Suggestion is the psychological process by which a person guides their own or another person's desired thoughts, feelings, and behaviors by presenting stimuli that may elicit them as reflexes instead of relying on conscious effort.
116-442: Nineteenth-century writers on psychology such as William James used the words "suggest" and "suggestion" in the context of a particular idea which was said to suggest another when it brought that other idea to mind. Early scientific studies of hypnosis by Clark Leonard Hull and others extended the meaning of these words in a special and technical sense (Hull, 1933). The original neuropsychological theory of hypnotic suggestion
232-413: A phenomenalist and fallibilist empiricism as an alternative to rationalistic speculation." Peirce developed the idea that inquiry depends on real doubt, not mere verbal or hyperbolic doubt , and said that, in order to understand a conception in a fruitful way, "Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of
348-412: A " stream of consciousness ", had a direct and significant impact on avant-garde and modernist literature and art, notably in the case of James Joyce . In "What Pragmatism Means" (1906), James writes that the central point of his own doctrine of truth is, in brief: Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word
464-657: A "neo-classical" pragmatism (such as Susan Haack ) that adheres to the work of Peirce, James, and Dewey. A few of the various but often interrelated positions characteristic of philosophers working from a pragmatist approach include: Dewey in The Quest for Certainty criticized what he called "the philosophical fallacy": Philosophers often take categories (such as the mental and the physical) for granted because they don't realize that these are nominal concepts that were invented to help solve specific problems. This causes metaphysical and conceptual confusion. Various examples are
580-501: A 1908 publication, his differences with James as well as literary author Giovanni Papini . Peirce regarded his own views that truth is immutable and infinity is real, as being opposed by the other pragmatists, but he remained allied with them about the falsity of necessitarianism and about the reality of generals and habits understood in terms of potential concrete effects even if unactualized. Pragmatism enjoyed renewed attention after Willard Van Orman Quine and Wilfrid Sellars used
696-449: A belief valid when it represents reality? "Copying is one (and only one) genuine mode of knowing". Are beliefs dispositions which qualify as true or false depending on how helpful they prove in inquiry and in action? Is it only in the struggle of intelligent organisms with the surrounding environment that beliefs acquire meaning? Does a belief only become true when it succeeds in this struggle? In James's pragmatism nothing practical or useful
812-454: A century later, Richard Rorty in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) argued that much of the debate about the relation of the mind to the body results from conceptual confusions. They argue instead that there is no need to posit the mind or mindstuff as an ontological category. Pragmatists disagree over whether philosophers ought to adopt a quietist or a naturalist stance toward
928-408: A certain degree of trust or faith and that we cannot always wait for adequate proof when making moral decisions. Moral questions immediately present themselves as questions whose solution cannot wait for sensible proof. A moral question is a question not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be good if it did exist. ... A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it
1044-436: A conception's meaning in terms of conceivable tests, Peirce emphasized that, since a conception is general, its meaning, its intellectual purport, equates to its acceptance's implications for general practice, rather than to any definite set of real effects (or test results); a conception's clarified meaning points toward its conceivable verifications, but the outcomes are not meanings, but individual upshots. Peirce in 1905 coined
1160-665: A difference in an individual's life and refer to claims that cannot be verified or falsified either on intellectual or common sensorial grounds. Joseph Margolis in Historied Thought, Constructed World (California, 1995) makes a distinction between "existence" and "reality". He suggests using the term "exists" only for those things which adequately exhibit Peirce's Secondness : things which offer brute physical resistance to our movements. In this way, such things which affect us, like numbers, may be said to be "real", although they do not "exist". Margolis suggests that God, in such
1276-657: A full-fledged epistemology with wide-ranging implications for the entire philosophical field. Pragmatists who work in these fields share a common inspiration, but their work is diverse and there are no received views. In the philosophy of science, instrumentalism is the view that concepts and theories are merely useful instruments and progress in science cannot be couched in terms of concepts and theories somehow mirroring reality. Instrumentalist philosophers often define scientific progress as nothing more than an improvement in explaining and predicting phenomena. Instrumentalism does not state that truth does not matter, but rather provides
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#17327838435681392-657: A groundbreaking text in the field of psychology; Essays in Radical Empiricism , an important text in philosophy; and The Varieties of Religious Experience , an investigation of different forms of religious experience , including theories on mind-cure . William James was born at the Astor House in New York City on January 11, 1842. He was the son of Henry James Sr. , a noted and independently wealthy Swedenborgian theologian well acquainted with
1508-419: A linguistic usage, might very well be "real", causing believers to act in such and such a way, but might not "exist". Pragmatic pedagogy is an educational philosophy that emphasizes teaching students knowledge that is practical for life and encourages them to grow into better people. American philosopher John Dewey is considered one of the main thinkers of the pragmatist educational approach. Neopragmatism
1624-936: A lively group informally known as The Metaphysical Club in 1872. Louis Menand (2001) suggested that this Club provided a foundation for American intellectual thought for decades to come. James joined the Anti-Imperialist League in 1898, in opposition to the United States annexation of the Philippines. Among James's students at Harvard University were Boris Sidis , Theodore Roosevelt , George Santayana , W. E. B. Du Bois , G. Stanley Hall , Ralph Barton Perry , Gertrude Stein , Horace Kallen , Morris Raphael Cohen , Walter Lippmann , Alain Locke , C. I. Lewis , and Mary Whiton Calkins . Antiquarian bookseller Gabriel Wells tutored under him at Harvard in
