William James

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

John Perry
…except your intelligence. I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco.

John Perry
Continuing conversations that began at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus.

Ken Taylor
Today, the philosophy of William James.

John Perry
Ken, William James is one of America’s greatest philosophers. His career spanned the turn of the 20th century. He was actually teaching at Stanford at the time of the 1906 earthquake.

Ken Taylor
You know, John, I know that James has this reputation as one of the great philosophers, but I’ve read a bit of James and I wonder if that reputation is really deserved? Is it like—is reading James like reading Hume, Kant, Aristotle, you know, they’re in complete control of all their ideas, mostly?

John Perry
Well, yes. And no, I mean, first, I mean, it should point out that James like, like you was deeply interested in psychology and philosophy, and he was actually a member of both departments at Stanford psychology first. And his great works in psychology, the Varieties of Religious Experience, the Principles of Psychology, to volume work, they are really fascinating, wonderful, rich. He’s non-doctrinaire. He’s full of insights and empirical observations. It’s really great. The philosophy on the other hand, I’m a bit like you, but by contemporary standards of rigor, it’s a little disappointing, although it’s always full of ideas.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, and one of the ideas that runs through all of his works is this thing he called pragmatism. But what did he mean by that?

John Perry
Well, he meant a lot of things by it. But two main things, one pretty plausible, one by my lights not so plausible.

Ken Taylor
Well let’s start with the plausible one. Give him the benefit of the doubt here.

John Perry
Well, that’s the pragmatic theory of meaning. James, James illustrates it with a story the story is kind of implausible. Some campers are having an argument about the following situation, a squirrel is running around a tree in a certain direction. A man for undisclosed reasons is following the squirrel around the tree in the same direction. Both the squirrel and the man are clearly going around the tree. But is the man going around the squirrel, he must be since he’s going around in a circle, and the squirrel is inside of the circle. But he must not be because if you go around a squirrel, you should first see the squirrels back, and then the side. And then his front, and the man just sees his back the whole time.

Ken Taylor
Well, that’s not what the guys I go camping with and we don’t worry about that kind of thing on our camping trip.

John Perry
Well, I sympathize. But James apparently hung around with a more intellectual crowd. Anyway, according to James, there was a spirited argument about whether it was true or not, that the man went around the squirrel. I mean, maybe they had been raking. But anyway, James pointed out that the two hypotheses that the man goes around the squirrel, and that he does not don’t lead to different observable consequences.

Ken Taylor
So he asked his friends, you know, what evidence what observation would show that one hypothesis was correct and the other incorrect that despite their heated argument, they couldn’t come up with anything with any difference. And so he convinced them that they were really arguing in their drunken stupor, maybe about nothing after all.

John Perry
Exactly. And the way James thought of it was a question as well, what work do these hypotheses do in predicting the future work? That’s where the idea of pragmatism comes from, and that they do the same work? There aren’t any differences. So the argument was empty. And I think he thought this about some philosophical arguments to.

Ken Taylor
Well, you know, that sounds plausible, lots of empiricist, the various threads of believe things like that. What’s the implausible part?

John Perry
Well, by my lights, the implausible part is the pragmatic theory of truth. This is the idea that what makes a belief true is the fact that it works. James says truth is good, because we can write it into the future. Well, I just don’t think that’s right. I think the reason that belief in the truth is helpful is because truth is what corresponds with the facts. And maybe it’s not so helpful in every case.

Ken Taylor
Well, right. Sometimes truth is unhelpful, and sometimes falsity is very helpful. But you know, you’re you’re a mad dog realist. So I am not surprised you don’t find James plausible and the pragmatic theory of truth,

John Perry
Well Ken, we’ve just touched the surface with William James, but then in a moment, we’ll be joined by a real scholar who can take us a little bit deeper. That’s Russell Goodman from the University of New Mexico,

Ken Taylor
And we’d love to have you join in this conversation too. 1-800-525-9917. That’s 1-800-525-9917 Or, as always, you can email us at comments at philosophytalk.org.

John Perry
But first, our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Julie Napolin and explores one of James’s ideas that had a huge influence outside philosophy: the stream of consciousness. She files this report.

Julie Napolin
In his book “The Principles of Psychology,” William James makes the radical move to say that consciousness isn’t always linear or logical. On a daily basis, we’re all immersed in what he calls “the stream of thought.”

Mitchell Breitwieser
For James thought has kind of an uneven rhythm, that it will sort of move quickly and abruptly and kind of in not quite clear ways across a bunch of associations and then sort of stop for a moment and reach a conclusion and then start up again and rush to another conclusion.

Julie Napolin
Mitchell Breitwieser is an English professor at UC Berkeley,

Mitchell Breitwieser
He likened the pacing of the stream of consciousness to a bird flying from limb to limb, sort of perching and flying, perching and flying and, and that attention to the kind of feel of that part of our thinking that we’re always doing, but aren’t always aware of.

