William James, Lecture II: What Pragmatism Means

[epictetus_rex]

Week two! Here, James introduces the pragmatic method, and it is on this that I want to focus. It seems to me that there is a difference between the two general formulations of the “pragmatic method”, and an important one. One formulation goes

Comments

[paulhope]

Just wanted to note I read this a while ago and intended on responding all week, but have been locked in debate in real_ for a while that's taken all my (suddenly precious) free philosophizing time. That said, I really appreciate this post and wish I had more to say.

I agree that the pragmatic theory of truth is problematic. I also like it these days anyway, for some reason. I'll try to have more to say once you get to that lecture.

I think most interesting thing for me about this lecture was that while the pragmatic method, as described, seems like a great idea, as illustrated by the squirrel example, I'm not really sure why it would be true. It seems to get its power purely by thinking about examples where an argument is demonstrated to be stupid because, dammit, it depends on what you mean by "going around" the tree. And if you ask which is the "correct" way to use "go around", you're asking what a linguistic convention is. "Correct" here is used in the sense of correct etiquette, not in the sense of a correct proof or argument or proposition.

However, I think an interesting question raised by other James lectures is whether James abuses the pragmatic method. There is some ambiguity about how one goes about deciding what the practical consequences of a notion are. For any particular notion, this could require an enormous amount of study and even empirical research. Does it really make philosophical problems any easier?