The Philosophy of William James: Radical Empiricism and Radical Materialism by Donald A. Crosby (review)

William James described his system as “too much like an arch built only on one side.” Donald Crosby’s project is to chart the dimensions of the arch, repair it in certain places, and continue its construction. He endorses a Jamesian empiricism according to which “pure experience” is the ultimate context within which we come to judgments about reality, but he resists James’s allusions to pure experience as the stuff from which the world is made (10). The metaphysical question is answered by “radical materialism,” Crosby’s label for his revision of James’s pluralism.

James insisted that experience is prior to the discriminations that we find within in it. Most people, for example, must be taught to listen for counter-melodies in a composition before they can actually hear them. Because experience usually comes already structured by concepts, Crosby sometimes speaks of relatively pure experience (59). He addresses Richard Rorty’s critique of empiricism as well as Bas C. van Fraassen’s idea of empiricism as a “stance” with no ontological commitments (59–73). Contrary to Rorty, it is precisely because experience outruns our conceptual structures that it can be a source of surprise and discovery. Galileo’s telescopic observations were dramatic and unexpected; they demanded a revision of cosmology, as even the defenders of geo-centrism, like Clavius, realized (79). In reply to van Fraassen, Crosby highlights James’s fallibilism, which serves as a check against inflexible commitments. The idea of a stance seems, at a minimum, to presuppose an ontology of inquirers capable of taking a stance, of evaluating evidence, and of coming to conclusions based on the norms of logic and science.

One way in which experience is relatively pure is that it does not come ready-made as divided between self and world. We know that children must learn to distinguish themselves from the world. If James is correct, as Crosby notes, then to be a self—an experiencer—presupposes relatively pure experience, not vice versa. Following James, Crosby argues that the self/world distinction arises as a functional segregation within pure experience. Those aspects of experience that are stable and resist the will we call objective; others are fleeting and pliable, and these are merely mental. As James says, a real fire may destroy a room, whereas an imaginary fire plays over the room harmlessly. James also recognizes that one’s own past choices are stubbornly real, as addicts are often chagrined to learn. For James, free will manifests itself only within a context of, among other things, habit and character as already formed; we are, in part, self-made, an insight that James found in Jules Lequyer.

According to Crosby, James holds that truth is the outcome of inquiry rather than existing antecedently to it. He rightly says that it is not easy to wrap our minds around this notion (26). Wayne Viney—to whom Crosby dedicates his book—reminded me that James knew threshold research and Fechner’s law that governs the relations between physical stimulation and sensory experience. Are there not truths about what exists beyond the lower and upper thresholds prior to our discovery of them? To be sure, these truths are revealed in experience as augmented by the psychophysicist’s instruments. But does this view of truth not conflate the distinction between how we come to know the truth and the truth we come to know? Furthermore, can this view be squared with pluralism, which James says in The Will to Believe is the view of a radical empiricist? Arguably, a philosophy that strives for adequacy to experience should acknowledge that, beyond the penumbra of experience, there may be a reality represented in our experience, only symbolically, as a pointing beyond itself.

Crosby deals with the questions of how two persons can know a common world and how we can know...