1740-439: A middle ground between materialism and absolute metaphysics. These opposites are comparable to what William James called tough-minded empiricism and tender-minded rationalism. Schiller contends on the one hand that mechanistic naturalism cannot make sense of the "higher" aspects of our world. These include free will, consciousness, purpose, universals and some would add God. On the other hand, abstract metaphysics cannot make sense of
1856-683: A physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave". He interacted with a wide array of writers and scholars throughout his life, including his godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson , his godson William James Sidis , as well as Charles Sanders Peirce , Bertrand Russell , Josiah Royce , Ernst Mach , John Dewey , Macedonio Fernández , Walter Lippmann , Mark Twain , Horatio Alger , G. Stanley Hall , Henri Bergson , Carl Jung , Jane Addams and Sigmund Freud . James spent almost all of his academic career at Harvard. He
1972-440: A priori truths but synthetic statements. Later in his life Schiller became famous for his attacks on logic in his textbook, Formal Logic . By then, Schiller's pragmatism had become the nearest of any of the classical pragmatists to an ordinary language philosophy . Schiller sought to undermine the very possibility of formal logic, by showing that words only had meaning when used in context. The least famous of Schiller's main works
2088-403: A revised pragmatism to criticize logical positivism in the 1960s. Inspired by the work of Quine and Sellars, a brand of pragmatism known sometimes as neopragmatism gained influence through Richard Rorty , the most influential of the late 20th century pragmatists along with Hilary Putnam and Robert Brandom . Contemporary pragmatism may be broadly divided into a strict analytic tradition and
2204-909: A significant worker in the Erie Canal project and helping Albany become a major center of trade, he then became the first vice-president of the Albany Savings Bank. William James (grandfather) went from being a poor Irish immigrant to one of the richest men in New York. After his death, his son Henry James inherited his fortune and lived in Europe and the United States searching for the meaning of life. Of James' five children, two—Margaret and Alexander—are known to have had children. Descendants of Alexander are still living. William James wrote voluminously throughout his life. A non-exhaustive bibliography of his writings, compiled by John McDermott ,
2320-565: A specific answer to the question of what truth and falsity mean and how they function in science. One of C. I. Lewis ' main arguments in Mind and the World Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge (1929) was that science does not merely provide a copy of reality but must work with conceptual systems and that those are chosen for pragmatic reasons, that is, because they aid inquiry. Lewis' own development of multiple modal logics
2436-432: A strong correlation between people's responses to suggestion both in- and outside hypnosis. In addition to the kinds of suggestion typically delivered by researchers interested in hypnosis there are other forms of suggestibility, though not all are considered interrelated. These include: primary and secondary suggestibility (older terms for non-hypnotic and hypnotic suggestibility respectively), hypnotic suggestibility (i.e.,
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#17327838435682552-593: A theory of pragmatic bioethics and its rejection of the principalism theory then in vogue in medical ethics . An anthology published by the MIT Press titled Pragmatic Bioethics included the responses of philosophers to that debate, including Micah Hester, Griffin Trotter and others many of whom developed their own theories based on the work of Dewey, Peirce, Royce and others. Lachs developed several applications of pragmatism to bioethics independent of but extending from
2668-429: A universe entirely distinct from the one you left behind you in the street. The two were supposed, he said, to have so little to do with each other, that you could not possibly occupy your mind with them at the same time. The world of concrete personal experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed. The world to which your philosophy-professor introduces you
2784-474: A variety of psychological symptoms which were diagnosed at the time as neurasthenia , and which included periods of depression during which he contemplated suicide for months on end. Two younger brothers, Garth Wilkinson ( Wilkie ) and Robertson (Bob), fought in the American Civil War . James himself was an advocate of peace. He suggested that instead of youth serving in the military that they serve
2900-419: A view if its conception of truth is analyzed and justified through interpretation, pragmatically. As a matter of fact, James's whole philosophy is of productive beliefs. Belief in anything involves conceiving of how it is real, but disbelief is the result when we dismiss something because it contradicts another thing we think of as real. In his "Sentiment of Rationality", saying that crucial beliefs are not known
3016-596: A wealthy family, James was the son of the Swedenborgian theologian Henry James Sr. and the brother of both the prominent novelist Henry James and the diarist Alice James . James trained as a physician and taught anatomy at Harvard, but never practiced medicine. Instead, he pursued his interests in psychology and then philosophy. He wrote widely on many topics, including epistemology , education, metaphysics , psychology , religion, and mysticism . Among his most influential books are The Principles of Psychology ,
3132-601: Is 47 pages long. He gained widespread recognition with his monumental The Principles of Psychology (1890), totaling twelve hundred pages in two volumes, which took twelve years to complete. Psychology: The Briefer Course , was an 1892 abridgement designed as a less rigorous introduction to the field. These works criticized both the English associationist school and the Hegelianism of his day as competing dogmatisms of little explanatory value, and sought to re-conceive
