Thoughts are made of language, while reality is made of, well, reality.
There are various semantic processes by which language grasps at reality, but it never actually becomes a perfect mirror. Rather, thoughts *model* reality, and our thought-models are deployed in various concrete situations for various concrete purposes. Deciding what to think means deciding which models to adopt. Some models are clearly better than others, but at the same time, James insists, there can be multiple, equally valid ways to model the same reality.
This recognition of the inevitable persistence of equally valid truths separates James's pragmatism from the correspondence theory, under which there is ultimately one truth (a mental copy of the whole of reality) that we can do a better or worse job of approximating. However, all that being said, the Jamesian theory of truth is not a license to wander off into la-la land, and it does contain (in restated form) most of what is valuable in the correspondence theory. For James, our beliefs are best described as "bets" with reality. We adopt a mental model and stake ourselves on its working well enough to address some particular problem. The means by which these bets are judged, of course, is the behavior of reality. If we bet sloppily or haphazardly, reality will give us our comeuppance, just as surely as if we were following the correspondence theory. James develops these arguments more fully in "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth". In "The Will to Believe" he explores tricky cases such as what it means to bet on the existence or non-existence of God, or on one's own ability to accomplish something.
The second issue is the relationship between universal and personal truths. It is certainly possible, for James, to distinguish between these two, or, more precisely, to acknowledge a spectrum between those two poles. Where James would object, though, is at the point where the universal is elevated above the personal. David Foster Wallace once wrote that mass media -- i.e., media looking for a universal audience -- tends to be full of junk, not because the audience particularly craves junk, but because "people tend to be really similar in their vulgar and prurient and stupid interests and wildly different in their refined and moral and intelligent interests. What's the difference, after all, between the "universal" and the "lowest common denominator"? For James, "what makes a life significant" is the pursuit of an ideal that animates the whole self. Since our whole selves are so very different, these ideals, which will pose various problems and hence generate various beliefs, will likewise be far from universal. But that doesn't justify giving them less attention, even "on the margin"; quite the contrary.
On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 1:19 PM, Michael Bishop <michaelbish@gmail.com> wrote:
I guess those are both important aspects of the universality of a truth.Perhaps this isn't the best example, but... I won't argue with someone who claims that the story of the virgin birth is as important and fulfilling to them as the golden rule, but I do think that the golden rule has more universal appeal and value and I think that suggests that on the margin, we should give a bit more time and emphasis to the golden rule.I also think that physical laws are more universal than the principles that even the best social science might discover. And within social science, generalizations that are true of more people/groups/organizations/cultures, (i.e. more universal) are typically more useful and deserve the privileged recognition most people are inclined to give them.On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 12:13 PM, Jesse Raber <jesse.raber@gmail.com> wrote:
Mike, when you say that a truth is more universal, do you mean that it applies to a wider variety of phenomena, or that it is held by a wider variety of people? Or something else?
On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 8:25 AM, Michael Bishop <michaelbish@gmail.com> wrote:
I think it is self-evident that some truths are more universal than others, and I feel we need words to describe this. I worry that using the word "truth" both for pragmatic truth and for correspondence truth can really confuse us. What happens is, for example, that we sometimes test the "truth" of a statement we using pragmatism, and then derive implications using correspondence theory.
I'd be curious what we know about people's intuitive definition of truth. Readings people can speak for themselves, and also offer their opinion about the definition other people work with. Personally, when I hear the word "true" I normally think more along the lines of the correspondence theory of truth than the pragmatic theory (though there are certainly times when I do think about pragmatic truthiness).
So while I'm temporarily willing to try out the pragmatists definition of truth, I think that my (and probably most people's?) usual practice of reserving the word truth for statements whose truth has a lot of universality, leads to less confusion.On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 12:30 AM, Jesse Raber <jesse.raber@gmail.com> wrote:
Just to clarify, James is arguing that science *can't* altogether invalidate religion. Either way, though, I think it would be interesting to hear people's thoughts on the relationship between science and religion and to discuss what James (or pragmatism in general) has to say about it.One popular resolution to the science/religion question that James rejects is the idea of separate spheres corresponding to separate kinds of truth. That is, he doesn't think that we use one kind of knowledge when dealing with the physical world described by science and a different kind of knowledge when dealing with emotional, ethical, or religious matters. Instead, he sees both science and religion growing as branches of one underlying kind of knowledge, which is the kind generated by subjecting beliefs to the test of future experience, i.e., judging things by their fruits. This common standard of knowledge, which science must accept, can be used, James argues in this passage from "The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness," to question not science itself, but some of the metaphysical assumptions that scientists tend to make, such as the idea that nature contains only impersonal forces:There are plenty of persons to-day--"scientists" or "positivists," they are fond of calling themselves--who will tell you that religious thought is a mere survival, an atavistic reversion to a type of consciousness which humanity in its more enlightened examples has long since left behind and out-grown. If you ask them to explain themselves more fully, they will probably say that for primitive thought everything is conceived of under the form of personality. The savage thinks that things operate by personal forces, and for the sake of individual ends. For him, even external nature obeys individual needs and claims, just as if these were so many elementary powers. Now science, on the other hand, these positivists say, has proved that personality, so far from being an elementary force in nature, is but a passive resultant of the really elementary forces, physical, chemical, physiological, and psycho-physical, which are all impersonal and general in character. Nothing individual accomplishes anything in the universe save in so far as it obeys and exemplifies some universal law. Should you then inquire of them by what means science has thus supplanted primitive thought, and discredited its personal way of looking at things, they would undoubtedly say it has been by the strict use of the method of experimental verification. Follow out science's conceptions practically, they will say, the conceptions that ignore personality altogether, and you will always be corroborated. The world is so made that all your expectations will be experientially verified so long, and only so long, as you keep the terms from which you infer them impersonal and universal.
