Bordogna call attention to the importance of James’s radical empiricist attitude, none of them provide a sustained treatment. This paper attempts to dig deeper into the historical context of James’s attitudinal component and, in so doing, to illustrate the continuity of concern amongst his work in the late 1890s. On this account, the 1896 context steeped in psychical research provides one of the most fruitful areas to explore the meaning of James’s “definite philosophical attitude.” As discussed below, I make the claim that James’s radical empiricist attitude appeals (1) on a general level to the inner significance of the individual, and (2) more specifically to the individual’s context as being on the fringe of socially acceptable or “rational” belief. This paper argues that if we interpret the “definite philosophical attitude” as an epistemological sensitivity to the way monistic thinking affects the...