PREVIEW-Episode 22: More James’s Pragmatism: Is Faith Justified? What is Truth?

0:00 Wes: This is a Partially Examined Life episode preview. You'll find the full episode available for purchase in the music section of the itunes store or at partiallyexaminedlife.com store. If you want more than one episode, you can become a PEL citizen at partiallyexaminedlife dot com membership.

0:25 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point said on doing philosophy for living. I'm not even gonna finish that because this is episode 22. It's a sequel to episode 20. Go listen to episode 21 before this. My name is Mark Linsonmeier calling in from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:43 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:45 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:48 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Annapolis, Maryland.

0:51 Mark: Yes, so we reconvened the whole group from episode 20 so long ago because we were discussing pragmatism, William James, and we felt that we were kind of rushed that there was a lot of sections of that book, Pragmatism, that we did not talk about his specifics. And it just seemed a very important topic and we would probably have some more fun with it if we came in here and let our mouths flow. However, we did read one new thing, which was the Will to Believe, an essay by him from Before Pragmatism, 1896. Pragmatism was 1907. So it does not use the word pragmatism in it.

I don't believe at least does not play an important part in it. And it is not essentially tied, I think, to the pragmatic conception, but it goes well with it, obviously, since it's the same dude. And it seemed necessary given how pragmatism, the book, the series of lectures, sold itself as being a way to reconcile hard nosed empiricists to belief in religion, or at least the acceptability of someone else's belief in religion or accepting the possibility that faith could be a rational choice. But yet it didn't really seem to pay off. It did have a chapter near the end where it talked about religion, but there's definitely something in a Will to Believe essay that was missing from the later pragmatism lecture.

2:03 Seth: So basically what it comes down to is you want facts and religion, right? Facts and faith.

2:08 Mark: That's what he says.

2:09 Dylan: Well, I think it's more than that. I mean, wouldn't he say that the disposition with respect to facts is that it's because we are capable of believing in them that we can have facts at all?

2:18 Seth: Wow, that was deep and quick, Dylan. You went straight there.

2:22 Wes: Well, I wouldn't say facts. I would say truths.

2:25 Dylan: Okay, Yeah, I think that's a good distinction. To the extent that there are facts, there are things that you associate the character of truth with. And that would be maybe sort of a special class of things in the sense that they're less disputable or whatever.

2:40 Wes: Yeah, I think, you know, he wants to say that to get to our truths, we have to brush up against realities. Right. There's a reality there, and there's an agreement between truths and reality. It's just that that agreement is predicated on something else in correspondence. It's predicated on this sort of functional relationship that we have of that reality, which ultimately ends up being a pragmatic relationship. But, yeah, I think the point is that the truth is a property of beliefs, and there's no beliefs without believers. So in a way, it doesn't really make sense to talk of some abstract truth independent of the activities and the interests of believers.

3:20 Mark: Very nice.

3:21 Dylan: But I mean, he wants to emphasize that. I mean, there's part of this that's a psychological argument, right? That is trying to avoid the problem of establishing, I mean, the correspondence. To the extent that it's correspondence, it's correspondence because we want that to be that way. This is sort of where he falls into sort of the desirability business that. Well, you know, the way we want to interact with the world is that for a lot of things, we want it to be as much as possible something like what the world is. And, yeah, we'll bracket the fact that it isn't exactly that way, but for a lot of things that we'll just say that, well, when I see a chair, I experience it as a chair.

And there's the sort of complicated interrelation between what I see there and what I extrapolate it into saying that it's a chair. And for a pragmatist, it seems to me that that sort of thing a pragmatist finds interesting, but not all that worrisome. There's a lot about pragmatism that just doesn't get its pants all in a bunch. That's sort of their big criticism. A pragmatist would have of, like, a lot of metaphysics and stuff like that, whether it be extreme skepticism or hardcore foundationalism and stuff like that, is that you just have your pants all in a bunch.

Just relax.