Julie Napolin
Around the turn of the 20th century, novelists became interested in James’s idea of the stream of thought. Stephen Arkin is an English professor at San Francisco State University.

Stephen Arkin
These shifts towards a sense of the crucial nature of interiority, the layered sense of what it meant to to have consciousness, invited writers to think about what they might do in addressing how to present this on the page.

Julie Napolin
The Irish prose writer James Joyce was one of them.

Stephen Arkin
Joyce was very, very taken with the idea of representing that flow.

Julie Napolin
In 1922, Joyce wrote “Ulysses,” an 800 page novel that takes place in 24 hours as two men, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dadelus, wander around Dublin. With only a loose plot, and no narrator telling us what to think. Joyce turn radically against the traditional novel.

Stephen Arkin
He was convinced that portraying consciousness involves working with a flow or a stream, a sense that there is an interior monologue going on. It’s very associative, that involves picking up notions that may wander so far afield that it’s hard really to know how these things are related other than as the preoccupation of someone getting through a day.

Julie Napolin
In “Ulysses,” the world of the characters rushes at you: the way Dublin smells, tastes, sounds and feels from moment to moment.

Stephen Arkin
What you get is a very, very different emphasis on what character is. It’s less a matter of how characters are situated in a particular physical world and much more a matter of how characters perceive the world.

Julie Napolin
In one episode, Leopold Bloom walks into a church and is suddenly bombarded by stream of associations, remembering bits and pieces of songs. Stephen Arkin gives his best Irish brogue.

Stephen Arkin
“Some of that old sacred music is splendid. Mercadante: seven last words. Mozart’s twelfth mass: the Gloria in that. Those old popes were keen on music, on art and statues and pictures of all kinds. Palestrina for example too. They had a gay old time while it lasted. Healthy too chanting, regular hours, then brew liqueurs. Benedictine. Green Chartreuse. Still, having eunuchs in their choir that was coming it a bit thick. What kind of voice is it? Must be curious to hear after their own strong basses.”

He reminds us that we all seem to walk around with an interior soundtrack.

Julie Napolin
Again, Mitchell Breitwieser from Berkeley.

Mitchell Breitwieser
One of the things that gets left behind is the idea that we necessarily think in sentences or even in words.

Julie Napolin
For both Breitwieser and Arkin, this cuts to the heart of philosopher William James’s discover.

Mitchell Breitwieser
There is for William James that kind of musicality in terms of motifs come and go and read, get reprised and so on. And there’s a kind of a flowingness.

Stephen Arkin
What does it mean to walk through the world with a constant playing stream of thoughts of associations of recollection, some that seem highly specific, and some that seem extraordinarily fragmented and vague, all of which amount to this thing we call ourselves?

Julie Napolin
Philosophy Talk, I’m Julie Napolin.

John Perry
I’m John Perry. And with me is Ken Taylor.

Ken Taylor
Our guest today is Russell Goodman. He’s the Regents Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico, author of “Wittgenstein and William James.” Russell, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Russell Goodman
Thanks very much for having me on. Glad to be here.

John Perry
Russell, just briefly, how did you get interested in William James?

Russell Goodman
Well, it was so long ago, I can’t really remember I think, I think I read “Varieties of Religious Experience” in college. And I remember being struck by sort of the history of religious enthusiasm that he dealt with there. The book is all about religious experience as a part of human life. And it’s a great survey of examples of this. So I had that in the background, and I probably taught a little bit in epistemology courses that I was offering. But I always found James a little weird, and it wasn’t it was wasn’t till I don’t know 1520 years out of graduate school that I found a way to use him and I’m first was thinking of him as a romantic an idea which I got by hearing Stanley Cavell talk about Emerson and Wordsworth. And I realized, well, William James is kind of a romantic too, and that led to the first book I wrote and then—

John Perry
So your entry into William James had to do with religion and your interest in in aesthetics?

Russell Goodman
Well, yes or no, because I think like a lot of people trained in analytic philosophy, I can’t get epistemology out of my head. So it Yes, aesthetics, yes, religion, but as components of our stance with relation to the world, or the way we understand the world, really. So I think what James thinks is that religious experience is a way of understanding the world, one among many.

John Perry
So tell us now a little bit about James. He was first a physiologist, sure, then a psychologist, then a philosopher, what led to these transitions?

Russell Goodman
Well actually start a little earlier, he was a an artist. First, he was actually committed to being a painter, moved back, he was quite good at it and moved back from Europe, dragged his family back, or had his father drag his family back when he was a teenager, to study painting in Newport. And then for reasons that are not totally clear. He abandoned painting and went into scientific training.

Ken Taylor
Maybe he wasn’t very good at it. You know?

Russell Goodman
Well, he was pretty good at it there. If you look at some of the books on James, he was a great art great oil painter. I guess I’d have to say he’s not as great a painter as he was, whatever he is.

Ken Taylor
You know, people should know that his brother is Henry James.

Russell Goodman
William was older first by about a year and a half.

