William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist. The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, he is considered to be one of the leading thinkers of the late 19th century, one of the most influential philosophers and is often dubbed the "father of American psychology".
Born into a wealthy family, James was the son of the Swedenborgian theologian Henry James Sr. and the brother of both the prominent novelist Henry James and the diarist Alice James. James trained as a physician and taught anatomy at Harvard, but never practiced medicine. Instead, he pursued his interests in psychology and then philosophy. James wrote widely on many topics, including epistemology, education, metaphysics, psychology, religion, and mysticism. Among his most influential books are The Principles of Psychology, a groundbreaking text in the field of psychology; Essays in Radical Empiricism, an important text in philosophy; and The Varieties of Religious Experience, an investigation of different forms of religious experience, including theories on mind-cure.
Along with Charles Sanders Peirce, James established the philosophical school known as pragmatism, and is also cited as one of the founders of functional psychology. James also developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism. A Review of General Psychology analysis, published in 2002, ranked James as the 14th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century. A survey published in American Psychologist in 1991 ranked James's reputation in second place, after Wilhelm Wundt, who is widely regarded as the founder of experimental psychology. James's work has influenced philosophers and academics such as Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Early life and education
William James was born at the Astor House in New York City on January 11, 1842. He was the son of Henry James Sr., an independently wealthy Swedenborgian theologian well-acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day, and Mary Robertson Walsh. He had four siblings: Henry (the novelist), Garth Wilkinson, Robertson, and Alice (diarist).
James received an eclectic and transatlantic education, where he developed fluency in both German and French. The family made two trips to Europe while James was still a child, setting a pattern that resulted in thirteen more European journeys during his life. His education encouraged cosmopolitanism.
Initially, James wished to pursue painting, which led him to pursue an apprenticeship in the studio of William Morris Hunt in Newport, Rhode Island. However, his father urged him to become a physician instead. In response, James said that he wanted to specialize in physiology. However, once he figured this was also not what he wanted to do, he announced he was going to specialize in the nervous system and psychology. In 1861, James then switched to scientific studies at the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard College.
In his early adulthood, James suffered from a variety of physical ailments, including those of the eyes, back, stomach, and skin. He was also tone deaf. His various symptoms were diagnosed at the time as neurasthenia, and included periods of depression during which he contemplated suicide for months on end.
Howard Feinstein, in Becoming William James (1984), wrote that William and his sister Alice had a close relationship that has been argued to consist of eroticism. He wrote her sonnets, declaring love, and made several paintings of her.
James' two younger brothers, Garth Wilkinson (Wilkie) and Robertson (Bob), fought in the American Civil War. James himself was an advocate of peace, suggesting that instead of youth serving in the military, they should serve the public in a term of service "to get the childishness knocked out of them".
In 1864, James took up medical studies at Harvard Medical School. In the spring of 1865, he took a break to join naturalist Louis Agassiz on a scientific expedition up the Amazon River, but aborted his trip after eight months, as he suffered bouts of severe seasickness and mild smallpox. His studies were interrupted once again due to illness in April 1867. Aged 26, James traveled to Germany in search of a cure and remained there until November 1868. His time there proved intellectually fertile, helping him find that his true interests lay not in medicine but in philosophy and psychology. Later, in 1902 he would write: "I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave". During this period, he began to publish; reviews of his works appeared in literary periodicals such as the North American Review. What he called his "soul-sickness" would only be resolved in 1872, after an extended period of philosophical searching. In June 1869, James finally earned his MD degree, but he never practiced medicine.
Life and career
James interacted with a wide array of writers and scholars throughout his life, including his godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, his godson William James Sidis, Charles Sanders Peirce, Bertrand Russell, Josiah Royce, Ernst Mach, John Dewey, Macedonio Fernández, Walter Lippmann, Mark Twain, Horatio Alger, G. Stanley Hall, Henri Bergson, Carl Jung, Jane Addams, and Sigmund Freud.
Harvard years
James spent almost all of his academic career at Harvard. He was appointed instructor in Physiology for the spring 1873 term, instructor in Anatomy and Physiology in 1873, Assistant Professor of Psychology in 1876, Assistant Professor of Philosophy in 1881, full professor in 1885, Endowed Chair in Psychology in 1889, Return to Philosophy in 1897, and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy in 1907.
Whilst James had studied medicine, physiology, and biology, and taught in those subjects, he was drawn to the scientific study of the human mind at a time when psychology was constituting itself as a science. He began to introduce courses in scientific psychology at Harvard, informed by the work of figures like Hermann Helmholtz and Pierre Janet. He taught his first experimental psychology course at Harvard in the 1875–1876 academic year.
James was one of the strongest proponents of the school of functionalism in psychology and of pragmatism in philosophy. He was a founder of the American Society for Psychical Research, as well as a champion of alternative approaches to healing.
During his Harvard years, James joined in philosophical discussions and debates with Charles Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Chauncey Wright that evolved into a lively group informally known as The Metaphysical Club in 1872. Louis Menand (2001) suggested that this Club provided a foundation for American intellectual thought for decades to come.
