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TRANSACTIONS OF THE CHARLES S. PEIRCE SOCIETY
Vol. 51, No. 4 (2015) • doi: 10.2979/trancharpeirsoc.51.4.08
Copyright © Charles S. Peirce Society
‘Concepts’ and Continuity: Onto-Epistemology in William JamesRussell Duvernoy
AbstractIn this paper, I focus on an internal tension within James’s Principles and suggest that its formal structure provides useful insight into James’s subsequent evolution. Specif-ically, through a close reading of James’s account of ‘conceptions’ in the Principles, I examine the tension between these ‘concep-tions’ construed as discrete and self-identi-cal and James’s famous phenomenological description of consciousness as a continuous stream. Such a tension primarily involves the intersection of an epistemic need (or condition of possibility) with a quasi-meta-physical intuition or postulate (continuity). Importantly, this tension is intensifi ed by the methodological constraints of bracket-ing metaphysical questions that James sets for himself in the Principles. James’s deci-sion to deny the cogency of this method-ological bracketing can therefore be read as his response to the tension I examine and his speculative turn to “radical empiricism” as an attempt to resolve epistemological dif-fi culties by going more radical ontologically. Doing so raises questions about the status of speculative metaphysics in intersection with empirical inquiry.
Keywords: continuity, epistemology, William James, metaphysics, methodology, natural science
Th e diversity of William James’s intellec-tual pursuits and accomplishments is an oft-observed truism. James is remembered as a pioneer of psychology, a public intel-lectual and lecturer, one of the founding fi gures of pragmatism, and an explorer of religious and psychic phenomena. James’s wide ranging energies in an age before
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today’s entrenched disciplinary boundaries led Cornel West to char-acterize him as “an authentic American intellectual frontiersman.”1 More recently, Francesca Bordogna has described this multiplicity of interests in terms of “boundary work,” providing a compelling account of James’s intellectual practice of dynamic interplay between various modes of thought.2 Given this diversity of interests and discourses, scholars have long debated how to best construe the internal develop-ment of James’s thought.
In this paper, I focus on an internal problem within James’s Principles to show how the formal structure of this problem provides useful insight into James’s subsequent evolution. Specifi cally, I off er a close reading of James’s account of ‘conceptions’ in the Principles which highlights a tension between ‘conceptions’ construed as discrete and self-identical and James’s famous phenomenological description of consciousness as a continuous stream. Th is tension is itself isomorphic with a central prob-lematic that reappears throughout James’s career in diff erent contexts– that between discrete units and continuity. In this particular case, my interest is in examining the extent to which the problematic involves the intersection of an epistemic need (or condition of possibility) with a metaphysical intuition or postulate (continuity) and therefore chal-lenges the methodological restraints James has imposed upon himself at this early stage.3
In calling this a tension or problematic, I do not mean to suggest that it is therefore a mark of a fundamental error or mistake in James’s philosophy. Quite the contrary – the richness of James’s thought and engagement with this issue, and the extent to which it resurfaces and repeats in diff erent specifi cations is a mark of the integrity of James’s engagement with its great philosophical depth and complexity. Nor should we understand by tension a situation that must be eradicated by a privileging of one side of the tension as more basic than the other. For James, the force of the problem is felt most acutely as an obligation to do justice to both sides insofar as they represent felt conditions of our experience. For these reasons, a full accounting of the diff erent ways that this formal tension functions over the course of James’s oeu-vre would take us far beyond the scope of a single journal article. Th is is even more the case insofar as James’s treatment of the formal tension never solidifi es on a single positive ‘solution,’ and instead varies as a function of the lens and context through which James approaches it. If I show here how James’s move to a “radical empiricism” is moti-vated through a desire to more adequately confront this tension, this is not to suggest that this move is fi nal or defi nitively successful. Th is is demonstrated most forcefully in his reopening of the question in his fi nal text Some Problems of Philosophy, and his tentative affi rmation of the “pulse-like” nature of experience as modulated through the ques-tion of novelty.4
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Th is article serves as an entrance into a fruitful heuristic for survey-ing the complexities of James’s development, while largely confi ning itself in scope to the Principles. Th is limited focus has two inter-related goals. Th e fi rst is to examine the extent to which the tension between discrete concepts and continuous psychological experience internal to the Principles is bound up with James’s methodological distinction between the proper work of psychology as natural science and the ques-tions of metaphysics which he places as beyond its scope. Clarifying and analyzing why and how this tension appears in the Principles as a consequence of its methodological bracketing can help us to better understand and situate James’s speculative turn to “radical empiricism.” Th is turn can be read as an attempt to treat epistemological diffi culties by going more radical ontologically, even as this means destabilizing the presumed determinacy of the boundary between the empirical and the speculative. In closing, I will discuss how this shift by James reconfi g-ures both sides of this boundary, calling into question not only narrow and reductive empiricisms which presuppose a denial of the real pres-ence of the “vague,” but also transforming assumptions with regard to the practice and criteria of success for metaphysics from an a priori dis-cipline of certainty to a hypothetical, provisional, and fallible, though nonetheless unavoidable, speculative framing of thought. Th e former reconfi guring is widely noted in the literature, but the latter, which is to my mind equally as important, has hardly been noted.
1. Psychology as a New ScienceDebates over the viability of a strict and fully determinate demarcation between metaphysics and psychology abounded in James’s contempo-rary milieu and an awareness of those discussions is important in con-textualizing the strategic motivations of his methodological imperatives to bracket the metaphysical in the Principles. In seeking to delineate the conditions under which psychology may progress as a science, James is weary of the way unexamined theoretical assumptions had hindered progress in developing accounts adequate to the full range of experien-tial evidence. His broad methodological strategy is therefore girded by a privileging of the felt sense of psychological experience such that a theory is suspect both (a) if it fails to be attentive to the way in which our fi rst person psychological experiences actually feel or (b) if it pos-its supra-empirical entities or faculties (such as a ‘transcendental soul’) which are categorically inaccessible in experience. Th is entails a sensi-tive empiricism on guard against what James takes to be the atomistic errors of the British school by remaining attentive to the actual nature of experience – that is, the way that such experience feels. One crucial component of this feeling of experience is its continuity, the way that our experiences come in a perceptual and mental fl ow, rather than as a series of discrete or bounded instants.