John Perry
So maybe his brothers literary talents made him feel he ought to get into into academia instead of competing? I don’t know.

Russell Goodman
Right, well it’s often said that one of them was a great psychologist, and one of them was a great literary figure. And, you know, take your pick about which which groups you can apply to which person because they were both that way.

John Perry
So what led him into philosophy?

Russell Goodman
Well, good question. I think he was always there in a way. And he’s one of the philosophers who of whom they’re some number—Wittgenstein is another—who never studied philosophy. He did it on his own. He went to medical school after his chemistry degree, basically. But his first publications were philosophical. So he read stuff. He was in Germany, Alladhi, new German, so he read Schopenhauer, Kant, Hegel, he certainly read Hume and mill, but it was all on his own. And you said very nicely in your introduction, that is his writing that he doesn’t have the complete control of his writing, that one would expect from a certain kind of professional philosopher from a professional philosopher. I think he didn’t, he never had complete control over his life was already always like the stream of thoughts on a split.

Ken Taylor
So I was picking up but it’s in my readings of Jamie, I have picked up something real about him that he does, kind of like the kind of control that a super sophisticated philosopher like Contra humanas, but you’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re discussing the philosophy of William James with Russell Goodman from the University of New Mexico.

John Perry
William James seems to say that it’s okay to believe in immortality and the existence of God. If having those beliefs will make your life better. That’s what he calls the wheel to believe. Does that make any sense to you? Are some of your beliefs ones you hold because they make your life go better, rather than because you have really good evidence for them? Join us by calling toll free at 1-800-525-9917 that’s 1-800-525-9917 or email us at comments@philosophytalk.org.

Ken Taylor
The ideas of William James: the will to believe, the stream of consciousness, the pragmatic theory of truth, the variety of religious experience—plus your calls and emails, when Philosophy Talk continues.

The Beatles
Nothing’s gonna change my world, nothing’s gonna change my world.

John Perry
The idea of a stream of consciousness was identified by the philosopher William James, and that’s who we’re talking about today. Is your consciousness an unbridled stream of blooming buzzing confusion, like Ken’s? Or is it a well ordered filing cabinet and organized treatise the to do list with orderly checkmarks like mine? I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. In religion, William James, distinguishes between the healthy-minded and the sick-minded. Which are you? Is your religion a shield? Or does it provide you with an impulse to get out in the world and do some good? The toll free number 1-800-525-9917 That’s 1-800-525-9917 Email us at comments@philosophytalk.org.

John Perry
Our guest today is Russell Goodman, author of “American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition.”

Ken Taylor
So Russell, I want to I get into James’s ideas of pragmatism, but I want to phrase it in a, in a different way Loki, his animating concerns seem to be multifarious. He was concerned with religion with science with, with ordinary conscious experience. How does I mean what is the philosophy of pragmatism, which many people think of as a kind of scientific philosophy? To help tie all these these animating concerns together?

Russell Goodman
Well, big question. I think James always was a scientific philosopher. But he had a very wide notion of science. And he also, but he also thought science didn’t do everything that you could do. And I guess he saw pragmatism as a more overarching theory, that would give an understanding of science, but also an understanding of religion and ethics.

Ken Taylor
So help me divide and conquer here. So I think we can easily understand how pragmatism helps with science, you know, observation and experiment, what works in theory construction, how does it help with religion? How does Yeah, I can get into this picture?

Russell Goodman
Well, I go back to Science for a little bit, because one of the features of his picture is what we now call holism. He thought of our knowledge as a system. He’s, and so the system includes science, but it also includes what he calls common sense. And it also may include, for some people, at least religion, he sort of oscillates between thinking of the system is public, that we something that we all share, and one that we sort of form for ourselves. But the advantage of pragmatism is that almost anything can go in the system and be part of your way of making your way through the world.

Ken Taylor
Is that because it’s because, you know, works is relative to our purposes, you know, so what believe what works? The truth is what works? Well, what works, in what context so different contexts can have is that is that what it’s about?

Russell Goodman
Yes, I think so. Believe what works is a little too, you know, quick and dirty as as a as an account, he does want to introduce the long run, he does understand that, that certain things that are false, might seem to be working for a while and then blow up in your face. So he wants that. But I guess what I’m trying to say is I would want to say is that the pragmatic theory of truth, has the problems has problems that you bring out, but that there are other sides of his pragmatism. And so understanding, a kind of broader notion of the way we understand the world is is something that could be independent of the pragmatic theory of truth.

John Perry
So, so So let me focus a little bit on this on this idea of the will to believe he says that sometimes we’re confronted with, with options that are less a forced, momentous and genuine and that’s when the will to believe can come in what was he getting out there?

