INTRODUCTION

There is, of course, no one way a pragmatist must view the nature and function of human consciousness. I''ll be concerned in this essay with the way William James understood consciousness. James's struggles with the problem of consciousness provide I believe a compelling example of the pragmatic method at work, the method of trying to keep all the things we need to believe in play at once. This is no easy task since the things we need to believe typically represent the needs of different aspects of human life, of different human practices. There will be the things we need to believe for purposes of doing psychology, for living morally, for making life significant, and so on. And there is no guarantee that the things we find ourselves needing to believe will not compete. Indeed, allowing, even relishing, competition among different beliefs, the constant shifting back and forth, revising, dispelling appearances of inconsistencies, refining, and drawing together various pieces of a view of the world that works, that makes sense, as much sense as can be made from here-and-now, is what makes James such a compelling figure. His modus operandi is as visible in his work on consciousness as anywhere else in his philosophy.

In the preface to The Will to Believe James described his “philosophical attitude” as a “radical empiricism,” empiricism because he regarded all claims concerning matters of fact as hypotheses subject to revision in the light of subsequent experience, and radical because he extended this empirical attitude to metaphysical hypotheses. Specifically, “unlike so much of the halfway empiricism that is current under the name of positivism or agnosticism or scientific naturalism, it does not dogmatically affirm monism as something with which all experience has got to square. The difference between monism and pluralism is perhaps the most pregnant of all the differences in philosophy” (WB, 5; emphasis added). Although he uses the expression “radical empiricism,” this view is not yet the doctrine that he later advocated as radical empiricism.' Yet he was already a pluralist in more than one sense.

In this essay I am interested in the kind of pluralism that James intended to foster in “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” and “What Makes a Life Significant,” but not only in those essays. He characterized this pluralism in the preface to Talks to Teachers as follows. “The truth is too great for any one actual mind, even though that mind be dubbed 'the Absolute,' to know the whole of it. The facts and worths of life need many cognizers to take them in. There is no point of view absolutely public and universal. Private and incommunicable perceptions always remain over, and the worst of it is that those who look for them never know where” (TT,4; emphasis in the original).

In Pragmatism, William James says of the pragmatic method that it

James identifies this method with the principle according to which “to develop a thought's meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce: that conduct is for us its sole significance” (P, 29). That is, if we want to know what, if anything, a given theory means, we must figure out what it tells us to do: a difference that makes no practical difference is no difference. This principle is a “corridor” from concept to concept or theory to theory in that it provides a concrete way of entering or understanding a given thought or theory, and of stepping outside of it to test it and compare it with others.

At the outset of his Gifford Lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James advises readers that he comes to his subject matter not as theologian nor as historian of religion nor as anthropologist but as a psychologist. James is alluding to his earlier labors, of which The Principles of Psychology (1890) and Psychology: Briefer Course (1892) are the notable monuments. Whatever varied fortunes these publications met with in James's own times, they have acquired the stature of landmarks, certainly in the history of American psychology but also - less conspicuously perhaps - in the modern history of ideas. Gordon W. Allport, for example, attests to the former fact in his preface to a 1961 reissue of Briefer Course: William James's “depiction of mental life is faithful, vital, subtle. In verve he has no equal.” The “expanding horizon of James,” he adds, contrasts markedly with the “constricting horizon of much contemporary psychology”; and Allport suggests that readers of the book apply the pragmatic test for themselves by asking whether they find their own horizons enlarged, whether they feel the “pulse of human nature.”

The revival of interest in William James seems to result largely from a new fondness for American pragmatism. Given that, we should not be surprised that, for many philosophers presiding at the revival, Dewey and Peirce receive the lion's share of attention. Or that contemporary interest, when focused on James, renews efforts to get his pragmatism straight, since that is admittedly a thorny concept, especially if it is linked with such other Jamesean doctrines as the will-to-believe.

Today's returnees to James are apparently less stimulated by his having been one of the last major introspective psychologists prior to the behaviorist take-over. Why this is so may be elusive, but, for whatever reasons, introspective psychology at its demise seemingly took memories of itself to the grave as well. Those who do occasionally remember are mostly lonely cemetery-walkers talking to themselves for lack of conversational company.