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James’s championing of ‘felt sense’ is one of the more infl uential and enduring marks of his legacy, but its critical nuance is sometimes overlooked, especially by those who accuse James of a naïve subjec-tivism. As Gerald Myers has observed, James’s use of introspection as ‘inner observation’ is not intended as a fi nal source of authority, but rather as evidence for further empirical investigation, as “only part of the experimental process.”5 Introspective reports and observation are indispensable, but not immediately self-certifying theoretically. It is a feature of James’s thought at large that he seeks to include rather than exclude – as such, his championing of the felt sense of experience and the value of introspective attention or observation as a source for psy-chology is best understood as a corrective against reductively positivist or purely physiological accounts.6 Th is is not a claim that such physio-logical accounts don’t have valuable information to off er, but that they should be taken as neither epistemically exhaustive nor descriptively suffi cient. For James, the ideal is a balance between formal experimen-tal and physiological laboratory investigation and a simultaneous phe-nomenological attention to introspective psychological experience. Th e methods of psychology as a natural science are “introspection, experi-mentation, and comparison.”7
James’s chapter on Attention (XI) provides an example of the way that introspection and experimentation can mutually enrich one another, as he utilizes the reaction-time experiments of Wundt and others as valuable sources of empirical evidence to plumb the func-tional role of selective attention. Importantly, the chapter begins with a condemnation of the failure of Associationist psychology to even recognize attention as a constitutive force of psychological experience. Understanding the meta-positioning of James’s off -hand criticism here is more complex than it might appear at fi rst. For James, the failure of associationist philosophy to attend to the relationship between selec-tive interest and attention results from mistaken priorities in the order of operations. Commitment to a prior theoretical position thus blocks the appearance of the full range of phenomenal data. Attention can-not appear as a constitutive force, because it “would . . .break through the circle of pure receptivity which constitutes ‘experience’ for the Associationist.”8 Th e mistake is that of failing to be attentive to the actual nature of experience because of a commitment to an ordering meta-position.9
For James, psychology in its current stage as a developing science was rife with such mistakes and it is for this reason that he sees the need to diff erentiate his work in Th e Principles as ‘psychology’ rather than ‘metaphysics’ or more broadly ‘philosophy’. Such a distinction func-tions strategically both as a corrective against unsatisfying explanatory accounts and as a condition of possibility for establishing psychology as a natural science.
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In the fi rst case, James is worried about the way that metaphysical presuppositions can both block an adequate observation of psycholog-ical experience (as indicated above), and, more problematically, off er explanations which appeal to inaccessible, transcendental entities. For James, such appeals, most notably to a Kantian transcendental unity of apperception cannot serve explanatory roles in a science of psychology, since they themselves are categorically incapable of explanation. A via-ble method of psychology as a science cannot base itself on principles which are in principle incapable of empirical investigation.
Th e second motive to James’s frequent distinction between ques-tions of “psychology” and “philosophy” is best understood in the con-text of idealist claims that a study of the mind on the model of a natural science is a category mistake. As Alexander Klein has shown, James’s distinction responds to the charge of his day that since the mind is not an ‘object’ it cannot be studied in the manner of a natural science.10 Idealist philosophers like T.H. Green argued that ‘minds’, of necessity, had properties that transcended space and time. James methodologi-cal framing therefore seeks to bracket questions as to the metaphysical status of mental phenomena as external to the proper work of the psy-chologist, since without such bracketing, empirical psychology could never get off the ground. Th e psychologist has as his data: “the thought studied; the thought’s object; and the psychologist’s reality” and it is his work to analyze these phenomena as realities “without troubling him-self with the puzzle of how he can report them at all.”11 Such “ultimate puzzles” are better left to the philosopher qua metaphysician since “. . . as psychologists, we need not be metaphysical at all. Th e phenomena are enough, the passing Th ought itself is the only verifi able thinker. . .”12
In this way, James’s bracketing of the metaphysical status of certain items is a way of establishing a framework in which psychology could be practiced as a science. James’s slogan “Divide et impera” is indicative of this desire to provide conditions for empirical inquiry independent of debates regarding the metaphysical status of the phenomena under question. In order to do so, certain “ultimate features” must be assumed and taken to be outside of the scope of the discipline in question: “James’s insight was that the success or failure of a fl edgling science depends in part on which ontological features it declines to explain.”13
Understanding this strategic aspect to James’s distinction also helps to unsettle any assumption that it is advanced to privilege of one set of questions (the scientifi c questions of psychology) over the other (the speculative questions of philosophy or metaphysics). Acknowledging the strategic element of James’s distinction also helps highlight its pro-visional nature – James is responding to the intellectual concerns of his day and as such his distinction is primarily strategic and methodologi-cal rather than based on a fundamental ontological separation or diff er-ence in kind between the two domains. I will now turn to consider how
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James’s account of ‘conceptions’ in the Principles puts his own meth-odological bracketing under question. However, given its provisional nature, these tensions should not be taken as indicative of a failure in James’s thought to consistently maintain a categorical distinction, but rather to emphasize the permeability of the boundary that James will increasingly blur, especially in the later work. In this way, James’s increasing preoccupation with the ‘metaphysical’ questions he claims to bracket in the Principles does not represent an abrupt shift or ‘turn’ in his thought, but rather a natural outgrowth of problems that fi rst appear in the context of the psychology.
2. Th e Image of the Concept in Principles of PsychologyTh e question of ‘concepts’ – what they are, how they function, their relation to perceptual experience – is a thread that runs throughout James’s work. As William Gavin has shown, tracking the functional role of the concept in relation to the percept and sensation is by no means a univocal task, since James does not always use these terms in a consistent technical manner.14 James’s account of concepts and conceptions in the Principles is also importantly not his fi nal say on the matter. Rather, his eventual turn to a more speculative ontology leads to important shifts in his formulation of the role of the concept, and its ontological and relational status with regard to the perceptual. Th is later turn is neither arbitrary nor unrelated to the tension that I detail here but is instead a more explicit engagement with it by undoing the methodological restraints James has imposed in this earlier period. Th erefore, in locating this tension as already internal to the descriptive account of the mind’s structure that James advances in the Principles, we can see the diffi culty that such an account has of remaining com-partmentalized against the larger “metaphysical” questions that James wants to bracket. As we will see, James himself will come to a similar conclusion soon after the publication of the Principles, and recognize that in order to more eff ectively treat this tension, he must make claims which go outside the boundaries he had established for psychology.
