Episode #154 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

I apologize in advance about my voice. I’m just getting over a cold, but I really wanted to get something out. I think it starts to get better as the episode goes on. Maybe this is some sort of metaphor for the last two months of my life. But glad to be back. I want to give a huge thanks to the people that support the show on Patreon, huge thanks to the people that contribute what they think the show’s worth on the website, and to all the people that are buying the new designs of merch located on the front page too. Couldn’t do this without you. Thanks again.

Today’s episode we’re going to be talking about pragmatism and a different way of thinking about the concept of truth. I hope you love the show today.

So, if you’ve listened to this show before, you probably know that the late 19th/early 20th century marks a period in Western thought where thinkers are grappling with a new set of problems surrounding the concept of certainty. Just think about that, though. For thousands of years—picture the Athenian Agora. Socrates wakes up every day, wraps a tablecloth around himself, marches into the middle of town, and argues with people all day long trying to get just a little bit closer to certainty or truth. Descartes toils away in solitude just trying to figure out what we can know for certain. The only one left to tell about his findings was his good pal Wilson the stove. Hegel creates one of the most elaborate systems ever trying to get to the truth. And shortly after, many thinkers started to become downright pessimistic about this entire pursuit, about every thinker so far when it comes to whether or not they’re actually doing anything that’s getting us closer to certainty.

And while these thinkers couldn’t be certain that we weren’t arriving at certainty, it’s certainly seen that way. So, what followed was a rigorous critique of the way things had typically been done. And several different paths forward emerged. And we can delineate these different approaches to solving this problem into different groups. So, one group of people, you could say they thought we just weren’t trying hard enough. The problem wasn’t that certainty is inaccessible. It was our methodologies. Think of the logical positivists here. Think of many of the phenomenologists. The problem lies in the tactics of the past, not in the project itself.

Now, another group of people went the other way. Maybe we’ll never be able to ultimately verify the integrity of our philosophy, but it is still undeniably useful or necessary. Sometimes people talk about these two groups responding to this issue as one of the major forks in the road at the beginning of what would become the continental and analytical divide in the 20th century. But a school of thought emerged that was trying to find some sort of middle ground between these two different types of thinkers—thinkers like Charles Sanders Peirce, William James. These guys and people like them would later go on to become known as the pragmatists.

But something interesting I want to consider here at the start is that we should all remember, none of these thinkers set out thinking of themselves as pragmatists. To them, they were among, again, many other thinkers that were looking into this problem of certainty. They were all undergoing a radical critique of the past. These thinkers just arrived at a very unique end point.

Now, to get to this end point here today, I want to put ourselves in the shoes of someone like Charles Sanders Peirce. And to do that, let’s just establish for the sake of the episode that we’re continuing on from here with the assumption that maybe the ways of doing things in the past has been fundamentally flawed. Certainty is impossible to ever have access to. Okay, now that we’ve established terms a bit, let’s just think about it from the perspective of someone during this time. So, if certainty is impossible, then our concept of truth within human affairs cannot be directly connected to certainty. Yet we say things are true and we say things are false all the time. One of the questions that would have concerned Peirce and William James would be, if that is true, then what have we humans really been up to for thousands of years?

Well, a couple things we do know. One, certainty has generally been the ideal to strive towards when it comes to the validity of an idea. We think we know things; new information emerges, and an idea is more true if it seems to correspond with reality in a more accurate way than the old idea. Philosophers have spent lifetimes creating ideas that can stake a claim to certainty. All throughout the history of thought, you can see several times they think they did the job. So, if you’re Charles Peirce or William James and you’re trying to figure out what we’ve actually been up to, maybe a good place to start would be to look at a few of these attempts by thinkers where they thought they got it right. Because if you’re a pragmatist, you are highly skeptical of this imperative towards certainty all together. Why is being certain about things so important anyway?

