- Length
- 208 pagesHarvard University Press, The Works of William James, 1975
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Pragmatism
Eight lectures that made pragmatism a public position and gave American philosophy its first distinctive doctrine. James proposed that the way to settle a metaphysical dispute is to ask what difference the answer would make, and was accused for the rest of his life of saying that whatever is useful is true.
- Date
- 1907
- Author
- William James
- Region
- Boston and New York
- Language
- English
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Lectures
- Method
- Analytic — Clarification of language and logical form
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Revived — Out of circulation and read again
- Years back to what it answers
- 29 years
Attacked immediately and widely on publication, eclipsed for half a century by analytic philosophy, and central again since the 1980s.
What the book says
Eight public lectures proposing a method for settling disputes that have gone on too long. James begins by dividing philosophers by temperament rather than doctrine - the tender-minded, who want principles, unity and optimism, and the tough-minded, who want facts, plurality and hard edges - and offers pragmatism as something both could use. The method itself is simple: to get a concept clear, trace what practical difference its being true would make; if no difference can be traced, the dispute is verbal. He illustrates with a man circling a tree while a squirrel circles the trunk, and asks whether the man goes round the squirrel - a question that dissolves the moment you say what you mean by round. The most contested lectures apply the method to truth itself. Truth, on James's account, is not a static relation of copying but something that happens to an idea: an idea is true insofar as it works, guides us reliably, and can be verified in experience. The last lectures apply this to religion, arguing that a belief which makes a real difference to a life has a claim that cannot be dismissed by pointing out that it cannot be proved.
What it argues
That the meaning of a conception lies in its practical consequences, and that this dissolves many disputes and reframes the rest. Applied to truth, the claim is that truth is not a mysterious agreement between an idea and a reality it never touches, but the property of ideas that lead us successfully through experience - and that the process of verification is what truth consists in rather than evidence for something else. James is emphatic that this is not a licence: an idea that works is one that survives contact with the world, and the world is not obliging. Applied to metaphysics, the method sorts live disputes from verbal ones. Applied to religion, it produces the book's most controversial move: a belief cannot be dismissed simply because it is unprovable, if holding it makes a genuine difference and nothing in experience counts against it.
What it answered
How to Make Our Ideas Clear 1878Charles Sanders Peirce
Peirce on what the pragmatic maxim is for, and the absolute idealism taught in American universities when James was writing. His relation to Peirce is the awkward one: he is not refuting him but popularising him, and the popularisation carried the idea to a readership the original never reached while altering it enough that its author objected. James's own account is that he was drawing out what the principle implied; Peirce's is that he had swapped meaning for truth.
What answered it
Russell and Moore, hard and early, arguing that the account of truth confuses a truth with the evidence for it and cannot explain what makes a belief work. Lovejoy catalogued thirteen distinct meanings the word pragmatism was carrying. James answered in The Meaning of Truth in 1909 and did not convince his critics. Peirce, whose principle it was, spent years distancing himself from what James had made of it. The dispute was not resolved so much as abandoned when analytic philosophy moved on.
How it argues
By illustration, in the best expository prose any philosopher has written in English. James does not build a system; he takes a dispute, shows what turns on it, and asks the pragmatic question. The squirrel, the corridor with rooms opening off it, the hotel with many doors - the images do the work, and they are why the lectures persuaded people who would never read a treatise. The looseness is real: terms shift between lectures, and the objections that followed fastened on exactly the places where a more careful writer would have stopped to define.
The moment
Harvard at the turn of the century, where James had built the first psychology laboratory in America, written the textbook that founded the discipline there, and turned to philosophy in his fifties. The lectures were public, delivered to large audiences, and written to be understood - which is both why they reached a general readership and why professional philosophers found them careless. He was sixty-five, in poor health, and died three years later.
How it travelled
Into the culture and out of the discipline, and then back. Pragmatism became the American philosophy in public understanding, usually in a coarsened form James spent his last years denying. Within philosophy it was displaced from the 1930s by logical positivism and then by analytic philosophy of language, and for a generation was treated as a period curiosity. The revival came through Quine, Sellars and above all Rorty, who put James and Dewey back at the centre of an argument about representation and truth that is still running.
The strongest objection
That the account of truth cannot do without the notion it replaces. If a belief is true because it works, we need to know what working consists in - and the natural answer is that it leads us to expect what actually happens, which reintroduces a relation between the belief and how things are that James wanted to dispense with. Russell's version was sharper and unfair: he pointed out that on James's account it would be true that Santa Claus exists for anyone the belief served well. James' reply, that a belief which conflicts with the rest of experience will not in fact work, is right and concedes that the world is doing the constraining, which is what the correspondence theorist said in the first place.
Why read it
Because it is the most enjoyable philosophy book written in English and takes an afternoon. The first two lectures contain the method and the temperament argument, and the sixth is where the trouble about truth begins. Read The Meaning of Truth afterwards if the objections interest you; James is a much better writer than he is a systematiser, and knowing that in advance makes the book easier to appreciate.
- First printed
- 1907
- First in English
- 1907
- Digitised
- Yes
James credits the principle to Charles Peirce's paper of 1878 and says so in the second lecture; Peirce disliked what James did with it enough to rename his own position pragmaticism, a word he thought ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers.
Written in English. The 1907 text is public domain.
Where it stands
Revived. Pragmatism is a live position in epistemology, philosophy of language and philosophy of religion, and James in particular is read again for the theory of belief and for the psychology that supports it.
The passage
Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest.
Pragmatism, lecture II. Public domain, and James' own words.
Contested
Whether James' theory of truth is a definition, a criterion, or an account of how truths are made is disputed, and his own formulations vary between lectures. How far he departs from Peirce, who thought he had ruined the idea, is a standing question. Whether the argument for religious belief follows from the method or is smuggled in beside it is argued. And the temperament typology that opens the book has been criticised as a rhetorical device that lets him treat philosophical disagreement as a matter of personality.