3248-409: Is a philosophical tradition that views language and thought as tools for prediction , problem solving , and action , rather than describing, representing, or mirroring reality . Pragmatists contend that most philosophical topics—such as the nature of knowledge, language, concepts, meaning, belief, and science—are best viewed in terms of their practical uses and successes. Pragmatism began in
3364-414: Is a case in point. Lewis is sometimes called a proponent of conceptual pragmatism because of this. Another development is the cooperation of logical positivism and pragmatism in the works of Charles W. Morris and Rudolf Carnap . The influence of pragmatism on these writers is mostly limited to the incorporation of the pragmatic maxim into their epistemology. Pragmatists with a broader conception of
3480-554: Is a concept that is derived from our interaction with the external world and not the other way around. At the same time he held persistently that pragmatism and epistemology in general could not be derived from principles of psychology understood as a special science: what we do think is too different from what we should think; in his " Illustrations of the Logic of Science " series, Peirce formulated both pragmatism and principles of statistics as aspects of scientific method in general. This
3596-442: Is a function of the meanings of the words in the statement ('all bachelors are unmarried'), and synthetic statements, whose truth (or falsehood) is a function of (contingent) states of affairs. The other is reductionism, the theory that each meaningful statement gets its meaning from some logical construction of terms which refers exclusively to immediate experience. Quine's argument brings to mind Peirce's insistence that axioms are not
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3712-494: Is a noun derived from the verb prassein , to do. The first use in print of the name pragmatism was in 1898 by James, who credited Peirce with coining the term during the early 1870s. James regarded Peirce's "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" series—including " The Fixation of Belief " (1877), and especially " How to Make Our Ideas Clear " (1878)—as the foundation of pragmatism. Peirce in turn wrote in 1906 that Nicholas St. John Green had been instrumental by emphasizing
3828-492: Is an important point of disagreement with most other pragmatists, who advocate a more thorough naturalism and psychologism. Richard Rorty expanded on these and other arguments in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in which he criticized attempts by many philosophers of science to carve out a space for epistemology that is entirely unrelated to—and sometimes thought of as superior to—the empirical sciences. W.V. Quine , who
3944-451: Is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only
4060-404: Is by hypothetical inference from external facts. Introspection and intuition were staple philosophical tools at least since Descartes. He argued that there is no absolutely first cognition in a cognitive process; such a process has its beginning but can always be analyzed into finer cognitive stages. That which we call introspection does not give privileged access to knowledge about the mind—the self
4176-421: Is getting lighter and floating up in the air, or that a fly is buzzing around one's head. The "classic" response to an accepted suggestion that one's arm is beginning to float in the air is that the subject perceives the intended effect as happening involuntarily. Consistent with the views of Pierre Janet—who noted (1920, pp.284–285) that the critical feature is not the making of a 'suggestion', but, instead,
4292-407: Is held to be necessarily true nor is anything which helps to survive merely in the short term. For example, to believe my cheating spouse is faithful may help me feel better now, but it is certainly not useful from a more long-term perspective because it doesn't accord with the facts (and is therefore not true). While pragmatism started simply as a criterion of meaning, it quickly expanded to become
4408-438: Is how organisms can get a grip on their environment. Real and true are functional labels in inquiry and cannot be understood outside of this context. It is not realist in a traditionally robust sense of realism (what Hilary Putnam later called metaphysical realism ), but it is realist in how it acknowledges an external world which must be dealt with. Many of James' best-turned phrases—"truth's cash value" and "the true
4524-658: Is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The "facts" themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them. Richard Rorty made the contested claim that James did not mean to give a theory of truth with this statement and that we should not regard it as such. However, other pragmatism scholars such as Susan Haack and Howard Mounce do not share Rorty's instrumentalist interpretation of James. In The Meaning of Truth (1909), James seems to speak of truth in relativistic terms, in reference to critics of pragmatism: "The critic's trouble … seems to come from his taking
4640-424: Is no point in asking what "ultimate reality" consists of. More recently, a similar idea has been suggested by the postanalytic philosopher Daniel Dennett , who argues that anyone who wants to understand the world has to acknowledge both the "syntactical" aspects of reality (i.e., whizzing atoms) and its emergent or "semantic" properties (i.e., meaning and value). Radical empiricism gives answers to questions about
4756-507: Is not antithetical to religion but it is not an apologetic for faith either. James' metaphysical position however, leaves open the possibility that the ontological claims of religions may be true. As he observed in the end of the Varieties, his position does not amount to a denial of the existence of transcendent realities . Quite the contrary, he argued for the legitimate epistemic right to believe in such realities, since such beliefs do make
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4872-461: Is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted. Of the classical pragmatists, John Dewey wrote most extensively about morality and democracy. In his classic article "Three Independent Factors in Morals", he tried to integrate three basic philosophical perspectives on morality: the right, the virtuous and the good. He held that while all three provide meaningful ways to think about moral questions,
4988-499: Is only the expedient in our way of thinking" —were taken out of context and caricatured in contemporary literature as representing the view where any idea with practical utility is true. William James wrote: It is high time to urge the use of a little imagination in philosophy. The unwillingness of some of our critics to read any but the silliest of possible meanings into our statements is as discreditable to their imaginations as anything I know in recent philosophic history. Schiller says
