Was James Psychologistic?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15173/jhap.v4i5.2945Abstract
As Thomas Uebel has recently argued, some early logical positivists saw American pragmatism as a kindred form of scientific philosophy. They associated pragmatism with William James, whom they rightly saw as allied with Ernst Mach. But what apparently blocked sympathetic positivists from pursuing commonalities with American pragmatism was the concern that James advocated some form of psychologism, a view they thought could not do justice to the a priori. This paper argues that positivists were wrong to read James as offering a psychologistic account of the a priori. They had encountered James by reading Pragmatism as translated by the unabashedly psychologistic Wilhelm Jerusalem. But in more technical works, James had actually developed a form of conventionalism that anticipated the so-called “relativized” a priori positivists themselves would independently develop. While positivists arrived at conventionalism largely through reflection on the exact sciences, though, James’s account of the a priori grew from his reflections on the biological evolution of cognition, particularly in the context of his Darwin-inspired critique of Herbert Spencer.References
References
Beaney, Michael, 2007. “C. I. Lewis: Pragmatism and Analysis.” In The Analytic Turn: Analysis in Early Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology, edited by Michael Beaney, pp. 178–95. New York: Routledge.
Ben-Menahem, Yemima, 2006. Conventionalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bordogna, Francesca, 2008. William James at the Boundaries: Philosophy, Science, and the Geography of Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Carnap, Rudolf, 1934/1937. The Logical Syntax of Language, translated by Amethe Smeaton. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.
———, 1950. “Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 4: 20–40.
Churchill, Frederick, 1977. “The Weismann-Spencer Controversy over the Inheritance of Acquired Characters.” In Human Implications of Scientific Advancement: Proceedings of the XVth International Congress for the History of Science, edited by Eric G. Forbes, pp. 451–68. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Darwin, Charles, 1859/1975. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Dilworth, David A, 2011. “Peirce’s Objective Idealism: A Reply to T. L. Short’s ‘What Was Peirce’s Objective Idealism?’” Cognitio: Revista de Filosofia 12: 53–74.
Duvernoy, Russell J., forthcoming. “‘Concepts’ and Continuity: Onto-Epistemology in William James.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society .
Freeman, Derek, 2000. “The Evolutionary Theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer.” In Herbert Spencer: Critical Assessments, vol. 2 of 4, edited by John Offer, pp. 5–69. London: Routledge.
Friedman, Michael, 1987. “Carnap’s Aufbau Reconsidered.” Noûs 21: 521–45.
———, 1999. Reconsidering Logical Positivism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———, 2000. A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger. Chicago: Open Court.
———, 2001. Dynamics of Reason. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Godfrey-Smith, Peter, 2014. “Quine and Pragmatism.” In A Companion to W. V. O. Quine, edited by Gilbert Harman and Ernest Lepore, pp. 54–68. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Gould, Stephen J. and Richard C. Lewontin, 1979. “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B 205: 581–98.
Isaac, Joel, 2005. “W. V. Quine and the Origins of Analytic Philosophy in the United States.” Modern Intellectual History 2: 205–34.
James, William, 1878. “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence.” Reprinted in James (1978), pp. 7–22.
———, 1884. “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology.” Mind 9: 1–26.
———, 1885. “On the Function of Cognition.” Mind 10: 27–44.
———, 1890/1981. The Principles of Psychology, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, The Works of William James. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———, 1891. “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life.” International Journal of Ethics 1: 330–54.
———, 1897/1979. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, The Works of William James. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———, 1907/1975. Pragmatism, edited by Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, The Works of William James. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———, 1909/1978. The Meaning of Truth, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, The Works of William James. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———, 1911/1979. Some Problems of Philosophy, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, The Works of William James. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———, 1978. Essays in Philosophy, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, The Works of William James. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———, 1987. Essays, Comments and Reviews, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, The Works of William James. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———, 1988. Manuscript Lectures, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, The Works of William James. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———, 1992–2004. The Correspondence of William James, edited by Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, 12 vols. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Klein, Alexander, 2008. “Divide Et Impera! William James’s Pragmatist Tradition in the Philosophy of Science.” Philosophical Topics 36: 129–66.