For the attentive reader, the tension between the discrete and the continuous appears immediately in Chapter XII of the Principles ‘Conception’. In this chapter James introduces a new theoretical entity into his mental menagerie, the ‘concept’ or ‘conception’. Th e concep-tion is “the function by which we . . . identify a numerically distinct and permanent subject of discourse.”15 Concepts allow us to ‘think the same’ and “this sense of sameness is the very keel and backbone of our thinking.”16 Concepts importantly mark a static and stable identity: “conceptions form the one class of entities that cannot under any cir-cumstances change.”17
Th is is the central diffi culty around which James’s image of the concept will pivot: is a concept a function or is it an entity? What is
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the diff erence between these two characterizations? In the Principles, James does not consistently maintain a fully articulated distinction between these two manners of characterizing conceptions. Certainly, thinking of concepts as functions, that is, as activities of selection from a continuum of perceptual experience is the best way of miti-gating the tension that I detail below. Th e problem with this strat-egy is that James does not clearly maintain such an account in the Principles. More formally, such a distinction tends to confl ate a genetic explanation with substantive or epistemic content. Even if concepts are genetically constituted by selections or cuts from a more continuous primary experience, James’s discussion in the Principles consistently discusses them in terms of their role as providing sta-ble epistemic identity. Indeed, this is precisely how he defi nes the concept.
Th is stable epistemic identity is exhibited when James denies that conceptions can develop into other conceptions. Th e examples he gives are of the number ‘13’ which James describes as “the utterly changeless conception of thirteen.” 18 It is not the case for James that this concep-tion alone allows us to understand one of its properties – that of being prime, or of being equal to the sum of 6 + 7. Rather, each of these additional properties are themselves distinct and separate conceptions that arise out of a comparison of the relations between such ‘change-less’ conceptions. James thus denies the fl exibility of any given con-cept: “Each conception thus eternally remains what it is, and never can become another,” going so far as to compare the “world of conceptions” to the “stiff and immutable” milieu of “Plato’s Realm of Ideas.”19 Insofar as our understanding of a particular meaning develops over time, then James is going to say that we are technically dealing with a diff erent concept.
James’s positing of such discrete and stable fi xed mental entities is at odds with the descriptions he has given of the continuous nature of mental experience. James himself acknowledges this contrast, and insists that “the psychology of conception is not the place in which to treat of those of continuity and change.”20 Despite his metaphorical allusion to Plato, it is also clear that James need not be positing any special ontological status for these peculiar mental entities. Instead, he is “speaking of the sense of sameness from the point of view of the mind’s structure alone, and not from the point of view of the uni-verse.”21 As such, he is “psychologizing, not philosophizing.”22 Despite James’s eff orts to compartmentalize this analysis by restricting it to the “mind’s structure,” there are several reasons why it is diffi cult to square discrete and self-identical ‘conceptions’ with James’s overall account of the holistic and continuous nature of thought. We can group these questions broadly around three themes: (1) inferential relationality, (2) semantic holism, and (3) sameness and fl ux.
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Questions of inferential relationality refer to the role of discrete con-cepts in James’s analysis of thought’s movement and fl ow. Th is analy-sis is the source of some of Th e Principles most famous and enduring terminology, in particular the contrast that James off ers between the ‘fl ightings’ of transitional and inferential movements and the substan-tive ‘perchings’ of concluding moments. It is tempting to simply ascribe ‘concepts’ to the position of a substantive ‘perching’ insofar as a concept represents a stable and discrete resting place. To do so however requires that we ignore the fi ner details of the functional relationships between ‘fl ightings’ and ‘perchings.’ For James, every substantive moment of thought famously carries with it a “fringe” of diff erent tonal, aff ective and semantic associations through which thought moves from one moment to the next.23 Moreover, because of the continuity of the expe-rience of thought, such boundaries between substantive moments are necessarily vague, containing a multitude of possible associations. Th is recognition of the ambiguity inherent in separating particular substan-tive moments results in the move to “[reinstate]. . .the vague to the proper place in mental life.”24 Th is reinstatement additionally affi rms the role that aff ective quality has in shaping the tendencies of thought and inference. Indeed, for James, it would seem that there is no stable distinction that can be made between the feeling of a thought and its conceptual content, the two are blended in a continuous fl ow of rela-tions. Yet, James’s description of concepts precludes the possibility of their having ‘fringes’ and therefore seems to block their entrance into the Jamesian analysis of inferential relations. What role can ‘concepts’, as strictly defi ned, really play in this continuous movement of thought? Is a ‘concept’ properly speaking something that can be mentally expe-rienced at all?
James has also famously committed himself to a view of ‘semantic holism’ in which the meaning of a thought is a complete movement which resists atomic analysis. On this holistic account: “the object of every thought . . . is neither more nor less than all that the thought thinks, exactly as thought thinks it, however complicated the matter, and however symbolic the manner of the thinking may be.”25 Since presumably the chief importance of ‘concepts’ is semantic, this makes it quite diffi cult to understand how self-contained and discrete con-cepts could be placed within this holistic fi eld without succumbing to a version of associationist atomism that James specifi cally rejects.26 Alternatively, if we are to place Jamesian ‘concepts’ in the place of the whole meaning of a thought, than we have to ignore their characteriza-tion as discrete and fi xed, since any meaning for James is always going to contain a ‘halo’ or ‘fringe’.
James’s phenomenological description of the mental stream also emphasizes its changeability. One of the consequences of this charac-teristic is that “no state once gone can recur and be identical with what
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it was before.”27 Th is conclusion follows in part from James’s linkage of the phenomenal experience of thought with the temporality of phys-iological and neural states. For a thought to repeat exactly, it would have to occur with an identical brain state. But, since any given brain state modifi es the subsequent brain states, such an exact and precise reoccurrence is logically impossible. For this reason “it is obvious and palpable that our state of mind is never precisely the same” and that “every thought we have of a given fact is, strictly speaking, unique, and only bears a resemblance of kind with our other thoughts of the same fact.” 28 James concludes this discussion with the declaration that “no two ‘ideas’ are ever exactly the same” and that “a permanently existing ‘idea’ . . . is as mythological an entity as the Jack of Spades.”29 If we take this claim seriously, it is clear that ‘concepts’ cannot be ‘ideas’, since ‘concepts’ are explicitly defi ned as permanent and exactly the same.30 Again we are led to question whether a ‘concept’ is a mental thing at all and if so how it can be experienced?