Among James's students at Harvard University were Boris Sidis, Theodore Roosevelt, George Santayana, W. E. B. Du Bois, G. Stanley Hall, Ralph Barton Perry, Gertrude Stein, Horace Kallen, Morris Raphael Cohen, Walter Lippmann, Alain Locke, C. I. Lewis, and Mary Whiton Calkins. Antiquarian bookseller Gabriel Wells tutored under him at Harvard in the late 1890s. His students enjoyed his brilliance and his manner of teaching was free of personal arrogance. They remembered him for his kindness and humble attitude.
In 1882, James joined the Theosophical Society.
In 1884 and 1885, James became president of the British Society for Psychical Research for which he wrote in Mind and in the Psychological Review.
In 1898, James joined the Anti-Imperialist League, in opposition to the United States annexation of the Philippines.
Writing
William James wrote voluminously throughout his life. A non-exhaustive bibliography of his writings, compiled by John McDermott, is 47 pages long.
He gained widespread recognition with his monumental The Principles of Psychology (1890), which totaled twelve hundred pages in two volumes and took twelve years to complete. Psychology: The Briefer Course, was an 1892 abridgement designed as a less rigorous introduction to the field. These works criticized both the English associationist school and the Hegelianism of his day as competing dogmatisms of little explanatory value, and sought to re-conceive the human mind as inherently purposive and selective.
In simple terms, his philosophy and writings can be understood as an emphasis on "fruits over roots", a reflection of his pragmatist tendency to focus on the practical consequences of ideas rather than become mired in unproductive metaphysical arguments or fruitless attempts to ground truth in abstract ways. An empiricist, James believed that we are better off evaluating the fruitfulness of ideas by testing them in the common ground of lived experience.
Later life and death
Following his January 1907 retirement from Harvard, James continued to write and lecture, publishing Pragmatism, A Pluralistic Universe, and The Meaning of Truth.
James was increasingly afflicted with cardiac pain during his last years. It worsened in 1909 while he worked on a philosophy text (unfinished but posthumously published as Some Problems in Philosophy).
In the spring of 1910, James sailed to Europe to take experimental treatments for his heart ailment that proved unsuccessful, and returned home on August 18. His heart failed on August 26, 1910, at his home in Chocorua, New Hampshire. He was buried in the family plot in Cambridge Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Thought
Epistemology
Pragmatism
Pragmatism is a philosophical approach that seeks to both define truth and resolve metaphysical issues. James created a pragmatic theory of truth, which was a synthesis of correspondence theory of truth and coherence theory of truth, with an added dimension. His book of lectures on pragmatism is arguably the most influential book of American philosophy.
James demonstrates an application of his method in the form of a simple story:A live squirrel supposed to be clinging on one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree's opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: Does the man go round the squirrel or not?James solves the issue by making a distinction between the practical meanings of 'round'. On the one hand, 'round' can mean that the man occupies the space north, east, south, and west of the squirrel; and on the other 'round' can mean that the man occupies the space facing the squirrel's belly, back and sides. Depending on what the one means by 'going round', the answer would be clear. From this example James derives the definition of the pragmatic method: to settle metaphysical disputes, one must simply make a distinction of practical consequences between notions, then, the answer is either clear, or the "dispute is idle".
"Cash value"
James defined true beliefs as those that prove useful to the believer. Accordingly, to seek the meaning of "true", one must examine how the idea functions in our lives. He argued that a belief is considered true if it functions for everyone.
To further detail this idea, both James and his colleague, Charles Sanders Peirce, coined the term "cash value", i.e. that the meaning of something is the "entire set of its practical consequences" and a single truth "must somehow be capable of being related to some sort of collection of possible empirical observations under specifiable conditions."
Truth, fact and verifiability
In "What Pragmatism Means" (1906), James describes the relationship between truth and fact:Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The "facts" themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.In James' sixth lecture on pragmatics, he begins by defining truth as "agreement with reality". This is multilayered: truth is both verifiable to the extent that thoughts and statements correspond with actual things and to the extent to which they "hang together", or cohere (as pieces of a puzzle might fit together); these, in turn, are verified by the observed results of the application of an idea to actual practice. In other words, a statement's truthfulness is verifiable through its correspondence with reality and its observable effects of putting the idea to practice. As such, a true idea or belief is one that we can blend with our thinking so that it can be justified through experiences. James gives the example of God:If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. For how much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged.In other words: "The problem is to build it [theology] out and determine it so that it will combine satisfactorily with all the other working truths." From this, we also know that "new" truths must also correspond to already existent truths.
In regards to beliefs, Kuklick describes that, for James, "A belief was not a mental entity which somehow mysteriously corresponded to an external reality if the belief were true. Beliefs were ways of acting with reference to a precarious environment, and to say they were true was to say they were efficacious in this environment." So, for James, knowledge is justified, and productive, true belief. Belief in anything involves conceiving of how it is real, but disbelief is the result when we dismiss something because it contradicts another thing we think of as real.