5104-534: Is simple, clean and noble. The contradictions of real life are absent from it. ... In point of fact it is far less an account of this actual world than a clear addition built upon it ... It is no explanation of our concrete universe F. C. S. Schiller 's first book Riddles of the Sphinx was published before he became aware of the growing pragmatist movement taking place in America. In it, Schiller argues for
5220-508: Is that ethics is a fallible undertaking because human beings are frequently unable to know what would satisfy them. During the late 1900s and first decade of 2000, pragmatism was embraced by many in the field of bioethics led by the philosophers John Lachs and his student Glenn McGee , whose 1997 book The Perfect Baby: A Pragmatic Approach to Genetic Engineering (see designer baby ) garnered praise from within classical American philosophy and criticism from bioethics for its development of
5336-425: Is the taking of the 'suggestion'— Weitzenhoffer (2000, passim), argued that scientific hypnotism centres on the delivery of "suggestions" to hypnotized subjects; and, according to Yeates (2016b, p.35), these suggestions are delivered with the intention of eliciting: Furthermore, according to Yeates (2016b, pp.35–36), 'suggestions' have four temporal dimensions: Suggestions, however, can also have an effect in
5452-404: Is the central goal of American pragmatism. Although all human knowledge is partial, with no ability to take a "God's-eye-view", this does not necessitate a globalized skeptical attitude, a radical philosophical skepticism (as distinguished from that which is called scientific skepticism ). Peirce insisted that (1) in reasoning, there is the presupposition, and at least the hope, that truth and
5568-467: Is the ultimate test and experience is what needs to be explained. They were dissatisfied with ordinary empiricism because, in the tradition dating from Hume, empiricists had a tendency to think of experience as nothing more than individual sensations. To the pragmatists, this went against the spirit of empiricism: we should try to explain all that is given in experience including connections and meaning, instead of explaining them away and positing sense data as
5684-433: Is to doubt their truth, even if it seems possible. James names four "postulates of rationality" as valuable but unknowable: God, immorality, freedom, and moral duty. In contrast, the weak side to pragmatism is that the best justification for a claim is whether it works. However, a claim that does not have outcomes cannot be justified, or unjustified, because it will not make a difference. Pragmatism Pragmatism
5800-400: Is verifiable through its correspondence to reality, and its observable effects of putting the idea to practice. For example, James extends his Pragmatism to the hypothesis of God: "On pragmatic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true. … The problem is to build it out and determine it so that it will combine satisfactorily with all
5916-794: The North American Review . James finally earned his MD degree in June 1869 but he never practiced medicine. What he called his "soul-sickness" would only be resolved in 1872, after an extended period of philosophical searching. He married Alice Gibbens in 1878. In 1882 he joined the Theosophical Society . James's time in Germany proved intellectually fertile, helping him find that his true interests lay not in medicine but in philosophy and psychology. Later, in 1902 he would write: "I originally studied medicine in order to be
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#17327838435686032-932: The Psychological Review . He challenged his professional colleagues not to let a narrow mindset prevent an honest appraisal of those beliefs. In an empirical study by Haggbloom et al. using six criteria such as citations and recognition, James was found to be the 14th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century. William James was the son of Henry James (Senior) of Albany, and Mary Robertson Walsh. He had four siblings: Henry (the novelist), Garth Wilkinson, Robertson, and Alice . William became engaged to Alice Howe Gibbens on May 10, 1878; they were married on July 10. They had 5 children: Henry (May 18, 1879 – 1947), William (June 17, 1882 – 1961), Herman (1884, died in infancy), Margaret (March 1887 – 1950) and Alexander (December 22, 1890 – 1946). Most of William James's ancestors arrived in America from Scotland or Ireland in
6148-528: The Amazon River , but aborted his trip after eight months, as he suffered bouts of severe seasickness and mild smallpox . His studies were interrupted once again due to illness in April 1867. He traveled to Germany in search of a cure and remained there until November 1868; at that time he was 26 years old. During this period, he began to publish; reviews of his works appeared in literary periodicals such as
6264-421: The good reasons approach . The pragmatist formulation pre-dates those of other philosophers who have stressed important similarities between values and facts such as Jerome Schneewind and John Searle . William James' contribution to ethics, as laid out in his essay The Will to Believe has often been misunderstood as a plea for relativism or irrationality. On its own terms it argues that ethics always involves
6380-411: The " ultimate Being " of Hegelian philosophers, the belief in a " realm of value ", the idea that logic, because it is an abstraction from concrete thought, has nothing to do with the action of concrete thinking. David L. Hildebrand summarized the problem: "Perceptual inattention to the specific functions comprising inquiry led realists and idealists alike to formulate accounts of knowledge that project
6496-487: The "lower" aspects of our world (e.g. the imperfect, change, physicality). While Schiller is vague about the exact sort of middle ground he is trying to establish, he suggests that metaphysics is a tool that can aid inquiry, but that it is valuable only insofar as it does help in explanation. In the second half of the 20th century, Stephen Toulmin argued that the need to distinguish between reality and appearance only arises within an explanatory scheme and therefore that there
6612-622: The 14th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century. A survey published in American Psychologist in 1991 ranked James's reputation in second place, after Wilhelm Wundt , who is widely regarded as the founder of experimental psychology. James also developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism . James's work has influenced philosophers and academics such as Alan Watts , W. E. B. Du Bois , Edmund Husserl , Bertrand Russell , Ludwig Wittgenstein , Hilary Putnam , and Richard Rorty . Born into
