Critically assess the contribution made to epistemology by William James
...pedient is almost any fashion: and expedient in the long run and on the whole of course, for what meets expediently all the experience in sight won’t necessarily meet all further experiences equally satisfactory. Experience, as we know, has ways of boiling over and making us correct our present formulas” (Thayer, p. 238) It is necessary here to know what James defines truth as, and in Pragmatisms Conception of truth he gives us his understanding of the word: “Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their ‘agreement’ as falsity means their disagreement, with ‘reality’. We can see that he is also suggesting that an idea can become true or untrue over time: “The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. It’s verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its verification.” (Thayer, p.229) The truth of an idea is also dependent on whether it coheres with the rest of your beliefs as James argues that we go for the most conservative explanation and change as few beliefs as we can. This idea of truth is very much a pragmatic one, where the practical outcome of the situation is the most important. This idea of James’ is probably one of the most criticised, and I intend to discuss this problem further on in the essay. Therefore an idea is true to us if the consequences are good, i.e. it works for us. He terms this ‘truth’ of an idea it’s ‘cash value’. His idea of truth being a somewhat relative concept follows on from this. The idea is that the truth of an idea is relative to the context in which it is being used. For example, take the question ‘How many planets are there in our solar system? In a pub quiz the answer would be 9. However, if you were working as an astrologer then you may like to debate this point. This truth of an idea is very important to James’ theory of knowledge. Following on from the above quotation he writes: “It seems evident that the subject is a hard one to understand, under its apparent simplicity; and evident also, I think, that the definitive settlement of it will mark a turning point in the history of epistemology.” James develops his ideas on knowledge further in his essays on radical empiricism. He attempts to deny the existence of consciousness and replace it with a more functional approach to matters of thought and experience, in a truly pragmatic way. He attempts to further the Kantian approach to epistemology, arguing against a mind-body dualism for the view that the world is comprised entirely of one kind of substance, ‘pure experience’. The word consciousness is then taken to signify the correlation of past experiences with present, a witness and record of experience so that we may call upon it. He argues that this ‘pure experience’ can play the part of the knower and the known in different circumstances, which can best be depicted with a grid like structure: Lecture1 Lecture2 Lecture3 Lecture4 my experience shared experience your experience From the grid here you can see that we each have our own stream of experiences, however, we can share an experience, although we may take away from it different ideas. The main difference between his ‘radical empiricism’ and other empiricisms that have gone before is the fact that according to James nothing that is not directly experienced can be included in his theory: “To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as 'real' as anything else in the system.”(Essays in Radical Experience: A world of pure experience) Critically assess the contribution made to epistemology by William James Personally, I think that James provides a strong argument for his theory of knowledge. He gives logical steps towards his conclusion that are quite easy to follow, and provides counter arguments where possible for criticisms that have arisen. My main objection towards James’ argument is what I believe to be a slight contradiction. He argues that all knowledge is empirically obtainable, and in his essays on radical empiricism states that if something is not directly experienced then we cannot have knowledge of it. However, in ‘The Tigers in India’ he states that we can ‘know’ that there are tigers in India by a process of thought: ‘To know an object is here to lead to it through a context which the world supplies’ (Thayer p.246) The tigers have still not been directly experienced, but this seems satisfactory for James. Maybe this is just a problem with the definition of the term ‘directly experienced’. If by this James means experience of the knowledge that there are tigers in India, from a book or from another person who has experienced the tigers in reality, then his theory holds. However, I don’t think that he is very clear on this point. Other philosophers have raised more technical faults with James’ arguments. One objection is that the psychological reason for a person believing something is true is combined with the reasons for it being true. Bertrand Russell in the ‘History of Western Philosophy’ is very critical of James’ idea of truth. He argues that we cannot assume that a belief is true just because its effects are good, or even if we could, we would have to know beforehand: 1) what is ‘good’ in this context and 2) what the effects of believing a certain idea are We can see this in chapter 29 where he says: “If this definition is to be useful…. We must know a) what is good. B) what are the effects of this or that belief, and we must know these things before we can know that anything is ‘t...