4:43 Seth: All right, so Dylan brings up a good point. Like last time we were kind of like, well, is this really a theory, or is this just kind of like the. Dope smoker's version of truth. And I want to at least try to give some credit to this. There seems to be this motivation, at least in James, where he's arguing against or he's trying to come up with a way to salvage something. Really the motivation behind the pragmatic theory, theory of truth, or the attempt to reconcile religion and truth or religion is that he's trying to salvage beliefs that can't in some way shape or form be verified or validated or made true or instantiated, whatever the case may be.

So pick your conventional theory of truth, you know, to believe that God is good versus to believe that you're sitting in a chair. They're two very different things. And it seems that he's basically just trying to find a way to come up with a theory of truth or come up with some way of reconciling those two things. And the reality of the situation is that truth in itself is kind of irrelevant, by which I mean to say something's true or not true, verifiable, not verifiable is a kind of underhanded way of saying that it has meaning or it doesn't have meaning.

6:07 Dylan: Exactly.

6:07 Seth: And so what he really wants to be able to do is come up with a systematic way of being able to say that religious beliefs have meaning in the same way that our beliefs about mundane factual things that we theoretically can verify and what have you have meaning. That to me is really what the whole enterprise is motivated by.

6:25 Wes: This is a good time, though, to make a distinction between his pluralism about religion and his view about, let's say, empirical or scientific truth, because I think there is a difference. You know, even though we're talking about pragmatic truth in relation to, let's say, the empirical, we're bumping up against these mind independent realities which, you know, he's, he's very adamant about talking about those realities because he doesn't want to be accused of subjectivism. But in, in religion, criterion changes, right? Criterion becomes purely internal in a sense.

And I think this is where we got in some discussion last time, where there's some seeming inconsistency with him talking about this is true for me. Well, I think that true for me applies only in the case of, let's say, religion. There's no simply true for me in the case of empirical truth because it rests upon agreement. You know, he talks frequently about agreement as well being a criterion of truth. And that agreement sort of falls out of the picture. In religion, it's pluralistic. We don't have to agree about what religious sentiments are going to serve our purposes.

7:34 Dylan: But along the lines of the kinds of things he wants out of scientific truth. I think he would say that part of the way at least individual religions or individuals have those religious conversations depends on a kind of consistency. Maybe it has certain kinds of different logical rules, but I would guess most of them are basically the same and. And that they demand a kind of consistency. It's not ad hoc in the religious tradition.

8:01 Wes: No, it's bumping up against something. But what it's bumping up against is internal. Right. It's psychological. So as opposed to mind independent realities that it's bumping up against, it has something to do with. Yeah, I think internal consistency is part of it. Internal needs and. Yeah, maybe those are common to all human beings. The extent to which it'll be pluralistic or something that's common in virtue of human nature, let's say, I think is an open question.

8:27 Dylan: You know, he focuses on this question of religion, I think, not knowing a lot about it, but in large part because of the context of the time. And that this question of religion was very, very topical in the late 19th century with sort of an onslaught of hardcore positivism and stuff like that. But when in reading through it, in this whole notion of the will to believe, even without going where I wanted to go at the beginning with extrapolating it just towards. That's the way it is with everything, it seems you could have been talking about lots of other things that are maybe in some ways even more personal and maybe less inflammatory. Just like, you know, being in love, that the characteristic of knowing that you're in love with somebody is going to be. They have the same kind of features.

9:13 Mark: Say more about that. How can you be sure that you're in love? Well, sort of deciding is part of what makes it the case.

9:20 Dylan: Yeah. I mean, that being in love, that loving your children, loving your wife, that act, that characteristic has a lot in common with religion. I mean, I wouldn't be the only person ever to say such a thing. Right.

9:32 Wes: Yeah. I think that relates to his forced option. Right. Where, you know, that's. That if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice thing where he talks about the man who, if he hesitates indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home.

9:51 Dylan: Yes, yes.

9:52 Wes: Cuts himself off from that particular. I love this angel possibility with a dash. Angel dash possibility. As decisively as if he went and married someone else.

