William James Flashcards
William James (1842-1910)
• Philosopher, psychologist, one of the originators of American pragmatism
• Fell into depression over the issue of whether modern science proved free will was an illusion and the difficulty of resigning himself to living in a deterministic universe
• “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will”
• During this time of crisis, he found comfort in religious belief
• Experimented with hallucinogens
• Said he only understood the German philosopher Hegel’s “Absolute Idealism” when on nitrous oxide
• Argues religious belief is not ruled out by science and is a reasonable personal choice
Pragmatism
•Empiricist (but you don’t have to be, you can be anything as a pragmatist, CF. Joseph Royce)
•We have access to experiences and ideas, not to reality itself.
•Truth is about weaving new beliefs in with all old ones when they prove to be valuable, whether for predicting scientific events (like eclipses) or because they are spiritually and ennobling to those that believe them. •Coherentist and pragmatist view of truth.
•Project: resolve the contradiction between cold scientific determinism and allegiance to empirical facts and the ideals of free will, morality, and God.
The will to believe
•”A defence of our right to adopt a believe in attitude and religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced.”
•”Voluntary adopted faith.”
•People think this isn’t philosophically reputable, even as they believe all sorts of things on faith themselves.
•Hypothesis— anything that may be proposed to our belief.
•A hypothesis can be live or dead.
Hypotheses and options
-Live hypothesis— is a real possibility to whom it is proposed.
-Option— a decision between two hypotheses.
Options could be:
Living or dead
Forced or avoidable
Momentous or trivial
-Genuine option— forced, living, and momentous.
-Some religious beliefs won’t be live options for a particular Audience while others are.
Forced and momentous
•Choose between going out with or without your umbrella.
•Not really Forced, you could just not go out.
•Given a chance to go to the north pole, this would be momentous, probably once in a lifetime opportunity.
•Some hypotheses investigated by scientists are live, they can possibly be believed, but are abandoned within a year because they investigate matters to trivial to spend more time on.
The passions, The will, and The intellect
•When it comes to some facts, we believe based on our feelings and what we choose.
•Other facts seem like there’s nothing left to do once we grasp and intellectually, we can’t help but believe them.
•We can’t just choose what to believe.
•Could you choose to believe the Abraham Lincoln was a mythical figure? •Or that 2 1 dollar bills can add up to $100?
•The whole “fabric of truths” is made up of beliefs we can’t help but believe.
Isn’t it silly to suppose we can choose what we believe?
•Pascal offers us a wager.
•But we probably feel like when religion has to resort to reasoning like this it is on its deathbed.
•A last ditch effort.
•A calculated faith that would not be approved by the deity.
•It’s not a living option to go to mass and take holy water for a Muslim.
•Is a case any religious position could make.
•Seems like we can’t choose what we believe.
Objective truth vs. other influences
•Compare the disinterested and impartial labors of so many scientists to the “little sentimentalist who comes blowing his voluntary smoke-wreaths”
•Clough, Huxley, Clifford all praise objective truth and our duty to believe only what evidence justifies.
•This seems healthy and normal.
•But it is really only our dead hypotheses that we can’t choose to bring back to life, and what has made them no longer a live option is not reason but some other influence, not even consciously chosen.
•Factors of belief: fear, hope, prejudice, passion, imitation, partisanship, pressure from cast and peer groups.
•We find ourselves believing all sorts of things we barely know why or how.
Conformist, non-rational beliefs
•Conformists inherited, taking up beliefs in: molecules, democracy, progress, Protestant Christianity, defending American against European dominance.
•We believe all the stuff for no good reasons.
•It’s the Prestige of those opinions that ignite them in our minds.
•We have faith in someone else’s faith, some other authority.
•”Our belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other, —what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up?”
•We want to believe we have the truth and we are always getting closer to it.
•But if the pyrrhonian sceptic asks how we know, can we really give a logical justification?
•No! We are willing to go in for a life based on the trust or assumption which he doesn’t care to make.
We dismiss theories we don’t find useful
•Clifford didn’t find Christian feelings useful.
•Huxley opposed bishops because they weren’t useful to his way of life.