Russell Goodman
Yeah. Well, he said that he should have later because he had, this was a lot of a very controversial paper. And he later said, he should have called it the right to believe that we were and so the idea that you kind of could wheel yourself into believing is not something that he himself believes. And it’s not true. I mean, he’s quite clear on the fact that I can’t, you know, believe there’s an elephant in the room just at my will. But he did want to justify it’s a, it’s an article about justification. And I don’t buy the whole thing. But I like to talk not about religion, or I’m not sure I want to follow him, but into in something else he talks about, namely, well, you might say romance is one example. And he gives the example of courting a member of the opposite sex, he’s really thinking of a guy courting a woman, and you have the right to believe that she’s going to love you back. Even in that momentous situation, even when you don’t have the evidence for it. And any claim he wants to make is that believing that that she’s going to love you back will contribute in some way to making it.

Ken Taylor
So let’s explore this a little bit. Certainly, you will have the right to act on the belief that she will love you back. I mean, you know, they call that they have terms for that, but aren’t pleasant anymore. And, I mean, you might assume that he will love you back. And that might keep you going or somehow but and that might be a useful assumption. But he thinks that makes it true or something, right?

Russell Goodman
It’s actually really a causal claim. I think I don’t think he I don’t I think he does think you have the right to act on the belief in an appropriate manner. And I think he wants to say, you know, the action wouldn’t be the sort of action that will that might do the trick, unless you had the belief in the first place. And so the, the sooner you can get, to put it rather crudely, you can get someone to love you. If you manifest your love and belief that the love will follow first. It’s a kind of this thing, this thing happens. And then this thing follows.

John Perry
It says we have that we have the right to believe at our own risk, any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our will. So I suppose if he was faced in modern times was drawing the line between, you know, undue optimism and sexual harassment, it would be that phrase, at our own risk. So you can be very nice to someone with a hope that she’ll return your attention. But you shouldn’t put her at risk.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking about the philosophy of William James with our guest, Russell Goodman, and we’d love to have you join this discussion. And the number to do so is 1-800-525-9917. That’s 1-800-525-9917. Or, as always, you can email us at comments@philosophytalk.org and Moe in Berkeley is on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Moe.

Moe
Yeah, very good discussion, I, I was just kind of responding to your question about whether we can have some beautiful vision, like I have a vision of happy freedom, and I can, you know, just I feel that useful. So therefore, I can work toward it, you know, based on having different shapeshifting different perspectives, and then having an in a general inference of happy freedom. And I call this the undiscovered when every time you you discover something, you invent it. And every time you invent something, you discover something. So the whole thing of pragmatism, to me is my for my interpretation, limited interpretation. Contingent interpretation is that we’re that we’re continually in that in that irony of our own personal nature, but we’re continually making up things as we’re finding things and as we find out about that thing, so that’s my idea of what why pragmatism works.

Ken Taylor
Moe, you’ve got a mouthful, I’m gonna let Russell respond to that. Thanks for the call.

Russell Goodman
Well, I think that’s basically right. No, I think he does blur the line between discovery and creation. And that’s part of his pragmatism that he calls humanism. We, we, we, it’s, and you can also think of this as something akin to Kant, we make up the world that we are, then we don’t make up the world, but we structure or in some way and form the world that we then register, he says that, and it’s a little hard to swallow, but it’s certainly a very, I think it’s worth swallowing. But he, he thinks that we can’t distinguish the world from our human interests in it and our human apprehension of it, as he puts it in a slogan that was taken up by later pragmatist, Hilary Putnam, the trail of the human serpent is over everything.

John Perry
So Russell, or I don’t know, Sarah Palin, somebody said, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. And I don’t want to accuse James of having a small mind. But, but I do worry about consistency here. That is, take take immortality, a lot of people would find their life goes better if they believe in their mortality. For many people, it’s a genuine option. And they feel they have to make up their minds about it. So so it’s in the category of things, he thinks you have things, he thinks you have a right to believe. But on the other hand, when we get back to that pragmatists theory of meaning, how, what experiences could you have? That would, that would be different? If if you were immortal? Or if God exists? If he can’t identify some of those experiences? Doesn’t he have to say the belief is meaningful and meaningless? And if it’s meaningless? How can we have the right to believe it?

Russell Goodman
Yeah, well, it wouldn’t be for him. And that was Emerson, by the way, the foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds you adore, adored by little statesman, philosophers and divines. That’s us. And, you know, I think James rejected abstract religious theology because it precisely because their conception of God didn’t make any difference in people’s lives for him. If if the notion of God has a meaning it is going to be in your experience. And so this is the way in which is the approach that we’ve been talking as a sort of pragmatic approach to religion actually folds into or coincides with the approach he takes in Varieties of Religious Experience where he’s studying the effects on people’s lives of, in some sense, belief in God, or what do you call it? But he was troubled by the question that you’re pushing, and then I’m slightly dodging here. He was troubled by the question with this question. I mean, suppose this makes this belief and religion makes your life better, it changes you morally, it changes you, as far as your happiness is concerned. Does that prove that there’s a God doing any of this? And I think he was worried about that question. And he didn’t, we can tell that he was inclined to want to say yes, but he never really did. I think he—

John Perry
So before we get off off this topic, just say a couple words about the healthy-minded, sick-minded distinction if I have that those terms right.