———, 2009. “On Hume on Space: Green’s Attack, James’s Empirical Response.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 47: 415–49.
———, 2012. “Review of Francesca Bordogna, William James at the Boundaries.” HOPOS: The Journal for the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 2: 161–66.
———, 2013. “Pragmatism.” In The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Utilitarianism, edited by James E. Crimmins, pp. 438–40. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
———, forthcoming. “Russell on Acquaintance with Spatial Properties: The Significance of James.” In Innovations in the History of Analytical Philosophy, edited by Sandra Lapointe and Christopher Pincock. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kuklick, Bruce, 1977. The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860–1930. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kusch, Martin, 1995. Psychologism: A Case Study in the Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge. London: Routledge.
Lewis, Clarence Irving, 1923. “A Pragmatic Conception of the A Priori.” The Journal of Philosophy 20: 169–77.
———, 1926. “The Pragmatic Element in Knowledge.” University of California Publications in Philosophy 6: 205–27.
Lloyd, Elisabeth A., 2001. “Units and Levels of Selection: An Anatomy of the Units of Selection Debates.” In Thinking About Evolution: Historical, Philosophical, and Political Perspectives, edited by Rama S. Singh, Costas B. Krimbas, Diane B. Paul, and John Beatty, pp. 267–91. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Misak, Cheryl, 2013. The American Pragmatists. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Myers, Gerald E., 1986. William James: His Life and Thought. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Offer, John, 2014. “Herbert Spencer.” In The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, edited by W. J. Mander, pp. 257–84. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pearce, Trevor, 2010. “‘A Perfect Chaos’: Organism–Environment Interaction and the Causal Factors of Evolution.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, University of Chicago.
———, 2014. “The Origins and Development of the Idea of Organism–Environment Interaction.” In Entangled Life: Organism and Environment in the Biological and Social Sciences, edited by Gillian Barker, Eric Desjardins, and Trevor Pearce, pp. 13–32. New York: Springer.
———, forthcoming. “James and Evolution.” In The Oxford Handbook of William James, edited by Alexander Klein. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Perry, Ralph Barton, 1935. The Thought and Character of William James, 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Poincaré, Henri, 1908/1914. Science and Method, translated by Francis Maitland. London: T. Nelson and Sons.
Reisch, George A, 2005. How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Richards, Robert, 1987. Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Richardson, Alan W., 1998. Carnap’s Construction of the World: The Aufbau and the Emergence of Logical Empiricism. New York: Cambridge University Press.
———, 2002. “Engineering Philosophy of Science: American Pragmatism and Logical Empiricism in the 1930s.” Philosophy of Science 69 (3 Supplement): S36–S47.
———, 2003. “Logical Empiricism, American Pragmatism, and the Fate of Scientific Philosophy in North America.” In Logical Empiricism in North America, edited by Gary L. Hardcastle and Alan W. Richardson, pp. 1–24. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———, 2008. “Carnapian Pragmatism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Carnap, edited by Michael Friedman and Richard Creath, pp. 295–315. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schilpp, Paul Arthur, ed., 1963. The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (The Library of Living Philosophers). La Salle, IL: Open Court.
Sklar, Lawrence, 1974. Space, Time, and Spacetime. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Spencer, Herbert, 1873. The Principles of Psychology. 2nd ed. 2 vols., System of Synthetic Philosophy. New York: Appleton and Co.
———, 1887. The Factors of Organic Evolution. New York: Appleton and Co.
Stump, David J., 2015. Conceptual Change and the Philosophy of Science: Alternative Interpretations of the A Priori. New York: Routledge.
Taylor, A. E., 1903. Elements of Metaphysics. London: Methuen.