We might be tempted to reconcile this tension by an appeal to the purpose of the two respective analyses: phenomenological description on the one hand and epistemic conditions of possibility on the other. According to such a strategy, the self-identity and stability of concep-tions would be posited as necessary structures of thought for epistemic purposes only. As such, ‘concepts’ need not necessarily be phenome-nologically experienced in our mental lives but are rather posited as a means of explaining how it is that we can have the phenomenologi-cal experience of consistent and stable meanings. Indeed, the need for such stable ‘concepts’ is actually a consequence of the contrasting and continuous nature of our phenomenal experience insofar as they func-tion as tools allowing us to navigate and make sense of the ambigu-ities of the on-going stream. ‘Concepts’ would then be conceptually of a second order parasitic upon the actually experienced ‘percepts’ of our mental lives. Such actually experienced ‘percepts’, as James has described them, are often ambiguous and vague, and contain a vast array of fringe-like associations and suggestions as opposed to the stable identity of ‘concepts.’31
Th is is the general direction to which James will turn in later accounts of the relation between concepts and percepts, however, this turn will also involve a diff erent conceptualization of consciousness which we will consider below. In the context of the Principles, what I wish to fl ag is that such a construal is in signifi cant tension with his methodological imperative to keep within the confi nes of the empirically verifi able. It is diffi cult to imagine what could count as the criteria of identifi ca-tion in verifying such a characterization, since ‘concepts’ by defi nition could not be experienced as the discrete entities they are claimed to be. Indeed, this kind of account clearly posits a kind of transcenden-tal epistemic condition of possibility and in so doing adopts a type of
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non-empirical quasi-Kantian structure for which James takes others to task. It is for this reason that James will have to more fully develop an alternative ontology in which both concepts and psychological con-sciousness will no longer be assumed as kinds of ‘things’, thus fl attening the transcendental condition into an experience-able process of func-tional selection. While we might say, with Gavin, that this account is already “latent” within the Principles, it remains undeveloped, indeed methodologically incapable of development, because it requires exceed-ing the confi nes of the empirically verifi able through an alteration of the meta-conceptual framing.32
To summarize, James’s characterization of concepts in the Principles is diffi cult to reconcile with his methodological framework on two accounts. First, if a concept is defi ned as a static, self-identical, and determinate mental “entity”, then it is unclear how such an entity could be identifi ed within the phenomenological description of psychic expe-rience that James gives us, since his description strongly emphasizes the fundamental continuity of this experience. Moreover, in his analysis of this experience, James repeatedly emphasizes the degree to which it escapes discrete atomization and is instead constituted by vagueness and indeterminacy, in which any particular meaning always shades off into a range of aff ective and fringe-like associations. Second, if we attempt to rescue the concept by removing it from the realm of the experienced per se, and instead understand it as a mental condition of possibility for our experience of stability, then we seem to posit a tran-scendental structure which, by defi nition, cannot itself be experienced, even if its eff ects can. We will next turn to consider how James treated this problem in his later development.
3. A More Radical Onto-EpistemologyFrancesca Bordogna’s 2008 William James at the Boundaries provides an exhaustive account of the way that James’s operational distinction between psychology and metaphysics ran into immediate criticism upon the publication of the Principles. Of particular interest is the way that the critiques have of falling on either side of the fence – for some, such as T.H. Green or Shadworth Hodgson, the distinction itself is untenable and for others (George Trumbull Ladd and G.S. Fullerton) it is James’s performance or maintenance of this distinction that falls short of the mark.33 Implicit in the critiques are diff erent valuations of the relative worth of the two domains proposed. As we have seen above, a certain strain of Idealist philosophers such as T.H. Green wanted to maintain that psychology could not be an empirical or natural science, in short, that it could only be approached through a philosophical study, thus maintaining a privileged position for philosophy above the merely empirical sciences. By suggesting that the mind can be studied empirically, philosophers like Shadworth Hodgson also worried that
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James evacuated the province of speculative philosophy by denying the effi cacy and importance of its questions. Hodgson (mis)reads James’s methodological bracketing as implicitly valued – by producing a psy-chological study of the mind that purports to eschew the questions of metaphysics as not necessary for such study, Hodgson suspects James of a positivist denial of the effi cacy or worth of metaphysics as such.34 Both philosophers are therefore critical of the possibility of such a dis-tinction because they maintain a privileged position for philosophical thinking.
On the other hand, James was also criticized by those who shared a desire to establish a fi xed boundary between the philosophical and the psychological and who aspired to an image of science as purely empiri-cal study uncontaminated by the speculative or metaphysical. For these critics, while James provided the appropriate rationale on paper, his actual investigation strayed too far from the empirical. G.S. Fullerton therefore objects that James, despite his stated bracketing, has covertly smuggled epistemological concerns into his psychology to the detri-ment of its scientifi c status. In eff ect, Fullerton’s worries share the same structure as those that I have raised around the characterization of the “concept” above. His main concern is how to understand the tension between James’s frequent characterization of consciousness as a unifi ed and continuous whole, with his simultaneous analysis of seemingly sep-arable parts within it.35 Fullerton thinks James unjustifi ed to affi rm the continuity of mind, and argues that it goes against much of the work of laboratory psychologists such as Wundt in “identifying elementary sensations and tracing the modalities of their ‘integration’ into higher mental states.”36
As Skrupskelis, Bordogna, and others have suggested, Fullerton’s objections signifi cantly impacted James’s appraisal of his work.37 However, James response goes in a diff erent direction from what Fullerton may have wished, since instead of attempting a more rigor-ous policing of the boundary, James declares that he was simply mis-taken to assert its possibility. In his 1894 Presidential Address to the American Psychological Association, James announces: “I have become convinced since publishing [the Principles] that no conventional restric-tions can keep metaphysical and so-called epistemological inquiries out of the psychology books.”38 Th e tension between an epistemic account and a purely descriptive one cannot be easily bracketed, because how we determine the constraints and conditions of this tension, and what we establish as possible criteria for a solution, are connected to fram-ing assumptions or commitments that exceed the exclusively verifi able. Th is is especially the case insofar as the very practice of verifi cation in the empirical scientifi c context is itself defi ned by precision. To be ver-ifi able is to be precisely specifi able if not empirically quantifi able. And yet, as James is recognizing, this methodological presumption has the
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eff ect of presupposing that ‘vagueness’ can only be registered as a mark of epistemic short-coming, rather than a possible qualitative reality.
