see by this what I meant when I called pragmatism a mediator and reconciler and said … that she unstiffens our theories. She has in fact no prejudices whatever, no obstructive dogmas, no rigid canons of what shall count as proof. She is completely genial. She will entertain any hypothesis, she will consider any evidence. It follows that in the religious field she is at a great advantage both over positivistic empiricism, with its anti-theological bias, and over religious rationalism, with its exclusive interest in the remote, the noble, the simple, and the abstract in the way of conception.
In short, she widens the field of search for God. Rationalism sticks to logic and the empyrean. Empiricism sticks to the external senses. Pragmatism is willing to take anything, to follow either logic or the senses, and to count the humblest and most personal experiences. She will count mystical experiences if they have practical consequences. She will take a God who lives in the very dirt of private fact – if that should seem a likely place to find him.
Her only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience’s demands, nothing being omitted. If theological ideas should do this, if the notion of God, in particular, should prove to do it, how could pragmatism possibly deny God’s existence? She could see no meaning in treating as ‘not true’ a notion that was pragmatically so successful. What other kind of truth could there be, for her, than all this agreement with concrete reality?
Specimen Questions
1 Critically discuss James’s claim that ‘whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right’. What exactly is meant here by ‘practical’?
2 What does James mean by the ‘anti-intellectualist’ tendencies in pragmatism, and is he right to see these as an improvement on more traditional philosophical approaches?
3 What is the pragmatist’s proposed notion of truth?
Suggestions for Further Reading (Including Internet Resources)
1 C. S. Peirce et al., Pragmatism, The Classic Writings, ed. H. S. Thayer (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982). A handy selection that includes readings by Peirce, William James and John Dewey, with editorial introductions.
2 A useful collection of essays is J. R. Shook and J. Margolis (ed.), A Companion to Pragmatism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). See esp. Chapter 2 on James, and Ch. 1 on Peirce.
3 For a compelling neo-pragmatical defense of the philosophical ideas of James and Dewey see H. Putnam and R. A. Putnam, Pragmatism as a Way of Life: The Lasting Legacy of William James and John Dewey, ed. David Macarthur (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2017).
4 For an introduction to C. S. Peirce, see C. Hookway, Peirce (London: Routledge, 1985) and also A. Atkin, Peirce (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015).
5 The more advanced reader may want to consider R. Rorty’s Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982) – a provocative exploration into the contributions of pragmatist American philosophers.
6 In terms of online resources, there are a couple of useful entries on William James and pragmatism to be found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/ (by C. Legg and C. Hookway) and at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james/ (by R. Goodman). The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has the following entries: https://www.iep.utm.edu/james-o/ (by W. P. Pomerleau) and https://www.iep.utm.edu/pragmati/ (by D. McDermid).
7 M. Bragg and his panel discuss the American philosophy of pragmatism on his radio program In Our Time (2005) at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003k9f5.
8 In the following episode of the Philosophy Bites podcasts, R. Tallisse talks about the pragmatist movement and some of the differences between the ideas of its founders James, Peirce and Dewey: https://philosophybites.com/2010/02/robert-talisse-on-pragmatism.html.
Notes
* William James, ‘What Pragmatism Means’, abridged with minor formatting changes from the second in a series of lectures given in Boston and Columbia University in 1906–1907 and published as a book in 1907 under the title Pragmatism (Longmans Green, New York).
1 1 Charles Sanders Peirce, ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’ (1878).
2 2 ‘Regnant’: in control, dominant (literally ‘ruling’).
3 3 For nominalism, see introduction to Part III, section 3.
4 4 For utilitarianism, see Part VIII, section 7.
5 5 For positivism, see Part II, section 11.
6 6 F. C. S. Schiller (1864–1937), an influential pragmatist thinker of the time; John Dewey (1859–1952), leading pragmatist philosopher, psychologist and educational theorist, who developed a version of pragmatism he called ‘instrumentalism’.
7 7 See introduction to Part VI, section 7.
11 Against Scepticism: G. E. Moore, A Defence of Common Sense*
In our earlier extracts from the writings of Kant, and even more in Hegel, we can see the style and language of philosophy becoming increasingly technical, with a consequent loss of the transparency and directness at which many of its earlier practitioners had aimed. In our own time, the writings of Hegel and his followers, in particular, have often been accused of being at best hard to follow, and at worst verging on the rankly unintelligible. At the start of the twentieth century, with the rise of the so-called ‘analytic’ movement, there was something of a revulsion against philosophical obscurantism, and a move towards a more down-to-earth approach. As far as the philosophy of knowledge is concerned, one important influence was the work of George Edward Moore, widely regarded as one of the founders of the analytical philosophy which now predominates in the English-speaking world.
In his famous essay ‘A Defence of Common Sense’ (1925), Moore pours a cold douche on the tortuous agonizings of many past philosophers about the possibility of genuine knowledge. He lists a number of basic ‘truisms’ of which he insists he is entitled to be quite certain – for example the proposition that the earth exists, and existed for a large number of years before he was born. (Remember that Descartes, in the Meditations (extract 4, above), had used his method of doubt – the dreaming argument, the hypothesis of a malicious deceiver – to call into question just such apparently obvious beliefs as the belief in an external world.) For Moore, such plain common-sense beliefs are just known to be true, and any philosopher who maintains the contrary is sooner or later bound to be trapped in inconsistency.
We can see here something of an echo of Hume’s scathing attacks against the wilder kinds of philosophical scepticism. But whereas Hume (extract 7, above) had pointed to our irresistibly strong human beliefs as being too strong for the sceptic to subvert, Moore suggests that what is wrong with philosophical scepticism is that it is inevitably trapped in a self-refuting paradox. The very fact