6728-456: The 18th century. Many of them settled in eastern New York or New Jersey. All of James's ancestors were Protestant, well educated, and of character. Within their communities, they worked as farmers, merchants, and traders who were all heavily involved with their church. The last ancestor to arrive in America was William James's paternal grandfather also named William James. He came to America from Ballyjamesduff , County Cavan, Ireland in 1789 when he
6844-497: The United States around 1870. Charles Sanders Peirce (and his pragmatic maxim) is given credit for its development, along with later 20th-century contributors, William James and John Dewey. Its direction was determined by The Metaphysical Club members Peirce, Dewey, James, Chauncey Wright and George Herbert Mead . The word pragmatic has existed in English since the 1500s, borrowed from French and derived from Greek via Latin. The Greek word pragma , meaning business, deed or act,
6960-401: The United States in the 1870s. Its origins are often attributed to philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce , William James , and John Dewey . In 1878, Peirce described it in his pragmatic maxim : "Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object." Pragmatism as a philosophical movement began in
7076-491: The absence of a hypnosis. These so-called "waking suggestions" are given in precisely the same way as "hypnotic suggestions" (i.e., suggestions given within hypnosis) and can produce strong changes in perceptual experience. Experiments on suggestion, in the absence of hypnosis, were conducted by early researchers such as Hull (1933). More recently, researchers such as Nicholas Spanos and Irving Kirsch have conducted experiments investigating such non-hypnotic-suggestibility and found
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#17327838435687192-544: The classic problems of politics: how to sustain political unity and civic virtue in the absence of war or a credible threat", and which "sounds a rallying cry for service in the interests of the individual and the nation". In simple terms, his philosophy and writings can be understood as an emphasis on "fruits over roots," a reflection of his pragmatist tendency to focus on the practical consequences of ideas rather than become mired in unproductive metaphysical arguments or fruitless attempts to ground truth in abstract ways. Ever
7308-412: The concepts of "agreement" and "reality", the last reasoning before thoughts settle and become autonomous for us. However, he contrasts this by supporting a more practical interpretation that: a true idea or belief is one that we can blend with our thinking so that it can be justified through experiences. If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in
7424-443: The empiricist, James believes we are better off evaluating the fruitfulness of ideas by testing them in the common ground of lived experience. James was remembered as one of America's representative thinkers, psychologist, and philosopher. William James was also an influential writer on religion, psychical research, and self-help. James defined true beliefs as those that prove useful to the believer. His pragmatic theory of truth
7540-567: The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. James is considered to be a leading thinker of the late 19th century, one of the most influential philosophers of the United States , and the "Father of American psychology." Along with Charles Sanders Peirce , James established the philosophical school known as pragmatism , and is also cited as one of the founders of functional psychology . A Review of General Psychology analysis, published in 2002, ranked James as
7656-401: The form of a simple story: A live squirrel supposed to be clinging on one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree's opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and
7772-399: The former for its a priorism , and the latter because it takes correspondence as an unanalyzable fact. Pragmatism instead tries to explain the relation between knower and known. In 1868, C.S. Peirce argued that there is no power of intuition in the sense of a cognition unconditioned by inference, and no power of introspection, intuitive or otherwise, and that awareness of an internal world
7888-410: The function of giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts played no role whatsoever, is nowhere to be found. The reasons why we call things true is the reason why they are true, for "to be true" means only to perform this marriage-function. James held a world view in line with pragmatism , declaring that the value of any truth was utterly dependent upon its use to
8004-462: The generation of explanatory hypotheses, and conducive to the employment and improvement of verification. Typical of Peirce is his concern with inference to explanatory hypotheses as outside the usual foundational alternative between deductivist rationalism and inductivist empiricism, although he was a mathematical logician and a founder of statistics . Peirce lectured and further wrote on pragmatism to make clear his own interpretation. While framing
8120-537: The human mind as inherently purposive and selective. President Jimmy Carter's Moral Equivalent of War Speech , on April 17, 1977, equating the United States' 1970s energy crisis , oil crisis, and the changes and sacrifices Carter's proposed plans would require with the "moral equivalent of war", may have borrowed its title and much of its theme from James's classic essay "The Moral Equivalent of War" derived from his last speech, delivered at Stanford University in 1906, and published in 1910, in which "James considered one of
8236-416: The importance of applying Alexander Bain 's definition of belief, which was "that upon which a man is prepared to act". Peirce wrote that "from this definition, pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary; so that I am disposed to think of him as the grandfather of pragmatism". John Shook has said, "Chauncey Wright also deserves considerable credit, for as both Peirce and James recall, it was Wright who demanded
8352-410: The intention of " saturating the cognitive microenvironment of the mind ", Coué's therapeutic method approach was based on four non-controversial principles: Charles Baudouin 's "laws of suggestion" are: Modern scientific study of hypnosis, which follows the pattern of Hull's work, separates two essential factors: "trance" and suggestion. The state of mind induced by "trance" is said to come about via