Russell Goodman
Yeah. Well, James always was a great psychologist, and he used these little psychological characterizations. You mentioned tough mind intended tender mind to make sense of phenomena. So the healthy minded religious types, as he put it, look, they for them, the world has a sky blue tint And they look on all things and see that it’s good. So the world is totally good. And it’s essential being and the six souls, or the twice born as he sees them have a sense of evil in the world. The phrase that I always talk to my students about is that for, for the six old radical evil gets its innings, which I think is probably a cricket term, radical evil gets its innings. And so you do not eliminate evil from the world. And you have to recognize that its present and sick souls have that consciousness of of evil. So even if they’re religious, so his examples are the Buddha and Christians, particularly Jonathan Edwards, Tolstoy, who have some sense, the six holes, the twice born have a sense of evil as in illimitable. But nevertheless, in some, in some sense overcome.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening for your listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking about the philosophy of William James with our guest, Russell Goodman, and we’d love to have you join this conversation 1-800-525-9917, or email us at comments@philosophytalk.org. And Don in San Francisco is on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Don.

Don
Thank you very much. It’s an exciting day. I feel like a freshman undergraduate seminar. Question is about belief. I don’t think we believe in science. I think science is I think filling that we believe about is what we don’t understand or we don’t know. And in belief, the word lie exists. And that’s my comment. Thank you very much.

Ken Taylor
Hey, John, that we don’t believe in science. So I wouldn’t. James deeply believes in science, but he wants us to rightly understand what science is up to what about isn’t Isn’t that right, Rosalyn.

Yeah, and one of the things James introduces early there in the in the pragmatism book earlier in our century is a historical account of science. This is one of the reasons why I think people after the writing of Thomas Kuhn on the history of science, look back to James because he thinks of our scientific categories as having a history and in that sense, being somewhat contingent, even though they are responding to the world. So it is believed in a feature of all pragmatists is fallibilism. You know, we can get things wrong, and we do get things wrong,.But it’s and it’s not as though and the world for James, see if I’ve got this right. The world you talked about this in passing, but I want to focus on a little bit more the world for James is not already. It’s not our it’s not like completely ready made. And already so and science does kind of reflects what is already so right. Because somehow the world is made by us, partly by not out of just nothing, but by materials that are somehow all ready to hand. But we do a lot of creating,

John Perry
Or making sense of this from the day we’re born of this blooming, buzzing confusion. Right?

Ken Taylor
Exactly. We’re throwing out right? We’re throwing out concepts, and sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. But in throwing out the concepts we’re not just reflecting the way the world aniseed Lee is in its own nature or something like that. But somehow construing the world is that right?

Russell Goodman
That’s exactly right. That’s exactly the way to put it. The blooming buzzing confusion is, is they’re all around us. And we have these he thinks of concepts as tools that we use to sort of slice up reality and or slice up what’s what what comes into us and make sense of it. And there is something out there that fights back. And if the if the tools don’t work, then we’re gonna have to change our conceptual tools. So definitely,

John Perry
There’s also a couple of things we got to mention here. One, of course, is we should say something about purse just that purse was a big influence on James on this pragmatism, but But secondly, a lot of people nowadays particularly equate science with physicalism the idea that the physical world is all it’s real that’s quite contrary to James he really, you really push this idea of what we’re most sure about as consciousness and any that evolved into something called neutral monism. And can you tell us what neutral monism is?

Ken Taylor
In one minute or less?

Russell Goodman
Yes, due to monism is a term that was coined by Bertrand Russell, to describe the theory that he took explicitly from James at some metaphysical view that James developed a sort of after and alongside of his pragmatism, it’s the view that reality is neither physical nor mental. It’s neutral. And that the physical and mental are as it were poles or precipitates out of this more fundamental neutral stuff.

Ken Taylor
Is that—they are ways of taking this neutral stuff. I mean, if we construct the world through we construct it through taking it as mental or taking it as physical or something like that. I think so.

Russell Goodman
I think so.

Ken Taylor
Well, on that note, you’re listening to Philosophy Talk. We’re discussing the philosophy of William James, with Russell Goodwin from the University of New Mexico. He’s author of “American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition” and also “James and Wittgenstein.”

John Perry
James is one of the great figures in American intellectual history. He influenced philosophy of course, but also psychology and also the study of religion. Ideas we use every day probably derived from James. Next we’re going to consider one of his influences that was quite large: his influence on American consciousness, including literature.

Ken Taylor
The impact of William James—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Paul Simon
Betty, when you call me, you can call me Al.

John Perry
Do you like stream of consciousness songs? Do you like stream of consciousness novels, then you’ve been influenced by William James? Are you a teacher teaching under the influence of the later pragmatist, John Dewey, then you’ve been influenced by William James, share the influence of James and pragmatism and the stream of consciousness on your life with us? I’m John Perry. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor. Our guest is Russell Goodman from the University of New Mexico, and we’ve got a caller on the line now—Jay in San Francisco. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Jay.

