William James The Will to Believe

William James ( )  Professor at Harvard; one of the first truly original American philosophers  One of the first ‘scientific’ psychologists  Credited, along with C.S. Pierce, with the invention of ‘pragmatism’

A pragmatist justification of faith  This is James’ aim: to give “a defence of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced.”  Note that this is not to show that the belief in question is true, but only that adopting the belief is not irrational, not forbidden intellectually. (Q: what standard is James adopting here? Can this sort of justification be applied in other contexts?)

Hypotheses and options  James calls an hypothesis “anything that may be proposed to our belief”, and makes a distinction between live and dead hypotheses. The ‘live- ness’ of any hypothesis is “measured by willingness to act”. Note, therefore, that belief is construed behaviouristically: I believe X just in case I act as if X were true. (Q: how do we measure ‘degrees of belief’ here?)  An ‘option’ is a choice between competing hypotheses.

Kinds of options  Living vs. dead: where the two hypotheses are both live, there is a living option (otherwise dead)  Forced or avoidable: where the two hypotheses are a logical disjunction -- that is, X or not-X -- there is a forced option (otherwise avoidable)  Momentous or trivial: where one of the two options involves “a unique opportunity”, there is a momentous option (otherwise trivial) -- note that important matters can be trivial in this sense if they are not unique, if they can be repeated  An option is genuine if it is living, forced, and momentous. Religious belief is supposed, therefore, to involve a genuine option. How?

Reason and will: how related?  James points to sets of facts which, on the one hand, seem to show that “our passional and volitional nature” (that is, our emotional and will- ful nature) underlie our convictions or beliefs, and, on the other hand, seem to show that belief is or ought to be independent of this nature. Which facts are these and how do we decide between these distinct views of the relation between reason and will (and emotion)?

Reason and will as independent  The set of facts appealed to here involve, at base, the recognition that ‘wishing a thing to be so-and-so cannot make it so’ and that scientific discovery (at least) involves the suppression or disregard of volitional or passional tendencies in us: “When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical sciences, and sees how it was reared; what thousands of disinterested moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience and postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission to the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar; how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness -- then how besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes blowing his voluntary smokewreaths, and pretending to decide things from out of his private dream!”  Don’t these facts show that ‘justified belief’ must involve the separation of reason and will?

What the 1st set of facts do and don’t show  What they show: that we must be careful about the way in which ‘our passional and volitional nature’ intrudes upon a decision to believe this or that  What they don’t show: that the complete separation of reason and will (or the setting aside of the latter in favour of the former) will ensure that we arrive at justifiable belief

Reason and will as inter- dependent  The set of facts appealed to here involve, at base, the recognition that the vast majority of our beliefs are not adopted on the basis of evidence, but ‘authority’ (which James calls “all those influences, born of the intellectual climate, that make hypotheses possible or impossible for us”) -- in other words, the ‘background knowledge’ in which we entertain hypotheses; and within such a context, we give credence to hypotheses which are useful (a normative, not a descriptive concept)

Where is ‘willing’ truth legit?  “Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, “Do not decide, but leave the question open,” is itself a passional decision -- just like deciding yes or no -- and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth.”  What circumstances are these? A: a choice between competing hypotheses that is forced, live, and momentous (religious belief is one of these; are there others?)

What is the ‘proof’ of this surprising claim?  Note that, on James account, the decision is required, but not the result (that is, either option is warranted), and this means that the decision to believe is as warranted as the decision not to. How can this be?  James makes his case on the backs of two distinctions: 1) absolutist vs. empiricist conceptions of truth; and 2) knowing or believing the truth vs. avoiding error.

Absolutist vs. empiricist conceptions of truth  The distinction James adopts here (a non-standard one, by the way) involves the distinction between “having the truth and knowing that one has it” and “having the truth but not being sure that one has it” -- the reflexive requirement in the first instance (the absolutist conception) is, according to James, fine in ideal, but practically impossible to obtain (at the very least, no candidate presents itself)  The empiricist conception, which James argues we should adopt (against our inclinations,) replaces ‘subjective certainty’ with ‘if the total drift of thinking continues to confirm it, that is what [the empiricist] means by its being true.”

‘Know truth’ vs. ‘Avoid error’  Though these are often taken to be synonymous commands, James thinks they diverge in one important respect: avoiding error at all costs means failing to adopt an hypothesis which may, in the long run, turn out to be true (and, in the sciences, would mean the suspension of research efforts altogether)  The upshot of these two distinctions is that we measure acceptability of belief as against the practical result, and we adopt hypotheses relative to the value which they might yield if they were true (just so long as they aren’t already ‘dead’)  We can adopt the ‘avoid error’ rule as practically equivalent to the ‘know truth’ rule only where the hypotheses in question are not forced, live, and momentous (the potential loss is too great where this is not so) Q: are only religious beliefs candidates for this approach?

How does this apply in the case of religious belief?  First, the claims of religion are of the sort that “cannot be settled by intellectual means” (settled in the absolutist sense)  Second, there are benefits that accrue to believers even in advance of the question being settled (the sacred or divine in the present -- the spiritual)  Third, religious hypotheses are live (for at least certain persons), forced (since contraries), and momentous (since we only get one chance to live and make this decision), that is, they are genuine options  Fourth, suspension of belief in religious matters means foresaking a potential valuable truth merely in order to avoid possible error, in circumstances where error can never be known and where foresaking truth here will mean abandoning real benefits -- this is not rational (says James)