This is regrettable on several counts. A full look at James's work forces one to stare hard and long at the notion of introspection, and, beyond interpreting James, at analyses that the notion deserves. Although the literature is liberally sprinkled with references to the concept, sustained treatments of it are uncommon. William Lyons's excellent contribution of a few years ago, so far as I know, is the only book-length study devoted to introspection. An idea that is knocked about as introspection is ought to be laid out for patient diagnosis, a consequence that we might hope from a Jamesean revival.

G. E. MOORE'S CRITIQUE OF PRAGMATISM

Shortly after the publication of his lecture series, Pragmatism, in 1907, James's pragmatism, and in particular his pragmatic conception of truth, was subjected to some harsh examination in articles by two leading British philosophers, G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. These must surely have contributed significantly to the tendency, at least in Britain, to think of James as a rather second-rate thinker. For, upon the face of it, their rather commonsense objections seem quite devastating. It is only more recently, as certain philosophical trends, of a kind often described as pragmatic, have hit the philosophical headlines, that objections like those pressed by Moore and Russell have come to seem less forceful. However, I am doubtful whether even now most commentators make it quite clear what it is that is largely wrong in these criticisms.

In his address on “Professor James' 'Pragmatism'” to the Aristotelian Society in 1908 (reprinted in Moore 1922) Moore begins by painfully assembling evidence to the effect that James intends to affirm both the following two propositions.

1. (1) All, and only, true ideas are verifiable.

2. (2) All, and only, true ideas are useful.

In a 1900 letter to his colleague - and life-long philosophical interlocutor - Josiah Royce, James confesses: [W]hen I write, 'tis with one eye on you, and one on the page. . . . I lead a parasitic life upon you, for my highest flight of ambitious ideality is to become your conqueror, and go down into history as such . . . in one last death-grapple of an embrace” (Sel. Letters, 192). Indeed, it is arguably the case that much of what James has to say concerning a host of philosophical topics is written with an anxious eye on his ongoing public philosophical debate with Royce. This essay is concerned with one such topic.

When Henry James writes of “the house of fiction” in his preface to the New York edition of The Portrait of a Lady, he teaches us to range analogically among domestic sites. He asks us to consider the relations, between, on one hand, the temporary home where he sits writing the novel - “I had rooms on Riva Schiavoni, at the top of a house near the passage leading off to San Zaccaria; the waterside life, the wondrous lagoon spread before me, and the ceaseless human chatter of Venice came in at my windows” - and, on the other hand, the conceit of the artist's process of building, his “edification.” Describing “the house of fiction,” he writes, “The spreading field, the human scene, is the 'choice of subject'; the pierced aperture, either broad or balconied or slit-like and low-browed, is the 'literary form'; but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher - without, in other words, the consciousness of the artist” (James 1984, 1070, 1075).

INTRODUCTION: TWO PRAGMATISTS

William James was generous in acknowledging his debts to fellow pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce. As well as dedicating The Will to Believe to his “old friend . . . to whose philosophical comradeship in old times and to whose writings in more recent years I owe more incitement and help than I can express or repay,” he emphasized Peirce's role in the birth of pragmatism in lecture 2 of Pragmatism: A New Name for some Old Ways of Thinking. Remarking that the word “pragmatism” derives from the Greek word for action from which our words “practice” and “practical” come, he noted that it was “first introduced into philosophy by Mr. Charles Sanders Peirce in 1878” (P, 28). In one respect, memory failed him: Peirce did not use the word in print in the papers James referred to - he did not use it in print (or, indeed, in his manuscripts) until after James had done so. But the views expressed in Peirce's writings of 1878 had been presented and discussed in a “Metaphysical Club” whose regular meetings both attended. Peirce later recalled:

However diverse our opinions of William James today, we generally agree that the great pragmatist was right about one thing: the pretensions of the Victorian “positivists.” James exposed the epistemological naivete of these cultural imperialists. He celebrated openness of mind over the arrogant, dogmatic closures we associate with the nineteenth-century scientific intelligentsia. These contemporaries of Darwin ascribed to the sciences a God's-eye view, and to the world a set of hard features discoverable by men and women bold enough to replace fantasy and superstition with facts. These Huxleys and Tyndalls and Cliffords thought themselves a new priesthood, and, while telling everyone what to believe, functioned as the thought-police of their age. So deep were the roots sunk in the western mind by this vine of conceits that we seem never to be able to get it out of our system. We attack it and attack it and attack it, and quote modern thinkers as diverse as Quine and Kuhn and Wittgenstein and Foucault against it. And we quote James. We honor him for being one of the first to take up the cause, for being among the great prophets of epistemic humility, a founder of truly “modernist” or even “postm modernist” thought.