10:03 Dylan: So yeah, I had forgotten about that part. I don't know how I could have forgotten about that. So he sort of puts it as a possibility there that those acts of human relations that aren't strictly empirical involve a lot of these sorts of things. So the activity of knowing about those relations and the activity of extracting meaning out of those relations, to use Seth's good word, comes from an act of believing. And that believing is going to then be inherently linked to the desirability, that it's just better to believe in it because it makes all sorts of other

10:44 Wes: things and even that it's a sort of self fulfilling prophecy. Right. You can in many cases get what you want without believing first.

10:53 Dylan: Yeah. And the thing about this is that this kind of thing isn't new. Socrates talks about this in, I think it's in the Meno. You know, he's being pushed to the wall about whether you know something first or whether you have to learn it and on and on. And he. Maybe it's in the apology. He says that at the end of the day he knows it's better to understand that I do not know everything and that that's a better way to live.

11:26 Wes: Yeah.

11:27 Dylan: And even the way he says it, it's an act of belief that you do this, that you face. It's an act of bravery that you say that you can know things and that you. That knowing is better than not and that all these sort of mental actions are at the end done because it makes your life better to do it than not to do it.

11:48 Mark: Of course, if you're feeling snide about it, maybe a better analogy between religious belief and your falling in love with your future partner or whatever is religious belief and my love for Reese Witherspoon.

12:06 Dylan: Yeah, but I mean, you can demote all kinds of feelings of connection that person has, whether it be to some notion of religious belief that you want to call God or that you want to say that it's the love that you feel for your favorite pencil. I mean, if you want to say all those things are the same, I guess you can. I just.

12:29 Mark: The point is there's reciprocation. That is if you take the leap and you know, say, yes, I am going to go ahead and get married or something, I do feel comfortable enough about this. I do have enough faith in my future wife that we're going to go ahead and take the step. Then there's. It seems like there's something akin to verification in that if it does, in fact turn out well. Whereas if I love a distant celebrity, then that love might keep me warm on cold nights. But.

12:55 Wes: Well, you're, you're assuming that verification requires reciprocation. Yes. I mean, the reciprocation for religion is sort of internal to belief itself.

13:05 Dylan: Yeah, like Dante being in love with Beatrice, the 12 year old he only saw on the bridge.

13:13 Wes: Being religious is like being in love with a 12 year old

13:18 Dylan: who you never met. Right.

13:23 Wes: Yeah. Send your hate mails.

13:28 Mark: That's all right. My email's the only one on the site.

13:30 Seth: I'll take it. So help me understand kind of the discussion where it stands now and connect it to this idea that this pragmatic method or pragmatic view of things, it's not just about belief, it's also about being a guide or a rule for action that there has to be some practical consequence to believing something for it to be true. And that that's actually the measure of truth is the utility of the practical consequence. And if.

14:02 Mark: Or is that the measure of the meaning of it being meaningful at all?

14:05 Seth: I don't know. I don't really know what language to use here. I mean, last time when we talked, the word utility kept coming to mind and not utility in the utilitarian sense, but like usefulness, practicality. And you know, it says if believing something makes no practical difference, then it's not just that it has no meaning. It's not just that it's useless, it's that it's not true.

14:26 Dylan: So it doesn't have truth value.

14:28 Seth: It doesn't have truth value because it has. It's no practical guide to action. It has no. It's useless. That's the only way I can think of to say it. So your long distance love of Reese Witherspoon has no practical utility to her, but it has some practical utility to you. So to some extent it's true insofar as it has usefulness, it has practical consequences for you. I wanted to bring back what you guys were talking about in terms of belief and tying it back to this idea of a practical consequence.

14:59 Mark: Right.

14:59 Seth: And so there are places in the pragmatism lectures where he says if something has no practical consequence, it's not just useless or meaningless, it's not true. So my reading of that says that trivial facts like this small portion of the wall in my office is white, which really has no practical consequence for me and certainly not for anybody else. It's not just a useless trivial fact. It's not true.