By the time of the Essays in Radical Empiricism a decade later, James has indisputably switched camps from “scientifi c psychology” to a speculative philosophical position oriented around the same structural problem – how can we account for the apparent disjunct between a continuity of experience and the discrete items or parts of which it appears to be constituted?39 In the context of the argument I am devel-oping here, this can be read as a sign of the degree to which the meth-odological constraints of the developing sciences are, in James’s view, unable to accurately encounter the phenomena under investigation.40 In a passage which reverberates with James’s own attempted bracketing in the Principles, he declares “scientifi c psychology” to simply assume as given a diff erence in kind between minds and things. Th is assumption is part of the methodological practice of the science in question: “Each science arbitrarily carves out a fi eld and encloses itself in that fi eld to describe and study the contents thereof.”41 Whereas James trumpets such a bracketing in the Principles, he now fl ags it as a reason why psy-chology remains mired in an inescapable dualism. As a framing assump-tion of empirical investigation, this dualism is for James a mark of its limitation in providing satisfactory answers that go beyond the narrow domain of an arbitrarily confi ned inquiry. By contrast, he appeals to “general philosophy, whose task is to scrutinize all assumptions, [and] uncover paradoxes and obstacles that science overlooks.”42
In eff ect, James’s response to Fullerton’s criticism that he has been too philosophical in the Principles is to suggest that, on the contrary, he hasn’t been philosophical enough! Th e question then becomes what type of philosophy or philosophical methodology is appropriate to utilize in looking to resolve the epistemological/phenomenological tensions detailed above. While there is a received image of James as inherently given to resolving philosophical problems by choosing a via media between extremes, such an image risks covering over the degree to which James is an innovator.43 Th at is, it retroactively construes his construction of a novel philosophical position as a choice of taking a middle option between two extremes. In the case of the concept as a site of intersection between epistemological needs and a phenomenological description of continuity, such a retrospective analysis fails to appre-ciate the manner in which James constructs this third option. It is not that it existed prior and he chose it, but that, faced with an intractable set of demands James radically creates a position that had not hitherto existed. Th is is a case of a speculative risk-taking rather than a moderate via media, even if it is motivated by an attempt to avoid the reductive poles of idealism or brute physicalism.
In positing the “pure experience” of radical empiricism, James trans-forms the disjunction between concepts as discrete epistemic units and
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a phenomenology of continuity by construing both in terms of func-tional relations and transactional processes. James’s proposal of a rad-ical empiricism is therefore best understood as implicitly aligned with subsequent developments toward process metaphysics – the problem of the tension between discrete entities both within a unifi ed continu-ity of consciousness or between separate such fi elds is mitigated when the very existence of an entity is transformed from an image of a sta-ble object with secondary qualities predicated of it, to a transactional function. James’s denial of consciousness is predicated on a denial of the framing assumptions of entities as ontologically paradigmatic and primary – that is, it is a tacit rejection of the standard presumptions of a substance metaphysics.44 Seen in this light, James’s innovative claims in “Does Consciousness Exist?” lose something of their enigmatic nature – James is not denying the existence of awareness as such, but rather con-ceptualizing it through a diff erent ontological frame, in which activity and process are ontologically primary, and stability, object, or entity are secondary outcomes.
James’s solution to the tension of his characterization of the ‘con-cepts’ in the Principles is to more thoroughly reject the assumption of subject/object dualism and turn to a more consistent characterization of concepts as functional selections, as actions or patterns of actions, rather than epistemic entities. Such a solution is only possible by cross-ing the presumed boundary delimiting what counts as empirical psy-chology. James accordingly develops these epistemological innovations alongside increasingly speculative metaphysical theorizing. Th e proces-sive nature of reality is refl ected in the account of concepts as relational selections that cannot be exclusively separated from the on-going pro-cesses of experience. Concepts both arise as selections and function as navigational tools within this experience.
As William Gavin has shown, we should not then read the cate-gories of the “percept” and the “concept” as exclusively oppositional. To do so would be to commit the error of what James calls “vicious intellectualism”, in which conceptual abstractions are reifi ed and their boundaries taken as absolute rather than vague. Such “vicious intellec-tualism” employs concepts “privatively”, that is, it treats a conceptual name as “excluding from the fact named what the name’s defi nition fails positively to exclude,” and then uses such an exclusion to make ontological claims about the nature of reality.45 Such claims however forget the origin of concepts as “man-made extracts from the temporal fl ux.”46 Th ey therefore function to establish relatively stable patterns within this fl ux and do a disservice to the greater fullness of reality if we mistake them as fully comprehensive of the reality they select from. Gavin writes “percepts and concepts must be seen as melting into one another, neither of these, taken alone, gives us a complete picture of reality.”47 Concepts are as much a part of experience as percepts.
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Th is claim avoids contradiction when James more consistently develops a functional, non-entity based account of the concept, but this account itself depends upon an implicit process oriented metaphysics which understands activity and relation as ontologically prior to, and constitutive of, apparently stable objects or entities. Such a metaphysics undergirds a functional understanding of the way that concepts “play a vital role, enabling us to steer through experience by providing us with a map of relations.”48 It moreover denies the basic assumption of an ontology divided between the mental and physical and sees both as conceptual abstractions, rather than ontological givens, arising out of on-going relational activity. Since concepts have to function as rela-tional selections which cannot be categorically separated from their instantiation in experience, there is no longer a problem about their epistemic identity as somehow discordant with a more primary con-tinuity, as they function as patterns of activity within this continuity.
We have recounted the way in which James’s response to tensions inherent in his psychological description of ‘concepts’ operationalizes a more speculative and unconventional metaphysical framing in order to dissolve an apparently insoluble dichotomy. Such a move destabi-lizes a number of categories that are taken for granted in the Principles, notably, a distinction between mind and world and a delimitation of questions of their relation as belonging to the metaphysical. It is nota-ble therefore as an indication of the way that a problem that appears internal to the Principles outstrips the methodological bracketing James has emphasized there. James solves a problem which originally appears internal to his psychology by going outside of the psychology.
We should note here that our exegesis of James’s strategy has been primarily motivated to present its conceptual motivation and coher-ence rather than off er a full endorsement of its fi nal success. Indeed, one interesting further avenue of research to be pursued on this line involves the degree to which this turn to process does not necessarily resolve the formal question of discrete identity and continuity. It would be more accurate to describe it as shifting the terms of its appearance. If there is no longer the same kind of epistemic tension between concepts and percepts, there is nevertheless a question as to how to account for the unity of the locus of experience in what Whitehead calls an “actual occasion.”49 Th is new version of the formal tension is, I would tenta-tively suggest, exhibited in James’s return to the possibility of experi-ence ‘growing’ by discrete pulses in Some Problems.
