William James (1842-1910), brother of novelist Henry James (1843-1916), was a medical doctor turned philosopher. William James literally wrote the book on psychology—The Principles of Psychology (1890)—establishing the field as a bona fide science. On philosophy, he was a pragmatist who followed Peirce and built on his work, bringing pragmatism into everyday life. The purpose of philosophy, James wrote, was to find out what definite difference various beliefs will make to us and our lives. His most notable works in philosophy are The Will to Believe (1897) and Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907).
The Cash Value of Beliefs
James said that truth is a matter of whether a belief is useful to us. Truth happens to an idea, he said, when it succeeds in predicting new sense experiences. Like philosopher of science C.S. Peirce (1839-1914), James was a staunch empiricist, seeing all of our knowledge coming from sense experience. But while Peirce emphasized the public and collective aspect of empiricism, James argued it was the right of the individual to understand the consequences of beliefs in his or her own personal life. Truth is what works for each person. The individual determines the practical and satisfactory consequences of a belief.
It may seem that James is saying that anything goes—if we like a belief we can say it’s true—but this is misunderstanding him. It is up to the individual to decide what is true, but this decision is not arbitrary; this decision is based on solid empirical evidence. James understood that the notion that truth was a rarified objective reality was nonsense. Truth is a tool by which we do things, or, to use James’s bold analogy, truth has a practical cash value. Whether a belief is useful or valuable can be determined only by the individual. That’s because knowledge comes only from experience, and experience is always subjectively experienced by the individual. We share many circumstances in common, but many particular circumstances differ from person to person A belief is true if it works for me in my particular circumstances, though it is incumbent on me to be sensible in deciding what works; it is not a matter of whim. I should be able to demonstrate that my beliefs are responding to evidence.
Everything in James’s philosophy rests on practical usefulness. Truth happens to an idea, not because we want it to, but because we make it true through our actions. A scientific hypothesis is true only after we have tested it sufficiently. Our personal goals are true only after we have taken action to accomplish them. James understood that truth is pluralistic, meaning that a particular belief could work in practical terms for one person but not another, meaning it is true for the first person but not a second person. Also, different beliefs work in different situations; there are multiple ways to do any task, so there are multiple truths.
What James was doing generated controversy. He was attacked by critics for being too subjective and relativistic. It was a seismic shift to measure truth not by it being universal but by it being useful. This went against most of what was held by philosophy and all of the political, scientific, and cultural expressions that stemmed from philosophy. But as James noted in the title of his book, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, he was pointing out the way people behave in their everyday lives. Truth is a matter of usefulness, and if an idea is useful, it is true—that’s how we act. More than that, he said, truth is merely the expedient in the way of our thinking. Interestingly, these ideas are similar to what Nietzsche had said a few years earlier, but there was zero chance that James saw Nietzsche’s writings, which had not yet been translated.
Like Peirce, James’s pragmatism was subjective but grounded in objective human experience. His critics were mistaken in thinking he meant that willful belief alone makes something true. He stressed that when we say a belief works for us, we don’t mean that it simply feels good to us. We mean that we have tangible experience that it works: “Experience, as we know, has ways of BOILING OVER and making us correct our present formula” (Pragmatism, VI.44, emphasis his). There is no absolute truth, James goes on to say, but we are still wise, even obligated, to strive continually to ensure that our beliefs are in harmony with the evidence before us, and we need to adjust our beliefs in accordance with new experiences.
Meanwhile we have to live to-day by what truth we can get to-day, and be ready to-morrow to call it falsehood. Ptolemaic astronomy, Euclidean space, Aristotelian logic, scholastic metaphysics, were expedient for centuries, but human experience has boiled over those limits, and we now call these things only relatively true, or true within those borders of experience. (Pragmatism, VI.45)
Truth is the expedient in our way of thinking—expedient in the sense of the most direct path to what works. This is how we learn and grow from childhood on, and this is how science operates. Truth is dynamic in always growing and changing.
A Right to Believe
James applied the realization that there is no absolute truth, only our best attempts at it, in The Will to Believe, in which he responded to a paper by mathematician William K. Clifford (1845-1879). Clifford asserted that it is morally wrong, everywhere and for anyone, to believe something on insufficient evidence. Clifford meant this as an attack on religious belief, and he had written other essays hostile to religion. James rightly called out Clifford’s bigotry, but identified the larger issue that if we followed what Clifford demands, we would end up not being able to believe anything, anywhere.