8468-415: The late 1890s. His students enjoyed his brilliance and his manner of teaching was free of personal arrogance. They remember him for his kindness and humble attitude. His respectful attitude towards them speaks well of his character. Following his January 1907 retirement from Harvard, James continued to write and lecture, publishing Pragmatism , A Pluralistic Universe , and The Meaning of Truth . James
8584-471: The limits of science, the nature of meaning and value and the workability of reductionism . These questions feature prominently in current debates about the relationship between religion and science , where it is often assumed—most pragmatists would disagree—that science degrades everything that is meaningful into "merely" physical phenomena . Both John Dewey in Experience and Nature (1929) and, half
8700-539: The literary and intellectual elites of his day. The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics. William James received an eclectic trans-Atlantic education, developing fluency in both German and French. Education in the James household encouraged cosmopolitanism . The family made two trips to Europe while William James
8816-464: The man occupies the space facing the squirrel's belly, back and sides. Depending on what the debaters meant by "going round", the answer would be clear. From this example James derives the definition of the pragmatic method : to settle metaphysical disputes, one must simply make a distinction of practical consequences between notions, then, the answer is either clear, or the "dispute is idle". Both James and his colleague, Charles Sanders Peirce , coined
8932-408: The man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: Does the man go round the squirrel or not? James solves the issue by making a distinction between practical meaning. That is, the distinction between meanings of "round". Round in the sense that the man occupies the space north, east, south, and west of the squirrel; and round in the sense that
9048-469: The mind of the observer and the act of observation affect any empirical approach to truth. The mind, its experiences, and nature are inseparable. James's emphasis on diversity as the default human condition—over and against duality, especially Hegelian dialectical duality—has maintained a strong influence in American culture. James's description of the mind-world connection, which he described in terms of
9164-526: The mind-body problem. The former, including Rorty, want to do away with the problem because they believe it's a pseudo-problem, whereas the latter believe that it is a meaningful empirical question. Pragmatism sees no fundamental difference between practical and theoretical reason, nor any ontological difference between facts and values. Pragmatist ethics is broadly humanist because it sees no ultimate test of morality beyond what matters for us as humans. Good values are those for which we have good reasons, viz.
9280-405: The movement do not often refer to them. W. V. Quine 's paper " Two Dogmas of Empiricism ", published in 1951, is one of the most celebrated papers of 20th-century philosophy in the analytic tradition. The paper is an attack on two central tenets of the logical positivists' philosophy. One is the distinction between analytic statements (tautologies and contradictions) whose truth (or falsehood)
9396-405: The multitude of formal logics, one set of tools among others. This is the view of C. I. Lewis. C. S. Peirce developed multiple methods for doing formal logic. Stephen Toulmin 's The Uses of Argument inspired scholars in informal logic and rhetoric studies (although it is an epistemological work). James and Dewey were empirical thinkers in the most straightforward fashion: experience
9512-437: The new name pragmaticism "for the precise purpose of expressing the original definition", saying that "all went happily" with James's and F. C. S. Schiller 's variant uses of the old name "pragmatism" and that he nonetheless coined the new name because of the old name's growing use in "literary journals, where it gets abused". Yet in a 1906 manuscript, he cited as causes his differences with James and Schiller and, in
9628-404: The object", which he later called the pragmatic maxim . It equates any conception of an object to the general extent of the conceivable implications for informed practice of that object's effects. This is the heart of his pragmatism as a method of experimentational mental reflection arriving at conceptions in terms of conceivable confirmatory and disconfirmatory circumstances—a method hospitable to
9744-509: The other working truths." From this, we also know that "new" truths must also correspond to already existent truths as well. From the introduction by Bruce Kuklick (1981, p. xiv) to James's Pragmatism : James went on to apply the pragmatic method to the epistemological problem of truth. He would seek the meaning of "true" by examining how the idea functioned in our lives. A belief was true, he said, if it worked for all of us, and guided us expeditiously through our semihospitable world. James
9860-402: The person who held it. Additional tenets of James's pragmatism include the view that the world is a mosaic of diverse experiences that can only be properly interpreted and understood through an application of " radical empiricism ". Radical empiricism , not related to the everyday scientific empiricism , asserts that the world and experience can never be halted for an entirely objective analysis;
9976-431: The possibility of conflict among the three elements cannot always be easily solved. Dewey also criticized the dichotomy between means and ends which he saw as responsible for the degradation of our everyday working lives and education, both conceived as merely a means to an end. He stressed the need for meaningful labor and a conception of education that viewed it not as a preparation for life but as life itself. Dewey
10092-485: The pragmatic theory of truth applied Darwinian ideas in philosophy; it made survival the test of intellectual as well as biological fitness . James's book of lectures on pragmatism is arguably the most influential book of American philosophy . The lectures inside depict his position on the subject. In his sixth lecture, he begins by defining truth as "agreement with reality". With this, James warns that there will be disagreements between pragmatics and intellectualists over