Jay
I had a question regarding the historical context of William James in terms of his pragmatism, which might even be a little bit of like, lead to relativism in some ways, but just the consequence of like the Civil War and people dying for ideas and that issue around shaping his ideas.

Ken Taylor
Well, okay, thanks for that. So Russell, tell us both about this is a good question. Because we can ask both about the setting in which James came up with the idea of pragmatism and je mentioned how it might lead to relativism and all that and people like Richard Rorty would say, yes, yes, yes. So So take that question and run with it for a bit.

Russell Goodman
Yeah, good. Well, I’ll start with the relative relativism first. Yeah, this always comes up. This is the question that comes up about pragmatism, aren’t you just a relativist? If what works for me may not work for you? And there’s no if there’s no sort of nature that we can get at directly, then isn’t this just sort of making up different stories and that sounds a little bit like our contemporary or recently deceased Neo pragmatists, Richard Rorty. So both early in the time of James and late towards the end of the 20th century, when we have these Neo pragmatists, Putin and Rorty, the question of relativism is huge. And so it is a big issue. And they’re always defending themselves against it. But of course, the question is coming up because of some of the things that they say.

Ken Taylor
So does James explicitly address. I mean, Paris had this thing about what in the long run, and he seemed to believe in some kind of convergence, rational theaters, inquiring will converge that the ideal limit of inquiry, is there something like anything like that in James?

John Perry
James had this term pluralism, was that his term for relativism?

Russell Goodman
Yes. Yes. Two questions. Well, James took versus long run view of truth, and accepts it in pragmatism. So he does think that there’s a convergence. And the truth will be the final human opinion, which is kind of an ideal that we may or may not arrive at, after we’ve done all our experimentation. That’s a common view to both person James, call that the long run view of truth rather than truth is what works.

Ken Taylor
So in the long run, will all divergence and pluralism and diversity of opinion just wash out? And why would anybody believe that in advance?

Russell Goodman
Right, well I don’t believe that. I mean, I think one of the things that has changed in in discussion of this long run idea, I think James and Peirce both thought that there would be one final system at the end point of inquiry. And I don’t see any reason to believe that there would be just one there might be several.

Ken Taylor
So take good take the other part of Jays. So is the context. So it’s James, sort of spring wholecloth, you know, a new way of thinking or is it that doesn’t have historical antecedents? Was he influenced by what was happening around him? What was going on?

Russell Goodman
Yeah, that’s a good question. I think he’s a pretty original guy. Actually, I think he really is part of that out of control. aspect of him, is it he’s just an idea creator? Sources? Yeah. People talk about the Civil War. I don’t know which he was born in 1842. So just missed out on it. His brothers were in there. One of them was the head of a black regiment and got wounded. I don’t know that the sort of I don’t, my reading of it. The civil war isn’t a big factor. I think Darwinian science is a big factor. He’s a Darwinian as his purse. I actually also thought I work on Emerson, I think Emerson is a factor. This is part of the romantic Lincoln’s and the sort of self reliant, optimistic side of James certainly Charles Sanders Peirce, who was his friend in Cambridge, slightly older three years older, was an influence in person James are usually thought of as the two co founders of pragmatism in the 70s and the 1870s. So that’s part of the context and that context is a very scientific context. So with James, you get you get hard science, you get chemistry, you get art, you get literature, you get psychology, and you get medicine, when it’s all—

Ken Taylor
One of the things that James seemed really concerned to do was, you mentioned the connection with romanticism. He seemed to believe that science had the potential to kind of deaden the world and turn it into make us see it as a mirror mechanism. But religion had this vitalizing thing in which science was driving out. And he seemed to want to re romanticize the world while retaining science. Is that is that is that?

Russell Goodman
I think that’s exactly right. I think that’s right. And so he shares with the Romantics, in the early 19th century, that idea that somehow science has disenchanted the world. And yeah, he looks to religion. It’s interesting, a lot of the Romantics look to art for that reenactment. James, despite his career as an artist, or as, you know, broken off career as an artist didn’t really go that way. But I think that’s right. It’s a critique of science rather than a rejection of it.

Ken Taylor
Vincent in Berkeley is on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Vincent—I know you’ve been waiting a while. What’s your comment or question?

Vincent
All right. Couple of couple of questions. First one is, when I’ve read Wittgenstein, he talks about meeting as use or meaning of a phrase, or sentence being relayed to us. And I’m wondering if if there’s a connection between him and Wittgenstein. I mean, I’m sorry, and Jameson that way? And the second question is, given what he says, what James says, it seems that whether you think his his, his system is true, depends upon whether you think He’s genuinely good.

Ken Taylor
That’s a clever question. From why I don’t know much about I know you’re writing a book about Vidkun, Stein and James. But my impression is that Vidkun Stein had this kind of disdain for James for some reason. But tell me more about that.