15:26 Wes: I don't think that's right, though.

15:28 Seth: You think that's a wrong reading or you think that's not right?

15:30 Wes: I think he would say that's true.

15:32 Seth: Okay.

15:33 Wes: I think the practical consequence thing is a more broad criterion. It's practical in the sense of, you know, it's part of a web of beliefs which has implications.

15:42 Dylan: Yeah. There's all sorts of things that you can feed into it having a practical consequence.

15:49 Seth: Okay.

15:50 Dylan: In terms of your environment. I mean, just from the standpoint, let's just pick just straight up physical theory, you know, the way you would describe the world with physical, mathematical, chemical theory. The consistency involved and stuff like that. The fact that the wall is white would fall at least into that. You know, the question of the wavelengths of the light being that color also has consequences in terms of the theory, just because of consistency, that all the other colors have the relationships that they have to themselves to each other, which has practical consequences for you all the time. So just in terms of what you see every day. So the fact that that wall is white is tied with everything that you see all the time.

16:36 Wes: The practical consequence here is actually just the perception itself.

16:41 Dylan: Sure.

16:41 Wes: What he talks about is verification. And I don't think we. There's another thing by James that is radical empiricism.

16:49 Mark: Yeah, I've read some of those.

16:51 Wes: Yeah. He believes in this direct perception, you know, and then some of what we read in the meaning of truth. The idea is that truth leads you up to there's this functional relationship where you might start out with an idea, say that the house is up the hill, and there's a lot of potentiality there. Right. That piece of knowledge is not that robust. It's almost like a variable. It's not that robust until it's acted upon. So you display your knowledge of that or the truth of that in your walking up the hill and your ability to function based on that belief.

And that functioning is just the practical consequence. But part of it is there's a termination to all of that. And one of the terminations is getting up to the house and directly experiencing it. That's sort of the consequence of a whole chain of what he calls these conjunctive relationships, almost like associations. You find yourself walking up a hill and then there's a termination. There are a number of different possible terminations, but one of the terminations is simply the direct perception of the thing in front of you, which counts as this pragmatic consequence.

18:02 Mark: Well, is it also the case that what's going to count as the correct termination? That would verify. Would make you call a belief true is the purpose that you have in holding the belief. We never just take up a belief and ask ourselves, you know, is this true or not? We always have some purpose for wanting to know why. Maybe it's just curiosity.

18:21 Wes: Yeah.

18:21 Mark: And that's going to determine. So that example that you were given from pragmatism, Seth, last time, that, you know, the guy's going up the trail and is thirsty and thinks that there's a house ahead where he might be able to get a drink. Well, if he actually gets a drink, then it worked out. And you could ask, well, what if he just. And this is not from pragmatism, what if he's just collapsed, he hallucinated, thought he saw a house, but somebody found him there, collapsed, gave him a drink and then went on his way. So he wakes up and thinks he went to the house. So there's a challenge there. Does it? I mean, would we say it was true that his original belief that if I follow this trail, then I'm going to find the house and get a drink of water? When he thinks that's what happens and his desire in wanting to know that was verified?

19:01 Wes: Well, it wasn't. It wasn't a direct perception. And it becomes complicated because he has a number of different formulations. Right. He also talks about it as a what we would be fated to believe if inquiry. It's a very Pearsian type of formulation, but it's at the end of the pragmatism lectures. But what we would be fated to believe if inquiry were extended indefinitely. So in the case of empirical truth, it's not that truths change. Exactly. You know, he gets into the whole half truth thing and the absolute truth. So it gets kind of complicated.

But the absolute, the realities themselves don't change, even though our relationships do. And you might call, say it's true on some provisional verification, but then it's overturned. But he ends up calling those things half truths. So say Maxwell's equations were sort of partial truths or half truths. And then Einstein's modification of that is probably still another partial truth. But ultimately you could get to some absolute truth as a sort of faded product of indefinite inquiry.