For our purposes here however, the more relevant question might be said to remain methodological, though this time in terms of normative epistemic criteria. How can we reasonably evaluate the status of James’s speculative shift with regard to the question of verifi cation? What can we learn about the possible risks and benefi ts of such a speculative gam-bit, especially as framed against the empirically verifi able?
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4. Responsible Risk-Taking: Metaphysics and Science In attempting to reconcile James’s apparent inability to maintain a consistent boundary between metaphysics and empirical psychology in the Principles, Ignas Skrupskelis has off ered an important distinc-tion between metaphysical assumptions and metaphysical explana-tions.50 According to Skrupskelis, keeping this distinction in mind allows us to reconcile two seemingly contradictory claims in James: (a) psychology is impossible without metaphysics because there is no metaphysically neutral starting point and (b) in order to be sci-ence, psychology should exclude metaphysics.51 On this account, all scientifi c empirical inquiries require some (metaphysical) framing assumptions that exceed the directly verifi able, but should not appeal to metaphysical entities for explanatory purposes.52 Paying attention to this diff erence has the additional eff ect of stressing the provisional-ity of the distinction between psychology and metaphysics. As such, James maintains the possibility of a mature interaction between meta-physics and natural science. As Skrupskelis observes, James’s under-standing is therefore distinct from a narrow or reductive positivism and he aspires to a future in which “the new psychology also holds out a promise of a new and better day for metaphysics.”53 Th e story I recount above would then involve James becoming clearer on the non-empirical nature of his framing assumption of continuity in the Principles and moving to more transparently situate this claim in the later radical empiricism.
Contra to the worries of Hodgson, James therefore affi rms the importance of philosophical thinking in helping to identify and inves-tigate the manner in which framing assumptions may tilt the out-comes of empirical inquiry. Th e imperatives of James’s psychological study do not evacuate the eff ectiveness of philosophy, but do unsettle any presumption that philosophy can achieve satisfactory results with regard to the nature of the mind by merely a priori investigation alone. Even after James’s speculative turn, he remains critical of a certain kind of ‘bad metaphysics,’ namely, any which seeks transcendental a pri-ori principles without grounding them in observed empirical conse-quences. Clearly, James has in mind the manner in which dogmatic philosophical systems of the past have failed to check their concepts against the actualities of lived experience. However, this does not mean that James rejects the very practice of metaphysical thinking per se, but rather affi rms its importance in framing the manner in which empirical questions appear. His commitments to continuity and holism provide a case in point, since it is not clear that they can be completely reduced to the empirically verifi able. Nevertheless, James has not arrived at these commitments merely through a priori armchair reasoning, but takes them to be suggested by both phenomenological experience as well as experimental results. Th ey therefore involve an interpretation
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which, while not dogmatically a priori, nevertheless challenges eff orts at verifi cation.54
What does it mean to say that such framing assumptions are meta-physical? Given the controversy that this term accrued in the 20th century, contemporary readers might prefer to see James’s commit-ments as methodological presuppositions rather than metaphysical claims. Haddock Seigfried reads James’s radical empiricism precisely in this way, as a methodological postulate rather than a substantive ontological or metaphysical position, calling it a “radically empiri-cist hermeneutics” which “replaces a systematic investigation of being with interpretive strategies which both structure and refl ect concrete fi ndings.”55 Seigfried reads metaphysics in a strong sense – to earn the term, (or the epithet as the case may be), nothing else counts for her but systematic and formal system-building which seeks to disclose the ultimate principle of being as such. James’s affi rmation of a pluralism and his recognition of the structuring quality of selective interest as an individual ordering principle, therefore, for Seigfried, result in the impossibility of a traditional metaphysics as such – because there can be no totalizing perspective: “[James’s]. . .metaphysics fi nally becomes an anti-metaphysics, a philosophy of the process of appropriating the world, of weaving chaos into order, and not a disclosure of being as being.”56
While Seigfried’s reading is understandable, it presumes the unques-tioned standing of an ontological gap between minds and world, when it is just this gap which James’s speculative radical empiricism is posi-tioned to overcome.57 To be sure, the result is not a disclosure of being qua being, or claims of non-perspectival access to absolute knowledge, if these are the criteria we assume for metaphysics. Nevertheless, and while it is diffi cult if not impossible to establish fi nal and fi xed criteria to ground what counts as metaphysics distinct from method, tracing the development of James’s thought should help us see that this diffi culty is part of the very permeability of the boundary between assumptions and explanations. Depending on how we frame our understanding, depending, that is, what metaphysics we assume, whether tacitly or explicitly, the terms of a problem will appear diff erently. James’s brack-eting of “metaphysical” questions in the Principles is therefore also a tacit acceptance of the presumed common-sense substance metaphysics of minds and worlds, of things and thought. His insight is to see that questioning this tacit acceptance and constructing an alternative posi-tion changes the shape of the apparent problems which appear.
We can therefore hold onto James’s desire to reject metaphysical explanations which would dismiss the need for empirical inquiry, even as we also recognize that the boundary between explanation and assumption is often vague, and, importantly, that our assumptions will often infl uence what we take to be in need of explanation. Th is results
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in the necessity of a horizontal view of the relationship between inqui-ries in the special sciences and metaphysical speculation in philosophy. Rather than one trumping the other, both need each other as critical challenges to any presumed adequacy or self-evidence of interpretation. Th is however may necessitate a shift in our understanding of the term metaphysics. In the case of James, while his commitment to continuity constitutes a central intuition about the nature of ‘how things hang together’, it need not be construed as representing a fi nal and absolute claim about the nature of the universe independent of empirical data.58 Such intuitions represent starting points for inquiry rather than ulti-mate ending points.
Th is distinction allows us to respect James’s worry about the phil-osophical habit of constructing irresponsibly closed metaphysical sys-tems, while also acknowledging the role that hunches or intuitions about the nature of reality play in directing inquiry. Recognizing that such intuitions are not metaphysically neutral is important insofar as fram-ing or guiding intuitions may not themselves come into view within an inquiry focused upon any one particular problematic. Th is is not to say that we need a fi nal and worked out metaphysics in order to go for-ward, but only that the ways in which we go forward, what appears to us as a problem or not, are framed by intuitions we have of how things ‘hang together’. Th e crucial departure from the absolutist kind of meta-physics James deplores is in maintaining a sense of provisionality and revisability in light of additional empirical data. Nevertheless, provi-sionality and revisability should not be seen as criteria that preclude admitting of the metaphysical nature of a framing supposition. Even if these claims are best understood as advancing metaphysical intuitions rather than absolute truths, they are neither ontologically neutral nor substantively extraneous. In Jamesian terms, they can potentially make a diff erence in the outcomes of our analyses.