Uebel, Thomas, 1992. Overcoming Logical Positivism from Within: The Emergence of Neurath’s Naturalism in the Vienna Circle’s Protocol Sentence Debate. Amsterdam: Rodopoi.
———, 2015. “American Pragmatism and the Vienna Circle: The Early Years.” Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 3: 1–35.
Winther, Rasmus, 2001. “August Weismann on Germ-Plasm Variation.” Journal of the History of Biology 34: 517–55.
Beaney, Michael, 2007. “C. I. Lewis: Pragmatism and Analysis.” In The Analytic Turn: Analysis in Early Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology, edited by Michael Beaney, pp. 178–95. New York: Routledge.
Ben-Menahem, Yemima, 2006. Conventionalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bordogna, Francesca, 2008. William James at the Boundaries: Philosophy, Science, and the Geography of Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Carnap, Rudolf, 1934/1937. The Logical Syntax of Language, translated by Amethe Smeaton. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.
———, 1950. “Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 4: 20–40.
Churchill, Frederick, 1977. “The Weismann-Spencer Controversy over the Inheritance of Acquired Characters.” In Human Implications of Scientific Advancement: Proceedings of the XVth International Congress for the History of Science, edited by Eric G. Forbes, pp. 451–68. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Darwin, Charles, 1859/1975. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Dilworth, David A, 2011. “Peirce’s Objective Idealism: A Reply to T. L. Short’s ‘What Was Peirce’s Objective Idealism?’” Cognitio: Revista de Filosofia 12: 53–74.
Duvernoy, Russell J., forthcoming. “‘Concepts’ and Continuity: Onto-Epistemology in William James.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society .
Freeman, Derek, 2000. “The Evolutionary Theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer.” In Herbert Spencer: Critical Assessments, vol. 2 of 4, edited by John Offer, pp. 5–69. London: Routledge.
Friedman, Michael, 1987. “Carnap’s Aufbau Reconsidered.” Noûs 21: 521–45.
———, 1999. Reconsidering Logical Positivism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———, 2000. A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger. Chicago: Open Court.
———, 2001. Dynamics of Reason. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Godfrey-Smith, Peter, 2014. “Quine and Pragmatism.” In A Companion to W. V. O. Quine, edited by Gilbert Harman and Ernest Lepore, pp. 54–68. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Gould, Stephen J. and Richard C. Lewontin, 1979. “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B 205: 581–98.
Isaac, Joel, 2005. “W. V. Quine and the Origins of Analytic Philosophy in the United States.” Modern Intellectual History 2: 205–34.
James, William, 1878. “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence.” Reprinted in James (1978), pp. 7–22.
———, 1884. “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology.” Mind 9: 1–26.
———, 1885. “On the Function of Cognition.” Mind 10: 27–44.
———, 1890/1981. The Principles of Psychology, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, The Works of William James. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———, 1891. “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life.” International Journal of Ethics 1: 330–54.
———, 1897/1979. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, The Works of William James. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———, 1907/1975. Pragmatism, edited by Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, The Works of William James. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———, 1909/1978. The Meaning of Truth, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, The Works of William James. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———, 1911/1979. Some Problems of Philosophy, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, The Works of William James. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———, 1978. Essays in Philosophy, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, The Works of William James. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———, 1987. Essays, Comments and Reviews, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, The Works of William James. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———, 1988. Manuscript Lectures, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, The Works of William James. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———, 1992–2004. The Correspondence of William James, edited by Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, 12 vols. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Klein, Alexander, 2008. “Divide Et Impera! William James’s Pragmatist Tradition in the Philosophy of Science.” Philosophical Topics 36: 129–66.
———, 2009. “On Hume on Space: Green’s Attack, James’s Empirical Response.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 47: 415–49.
———, 2012. “Review of Francesca Bordogna, William James at the Boundaries.” HOPOS: The Journal for the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 2: 161–66.
