The pronouncements on the nature of truth in Pragmatism evoked howls of indignation (e.g., Russell 1945) as well as exaggerated praise. The howls (and some of the praise) came from readers who thought that James identified truth as whatever it gives us “satisfaction” to believe: the critics believed that this amounted to irrationalism, while the enthusiasts thought that the idea that truth is jibing with reality deserves to be abandoned (Rorty 1982), and the Italian pragmatist Giovanni Papini thought that irrationalism is a good thing (Perry 1935, 2:570-9).

The howlers and the enthusiasts were careless readers, however. They virtually ignored what James wrote about truth elsewhere. But it is not easy to say in a few words what James did think about truth, for, as I shall argue, James's view developed in complicated ways as he worked out his metaphysical system. In the present essay, I isolate the elements in James's theory of truth and show how they were linked by James's metaphysics of radical empiricism.

In thinking about William James, it helps to remember that James not only dedicated Pragmatism to John Stuart Mill, but reiterated some of Mill's most controversial claims. In “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” James says that “The only possible reason there can be why any phenomenon ought to exist is that such a phenomenon actually is desired” (WB, 149). This echo of the most ridiculed sentence in Mill's Utilitarianism is, I suspect, deliberate. One of James's most heartfelt convictions was that to know whether a claim should be met, we need only ask which other claims - “claims actually made by some concrete person” - it runs athwart. We need not also ask whether it is a “valid” claim. He deplored the fact that philosophers still followed Kant rather than Mill, still thought of validity as raining down upon a claim “from some sublime dimension of being, which the moral law inhabits, much as upon the steel of the compass-needle the influence of the Pole rains down from out of the starry heavens” (WB, 148).

The view that there is no source of obligation save the claims of individual sentient beings entails that we have no responsibility to anything other than such beings. Most of the relevant sentient individuals are our fellow humans. So talk about our responsibility to truth, or to reason, must be replaced by talk about our responsibility to our fellow human beings. James's account of truth and knowledge is a utilitarian ethics of belief designed to facilitate such replacement. Its point of departure is Peirce's treatment of a belief as a habit of action, rather than as a representation. A utilitarian philosophy of religion must treat being religious as a habit of action.

When William James began to write in the nineteenth century, technological, industrial, and political revolutions had destroyed ways of life evolved over centuries of adaptation to nature. James belongs with those who tried to reweave a coherent world in thought and experience. At the end of his life, he evolved what he called a “comminuted” - pulverized - “Identitätsphilosophie.” Without grasping this world-view, there is no way to know what James was up to, for example, his pragmatic theory of truth.

The view that spirit (or mind) and nature (or matter) are identical was advanced most famously by Schelling very early in the nineteenth century, with key concepts refined, disciplined, and constricted by Hegel a little later. Early on, James has little or nothing to say about Shelling, as if even acknowledging his existence were to give him too much credit. With regard to Hegel, he bristles with contempt. We will see how he inched over the decades toward the views he ridiculed. He tried to retain a vision of the individual's intimate inclusion in a whole, but a whole construed pluralistically. His method was a phenomenology divested of rationalistic presuppositions.

William James was John Dewey's philosophical hero, because his “biological psychology” of the 1890 The Principles of Psychology led Dewey out of bondage in the land of Hegel and into the wonderful land of naturalism. Dewey attempted to repay his debt by passionately expounding and defending James's philosophy over a period of fifty-one years, stretching from 1897 to 1948. While not calling into question the philosophical brilliance of these essays, it will be shown that they gave a blatantly distorted, self-serving account of James's philosophy, the basic aims of which were to despookify and depersonalize it so that it would agree with Dewey's naturalism and socialization of all things distinctively human. The intent of my “exposé” of this act of hero worship-turned-philosophical usurpation, however, is to bring into bold relief the salient features of their philosophies by highlighting their deep-seated differences. Because of the limitations of space, only Dewey's attempted naturalization of James will be considered.

“Naturalism” has meant very different things to different philosophers. Since my claim is that Dewey attempted to make James into “a good naturalist like himself,” it is Dewey's sense that is relevant. His naturalism comprises two components. First, there is no ontological dualism between the mental and the physical, be it in the form of an irreducible mentallphysical substance or a mental1 physical event dualism, psychological states and processes being reducible to certain distinctive ways in which an organism interacts with its natural environment. This is called “biological behaviorism” by Dewey and is invidiously contrasted with a “physiological behaviorism” that understands mental phenomena exclusively in terms of physical processes and states within the organism.

One of the most interesting and problematic threads in the literature on James concerns the relationship between his philosophy and Kant's. It is difficult to imagine at first two philosophers farther apart than Kant and James. Kant was a lover of unity and systematicity, and exalted the absolute and necessary features of our experience; James had little patience with philosophical systems, thought there was much less unity to the world than often imagined, and denied there were any utterly indefeasible elements in our experience. These deep differences are undeniable. It is perhaps then no surprise when we find Richard Rorty arguing that James's pragmatism is part of what he thinks of as “the anti-Kantian revolution” (Rorty 1979, 7). Elsewhere he writes:

The last decade of William James's life was his most productive and distinguished, beginning in 1901-2 with his hugely successful Gifford Lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience, and seeing the publication of virtually all of his strictly philosophical writings, with the notable exception of The Will to Believe. Although his output in this period was voluminous in pages and expansive in topic, James expressed dissatisfaction throughout the decade with his failure to produce a systematic work explicitly on metaphyics. From Varieties itself, which was to have had a philosophical complement, until the final effort, posthumously published as Some Problems in Philosophy, nearly every project of James's harbored both the hope and the disappointment of this desire to found and defend his radically empiricist Weltanschauung in a thoroughgoing manner.

In 1907 when an invitation to lecture at Oxford from the Hibbert Trust Committee arrived, James appears to have been more interested in working on a book to fulfil1 his promise for a metaphysics than in offering yet another series of public lectures. He found himself nonetheless unable to resist the temptation to attack philosophies of the absolute one last time. Originally titled “The Present Situation in Philosophy” and delivered in 1908, the lectures include a mixture of rousing polemical refutation and spirited constructive exposition, thus manifesting both interests.

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.