•Newman adopts Catholicism and finds reasons for staying there, “because a priestly system is for him an organic need and delight.”
•Scientists don’t look into telepathy, even if it were true it would go against the scientific picture and should be suppressed!
•It would undo the uniformity of nature, a belief needed by science.
•logicians like Clifford desire to exclude “all elements for which they, in their professional quality of logicians, can fine no use.”
•Feelings and choices influence what we believe, reasoning comes later to the affair (post hoc.)
•Then pascal argument seems like a “regular clincher”
Conditions for passional belief
•James defends the view that are feelings (passional nature) not only can but must decide an option for us, whether it is a genuine option (live, forced, momentous) that can’t be decided on intellectual grounds.
•Even deciding to not decide, but leave the question open, is a decision based on feelings, and risk losing the truth as well.
•Empiricism— we may arrive at the truth, but only fallibly, we might always be wrong in our belief to have discovered it.
•Absolutism (rationalism)— we can arrive at the truth and no we hav it.
Empiricists and absolutists
•Both empiricists (in science) and absolutists (in philosophy) claim to have the system for discovering truth and the right way to arrive at it, all others are false.
•Scholastic philosophy (Thomas Aquinas) held that truth is a matter of proposition perfectly corresponding to a real thing.
•There is no Possibility of doubt for obvious truths.
•We fall into this, even the greatest empiricists “dogmatize like infallible Popes.”
•Clifford believe so strongly in an anti-Christian picture Christianity is a dead option for him.
We should recognize our fallibility
•”Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit entering visited planet are they found?”
•Empiricist— our beliefs are always revisable, and subject to reevaluation in the light of new evidence.
•One objectively certain truth— “that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.” (Cf. Descartes)
•Outside of math, nothing else is certain.
•Tests of truth? No one agrees: revolution, public consensus, instinct of the heart, systematized experience of the race, clear and distinct ideas guaranteed by the veracity of God (Descartes), common sense, Kant’s account, inconceivability of the opposite, verifiability by sense, deep possession of complete organic unity or self-relation (Hegel), etc. 
How could you tell you were right?
•If you had the objective truth, you would have the objective truth.
•But your belief that you have the objective truth is “just one more subjective opinion added to the lot.”
•So many views have been claimed to be true:
-the rationality of the world, it’s existence as a brute fact, there is a personal God, a personal God is inconceivable, there is an extra-mental physical world immediately known, the mind can only know its own ideas, a moral imperative exists, obligation is the only result of desires, a permanent spiritual principle is in everyone, there are only shifting states of mind, there is an chain of causes, there is an absolute first cause, an eternal necessity, a freedom, a purpose, no purpose of a primal One, A primal many, infinity, no infinity, etc.
•Someone has thought just about everything to be absolutely true at some point or another.
•How could we tell we, out of all the others, actually had it right?
Knowing truth and avoiding error
•Empiricist still hope for truth, they just see truth as what is confirmed in “the total drift of thinking,” they do not think any belief is unrevisable.
•James: there are two goals at hand, knowing the truth and avoiding error.
•Clifford errs on the side of avoiding error.
•But this is at the cost of losing out on truth.
•But you could instead be ready to risk being duped in an investigation many times rather than give up on the hope of ever being right.
•To say “better go without belief forever then believe a lie!” Shows a persons psychology, his “private horror of becoming a dupe”
•He may think himself critically minded but this impulse he slavishly obeys.
•He leaves his private horror of becoming a dupe unquestioned.
•Like telling soldiers we must stay out of battle forever lest we risk a single wound.
•Lightness of heart is healthier than an egg excessive nervousness.
When to believe
•If the option between losing truth and gaining truth is not momentous, we can throw out the chance of truth to avoid believing falsehood.
•We can suspend judgment.
•In scientific questions and even in human affairs generally.
•There is no hurry to believe the wrong theory about the physical facts of nature.
•”What difference… does it make to most of us” whether we believe in x-rays, “mind stuff”, or the “causality of conscious states?”
•It doesn’t make any difference, these options are not forced on us, we can continue to suspend judgment.h
From the heart
•In scientific investigation, we must balance nervousness about being deceived an interest in the truth.