Russell Goodman
Well, it’s a very complicated story. And that’s why I was able to write a book about it, because there’s lots to talk about. You know, it’s interesting, the phrase did me a lot of good is one that Vic and Stein uttered in a famous letter, or maybe not so famous, but a 1912 letter to Bertrand Russell, when he was just come, just starting philosophy at Cambridge. And he was he read Varieties of Religious Experience and reported to Russell that it did him a lot of good. And that was just a postcard. So one doesn’t really quite know how. And he always loved that book was recommending it to students throughout his life. But he was critical of James and it’s not clear he ever read pragmatism, he was he was afraid of pragmatism, or he hated pragmatism without quite knowing what it was. But there are these kinds of plaintiff, a couple of plaintiff little questions that Vic and Stein has, where he literally asks himself in uncertainty, aren’t you a pragmatist? Or I’m saying something that sounds like pragmatism. So he did see or sense some sort of connection between pragmatism and his philosophy. And he didn’t like that.

Ken Taylor
And he never really—does he ever work anywhere ever directly head on addresses James works, because like I said, my casual reading of Wittgenstein, I get the sense that he thought there was something very wrong with it.

Russell Goodman
Well, you get that because he does address James’s works in his late unpublished work, philosophical investigation. So James has mentioned four times in that book more than anybody else, except for St. Augustine. So James is is a kind of subject in the book. But it’s almost always critical. Yeah. And so they’re, I think, with Wittgenstein, and James, you have to look at pragmatism, which he hated. But he probably never read that book, you have to look at the varieties of religious experience, which he loved, and which I think had an influence on the Tractatus his first book, and you have to look at the Principles of Psychology, to which most of the references in philosophical investigations are, and he was teaching at the end of the war, or after World War Two, and Wittgenstein came back to Oxford came to Oxford. He was lecturing on the Principles of Psychology, mostly critically. But I think this is part of the argument in my book that yes, he was critical for good reasons of James’s psychologism in the Principles of Psychology, but he also learned a lot from William James.

John Perry
So it sounds like Wittgenstein, a bit like Ken and I admire James, maybe more for his psychology than for his philosophy. Although I think my own view is Wittgenstein and James have one thing in common. They’re both leave a lot of details hanging.

Ken Taylor
Anyway, on that note, thank you for joining us. It’s been a wonderful conversation.

Russell Goodman
Well, thank you very much for having me. I’ve enjoyed it too.

Ken Taylor
Our guest has been Russell Goodman, regents professor of philosophy at the University of New Mexico, author of “Wittgenstein and William James,” which we were just talking about. So, John, what did you What did you learn today?

John Perry
Well, I learned a lot today and preparing for the program. I read James’ “Psychology” when I was a student, like Russell did, “The Varieties of Religious Experience” and I always found it very inspiring. I really found his philosophy disappointing when I went at it from the point of view of a teacher I thought I should get some James into my intro course I just didn’t find anything I thought was very helpful, but returning to it now maybe when I’m older and wiser I actually found it a lot more interesting and engaging and I really what we were talking about at the end, Russell and Wittgenstein—I mean, Russell about Wittgenstein and James, that’s fascinating. And I didn’t know that story. I’m gonna look into his new book.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, I you know, my interest is repeating James, I guess, partly is because I think I’ve become more of a pragmatist and a relativist in my old age. And so, you know, I’m always looking for antecedents to my pragmatic relativism, which is, keeps growing in me when I was young, and would read some of James, I would say, you know, I have better things to do, you know, and I never really Dig Dug into the varieties of religious experience. But that sounds like a really great read. And I think we should put it on our next summer reading list or something like that. But you know, this conversation continues on our, our Facebook page, our Facebook page, and we’d love you to become a member of our Facebook community. It’s growing and growing and growing. It’s up to many hundreds and why don’t you join us too.

John Perry
And you know, you can download podcasts of our program from our website—that’s philosophytalk.org. You’ll enjoy the podcasts, we clean them up a little. So if there’s any glitches that annoyed you in the program, you won’t find them in the podcast. And with that…

Ken Taylor
John, you hear that drumming? That signal is my favorite time of the show: it’s time for a conundrum.

John Perry
A conundrum is where a listener calls in with a problem, and we use philosophy to help them solve it.

Ken Taylor
And we’ve got a caller on the line now. Welcome to Philosophy Talk. So tell us your name and where you’re calling from.

Sean
My name is Sean. I’m calling from Vancouver, Washington.

John Perry
Ooh cool, Vancouver, Washington. That’s right up there next to Portland, right?

Ken Taylor
And what do you do up there in Vancouver, Washington right next to Portland?

Sean
Brew beer and stay out of the rain.

Ken Taylor
You’re a professional beer brewer?

Sean
Nah, I’m a homebrewer.

John Perry
Cool. So what’s your conundrum?

Sean
Well, I wondered whether someone who says they never lie can be telling the truth.

Ken Taylor
Well if they never lie, they can be. I mean, what do you mean? Why is that a conundrum?