“The turning was due to William James.” W. E. B. Du Bois here recalls, in his autobiography Dusk of Dawn (1940), that his favorite Harvard professor encouraged him to move from studying philosophy to history and social problems (Du Bois 1986, 582). But, more important, this short sentence neatly distills James's catalytic impact not only on Du Bois but on two generations of Harvard students. The act of turning is Jamests most characteristic move, be it found in the turning or troping of words as “in itself an act of power over meanings already in place,” or as it animates the pragmatist's emblematic stance (Poirier 1987, 17). In James's famous words, the pragmatist “turns his back resolutely. . . upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction . . . from verbal solutions, fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward” facts, action, and power (P, 31).

A remarkable number of American intellectuals responded to James's invitation to turn. He directly influenced two generations of his Harvard students: Du Bois, Gertrude Stein, Walter Lippmann, the sociologist Robert Park, the philosopher Alain Locke, Robert Frost, the jurist Learned Hand, and the cultural philosopher Horace Kallen. He also shaped the thinking of young contemporary admirers like the socialists Harold Laski, William English Walling, and Randolph Bourne, and, of course, younger pragmatists - John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and Charles Cooley - and psychologists James Mark Baldwin and John B. Watson.

Logical necessity is one of the perennial problems of philosophy. Statements like “g = 9.81 m/sec2” or “Radioactivity causes cancer” may be physically necessary, but they are contingent: they could be false, and be refuted by new experience. By contrast, it seems that statements like “¬(p & ¬p),” 2 + 2 = 4,” and “All material objects are located in space” are logically necessary. They do not just happen to be true, since their being false is not merely extremely improbable, but inconceivable. By the same token, disciplines like logic, mathematics, and metaphysics, which seek to discover such truths, seem to be a priori, completely independent of experience.

At the turn of the century there were three accounts of this special type of truth. According to psychologistic logicians like Boole, the laws of logic describe how human beings (by and large) think, their basic mental operations, and are determined by the nature of the human mind. Against this Platonists like Frege protested that logical truths are strictly necessary and objective, and that this objectivity can only be secured by assuming that their subject matter - thoughts and their structures - are not private ideas in the minds of individuals, but abstract entities inhabiting a “third realm” beyond space and time. Finally, according to Russell, logical propositions are completely general truths about the most pervasive traits of reality, a view which is in some ways reminiscent of Mill's claim that mathematical propositions are well-corroborated empirical generalizations.

INTRODUCTION

In this essay I shall try to describe the central features of Wittgenstein's critique of traditional philosophy as they appear in their most mature form in the Philosophical Investigations and in the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. The leading idea can be stated quite simply: Philosophers are led into confusion because they are antecedently disposed to view various uses of language in ways inappropriate to them. This is not usually (or simply) a matter of reasoning from false premises about language but is, instead, a tendency to view language from a skewed or disoriented perspective. The proper task of philosophy-indeed, its whole task-is to induce us to abandon such improper perspectives.

Wittgenstein uses various similes and metaphors to indicate how we can be captured by an inappropriate orientation: “It is like a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at. It never occurs to us to take them off” (PI, 103). Notice that this passage does not suggest that we exchange our glasses for a better pair. We should simply take them off, for our “uncorrected” way of viewing the world was adequate to begin with.

THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION

How is it possible for signs to point? How is it possible for signs to point to what is not there? These questions are extremely general ones about intentionality, the property of “aboutness” or “ofness” whereby one part of the world (a sign such as the words “the stoplight” or “The stoplight is red”) represents some other part of the world (e.g., an object such as a particular traffic signal or a state of affairs such as the traffic signal's being red).