University of [email protected]
REFERENCES
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Fullerton, George Stuart, Cattell, J. Mckeen, and Baldwin, J. Mark. “Th e Psycho-logical Standpoint.” Psychological Review 1.2 (1894): 113–33.
Gavin, William J. “William James and the Indeterminacy of Language and ‘Th e Really Real.’” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. 50 (1976): 208–218.
———. William James in Focus: Willing to Believe. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013.
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James, William. Th e Principles of Psychology. Vol. 1. New York: Dover Publications.1950.
———. Pragmatism. Ed. Fredson Bowers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1975.———. Essays in Radical Empiricism. Ed. Frederick Burkhardt. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP: 1976.———. Th e Writings of William James: a Comprehensive Edition. Ed. John J.
McDermott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977a. ———. A Pluralistic Universe. Ed. Fredson Bowers. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard
UP, 1977b.———. Some Problems of Philosophy. Ed. Frederick Burkhardt. Cambridge, MA.:
Harvard UP, 1979.Klein, Alexander. “Divide et Impera! William James’s Pragmatist Tradition in the
Philosophy of Science.” Philosophical Topics 1 (2008): 129–66. Myers, Gerald E. William James, His Life and Th ought. New Haven: Yale UP,
1986.———. “Pragmatism and introspective psychology” in Putnam, Ruth Anna. Th e
Cambridge Companion to William James. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge UP, 1997: 11–25.
Natsoulas, Th omas, “On the Temporal Continuity of Human Consciousness: Is James’s Firsthand Description, After All, ‘Inept’?” Th e Journal of Mind and Behavior 27.2 (2006): 121–147.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. Philosophical Writings of Peirce. Ed. Justus Buchler. New York: Dover Publications: 1955.
Seigfried, Charlene Haddock. William James’s Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York, 1990.
Sellars, Wilfrid. “Philosophy and the Scientifi c Image of Man”, in Science, Percep-tion and Reality. New York: Th e Humanities Press, 1963.
Skrupskelis, I. K. “James’s Conception of Psychology as a Natural Science.” His-tory of the Human Sciences 1 (1995): 73–89.
Stengers, Isabelle. “William James an Ethics of Th ought?” Radical Philosophy, 157 (2009): 9–19.
Strawson, G. “Th e Self ”, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol. 4, (1997): 405–28.West, Cornel. Th e American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism.
Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. New York: Th e Free
Press, 1967.———. Process and Reality. New York: Th e Free Press, 1978.
NOTES
1. West 1989, 55. 2. Bordogna 2008, 7–10. 3. Explicit treatments of variations on this problem include : “Th e
One and the Many” in Pragmatism, “Th e Continuity of Experience” in A Pluralistic Universe and “Th e One and the Many” in Some Problems of Philosophy.
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4. If the earlier James of our focus in this paper is worried about a lack of proper theoretical attention to the psychological experience of continuity and vagueness, the more philosophical James in Some Problems is worried that a thorough-going experiential continuity can’t account for the equally forceful experiential sense of novelty.
5. Myers 1997, 16. 6. Stengers 2009 articulates this quality in terms of a Jamesian
“Ethics of Th ought” in which James consistently resists the tendency of the expert to hide or deny thought’s consequences by a claim to pure abstraction or objectivity. James’s operative principle is to include as many diff erent sources of evidence as possible. Charlene Haddock Seigfried also notes this feature of James’s thought: “James consistently applies the methodological postulate that no one point of view can ever encompass the fecundity of reality and that a plurality of points of view is necessary for disclosing more real possibilities of experience” (Seigfried, 1990, 163).
7. James 1950a, 197.8. Ibid., 402.9. As William Gavin has helpfully observed, the commitment here
is to an image of consciousness as fundamentally passive receptivity which therefore fails to account for the activity of consciousness as a process of selective attention. Gavin therefore argues that “from a metatheoretical . . .perspective, [Principles] needs to be viewed as an interpretive text and not just as a descriptive one” (Gavin, 2013, 19). Gavin’s reading is consistent with the argument advanced above, but the orientations and aims are diff erent. Th at is, here I am seeking to show how James has not yet fully determined what Gavin chooses to call the “latent content” of the Principles. Th is lack of determination is revealed in the deep tensions that this paper closely investigates. However, the outcome of this investigation is quite similar to Gavin’s reading, insofar as it is the more determined emergence of this issue which leads James to his methodological shifts.
10. Klein 2008, 129–66. 11. James 1950a, 184.12. Ibid., 346.13. Klein 2008, 150.14. Gavin 1976, 208–11.15. James 1950a, 461.16. Ibid., 459.17. Ibid., 467. While particular and individual conceptions are for
James immutable, this does not mean that new conceptions cannot arise. Insofar as the fl ow of experience itself is made up of change, the possibility of new conceptions is granted: “New conceptions come from new sensations, new movements, new emotions, new associations, new
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acts of attention, and new comparisons of old conceptions, and not in other ways” (ibid.).
18. Ibid., 466.19. Ibid., 462.20. Ibid., 467.21. Ibid., 459.22. Ibid., 459.23. Ibid., 261–213.24. Ibid., 254.25. Ibid., 276.26. Such a version would think of stable and eternally fi xed ‘con-
cepts’ as atomistic simple identities out of which more complex objects of thoughts and meanings are built. Th is is clearly untenable if James is going to maintain any semblance of consistency since he has gone to such lengths to expose Humean associationism for its denial of the feeling of continuity and connection unifying thought (James 1950a, 350–53).
27. James 1950a, 230.28. Ibid., 233.29. Ibid., 236.30. James doesn’t deny our experiences of sameness, but only denies
that such experiences can be linked to purely identical body-states: “Th ere is no proof that the same bodily sensation is ever got by us twice. . . . What is got twice is the same OBJECT. We hear the same note over and over again; we see the same quality of green, . . .etc.” (231). Th is is a good example of a point at which James’s desire to maintain a distinction between psychological claims and metaphysical claims breaks down, as the status of the ‘sameness’ of these objects, which would seem to be necessarily external, is precisely what is at stake.