20:05 Dylan: But it's not necessarily going to be the case that in the wake of Francis Einstein's theory that you're going to even understand Maxwell's theory in the same way that you did before. And so it doesn't seem completely clear that even though you have these kinds of revisions of how you understand the world in which you have a place for all the facts that you had beforehand, so that you have to still account for the same sort of data set that you necessarily understand the origin of that data set. In the same way, the picture of the world is different.

So that when you have action at a distance in Newton and you have Newton's account of it, well then when you come up with Maxwell and you think of it as a field and you, you even have the same mathematics that you did with Newton, but now you really understand it as being a field theory, then that's going to give you a different picture of the world, that it's no longer the case that the Moon is acting and the Earth are acting at a distance unmediated in between. It really is that they both are the sources of fields that are permeating the universe everywhere.

And that at their particular distances those fields create a potential that results in a force. The end result is the same facts are there. The Earth and the Moon are orbiting in the way that they do and that they move the ties in the same way and you get the same equations of motion, but the picture of the world you have is different.

21:39 Wes: So I. Maxwell's equation. So you have to modify the equation divided by the square root of 1 minus the speed of light squared, right?

21:48 Dylan: So yeah, so then with the case of relativity, you're going to modify the equations themselves. So that's another case. But it seems to me that both of them that just because you modify and you have a kind of revision of scientific theory, which is certainly true and part and parcel to it, sometimes you throw away things altogether, like you throw away caloric, because that fails somehow as a concept. Other cases you revise them and so you somehow keep the name. But it's not clear that it stays exactly the same, that whatever you meant by corresponding is exactly the same. It seems likely that you revise those things as well, that it's not kind of a simple accretion, like, it's not like a spiral where you're spiraling in towards the truth at every instance.

22:36 Wes: I thought he was saying we are gradually. Oh, that's why, getting better, getting more, you know, as inquiry goes on. And I think he does say Maxwell's equations, right, strictly speaking are false. And then we might say, yeah, they don't work for frames that are. Have a relative speed approaching the speed of light or something.

22:56 Mark: Now, James does talk about truth as a limit in much the way Peirce does in some places. But I think he's really clear that even though we can. That's part of the concept. And in fact that concept itself has utility. Right. If we think, oh, if I apply the correct scientific method long enough, this will get me closer to truth or something, so that in itself has utility. However, he wants us to make really clear that that concept is an abstraction from actual verification experiences. And there's a conflict there that I'm not sure that I can make sense of, because on the one hand he says he's a fallibilist, which if you're a fallibilist, that means you're always saying I could be wrong, even though right now I think I'm right, I could be wrong.

So the truth is always going to be transcendent. It's going to be transcendent of any given experience. But on the other hand, he wants to make really clear that this concept of truth is a limit, is just a pale abstraction from the concretes. And we can't. Then he doesn't want to call them, you know, half truths. And really the truth is this unobtainable thing that we could only theoretically get at if we were allowed to pursue inquiry forever and ever. Like he really wants to retain the word truth. He does use the word true insofar forth some of the time.

I guess I would.

24:12 Wes: Yeah.

24:12 Mark: I like that better than half truth because that points to like, the full. Oh, we can't get at the full. We can never get the full.

24:19 Wes: Yeah, I think these are different. And this is part of the problem. He's using the word truth in different ways in those circumstances. Right. It's important that James isn't simply just taking a word and giving it a new definition. Right. This can't simply be a semantic reassignment. So when you talk about the nature of something, there has to be some fundamental intuition about truth that's preserved. And then we go on to modify the theory, otherwise it just becomes, oh, I can use truth to mean whatever I want. Right. So he has to be preserving some intuition about truth even as he rejects force moments and even as he says, well, agreement means this functional relationship.

And I think that basic intuition is just to say, if we say, and this is, was formulated formally by a logician later on. But this is sort of the commonly accepted basic intuition with the least metaphysical commitments, which is that if you say, for instance, quote unquote, it's raining outside is true. That's true if and only if it's raining outside. So that's the basic intuition that you start from and then you say, well, what does that mean? Does it mean Correspondence? Does it mean coherence? Does it mean. Mean this doesn't mean that, but you can simply discard the initial basic intuition.