Sean
When my wife and I got married, we had a circumstance where each of us lied to the other one and was caught doing so by the other person. Okay, and we made a commitment to each other that we would never lie again. Okay. I then kind of internalized that and applied it to everything in my life, with the idea that I should never lie about anything.

John Perry
Since then, you’ve lost job after job and friend after friend.

Sean
I’m not a very popular guy in some circles.

Ken Taylor
So what you’re really asking is whether one could really hold oneself in a real world to a commandment of never lying. Is that what you’re really asking?

John Perry
So I mean, if you define a lie as an untruth, and then you go by what the witnesses ask, or do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? It’d be pretty hard not to lie. I mean, I try to tell the truth. And most of the time, nothing but the truth. But I really have no interest in telling the whole truth to most people about most things.

Ken Taylor
And most people don’t have an interest in hearing the whole truth about the whole thing. You know, most things. I mean, your wife asked, How does my new hairdo look? How does my dress look? I mean, you know, if you think it’s awful, you’d be a fool to say it looks awful. Don’t you think, Sean?

Sean
Yeah I generally couch in less harmful terms.

Ken Taylor
Well, you say you try to soft-pedal the truth.

Sean
Yeah, and that’s kind of what I was getting at: is omission a lie?

John Perry
Well, you know, Ken makes a very good point, as usual. Lying is is is a matter of talking to other people. And talking is really not so simple as it seems there’s always different speech acts involved. Is my wife looking for a little reassurance or a compliment? Or is it a situation as Ken describes where she really wants my analytic, honest opinion? I really can hardly think it counts as a lie of somebody’s fishing for a compliment. And you kind of go out of your way to say something not too inaccurate.

Ken Taylor
Yeah. So I mean, I don’t think it’s a yes or no. Simple thing. I mean, I do think sometimes, the setting gives you license, and may even require you to withhold information, right, about your attitude about your thoughts or evaluation. I hate to sound like a situational ethicist or anything like that, but I think it’s very situational.

John Perry
Here’s a completely hypothetical example. You’re kind of an old philosopher. Be eaten down by time and thinking your entire life and you decided, well, the world’s meaningless. There is no God. And we’re all just bleeped. But and you’re teaching an intro course and the students say, Do you believe in God? Do you believe there’s meaning in the world? Is life worth living? What are you supposed to say? Oh, no, no, no, it’s no God, the universe is meaningless. And you know, I know you’re going through adolescent angst and you’re very sensitive, but I just have to tell you the truth, it’s just a bunch of bleep. Well, you shouldn’t say that. You should say, Oh, well, I you know, you should kind of prevaricate. You should say, Well, you know, I’ve thought about it a lot. And sometimes I feel one way and sometimes I feel another and it’s a very interesting question, you should decide for yourself.

Ken Taylor
Well, on that one, I disagree with you. And I think you should rub their nose and the meaninglessness of existence and get them depressed and ready for what’s about to assault them. But what do you think about that, John?

Sean
When I was in school in Montana, one of my philosophy professors introduced me to the idea of the festering falsehood.

John Perry
The festering falsehood…

Ken Taylor
That’s nice and alliterative. But what is it?

Sean
The idea is that lies fester in darkness and misinformation festers in darkness. And that the only way to live like a pure, fully realized life is to never have any falsehood, fester. Yeah. To the light of day and burn it out.

John Perry
I mean, there’s a practical matter. It’s usually easier to stick to your story of it’s true than keep trying to remember what exactly lies you’ve told exactly. Now, Ken didn’t you’re a philosopher Kant, one of your favorites. Didn’t he say that? If somebody came to the door and and said, you know, where’s your father, I want to shoot him. That even then you shouldn’t lie. You shouldn’t say oh, he’s not here. He’s vacationing in Portland.

Ken Taylor
Which just proves one thing that even the smartest deepest thinkers in the world can say, the most boneheaded dumb things. Sean, I hope we’ve helped you think some about Yeah, you’re challenging questions

Sean
You have, thank you very much guys.

Ken Taylor
If you have a philosophical problem or quandary that’s affecting your work or your play or keeping you awake at night, John and I would be happy to lend an ear, maybe give you some sound advice.

John Perry
Go to the Philosophy Talk website and poke the conundrums button with your mouse, or just send an email to conundrums@philosophytalk.org Philosophy Talk is a presentation of Ben Manilla productions and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University copyright 2008.

Ken Taylor
Our Executive Producer is David Demarest.

John Perry
Our Production Coordinator is Devin Strolovitch. Daniel Elstein is our Director of Research. Lael Weis is our webmaster. Also thanks to Zoe Corneli, Merle Kessler, Corey Goldman, and Mark Stone.

Ken Taylor
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from the Templeton Foundation.

John Perry
And from various groups at Stanford University, the friends of Philosophy Talk, and the members of KALW San Francisco, where our program originates.

Ken Taylor
The views expressed or (mis-expressed) in this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

John Perry
The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org. I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening.

John Perry
And thank you for thinking.