10208-413: The process of a hypnotic induction—essentially instructing and suggesting to the subject that they will enter a hypnotic state. Once a subject enters hypnosis, the hypnotist gives suggestions that can produce sought effects. Commonly used suggestions on measures of "suggestibility" or "susceptibility" (or for those with a different theoretical orientation, "hypnotic talent") include suggestions that one's arm
10324-505: The products of extensive abstraction back onto experience." From the outset, pragmatists wanted to reform philosophy and bring it more in line with the scientific method as they understood it. They argued that idealist and realist philosophy had a tendency to present human knowledge as something beyond what science could grasp. They held that these philosophies then resorted either to a phenomenology inspired by Kant or to correspondence theories of knowledge and truth . Pragmatists criticized
10440-405: The public in a term of service, "to get the childishness knocked out of them." The other three siblings (William, Henry, and Alice James) all suffered from periods of invalidism . He took up medical studies at Harvard Medical School in 1864 (according to his brother Henry James , the author). He took a break in the spring of 1865 to join naturalist Louis Agassiz on a scientific expedition up
10556-514: The real are discoverable and would be discovered, sooner or later but still inevitably, by investigation taken far enough, and (2) contrary to Descartes's famous and influential methodology in the Meditations on First Philosophy , doubt cannot be feigned or created by verbal fiat to motivate fruitful inquiry, and much less can philosophy begin in universal doubt. Doubt, like belief, requires justification. Genuine doubt irritates and inhibits, in
10672-425: The response to suggestion measured within hypnosis), and interrogative suggestibility (yielding to interrogative questions, and shifting responses when interrogative pressure is applied: see Gudjonsson suggestibility scale . Metaphors and imagery can also be used to deliver suggestion. William James William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist, and
10788-578: The role that religion can still play in contemporary society, the former in A Common Faith and the latter in The Varieties of Religious Experience . From a general point of view, for William James, something is true only insofar as it works. Thus, the statement, for example, that prayer is heard may work on a psychological level but (a) may not help to bring about the things you pray for (b) may be better explained by referring to its soothing effect than by claiming prayers are heard. As such, pragmatism
10904-441: The sense of being good for so much. For how much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged. Whereby the agreement of truths with "reality" results in useful outcomes, "the 'reality' with which truths must agree has three dimensions": According to James's pragmatic approach to belief, knowledge is commonly viewed as a justified and true belief. James will accept
11020-433: The sense that belief is that upon which one is prepared to act. It arises from confrontation with some specific recalcitrant matter of fact (which Dewey called a "situation"), which unsettles our belief in some specific proposition. Inquiry is then the rationally self-controlled process of attempting to return to a settled state of belief about the matter. Note that anti-skepticism is a reaction to modern academic skepticism in
11136-400: The term " cash value ": When he said that the whole meaning of a (clear) conception consists in the entire set of its practical consequences, he had in mind that a meaningful conception must have some sort of experiential "cash value," must somehow be capable of being related to some sort of collection of possible empirical observations under specifiable conditions. A statement's truthfulness
11252-423: The truth is that which "works." Thereupon he is treated as one who limits verification to the lowest material utilities. Dewey says truth is what gives "satisfaction"! He is treated as one who believes in calling everything true which, if it were true, would be pleasant. In reality, James asserts, the theory is a great deal more subtle. The role of belief in representing reality is widely debated in pragmatism. Is
11368-497: The ultimate reality. Radical empiricism , or Immediate Empiricism in Dewey's words, wants to give a place to meaning and value instead of explaining them away as subjective additions to a world of whizzing atoms. William James gives an interesting example of this philosophical shortcoming: [A young graduate] began by saying that he had always taken for granted that when you entered a philosophic classroom you had to open relations with
11484-505: The unique character of art and the disinterested nature of aesthetic appreciation. A notable contemporary pragmatist aesthetician is Joseph Margolis . He defines a work of art as "a physically embodied, culturally emergent entity", a human "utterance" that isn't an ontological quirk but in line with other human activity and culture in general. He emphasizes that works of art are complex and difficult to fathom, and that no determinate interpretation can be given. Both Dewey and James investigated
11600-611: The wake of Descartes. The pragmatist insistence that all knowledge is tentative is quite congenial to the older skeptical tradition. Pragmatism was not the first to apply evolution to theories of knowledge: Schopenhauer advocated a biological idealism as what's useful to an organism to believe might differ wildly from what is true. Here knowledge and action are portrayed as two separate spheres with an absolute or transcendental truth above and beyond any sort of inquiry organisms used to cope with life. Pragmatism challenges this idealism by providing an "ecological" account of knowledge: inquiry
11716-489: The word 'true' irrelatively, whereas the pragmatist always means 'true for him who experiences the workings.'" However, James responded to critics accusing him of relativism , skepticism , or agnosticism, and of believing only in relative truths. To the contrary, he supported an epistemological realism position. Pragmatism is a philosophical approach that seeks to both define truth and resolve metaphysical issues. William James demonstrates an application of his method in
11832-519: The work of Dewey and James. A recent pragmatist contribution to meta-ethics is Todd Lekan's Making Morality . Lekan argues that morality is a fallible but rational practice and that it has traditionally been misconceived as based on theory or principles. Instead, he argues, theory and rules arise as tools to make practice more intelligent. John Dewey's Art as Experience , based on the William James lectures he delivered at Harvard University,
