William James’s Pragmatism: some basic ideas and their genesis

Abstract

William James’s book, published in 1907 in New York, was considered by contemporaries as a manifesto of pragmatism, a new philosophical movement. This marvelous work, written in an engaging and accessible style, provides a detailed account of the pragmatic ('instrumental') conception of truth. All our theories, James insists, are instrumental, are mental modes of adaptation to reality. Any idea that helps us deal, whether practically or intellectually, with a certain reality and affect it in a desired way, should be considered as useful, therefore true. Truth is a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience, “what would be better for us to believe”. For James, the question of how much of what we perceive is 'given' and how much 'added' is meaningless, like the question of whether a man essentially walks more on his left leg or his right: one cannot separate the 'real' from the 'human' factor in the growth of one's cognitive experience. Such interpretation of pragmatism so dismayed Charles Sanders Peirce that he renamed his own variant 'pragmaticism' (a term he hoped was “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers”). In more recent time, at the turn of the 21st century, the long-ago dispute between James and Peirce echoed in the Rorty-Putnam debate which has had considerable resonance in the US (and beyond) and showed that in our days, a hundred years from the publication of James’s book, pragmatism still retains its philosophical import and attractiveness for many professional thinkers.