I don't know anything about William James apart from what I've read on your Substack. I'm interested to learn more about his philosophy- is there a certain work of his, or perhaps a secondary source, which you'd recommend for the untrained layman (one without tons of free time to devote to careful, systematic study)?
I would recommend just going straight to Pragmatism by James himself. He’s a remarkably lucid writer, and you will totally be able to follow the train of ideas without much philosophical background. It’s a short booklet, so not a huge time investment.
I think old-school James-style pragmatism is a severely underrated philosophy, and is so often caricatured by later thinkers (I also think CS Peirce is fantastic here). I recently finished Hasok Chang’s Realism for Realistic People, which is effectively one long argument for pragmatism in the philosophy of science which I thought was absolutely brilliant.
Fully agree! And thanks for the ideas for things to read. Looking forward to reading Pierce. Just gotta finish James’s Varieties of Religious Experience first
I've also been on a pragmatist (re)awakening lately, though I've taken a somewhat different route. I think James is fantastic but I think passages like the one you quote flirt too much with double meanings. Though I can give it a reading that works, I think it ultimately leaves the issue of what's 'real' in too noble a position. My understanding of pragmatism post-James is that the issue of what's real vs. not real should finally be dissolved, and in its affinity with the therapeutic philosophy of Wittgenstein, we ought to unmask language games about reality as empty, rather than try to save their vocabularies by reinterpretation.
A practical argument for this is that, as shown by history, James's approach either continues to participate in interminable discussions about what's really real, or it has to put up its hands and say it's being poetic. I have more sympathy with the line taken by Richard Rorty, who encourages that we should allow all gods to finally die and stop searching for foundations, and if that means we can't do certain kinds of philosophy any more, so much for philosophy.
I think I am sympathetic to this, although I am not sure I can get entirely on board (yet?). Let me give you some preliminary thoughts that I hammer out over coffee before running to work (sorry for a host of typos).
As a pragmatic matter, I don't treat language games as empty since I constantly bet my life on them. So in a sense, I don't really care whether or not if these statements are empty, because if they are declared as empty, then I clearly care about empty things. Perhaps saying it in another way, everything is ultimately empty - nothing is grounded in logical proposition. So I don't quite see why I should discard real without discarding most other concepts. If the concept of "real" is (1) useful to me and (2) can be used semicoherently in restricted domains and conversations, thats cool.
What I want is a flexible enough framework that lets me discuss all features of my flux of experience without terrible tensions that forbid me from psychologically integrating certain of them. What I want is to act and feel in saner and coherent way in relation to them (for example, I want to avoid a mindset that prevents an appropriate weighting of sacred experiences, when these clearly appear to be spiritually healthy). I do not want to be spending my effort playing certain language games that seems to hurt rather then help. But I accept that my framework will always be fuzzy. Realness itself will be fuzzy. There is no pure language game adjudication of realness. Only a certain fuzzy level of realness being implied my web of actions that work, for whatever my goal in life is. I do think it is a mistake to think that realness is a sharp scalar quantity that we can adjudicate, the way we often try to adjudicate boolean truth or falsity, or bayesian subjective probability. That said, perhaps we could adopt a useful scheme of fuzzy logic to have an operationally useful notion of realness in limited domains, although I am not too bothered if we don’t have it. It definitely wouldn't be perfectly canonical, but because humans have overlapping goals, there could perhaps be a significant group of humans agreeing on its construction, getting to very similar conclusions about realness (in limited domains of applicability). All to say, realness clearly has a social and constructive component too it. I'm fine with that. As long as its useful.
This is very fair. I should temper my comment above by saying that if it is possible to dissolve the issue of the real vs. the unreal, it doesn't necessarily mean that talk of the real is senseless and ought to stop. There's always the option for us to read the 'real' and 'true' as something like a meta-language - as the compliments we pay to ideas which are useful and coherent with the rest of our beliefs. Then the empty language games I criticise are not all uses of these words, but activities like trying to analyse truth as a property of a sentence in its relation to the world-in-itself and so on.
By endorsing Rorty, I do go further than this in feeling that we should deflate all this language, even if we're not actually committed to it by pragmatism. But perhaps I'm overlooking the significance of James's pluralism on this point - the reason why I'm tempted by a different way of talking is because it's apparently quite hard for us to get past some very deep confusions if we continue to use traditionally foundationalist language, but this is a practical issue which we perhaps ought to work out by trying each method in application, rather than by trying to foresee the one that's right. By trying to legislate a certain way of talking, I'm trying to make my understanding of the issues more secure, but that's not a very pragmatist strategy!
All legit concerns. I am increasingly pro the empirical approach you discuss at the end. That said, I think it would be healthy if people refined their mental model truth. "Compliments to useful ideas that are coherent with the rest of our beliefs" - I can totally get on board with that!
