Andrew's Post

A) I was actually very much intrigued by James concept of consciousness. This could partly be because he vamboozled me with his talk about secondary personalities and direct research on the nature if experience, or maybe because I have an inherent trust of him as a psychologist and a philosophy. Moreover, he captured my affinity for Buddhism with his second and third natures of thought (That it is continuous and always changing). For a mix of all these reasons, his ideas on consciousness really spoke to me. His notion of the ever changing self, one who can never experience the same sensation twice, even sensory stimulation by the same object, is also right up my alley and something that I held as a personal belief long before reading James. His philosophy, on this subject at least, was well organized, well argued and extremely compelling. For these reasons I consider his ideas about consciousness to be more that philosophically adequate, they are downright interesting.

James beliefs about reason on the other hand I was not so impressed by. Following from my vehement disagreement with a purely instrumentalist view of truth, I cannot allow myself to push a concept as important as reason to the realm of pure social construction. James feels that rationality is one more of the “lenses” which we develop to look at the world. He takes it off his perch as the central philosophical tool, and says that it, like everything else, cannot be approached with out us bringing along our experiences as well. It is therefore not perfect, not infallible and not the central method of us getting after truth. It is quite the opposite, a tool or lense that we can use to examine the world. But in using it we change it to fit our conceptions of what it should be. It is therefore not infallible and central to discovering truth, just another expedient concept that mankind has kept around for a long time.

Obviously if James does not agree with the notion of pure reason, he cannot agree with Descartes. James and Peirce have disagreed with Descartes on a number of issues and this is simply one more of them. Descartes would not be comfortable with James’ ideas of the subject bringing its experience to all facets of life, and the repercussions that has on truth. Furthermore, Descartes believed that reason was the paramount way which we could understand reality. James is not in line with this as all.

B) I think the most central tenet of James’ philosophy on belief stems from his “dead hypothesis” theory. I actually found this idea to be very profound, especially his use of it to answer the famous Pascals ontological argument. While it may seem rational to believe in god if the stakes are so high, one cannot bring themselves to believe in the Christian God if they are not already, on some level, programmed to do so. To a Muslim, the existence of the Christian God is a dead hypothesis, and there for not even a considerable option. After rightfully critqueing Pascals wager, things begin to take a turn for the worse.

James begins to use his theories to explain why one would accept a belief without that much evidence. TO show some reasons, James begins to go after science. Here he asserts that science too accepts many beliefs and faiths for similar reasons that religion does. Since scientists believe so strongly in their method, their hopes for certain outcomes effects their experience of them. This is much the same way that religious individual’s experience of the world is shaped by their belief in God. I think this is more of an attack on science than it is a support of belief, an attack that is not entirely unfounded, but one that does not prove belief and faith to be anymore acceptable that it is already seen to be by the rational community. Much like his previous attempts to explain faith, I find this one unconvincing.