•But aren’t there forces options where we can’t wait without serious consequences for more evidence to come in?
•Moral questions can’t wait, because they are about what to be, not about determining what is.
•Science still “consults her heart” when choosing avoiding error and seizing truth to be her goals, these are chosen with the heart.
•Moral judgements are made from the heart.
Is moral scepticism any different?
•Do we believe in an objective Moral Reality (Moral realism) or that our moral beliefs are subjective, biological impulses (moral subjectivism) and there are no moral truths (moral nihilism, moral skepticism?)
•Doesn’t the heart really decide this decision to?
•The cool-hearted always think those who believe in a moral reality are naïve dupes.
•Yet the moral realist sincerely believe that there is a moral truth and that all the subjectivists or moral sceptics cunning is worthless in light of it.
•Just as scepticism about the external world can’t be refuted, nor can moral skepticism, but we commit one way or Another with our hearts wholeheartedly to the idea that there is truth or is not truth.
•Who is wiser? Only omniscience knows”
Faith can help create facts
•In interpersonal relationships, if I don’t give you the benefit of the doubt, if I don’t initially trust you will reciprocate trust and kindness, then we will never hit it off.
•Who gets promotions and appointments but the person who risks things for them, believing that it’s a live possibility that he can earn them. •Refusing to venture forth until absolute evidence comes in leads to no risks in friendship or career.
•Governments, armies, commercial systems, ships, colleges, athletic teams, require and unestablished faith or trust for people who work together towards a common goal.
•Passengers on a train who are strangers can be Looted by a few highway men because the passengers don’t know if anyone will back them up.
•A man who wants his date to go well must have confidence that it will go well, otherwise leaning on the fact that there’s no evidence that it will go well, can undermine his confidence.
•Faith in a fact can help create facts and is necessary in all sorts of courses of life without scientific evidence.
Religious faith
•But what about religious faith? •Generally, religion makes two sorts of claims.
•The best things are eternal things.
•We are better off if we believe in eternal things.
•Of course, for some people religion is not a live option, it’s not something they can possibly believe.
•In which case James says you need go no further, he is seeking to justify the right of those who do go further, for whom religion is a live option, to believe.
If Live, the religious option is forced and momentous
•If live for an individual, then religion is a momentous option.
•And it is forced.
•Remaining sceptical we risk losing out on truth, agnosticism is still a choice, which says “better risk loss of truth and risk of error.”
•You cannot know for sure before you ask someone to marry you if the marriage will work out, you also cannot wait forever or the person may marry someone else.
•The religious skeptic: yield to the fear of being in error rather than yield to the hope that it may be true.
•It is not reason vs the passions, but one passion (fear) trying to lay down a law.
•Is Dupery through Hope any worse than Dupery through fear?
•If he’s willing to take the world religiously, and chance to dupery through hope, why should the person willing to risk to dupery through fear tell him he cannot? 
Faith and live options
•And if God is understood as a person, then just as it takes some initial trust with other human beings to make their acquaintance and friendship (they might be worth trusting, they won’t rob you or judge you, etc.) So too can it actually be part of the deal that human beings are to meet the Devine half way, so to speak, and trust.
•” A Rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.”
•James reiterates that the freedom to choose can only cover live options which the intellect cannot alone resolve.
•You can’t just believe anything, it has to see possibly true to you.
The queerest idol
•Supposing that we must wait for more evidence and live as if religion were not true “seems to me the queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave.”
•If we are empiricists, if we hold to fallibilism, the view that no views are certainly true and all beliefs are revisable, we cannot believe that there will ever be certain evidence for everything.
•People are welcome to wait, and they do so at the their peril just as much as those of faith follow the path at their peril.
•We shouldn’t criticize each other, those who have chosen a different path, but must respect the mental freedom of each.
James Fitz-James Stephen
•”In all important transactions of life we have to take a leap in the dark… if we decide to leave the riddles unanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in our answer, that, too, is a choice: but whatever choice we make we make our peril… Each must act as he thinks best; and if he was wrong, so much the worst for him… act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes… if death ends all, we cannot make death better.” 