31. In the ‘Stream of Th ought’ chapter James makes a similar epis-temic point with regard to sameness and identity, though he is not yet utilizing the language of ‘conceptions’ in the strict sense: “Sameness in a multiplicity of objective appearances is thus the basis of our belief in realities outside of thought” (James 1950a, 272). Sameness functions strategically as a condition of the possibility of knowing an external non-mental world.
32. Gavin’s insightful distinction between the “latent” and the “man-ifest” content of James’s texts is a framing heuristic utilized through the entirety of his recent monograph on James. See Gavin 2013, xii.
33. Bordogna 2008, 79–90. 34. Ibid., 81. Given James’s subsequent development, it is clear that
his distinction was not intended to devalue philosophy, but rather to challenge the hegemony of a certain construal of philosophy, especially insofar as this construal had hindered investigation into the mind.
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35. Fullerton 1894, 128–131. 36. Bordogna 2008, 84–5. 37. Bordogna 2008, Skrupskelis 1995. 38. James 1967, 168. 39. James 1976, 106. Th e quotes that follow are all translations into
English taken from James 1905 talk delivered in French at the Fifth International Congress of Psychology in Rome. Th is talk is included in the ERE as “La Notion de Conscience” or “Th e Idea of Consciousness.”
40. Here, James confi nes himself to citing this diffi culty as a conse-quence of a dualistic framing in the emerging conception of psychology as a natural science. However, by the time of the lectures of A Pluralistic Universe, James has been led to recognize that the disjunctive framing of this issue is itself a consequence of deeply held ordering assumptions with regard to the relation of exclusive disjunction and the law of the excluded middle. Th is leads him to formulate his famous “trilemma” and to give up what he calls an exclusively “intellectualist logic” in chapter 5 of that text (James 1977b, 83–101).
41. Ibid., 107.42. Ibid.43. Th is is a widespread view, and one with much good evidence
to recommend it. Seigfried refers to it as James’s “Usual hermeneutical practice of developing the strengths and weaknesses of two extreme positions when interrogated as to their value for life – and then off ering a mediating position” (Seigfried 1990, 395). West, whose chief focus and concern is James’s moral and social philosophy, reads this tendency more critically: James’s “middle-of-the-roadism . . . attempts primar-ily to dissolve [dualisms] by combining the best of each, rejecting the rest, and affi rming a protean pluralism that occupies middle space” (West 1986, 57). For West, the political consequences of this method are invariably tied to an overly harmonious optimism which cannot eff ectively challenge the status quo. A helpful distinction here might be made between James’s epistemological risk-taking, in which a radi-cal new view is constructed, not simply chosen as a medium between existing options, and his ethical pluralism, which does seek to navigate polarizing demands by appealing to middle grounds. However, to the extent that such grounds must sometimes be created, the point stands.
44. As Whitehead writes, James’s radical empiricism and its atten-dant denial of the substantiality of consciousness begins a “new stage in philosophy” in marked departure from the dominance of the Cartesian and Kantian assumptions of the previous two hundred and fi fty years (Whitehead 1967, 143–145). Whitehead additionally observes that the focus of James’s shift involves the distinction between ‘entity’ and ‘func-tion’, though he notes that the ambiguity of the language can dull the radicality of the diff erence, since a ‘function’, in an abstract way, could be thought of as an ‘entity’ (as could anything, as Whitehead notes.)
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Whitehead drolly observes, “Obviously, this is not what James had in mind” (ibid.) Whitehead’s announcement that James has “entirely alter[ed] the lighting” of the problem of the relationship between mind and world refers to the radical inversion from a substance oriented metaphysics to one that sees processes (functions) as paradigmatic.
45. James 1977b, 32. 46. Ibid., 99.47. Gavin 1976, 209. 48. Gavin 1976, 210. 49. Whitehead, 1978.50. Skrupskelis 1995, 73–89. 51. Ibid., 73.52. In Alexander Klein’s language, the framing assumptions are
domain-specifi c ‘ontological agreements’ that are features of the respec-tive special science in question, rather than assumptions about the a priori nature of the universe.
53. Skrupskelis 1995, 78.54. Th e seeming diffi culty of verifying the continuity claim is illus-
trated by contemporary philosophers of mind who oppose it. Galen Strawson has argued that the introspection which serves as the source of James’s claim of mental continuity does not match his own experience of consciousness, and instead asserts that “When I am alone and think-ing, I fi nd that my fundamental experience of consciousness is one of repeated returns into consciousness from a state of complete if momentary unconsciousness. . . . Th e situation is best described, it seems to me, by saying that consciousness is continually restarting. Th ere isn’t a basic substrate (as it were) of continuous consciousness. . .” (Natsoulas 2006, 123; Strawson 1997).
55. Seigfried 1990, 326.56. Ibid., 352.57. Th is is a common diffi culty with approaching the radicality
of James’s radical empiricism. Consider another prominent reader of James, Gerald E. Myers. With regard to “pure experience,” Myers asks: “His theory never adequately answers the troublesome question of why, if these distinctions [subject and object] do not characterize initial experiences, we nevertheless fi nd them retrospectively.” (Myers 1986, 309). Th is question, in itself a good one, presumes that James’s radical empiricism is exclusively an epistemological position. I am suggesting however that the epistemological position is most charitably considered if we recognize that there are substantial ontological components to it as well. As such, Myers has not gone far enough in understanding the way in which the functional account of experience can under-cut the framework he is presuming, notably that of the independent exis-tence of subjects and objects. Th at is, Myers hasn’t adequately taken on the process elements implied by James’s move to postulate a ‘pure
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experience’ metaphysically. Th is sentence is telling: “Th e doctrine of pure experience does not deny that minds and bodies exist; it denies only that the diff erences between them are ultimate and unanalyzable” (ibid.). In this case, it really does depend on what we mean by ‘bodies’, ‘minds’ and ‘exist.’ James is precisely denying that ‘bodies’ and ‘minds’ exist, if they are construed as independent substantial entities rather than transactional processes.
58. Peirce, for example understands the relation between the meta-physics of continuity and subsequent inquiry in just this fashion: Synechism (continuity) is not “an ultimate and absolute metaphysical doctrine; it is a regulative principle of logic, prescribing what sort of hypothesis is fi t to be entertained and examined” (Peirce 1955, 355/ CP 6.169–73). ‘How things hang together’ is an allusion to Sellars: “Th e aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term” (Sellars 1963, 1).