I don't know anything about William James apart from what I've read on your Substack. I'm interested to learn more about his philosophy- is there a certain work of his, or perhaps a secondary source, which you'd recommend for the untrained layman (one without tons of free time to devote to careful, systematic study)?
I would recommend just going straight to Pragmatism by James himself. He’s a remarkably lucid writer, and you will totally be able to follow the train of ideas without much philosophical background. It’s a short booklet, so not a huge time investment.
I think old-school James-style pragmatism is a severely underrated philosophy, and is so often caricatured by later thinkers (I also think CS Peirce is fantastic here). I recently finished Hasok Chang’s Realism for Realistic People, which is effectively one long argument for pragmatism in the philosophy of science which I thought was absolutely brilliant.
Fully agree! And thanks for the ideas for things to read. Looking forward to reading Pierce. Just gotta finish James’s Varieties of Religious Experience first
I've also been on a pragmatist (re)awakening lately, though I've taken a somewhat different route. I think James is fantastic but I think passages like the one you quote flirt too much with double meanings. Though I can give it a reading that works, I think it ultimately leaves the issue of what's 'real' in too noble a position. My understanding of pragmatism post-James is that the issue of what's real vs. not real should finally be dissolved, and in its affinity with the therapeutic philosophy of Wittgenstein, we ought to unmask language games about reality as empty, rather than try to save their vocabularies by reinterpretation.
A practical argument for this is that, as shown by history, James's approach either continues to participate in interminable discussions about what's really real, or it has to put up its hands and say it's being poetic. I have more sympathy with the line taken by Richard Rorty, who encourages that we should allow all gods to finally die and stop searching for foundations, and if that means we can't do certain kinds of philosophy any more, so much for philosophy.
I think I am sympathetic to this, although I am not sure I can get entirely on board (yet?). Let me give you some preliminary thoughts that I hammer out over coffee before running to work (sorry for a host of typos).
As a pragmatic matter, I don't treat language games as empty since I constantly bet my life on them. So in a sense, I don't really care whether or not if these statements are empty, because if they are declared as empty, then I clearly care about empty things. Perhaps saying it in another way, everything is ultimately empty - nothing is grounded in logical proposition. So I don't quite see why I should discard real without discarding most other concepts. If the concept of "real" is (1) useful to me and (2) can be used semicoherently in restricted domains and conversations, thats cool.
What I want is a flexible enough framework that lets me discuss all features of my flux of experience without terrible tensions that forbid me from psychologically integrating certain of them. What I want is to act and feel in saner and coherent way in relation to them (for example, I want to avoid a mindset that prevents an appropriate weighting of sacred experiences, when these clearly appear to be spiritually healthy). I do not want to be spending my effort playing certain language games that seems to hurt rather then help. But I accept that my framework will always be fuzzy. Realness itself will be fuzzy. There is no pure language game adjudication of realness. Only a certain fuzzy level of realness being implied my web of actions that work, for whatever my goal in life is. I do think it is a mistake to think that realness is a sharp scalar quantity that we can adjudicate, the way we often try to adjudicate boolean truth or falsity, or bayesian subjective probability. That said, perhaps we could adopt a useful scheme of fuzzy logic to have an operationally useful notion of realness in limited domains, although I am not too bothered if we don’t have it. It definitely wouldn't be perfectly canonical, but because humans have overlapping goals, there could perhaps be a significant group of humans agreeing on its construction, getting to very similar conclusions about realness (in limited domains of applicability). All to say, realness clearly has a social and constructive component too it. I'm fine with that. As long as its useful.
This is very fair. I should temper my comment above by saying that if it is possible to dissolve the issue of the real vs. the unreal, it doesn't necessarily mean that talk of the real is senseless and ought to stop. There's always the option for us to read the 'real' and 'true' as something like a meta-language - as the compliments we pay to ideas which are useful and coherent with the rest of our beliefs. Then the empty language games I criticise are not all uses of these words, but activities like trying to analyse truth as a property of a sentence in its relation to the world-in-itself and so on.
By endorsing Rorty, I do go further than this in feeling that we should deflate all this language, even if we're not actually committed to it by pragmatism. But perhaps I'm overlooking the significance of James's pluralism on this point - the reason why I'm tempted by a different way of talking is because it's apparently quite hard for us to get past some very deep confusions if we continue to use traditionally foundationalist language, but this is a practical issue which we perhaps ought to work out by trying each method in application, rather than by trying to foresee the one that's right. By trying to legislate a certain way of talking, I'm trying to make my understanding of the issues more secure, but that's not a very pragmatist strategy!
All legit concerns. I am increasingly pro the empirical approach you discuss at the end. That said, I think it would be healthy if people refined their mental model truth. "Compliments to useful ideas that are coherent with the rest of our beliefs" - I can totally get on board with that!