Three big attempts at certainty they’re going to reject are solipsism, the correspondence theory of truth, and foundationalism. And they’re going to get to the bottom of the presuppositions we’ve been making about truth that led to these mistakes in thought. So, let’s start with solipsism. The solipsism bumper sticker would be “I think, therefore I am,” the tradition of Descartes and Locke. Remember, Descartes’ point when he says that—the only reason he’s thinking about his individual consciousness at all is because he’s trying to find something we can be absolutely certain about. He stakes a claim to certainty by saying, well, the very fact that I’m thinking means I must certainly be a thinking thing. Maybe we can’t know anything else for certain outside of that. Knowledge of the world may always be fallible. But it is impossible to deny that I’m having thoughts. Descartes, of course, built things that he thought were certain on top of that. But we can see the machinery he’s trying to use to ground knowledge of things in certainty.

So, it seemed for a while like Descartes had done it. Certainty had been achieved, and balance had been restored to the universe. But it didn’t take long for thinkers to find flaws in his reasoning. And people like Peirce and James would be the beneficiaries of that critique. In fact, to them, not only had Descartes not arrived at certainty; he succeeded in getting many thinkers after him on this delusional quest for certainty completely over-indexed on the importance of the individual consciousness.

First of all, they would say, we have no reason to assume that anything I claim to know about my consciousness is any more reliable than my knowledge of the outside world. So, if we can’t ever have complete certainty about the outside world, we can’t ever have certainty about the internal world either. We are always inferring things about our individual consciousness, which is to say it is always inferential—is what they call it. One thing to make clear here, though, is that the brain, for someone like William James, is far too complex to ever understand fully, let alone consciousness. How can we ever use it as a tool to stake a claim to certainty and still be responsible thinkers?

So, this led to another strategy by thinkers. They said, okay, maybe it’s true that consciousness is inferential, which means that we experience things and often infer things about them in order to make sense of them. We plug them into this inference framework that we have that gives them meaning to us. Okay. What if as a solution to that we tried to just look at the raw, base experience before any sort of inference had been made at all? I mean, if we are self-aware of the fact that we’re making these inferences about things, then hypothetically, couldn’t we spot them when we see them?

A lot of thinkers tried their hand at figuring out a way to do this. But when you’re Peirce and James and you’re looking for that presupposition that deceived all these people, it would be this belief: that they believed that we can actually gain access to some deep, fundamental level of experience that exists independent of these inferences of the mind perceiving them. Peirce rejects this completely, obviously. See, to him, it is impossible to use thought to access an object in the world without making these inferences. The inferences are the mediator. They are the necessary bridge between thought and objects and reality. So, in a way, for Peirce, cognition itself requires inferences about objects to even get off the ground at all.

So, if you’re really sitting around saying, “I’m going to be a philosopher today. I’m going to solve some of the problems of the universe. Today, I’m going to get rid of human judgements. Yeah, that’s a problem. I’m going to create a system that just removes all judgments, inferences, relations, every cognitive faculty I have. And then I’m just going to sit here in my front room, naked, and just let the photons wash over me.” If you really believe that, Peirce might think—well, he’d probably think you need a new hobby, maybe quilting or something. But he’d also say that all you’ve really succeeded in doing there is to create a new set of inferences.

There is no essence to a thing if you’re a pragmatist. To understand something is not to access some foundational essence rooted in the universe. To understand something is to know all the ways that thing has consequences on behavior or human action. And here’s the big point. Once again, we evoke the concept of truth all the time and, clearly, certainty is not what we’re getting at. Then, what is the meaning of truth? What really makes something true or false to us?

Pragmatists are going to lean heavily towards something called the convergence theory of truth, or the idea that something is deemed to be true because—take any issue you want to know the truth or falsehood of—the truth is the conclusion that all the people looking into it will converge upon given enough time. The group of people rationally trying to get rid of false ideas and converge upon true ones, that is the true determiner of what is true. This convergence of minds and inferences is all that we have to determine what we call truth. And more than that, it’s all we’ve ever had. We just thought we were trying to access certainty. But this really is a social process.