Having read this far in this book, you should have realized that absolute, certain knowledge is impossible. Beyond this reality ignored by Clifford and other positivist philosophers (see Chapter 19), James observed that generating beliefs is a process and that we can identify multiple dimensions to that process. We must make choices about what to believe and how we will act, James said, similar to what Kierkegaard had said (see Chapter 17). Affecting our freewill choices are the dimensions of the options among which we must choose. Options can be living or dead, forced or avoidable, momentous or trivial. A live option is one you can put your will behind; a forced option is one for which there is no possibility of not choosing; and a momentous option is one that is unique, irreversible, and/or has significant effects on you. Those are genuine options, and I list those sides of the dichotomies because dead options are irrelevant, avoidable ones are just that, and trivial options are of no consequence. Therefore, James says, our decisions on dead, irrelevant, and trivial matters are of no great import, so we can concede to Clifford’s demand to withhold belief and action without sufficient evidence.
However, only options that are of the forced, living, and momentous kind can be called genuine options for us. With these genuine options, we have a right to believe what we see as the practical decision, even when the evidence could be considered insufficient. When options are forced, these are decisions that we have to make, and we have a right, even the duty, to make decisions even though we do not have complete evidence. Plus, James reminds us that some beliefs can become true only when we first place faith in their possibility. He gives as an example cultivating a friendship: “Do you like me or not?” he asks. There is little chance of you coming to like me if I do not act toward you with the faith of believing you are worth trusting and capable of liking me. But, he says, “if I stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I have objective evidence, until you shall have done something apt, as the absolutists say,…ten to one your liking never comes” (The Will to Believe, IX, 2). On religious beliefs, which Clifford attacked, James says that these are clearly live options. We will live our lives either with or without a religious perspective, so it is a forced option. Undeniably, it is a momentous option because the choice to live with a religious mindset or not affects us in profound ways, James says. Therefore, on pragmatic principles, if the hypothesis of God works for us satisfactorily—if it has cash value—it is true.
We Have Free Will
One truly genuine option is whether we have free will. It’s a simple hypothesis: I have the ability to choose freely what actions I will take. Whether that hypothesis is correct—or its opposite, that our choices are determined by external forces—is impossible to prove by reason or experience. This is, undeniably, a living and momentous option to believe we have free will, and James says we are forced to make a choice. Therefore, he said, we have a right to choose the option that works for us. James emphatically chooses to believe that he has free will—and not only to believe it but to act with it and believe in his individual reality and creative power.
Not content with his freewill choice to believe he has free will, James wrote an essay entitled “The Dilemma of Determinism” (1884) in which he refuted the deterministic hypothesis. We’ve seen several versions of determinism already in this book, when philosophers in their quest for understanding assumed that believing in determinism was understanding how the world works. James refutes that belief with the following argument:
- Many actions that people perform are later regretted (murder or cruelty, for example).
- Determinism professes that it is impossible for anything in the universe to be otherwise than it is.
- Determinism claims that everything is the inevitable result of previous causes, but that implies that judgments of regret are in error. To regret something is to believe that things could have been different from the way they are.
- Determinism is the pessimistic position that evil and cruel actions are necessary and unavoidable and therefore should not be regretted but accepted.
- The only way a determinist can avoid this fatalistic pessimism is to say that acts of cruelty are actually good and rationally necessary and that regret is irrational and bad. (This was a position of some Stoics, see Chapter 4.) We are left with the dilemma that either regret is good and cruelty is bad or that cruelty is good and regret is bad. But determinism says that both cruelty and regret are necessary and unavoidable events. This is a contradiction.
- Therefore, James concludes, if determinism is true, then “something must be fatally unreasonable, absurd, and wrong in the world” (“The Dilemma of Determinism,” 164).
Belief in determinism suppresses the reality of our moral and practical lives. If, instead, we believe in indeterminism (free will), then, James says, we open ourselves up to the reality that our choices and actions make a difference.
The best way to sum up James is to understand that everything in his philosophy is based on his notion of individual psychology. The individual engages in freewill choices according to his or her subjective situation. We are beings who must choose and act; to act, we create beliefs that have value to us. Each one of us maintains our beliefs as long as they work for us.