James argues that this position results in an application of "radical empiricism". Unrelated to the everyday scientific empiricism, radical empiricism asserts that the world and experience can never be subject to an entirely objective analysis as the mind of the observer and the act of observation affect any empirical approach to truth. As such, he argued that there is no such thing as objective truth.
Whereby the agreement of truths with "reality" results in useful outcomes, "the 'reality' with which truths must agree has three dimensions":
"matters of fact";
"relations of ideas"; and
"the entire set of other truths to which we are committed".
James names four "postulates of rationality" as valuable but unknowable: God, immortality, freedom, and moral duty.
Will to believe doctrine
In his 1896 lecture titled "The Will to Believe", James defends the right to violate the principle of evidentialism in order to justify hypothesis venturing. This idea foresaw 20th century objections to evidentialism and sought to ground justified belief in an unwavering principle that would prove more beneficial. Through his pragmatism, James justifies religious beliefs by using the results of his hypothetical venturing as evidence to support the hypothesis's truth. Therefore, this doctrine allows one to assume belief in a god and prove its existence by what the belief brings to one's life.
This position was criticized by advocates of skepticism rationality, like Bertrand Russell in Free Thought and Official Propaganda and Alfred Henry Lloyd with The Will to Doubt. Both argued that one must always adhere to fallibilism, recognising of all human knowledge that "None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error", and that the only means of progressing ever-closer to the truth is to never assume certainty, but always examine all sides and try to reach a conclusion objectively.
Discussion and legacy
Richard Rorty made the contested claim that James did not mean to give a theory of truth with this statement and that we should not regard it as such. However, other pragmatism scholars such as Susan Haack and Howard Mounce do not share Rorty's instrumentalist interpretation of James.
In The Meaning of Truth (1909), in response to critics of pragmatism, James seems to speak of truth in relativistic terms: "The critic's trouble...seems to come from his taking the word 'true' irrelatively, whereas the pragmatist always means 'true for him who experiences the workings.'" However, James rejected his critics who accused him of relativism, skepticism, or agnosticism, and of believing only in relative truths, and supported an epistemological realism position.
A criticism of pragmatism is that the best justification for a claim is whether it works. On the other hand, a claim that does not have outcomes cannot be justified, or unjustified, because it will not make a difference. As James states: "There can be no difference that doesn't make a difference."
James stated that pragmatism's goal is ultimately "to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences", but he did not clarify what he means by "practical consequences". Whether James means the greatest number of positive consequences (in light of utilitarianism), a consequence that considers other perspectives (such as his compromise of the tender and tough ways of thinking), or a completely different take altogether, it is unclear what consequences truly fit the pragmatic standard. The closest James comes to explaining this idea is by telling his audience to weigh the difference it would "practically make to anyone" if one opinion over the other were true, and although he attempts to clarify this, he never specifies the method by which one would weigh the difference between one opinion over the other. Thus, the flaw in his argument appears in that it is difficult to fathom how he would determine these practical consequences, which he continually refers to throughout his work, to be measured or interpreted. He has said that an opinion is correct that works for us humans in practice.
However, Peirce made more of an effort to define these consequences. For him, "the consequences we are concerned with are general and intelligible." He further explains this in his 1878 paper "How to Make Ideas Clear," by introducing a maxim that allows one to interpret consequences as grades of clarity and conception. Describing how everything is derived from perception, Peirce uses the example of the doctrine of transubstantiation to show exactly how he defines practical consequences. Protestants interpret the bread and wine of the Eucharist is flesh and blood in only a subjective sense, while Catholics would label them as actual, and divinely mystical properties of flesh via the "body, blood, soul, and divinity", even with the physical properties remaining as bread and wine in appearance. But to everyone, there can be no knowledge of the wine and bread of the Eucharist unless it is established that either wine and bread possesses certain properties or that anything that is interpreted as the blood and body of Christ is the blood and body of Christ. With this Peirce declares that "our action has exclusive reference to what affects the senses", and that we can mean nothing by transubstantiation than "what has certain effects, direct or indirect, upon our senses". In this sense, James's pragmatic influencer Peirce establishes that what counts as a practical consequence or effect is what can affect one's senses and what is comprehensible and fathomable in the natural world.
James's emphasis on diversity as the default human condition—over and against duality, especially Hegelian dialectical duality—has maintained a strong influence in American culture. James's description of the mind-world connection, which he described in terms of a "stream of consciousness", had a direct and significant impact on avant-garde and modernist literature and art, notably in the case of James Joyce.
Free will
James was prompted to believe his will was free by reading Charles Renouvier, whose work convinced James to convert from monism to pluralism. In his diary entry of April 30, 1870, James wrote:
I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will—"the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts"—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.James developed a two-stage model of free will to explain how people make decisions. James distinguishes between chance, " the in-deterministic free element" we have no control over, and choice, "an arguably determinate decision that follows causally from one's character, values, and especially feelings and desires at the moment of decision".