For Peirce, the meaning of your actions isn’t located up in your brain somewhere but in your public acts. Actions speak louder than thoughts, I guess. So, in this way, truth is a tool, not some piece of reality that we’re uncovering. For William James, a true statement is going to be one where, when you believe in it or act as though it is true, there are good results. So, for example, say you believed that cars don’t really exist. The truth about cars is that they’re just figments of your imagination, hallucinations that can be ignored. For William James, this is false, not because we ran an experiment that proves it to be otherwise beyond a shadow of a doubt, not because he began from some foundational place like Descartes and built a system that proves it to be otherwise, but simply because when you actually play the tape out on that belief, the first time you test the truth of that and moonwalk into the middle of the intersection, Grandma Beatrice is going to have a new hood ornament. And for William James, it turns out that hood ornament was wrong.

This is why societies tend to gravitate towards trying to make decisions that move us away from false ideas and towards true ones. The true ideas are determined by which ones are producing the most favorable outcomes for us. Of course we gravitate towards them. See, once again, social action is the place where we find meaning, not in some individual consciousness. Again, Descartes and Locke wanted to make that the foundation of where we can get to true statements. But to the early pragmatists, that individual consciousness and all the inferences it makes are social products. Meaning is to be understood through action.

Now, this action is an important part of this whole scheme. See, for James, as we develop as people, we mature towards greater and greater levels of intentionality in our actions. Another way to put that would be to say that at the lowest level of development, we’re just a collection of instincts. But once again, as we mature as people, we develop increasingly powerful levels of free will. Free will is going to be an important concept for James. And what’s even more interesting is how he thinks the way we think about free will will be largely shaded by our overall personality.

So, I believe, on the episode we did on William James earlier in the podcast, I talked briefly about his concept of categorizing people in terms of them being either healthy-minded or sick souls. Wanted to go more into depth on that today. And while talking about these different ways of orienting yourself with the world, maybe notice the parallels to the two different ways philosophers oriented themselves in the continental/analytic divide we referenced earlier.

So, when talking about writers he read early on during his life, he describes it like this: “One can but recognize in such writers as these the presence of a temperament organically weighted on the side of cheer and fatally forbidden to linger, as those of the opposite temperament linger, over the darker aspects of the universe.” People weighted on the side of cheer, he said, are the healthy-minded. He talks about these people at one point as though they were born with a bottle of champagne with their name on it. These are people that value “courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously precautionary states of mind.” So, basically, they wouldn’t like your boy Steve.

But the other approach is that of the sick souls. And try not to infer any sort of negative connotation when it comes to that word “sick” as though William James is trying to say that these people are weak or flawed in some way. He actually thinks some of the greatest people ever have been of this sick predisposition. It’s not any worse than the healthy-minded approach to him. He just uses the word “sick” to denote a malaise that comes with an awareness of the evil present in the world and an unwillingness to ignore it.

The healthy-minded person says, “Well, of course there’s evil in the world. But I’m going to focus on, preserve, and generate all the good there is out there—positive thinking.” The sick soul says, “Look, you can’t just buy a self-help book that tells you the power of positive thinking, ignore the very real twisting knife in the side of the world, and feel good about yourself.” The healthy-minded say that in a world where you can choose to focus on anything, why not focus on the good rather than ruminate on all the negative? The sick soul says, “In a world where you can focus on anything, the good will take care of itself. The issues that warrant our attention are the ones where there’s problems for us to solve.”

James says, “We can see how great an antagonism may naturally arise between the healthy-minded way of viewing life and the way that takes all this experience of evil as something essential. To this latter way, the morbid-minded way, as we might call it, healthy-mindedness pure and simple seems unspeakably blind and shallow. To the healthy-minded way, on the other hand, the way of the sick soul seems unmanly and diseased. With their grubbing in rat-holes instead of living in the light; with their manufacture of fears, and preoccupation with every unwholesome kind of misery, there is something almost obscene about these children of wrath and cravers of a second birth.”

Just to be clear, these two approaches are clearly not a binary opposition. They exist as poles on either side of a massive spectrum. People fall all over this spectrum, but they may tend to gravitate towards one side or the other. But the good news is that there’s mobility across this spectrum. James says that for anyone that finds themself, say, in the sick-soul side of things and wants to change it about themselves, there is hope. He believed you definitely could change the way you orient yourself the same way the positive thinker has to be vigilant and make sure they act with intentionality towards the optimistic, the idealistic, the monism of their life, or else they might find themselves slipping. So too can the pessimist direct the intentions of their actions in change as well.