But here we have mind-cure, with her diametrically opposite philosophy, setting up an exactly identical claim. Live as if I were true, she says, and every day will practically prove you right. That the controlling energies of nature are personal, that your own personal thoughts are forces, that the powers of the universe will directly respond to your individual appeals and needs, are propositions which your whole bodily and mental experience will verify. And that experience does largely verify these primeval religious ideas is proved by the fact that the mind-cure movement spreads as it does, not by proclamation and assertion simply, but by palpable experiential results. Here, in the very heyday of science's authority, it carries on an aggressive warfare against the scientific philosophy, and succeeds by using science's own peculiar methods and weapons. Believing that a higher power will take care of us in certain ways better than we can take care of ourselves, if we only genuinely throw ourselves upon it and consent to use it, it finds the belief, not only not impugned, but corroborated by its observation.This argument really cuts Richard Dawkins type arguments for atheism off at the knees, if you ask me. But James is nothing if not evenhanded, and what he gives with one hand he often takes away with the other. Religion, too, must accept the common standard of judging beliefs by their fruits. According to that standard one can never be bound by eternally fixed commandments or creeds. Likewise one must subject any part of one's beliefs that can be evaluated scientifically to such evaluation, even if the results might contradict sacred teachings. You might say, then, that for James science and religion humble each other (or "unstiffen" each other, to use a Jamesian word.)On Sat, Jan 4, 2014 at 6:40 PM, Ruth Raubertas <ruthraubertas@gmail.com> wrote:
...Just wondering what folks think about whether James successfully shows that religion is "wholly debunked by science."RROn Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 4:58 PM, Jesse Raber <jesse.raber@gmail.com> wrote:Hi all! Sorry for the delay -- I fell behind with all the holiday traveling and visiting. Probably should have built a week off into the syllabus ... but let's pick up where we left off."The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness" is a turning point in the Varieties. In the previous lectures, James is concerned with clearing the field for religious experience, establishing its general nature, distinguishing it from neighboring categories such as morality, and showing that it cannot be wholly debunked by science. Now he starts to weight the different elements within religious experience, and moves closer to the vital question of what we ought to look for in it.In Lecture II, James distinguishes religion from morality by noting that morality always demands an "effort of volition." "The moralist must hold his breath and keep his muscles tense," he writes; but this "athletic attitude tends ever to break down" -- there are limits to human willpower, "even in the most stalwart." Religion, then, starts with the recognition that "when all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent on the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort, deliberately looked to and accepted, we are drawn and pressed as into our only permanent positions of repose." In religious experience, that is, the "will to assert ourselves," even to assert the morally good, gives way to the "willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God" (my emphasis).In this lecture, we begin to see, however, that there are different ways to imagine and enact the religious surrender of the will. For the deep-dyed religious optimists he discusses here, what is surrendered is the belief in the final reality of evil -- if we think we see pain and suffering, we must surrender the organ of that seeing, and open our inner eyes to the higher truth that "God is well, and so are you," if only you "awaken to the knowledge of your real being." ("All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well," as Julian of Norwich said and T.S. Eliot echoed.) Evil, in this view, is real only to the extent that we believe in it -- an idea that is at least superficially congruent with James's argument in "The Will to Believe" that some beliefs (especially of the "I think I can, I think I can" variety) have the power to make themselves true.James gives the religion of healthy-mindedness a fair hearing and defends it against his audience's presumed scorn -- though as we'll see in the next lecture he's holding his own nuanced criticisms in reserve. He argues, both here and in this week's supplementary essay, "The Gospel of Relaxation," that the religion of healthy-mindedness offers a needed correction to the moralizing pessimism of New England Calvinism. He also argues that, regardless of the cultural context, there will always be certain types of people who will find in the religion of healthy-mindedness the truest expression of their optimistic temperament, and that no good can come from trying to change such people's relationship to the universe.James presents the religion of healthy-mindedness as being ambivalent about whether faith negates evil in a blatant or a subtle way; whether, for instance, faith physically heals disease or raises the believer to a spiritual plane where the disease is no longer important. Both the blatant and the subtle versions of the religion of healthy-mindedness are still with us today, the blatant version in Christian Science, the prosperity gospel, and various New Age movements, and the subtle version in faiths, such as Unitarianism, that preach universal salvation and deny the existence of hell. Do you welcome these movements, for the sake of others or yourself? If not, where do you think they do wrong or fall short?
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