———, 2013. “Pragmatism.” In The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Utilitarianism, edited by James E. Crimmins, pp. 438–40. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
———, forthcoming. “Russell on Acquaintance with Spatial Properties: The Significance of James.” In Innovations in the History of Analytical Philosophy, edited by Sandra Lapointe and Christopher Pincock. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kuklick, Bruce, 1977. The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860–1930. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kusch, Martin, 1995. Psychologism: A Case Study in the Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge. London: Routledge.
Lewis, Clarence Irving, 1923. “A Pragmatic Conception of the A Priori.” The Journal of Philosophy 20: 169–77.
———, 1926. “The Pragmatic Element in Knowledge.” University of California Publications in Philosophy 6: 205–27.
Lloyd, Elisabeth A., 2001. “Units and Levels of Selection: An Anatomy of the Units of Selection Debates.” In Thinking About Evolution: Historical, Philosophical, and Political Perspectives, edited by Rama S. Singh, Costas B. Krimbas, Diane B. Paul, and John Beatty, pp. 267–91. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Misak, Cheryl, 2013. The American Pragmatists. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Myers, Gerald E., 1986. William James: His Life and Thought. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Offer, John, 2014. “Herbert Spencer.” In The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, edited by W. J. Mander, pp. 257–84. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pearce, Trevor, 2010. “‘A Perfect Chaos’: Organism–Environment Interaction and the Causal Factors of Evolution.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, University of Chicago.
———, 2014. “The Origins and Development of the Idea of Organism–Environment Interaction.” In Entangled Life: Organism and Environment in the Biological and Social Sciences, edited by Gillian Barker, Eric Desjardins, and Trevor Pearce, pp. 13–32. New York: Springer.
———, forthcoming. “James and Evolution.” In The Oxford Handbook of William James, edited by Alexander Klein. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Perry, Ralph Barton, 1935. The Thought and Character of William James, 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Poincaré, Henri, 1908/1914. Science and Method, translated by Francis Maitland. London: T. Nelson and Sons.
Reisch, George A, 2005. How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Richards, Robert, 1987. Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Richardson, Alan W., 1998. Carnap’s Construction of the World: The Aufbau and the Emergence of Logical Empiricism. New York: Cambridge University Press.
———, 2002. “Engineering Philosophy of Science: American Pragmatism and Logical Empiricism in the 1930s.” Philosophy of Science 69 (3 Supplement): S36–S47.
———, 2003. “Logical Empiricism, American Pragmatism, and the Fate of Scientific Philosophy in North America.” In Logical Empiricism in North America, edited by Gary L. Hardcastle and Alan W. Richardson, pp. 1–24. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———, 2008. “Carnapian Pragmatism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Carnap, edited by Michael Friedman and Richard Creath, pp. 295–315. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schilpp, Paul Arthur, ed., 1963. The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (The Library of Living Philosophers). La Salle, IL: Open Court.
Sklar, Lawrence, 1974. Space, Time, and Spacetime. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Spencer, Herbert, 1873. The Principles of Psychology. 2nd ed. 2 vols., System of Synthetic Philosophy. New York: Appleton and Co.
———, 1887. The Factors of Organic Evolution. New York: Appleton and Co.
Stump, David J., 2015. Conceptual Change and the Philosophy of Science: Alternative Interpretations of the A Priori. New York: Routledge.
Taylor, A. E., 1903. Elements of Metaphysics. London: Methuen.
Uebel, Thomas, 1992. Overcoming Logical Positivism from Within: The Emergence of Neurath’s Naturalism in the Vienna Circle’s Protocol Sentence Debate. Amsterdam: Rodopoi.
———, 2015. “American Pragmatism and the Vienna Circle: The Early Years.” Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 3: 1–35.
Winther, Rasmus, 2001. “August Weismann on Germ-Plasm Variation.” Journal of the History of Biology 34: 517–55.
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