He says, “What are we to say of this quarrel? It seems to me that we are bound to say that morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience, and that its survey is the one that overlaps. The method of averting one’s attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. And it will work with many persons; it will work far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere of its successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a religious solution. But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even though one might be quite free from melancholy one’s self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses to positively account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.”

His larger point overall here is that he is giving a pragmatist’s take on the variety of ways that people have religious experiences. And to him, he’s not just talking about major religions like Islam or Christianity. Those are great and all. But what they are at their core are attempts at codifying a very real religious experience that human beings have in relation to whatever they think is divine. Human beings have these religious experiences. These major religions are attempts at explaining this phenomenon. And to be clear, sure, you could have that religious experience when you feel deeply connected to an almighty creator, fine. But James wants to point out how you could just as easily have that experience about skateboarding or the love of your life. And he thinks whether you look at these experiences through the healthy-minded or sick-soul lens will drastically impact what source of religious interpretations you prefer.

He says this towards the end of that same work. For the record, it is the Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902. “The completest religions would, therefore, seem to be those in which the pessimistic elements are best developed. Buddhism, of course, and Christianity are the best known to us of these. They are essentially religions of deliverance: the man must die to an unreal life before he can be born into the real life.”

Now, think about the fact that both of these different ways of orienting yourself with reality imply the possibility of action. This instantly inspires a follow-up conversation about free will and determinism. Where do the pragmatists generally land on that issue? Well, it’s complicated and varied, but James makes a really interesting point in the conversation. Pragmatism, once again, generally is going to look for the middle path between these two options or some version of compatibilism.

He says, consider this, when you look at the entire history of the world, that history can be explained by both determinism and free will. You could believe that, through intentionality, we have created our history, that trillions of decision points have interacted to create a confluence of events that has led to this moment. You could also believe that a completely predictable, complex process of trillions of sensations has played out and that we are just the marionettes doing the heavy lifting. Both theories can account for the past but, William James says, when looking into the future, your belief about whether you have free will or not is everything.

You ever see somebody that hears about determinism for the first time, and their response is to get depressed and say, “Oh, well, then I guess that means I don’t have control over any of my actions anyway. Guess I won’t even try anymore about the things I’m passionate about.” Uh, well, first of all, that’s not at all what determinism is saying. Second of all, William James is advocating for a belief in compatibilism—some middle ground between these two extreme positions. In order to take action on anything or responsibility for yourself in any way, you need to believe in at least a degree of free will or autonomy. It certainly helps moving into the future if you don’t hold the belief that everything you do is out of your control. And if we can’t have certainty anyway about how things unfold, then pragmatically, it makes sense to believe in intentionality.

Just think about that. Think about how our beliefs about what possibilities we have in life—when truth is connected to the ideas that yield favorable outcomes for us—think about how much believing that you have no control over anything—tied to the back of the cart by your hands being pulled in whatever direction it wants to go—think of how much what we believe about free will determines the quality of our lives. Think about being in that place, by the way. Believing you have no responsibility for your future actions is a favorable outcome for that person. Really makes you start to think, why is that such a favorable outcome to that person?

The best way I’ve heard it described was something like this. Imagine you’re being chased by a bear. You’re running, and you come to the edge of a cliff where there’s like a 6-foot gap between you and safety on the other side. You have to try to jump. Can you make the jump there? What William James is saying is that forget whether you can or can’t for a second. Consider that if you believe the truth is that you will never be able to make it, then you will never even try to jump. And you’re just going to get eaten by the bear. But if you believe there’s at least a possibility you can, and then you jump, and the favorable outcome—the truth—was that you actually can make the jump, consider this: the truth never could have been realized without you believing it was possible.

In this way, in a world where the truth about things is often thought of as us uncovering something latent in the cosmos, inquiring about the way that things are, what we think is possible has a huge impact on what the truth ends up being. A scientist that believes a hypothesis is impossible will never run the experiment. And in the case of the person that believes it’s out of their control on a deterministic rollercoaster, imagine being a scientist that refuses to run an experiment and sees that as a favorable outcome. William James said that the first act of free will is to admit that your will is free.

Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.