How is it possible for signs to point? The obvious fact that signs point to something other than themselves is puzzling because it is difficult to see how to avoid a threatened regress of interpretations: an ordinary sign, for example, the linguistic sign “plus” or “Playful,” can be interpreted in various possible ways. Linguistic signs, after all, are arbitrary. The linguistic sign “Playful,” as uttered by me on a particular occasion, may be interpreted by my hearer as the name of a particular gray cat or as an attribution of the quality of playfulness to the creature in front of me or even (nonstandardly) as a sign for the color gray. Once we notice this, we feel the need to find something that will single out just one of the possible alternative interpretations in order for signs to succeed in pointing to something beyond themselves.

The notion of “family resemblance” concepts seems to have particularly impressed itself on Wittgenstein in connection with historical and cultural categories. In describing, say, religions or ideologies, we find we cannot delineate them by giving clear, necessary, and sufficient conditions. The same applies to schools of thought such as “materialism” or “idealism” or “naturalism.” These labels are family resemblance concepts: we use them to refer to something that is many-faceted and historically evolving. When we try to locate Wittgenstein within existing philosophical traditions we need to remember this exercise, too, will involve our using just such a variety of crisscrossing similarities, some general and some specific (PI, 66). We must not assume a similarity in one respect will be accompanied by similarities in others, or that any inconsistency or defect in the comparison is necessarily indicated by this. The value of these comparisons is to be assessed pragmatically, by their power to illuminate the structural features of his difficult arguments.

How does Wittgenstein's later thought bear on moral philosophy? Wittgenstein himself having said so little about this, philosophers have been free to take his ideas and methods to have the most various implications for ethics. I shall in this essay be concerned with Wittgenstein's ideas about mathematics and some possible ways of seeing their suggestiveness for ethics. I shall bring those ideas into critical contact with a rich and thoughtful treatment of ethics, that of Sabina Lovibond in Realism and Imagination in Ethics. She defends a form of moral realism which she takes to be derived from Wittgenstein (RIE, p. 25); and her work is thus of great interest if we are concerned not only with questions about how Wittgenstein's work bears on ethics but also with questions about the relation between his thought and debates about realism. Wittgenstein is misread, I think, when taken either as a philosophical realist or as an antirealist. Elsewhere I have argued against antirealist readings. One aim of this present essay is to trace to its sources a realist reading of Wittgenstein - its sources in the difficulty of looking at, and taking in, the use of our words.

The clearest unchanging feature of the course over the decades was the opening question: How does the Investigations begin? Against even the brief, varying introductory remarks I would provide - all omitted here - concerning Wittgenstein's life and his place in twentieth- century philosophy, in which I emphasized the remarkable look and sound of Wittgenstein's text and related this to issues of modernism in the major arts, the opening question was meant to invoke the question: How does philosophy begin? And how does the Investigationsaccount for its beginning (hence philosophy's) as it does? And since this is supposed to be a work of philosophy (but how do we tell this?), how does it (and must it? but can it?) account for its look and sound?

In one of his harshest judgments on philosophy Wittgenstein observes at PI, 194: “When we do philosophy we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, put a false interpretation on them, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it.” He does not document the extent to which this actually goes on in philosophy, or where it goes on, if it does. When he makes the remark he has been discussing possibility. In that case perhaps he has a point. It might well apply as well to much of what is said in philosophy about thought, meaning, and understanding - in short, about the mind. When we reflect philosophically on those “mental” or “intentional” ways of speaking in which we describe so much of what we do it is easy to start down a path, no one step of which is exactly “savage” or “uncivilized,” but which ends up with something “queer” in the sense of being completely and irretrievably mysterious.

I want to look at one - but only one - way in which Wittgenstein thinks this happens, and what he does, or suggests, to counteract it. It can start with puzzlement over the meanings of words. Not with wondering what some particular word means, but with wonder at the very phenomenon of meaning. Words as we encounter them are sounds or marks, but obviously not all sounds or marks are meaningful. Leaves make sounds in the wind, and a snail makes marks in the sand. It is not even their being produced by human beings that makes sounds or marks meaningful. Humans also produce sounds and marks which have no meaning, and often do so intentionally. As Wittgenstein puts it, mere sounds or marks on their own seem “dead” (BLBK, p. 3).