11948-418: Was 18 years old. There is suspicion that he fled to America because his family tried to force him into the ministry. After traveling to America with no money left, he found a job at a store as a clerk. After continuously working, he was able to own the store himself. As he traveled west to find more job opportunities, he was involved in various jobs such as the salt industry and the Erie Canal project. After being
12064-672: Was a synthesis of correspondence theory of truth and coherence theory of truth , with an added dimension. Truth is verifiable to the extent that thoughts and statements correspond with actual things, as well as the extent to which they "hang together", or cohere, as pieces of a puzzle might fit together; these are in turn verified by the observed results of the application of an idea to actual practice. The most ancient parts of truth … also once were plastic. They also were called true for human reasons. They also mediated between still earlier truths and what in those days were novel observations. Purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment
12180-480: Was also not what he wanted to do, he then announced he was going to specialize in the nervous system and psychology. James then switched in 1861 to scientific studies at the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard College . In his early adulthood, James suffered from a variety of physical ailments, including those of the eyes, back, stomach, and skin. He was also tone deaf . He was subject to
12296-419: Was an attempt to show the integrity of art, culture and everyday experience ( IEP ). Art, for Dewey, is or should be a part of everyone's creative lives and not just the privilege of a select group of artists. He also emphasizes that the audience is more than a passive recipient. Dewey's treatment of art was a move away from the transcendental approach to aesthetics in the wake of Immanuel Kant who emphasized
12412-418: Was anxious to uncover what true beliefs amounted to in human life, what their "cash value" was, and what consequences they led to. A belief was not a mental entity which somehow mysteriously corresponded to an external reality if the belief were true. Beliefs were ways of acting with reference to a precarious environment, and to say they were true was to say they were efficacious in this environment. In this sense
12528-432: Was appointed instructor in physiology for the spring 1873 term, instructor in anatomy and physiology in 1873, assistant professor of psychology in 1876, assistant professor of philosophy in 1881, full professor in 1885, endowed chair in psychology in 1889, return to philosophy in 1897, and emeritus professor of philosophy in 1907. James studied medicine, physiology, and biology, and began to teach in those subjects, but
12644-431: Was based upon the ideomotor reflex response that William B. Carpenter declared, in 1852, was the principle through which James Braid's hypnotic phenomena were produced. Émile Coué (1857–1926) was a significant pioneer in the development of an understanding of the application of therapeutic suggestion; and, according to Cheek and LeCron, most of our current knowledge of suggestion "stems from Coué" (1968, p. 60). With
12760-701: Was buried in the family plot in Cambridge Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts . He was one of the strongest proponents of the school of functionalism in psychology and of pragmatism in philosophy. He was a founder of the American Society for Psychical Research , as well as a champion of alternative approaches to healing. In 1884 and 1885 he became president of the British Society for Psychical Research for which he wrote in Mind and in
12876-638: Was drawn to the scientific study of the human mind at a time when psychology was constituting itself as a science. James's acquaintance with the work of figures like Hermann Helmholtz in Germany and Pierre Janet in France facilitated his introduction of courses in scientific psychology at Harvard University . He taught his first experimental psychology course at Harvard in the 1875–1876 academic year. During his Harvard years, James joined in philosophical discussions and debates with Charles Peirce , Oliver Wendell Holmes , and Chauncey Wright that evolved into
12992-557: Was increasingly afflicted with cardiac pain during his last years. It worsened in 1909 while he worked on a philosophy text (unfinished but posthumously published as Some Problems in Philosophy ). James sailed to Europe in the spring of 1910 to take experimental treatments for his heart ailment that proved unsuccessful, and returned home on August 18. His heart failed on August 26, 1910, at his home in Chocorua, New Hampshire . He
13108-440: Was instrumental in bringing naturalized epistemology back into favor with his essay "Epistemology Naturalized", also criticized "traditional" epistemology and its "Cartesian dream" of absolute certainty. The dream, he argued, was impossible in practice as well as misguided in theory, because it separates epistemology from scientific inquiry. Hilary Putnam has suggested that the reconciliation of anti-skepticism and fallibilism
13224-404: Was opposed to other ethical philosophies of his time, notably the emotivism of Alfred Ayer . Dewey envisioned the possibility of ethics as an experimental discipline, and thought values could best be characterized not as feelings or imperatives, but as hypotheses about what actions will lead to satisfactory results or what he termed consummatory experience . An additional implication of this view
13340-485: Was still a child, setting a pattern that resulted in thirteen more European journeys during his life. James wished to pursue painting, his early artistic bent led to an apprenticeship in the studio of William Morris Hunt in Newport, Rhode Island , but his father urged him to become a physician instead. Since this did not align with James's interests, he stated that he wanted to specialize in physiology. Once he figured this
13456-629: Was the constructive sequel to his destructive book Formal Logic . In this sequel, Logic for Use , Schiller attempted to construct a new logic to replace the formal logic that he had criticized in Formal Logic . What he offers is something philosophers would recognize today as a logic covering the context of discovery and the hypothetico-deductive method. Whereas Schiller dismissed the possibility of formal logic, most pragmatists are critical rather of its pretension to ultimate validity and see logic as one logical tool among others—or perhaps, considering
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