a) I found James’ account of consciousness to be not only perfectly adequate, but also exceptionally modern. In his disavowal of the existence of consciousness, James is completing the logical steps that begin with a disagreement with Cartesian dualism. Kant, he feels, has argued effectively and convincingly against the notion of dualism, but there are still lingering characteristics in our beliefs and even in our language. Consciousness, James argues and many modern philosophers might agree with, is one such remnant of old, dualistic language. Paul and Patricia Churchland are perfect examples of contemporary philosophers of mind who have been arguing against the notion of consciousness for years.
Previously, consciousness was considered an absolute necessity. Surely we were thinking, and it very much appears that this thinking occurs within a matrix of consciousness. James, ever the pragmatist, views consciousness as something of an unnecessary innovation. It cannot be deduced from anything but itself (2), meaning it has no real effect on anything. Something with no effect is not inclined, given pragmatist views, to be seen as true or worth consideration. Instead of thinking of consciousness as some kind of special function of thinking, James would be likely to agree with the Churhlands and say that what appears to us as consciousness is only our rationalization of ongoing brainstates.
His new take on rationalism could be seen as a result of this new conception of consciousness, as well as a result of the pragmatist views of the limits of our experiential abilities. The fact that rationalism is tailored to get us through the day and is as likely to use false beliefs to do it as true beliefs is obvious in its departures from previous philosophical conventions.
I am actually not as opposed to his conceptualization of rationality as one might expect given my disagreement with him over truth. Again, his work is in line with modern thinking (in part because it helped create the modern thinking) in evolutionary psychology. While there are problems with evolutionary psychology, it does make a good point by stating that our rationality is evolved to keep us alive and make us successful at reproducing, but not necessarily to give us true understandings of the deeper mysteries of the universe. This makes rationality itself fallible, fulfilling one of the pragmatist conventions.
b) Continuing the trend of pragmatists utilizing scientific and experimental terminology, James uses the term “hypothesis” to refer to a proposition which we can either believe or not believe. Some of these hypotheses are ones which we have some natural inclination, no matter how small, to possibly accept; these are called live hypotheses. Dead hypotheses, on the other hand, are those which James claims a given individual does not have any real possibility of accepting. I personally question the existence of dead hypotheses, but as they are not absolutely essential to his final conclusions, I will overlook them for the time being.
James then goes into some detail about the nature of our beliefs and whether or not we have the capacity to change them. He agrees with the modern, anti-Cartesian position that we cannot simply begin to believe that “the two one-dollar bills in our pocket must be a hundred dollars” (231). We can say such things, but to accept it as a belief would undermine much of our coherence view of what we know. To this end, he uses the example of Pascal’s wager and Pascal’s famous conclusion that to bring ourselves to believe in religious doctrine in which we do not currently believe, we need simply to spend enough time around it and act for long enough as though we believe it. James includes Pascal’s wager so that he might undermine and ridicule it. He claims that this type of belief will never actually come to fruition, for the nonbelievers who try to convert themselves will find that the religious convictions were always a dead hypothesis for them (232).
While reliance on the concept of a dead hypothesis is troubling enough, James then begins establishing his justification for believing in unsupported hypothesis on what I consider to be rather shaky ground. He claims that by our nature, we are inclined and even required to “decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot be decided on intellectual grounds” (234). Using this, James then goes on to begin making justifications for self-fulfilling prophecies and hypotheses for which we cannot find proper evidence until we have accepted them. He argues that this is just as in the sciences; he claims that if scientists had not adopted hypotheses that they were trying to get confirmed, we would not have made nearly as much scientific progress as we have. He goes on, “The most useful investigator, because the most sensitive observer, is always he whose eager interest one side of the question is balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest he become deceived” (237).
This idea of science flies in the face of everything that science has espoused for the last century. Experiments are not conducted with the hope of a certain outcome; the ideal scientist is not committed to one outcome, but rather open to any possibility. Psychology has been especially firm about this point. The experimenters themselves are often kept as totally in the dark as possible about the experiment so as to not allow their personal biases to influence the outcome (or perceived outcome) of the experiment.
These same objections undermine the end of his line of argumentation. James is trying to justify adopting evidentially unsupported hypotheses by claiming that, similarly to the scientist who favors one side, we might actually need to have adopted the beliefs in order to find evidence for them. This is the worst kind of science, and likewise it is the worst kind of epistemological investigation. I think James is assuming that we would not be swayed by our personal opinion or desire to find evidence, even if we had to confabulate it, for our unsupported beliefs; if this is the case, though, James fails to understand human psychology very well. It is psychologically difficult to maintain unsupported beliefs, and the human mind will find reasons, no matter how bad, to support it if there are none.
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