Otherwise you're just redefining a word.

25:40 Mark: Right, but it's the basic intuition there. James would say it's important that that's a particular. That yes, it gets at a class of similar things, but because it's a particular, you can't immediately abstract just from that something like, you know, any statement I make about an alleged fact, there is some state of affairs out in the world whether I could possibly have any experience of it or not, you know, so there's limits of the applicability of these particular examples. So you're right, he does want to do justice to, I think, all of the particular examples, but he doesn't want to let us abstract from any one of them and come up with this transcendental theory.

Then that would rule out some of the other ways he wants to use the term. That example of its raining only is a paradigm case because it's easy to verify, right? And then you can start considering sort of more borderline cases. And he. In one of the Meaning of Truth

26:33 Wes: chapters, by the way, it's not as obvious as it may seem because it's not just a matter of direct experience. There's a whole web of background beliefs required in order to make that statement, right? So, for instance, the water coming down could be from something else. Part of the meaning of raining has to do with precipitation and blah, blah, blah. There's a whole theoretical commitment. So there's also consistency with a whole web of beliefs that's. That's involved in that. But yeah, you're right, it's easy to verify. What am I saying, right?

27:01 Seth: I don't know. I just think it's interesting. We seem to be using the term belief kind of loosely here. And I realized at some point during the conversation in the last 20 minutes or so that I've been thinking about this very much from a subjectivist and kind of epistemological point of view and that, you know, you guys, when you talk about this web of belief, you're really mentioning metaphysics because. Or getting into metaphysics because it's not a web of belief. Like for me, I don't have a web of belief about the physical laws of the universe. They're out there and somebody's written them down and there's been research and somehow it makes my television work and that kind of thing. But I don't have a consistent or coherent or really any sense of Beliefs about the physical laws of the universe.

27:47 Dylan: I disagree with you about that, Seth. I think you certainly do. You just might not have it in the same way as a mathematical theory. Right. But you walk around every day, for instance, you pick up a pen and you set it down and whether you've articulated or not, you have expectations regarding how that's going to behave.

28:07 Seth: Yes, but I can give a Humean account of my experience of that that explains that by habit, not by any sense of. Well, so I was getting the point. Saying that you've touched on something that's clearly the case. I'm saying that I don't have whether it's articulated or not and whether I say, well, it's really just habit, like I have a psychological habit because I've seen it happen a thousand times, I expect it to happen again. And that's got nothing to do with some web of belief. It's just my subjective experience of the world. But I think you guys are right.

Like I'm. I mean there is something to the fact that it's part of a consistent system and that James wants to say that you should believe things that fit with other things that make sense. To believe that you're right to talk about a web of belief. It just sounds funny to me. The word belief doesn't seem to fit in that sense. In the same way that like say for example, my belief in God would. That's a whole different kind of belief, at least in this sense.

29:03 Wes: I think you're right. He's the pluralist when it comes to religion. But you know, again, I think we should remember he takes great pains not. He's furious at being called a relativist. Right. You know, that chapter in the Meaning of Truth on the misinterpreters. He wants to say that yes, there are realities and we brush up against those realities. Realities in a certain way. We can't just decide what we want to be true.

29:22 Mark: Right. And that's what objectivity is for him. It's that we cannot arbitrarily focus our belief. It has to work its way around these pre existent things.

29:31 Wes: Yeah, but in the case of religion, I think there's a lot more leeway because it's not an empirical matter and it's the criteria and the things that we're bumping up against are more variable from individual to individual and they're essentially internal. So you could say true for me in that case, in a sense, coherently. Right. Because to say, you know, I think he would say you're talking about God, you're not really making a metaphysical assertion about an entity. Maybe I'm wrong about that. But you know he talks more about promise, right? And the emotional significance of what it means to be religious and establishing hope or promise.

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