Rachael's Final Project Proposal

Rachael Dziechciarz
Research Paper Proposal
March 3, 2008

The general topic area that I will be working on is Pragmatism and social/political progressive movements. More specifically, I will focus on pragmatism and democracy. I am going to do this using option one.
The pragmatist position on democracy is that it is a process of experiences that the people within the democratic society are constancy learning. Democracy is a process, like learning and education, which has no end in sight. It is the way community goes about the learning process collectively. Also, democracy is one of the tools that is necessary in order for the “Great Community” to be achieved.
The pragmatists use the experiences of democracy that have been learned to continue the quest for better experiences. I think that the pragmatists want to find an objective way to practice democracy, which will lead to a society where individual and social goals are achieved simultaneously. One of the issues with democracy is that the people that have decision-making power are not as objective as they should be, and this leads them to use democracy as a way to achieve their political ends. As stated earlier, democracy never has an end, and should be viewed as a combination of experiences that should be continuously called into question.
Democracy doesn’t have to an abstract ideal, but can be implemented in such a way as to bring about true communication among people in the same society. When people learn to communicate with one another effectively, selfish interests become shared interests too, which creates a win-win situation for everyone involved. Furthermore, I would like to claim that the closer society gets to true democracy across the world, using the pragmatic method, the more chance there will be for stability and peace to reign over destruction and war.
Right now, I know that I will be using many ideas that came from John Dewey. This is because he developed clear ideas about how pragmatism fits in with the concept of democracy. I will definitely use his “Search for The Great Community,” and probably also “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy.” Another pragmatist thinker that I will incorporate into my paper is Ralph Waldo Emerson. I think that his article titled “Self-Reliance” has many ideas about how a society should act. I think Dewey may have taken some ideas from Emerson’s work, although I will admit that Emerson has some extreme views that I won’t include to support my topic.

Top 10 titles that concern my topic area:
(1) Democratic hope: pragmatism and the politics of truth by Robert B. Westbrook (BOOK)
(2) Democracy and the claims of nature: critical perspectives for a new century by Ben A. Minteer (BOOK)
(3) Pragmatic moral realism: a transcendental defense by Sami Pihlstrom (ELECTRONIC RESOURCE)
(4) Judging under uncertainty: an institutional theory of legal interpretation by Adrian Vermeule (BOOK)
(5) Public Administration as Pragmatic, Democratic, and Objective by David L. Hildebrand (JOURNAL ARTICLE)**(I’m definitely going to use this one!)
(6) Rediscovering the Taproot: Is Classical Pragmatism the Route to Renew Public Administration? by Patricia M. Shields (JOURNAL ARTICLE)
(7) Dangerous Supplements, Inventive Dissent, and Military Critiques of the Bush Administration’s Unitary Executive Theories by Marouf Hasian Jr. (JOURNAL ARTICLE)
(8) Principle vs. Pragmatism: Policy Shifts and Political Competition by M. Tavits (JOURNAL ARTICLE)
(9) The Challenge of Pragmatism for Constructivism: Some Perspectives in the Programme of Cologne Constructivism by Stefan Neubert and Kersten Reich (JOURNAL ARTICLE)
(10) Democracy After Liberalism: Pragmatism and Deliberative Politics by Michael J. McGandy (BOOK)

Chaz and Andrews Project Proposal

The topic which our project is centered on is Pragmatism and the environment applied to our hiking trip we will be conducting this spring break. We will be focusing on Dewey's approach to self in relation to the environment when separated from Dewey's notion of the “great community”. By placing ourselves outside of our community we will explore how this alters our perception of self through the environment, or “nature”. By applying pragmatism to our project our goals are two-fold. First we will take a hands on approach to the pragmatist theory or pragmatist view on self by placing ourselves in an environment beyond our normal routine. Second we will be exploring pragmatists views on conservation and sustainable developments based on observations during our journey and readings of Dewey and Bill Belleville's book Losing It All to Sprawl: How Progress Ate My Cracker Landscape.
We will be challenging the Pragmatist idea that self is intrinsically connected to one's community. Dewey states that “nature's place in man is no less significant than man's place in nature,” thus to explore this idea we want to change our place in nature expecting to see nature change place in ourselves so to speak. While Chaz agrees with Dewey's belief that the self is connected with the environment or nature, and Andrew feels that the self is a choice undetermined by the immediate surroundings. The discourse on this matter during our trip will be the basis for the project and how we come to discern our positions. Emerson's ideas of nature will also be incorporated to distinguish Dewey's ideas and how they relate to his and our own.
The sources of reading we will be using for our research are both the Emerson and Dewey passages from Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy as well as Bill Belleville's book. I think also Stuhr's Pragmatism, Postmodernism, and the Future of Philosophy could apply in some manner upon further investigation.

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.

Post 5

James account of our conscious experience is very much in keeping with the idea of continuity and flow of experience that is a recurring theme in pragmatism. He steps away from earlier modern philosophical accounts of the notion of consciousness. He doesn’t move away from rationalism and empiricism completely he tries to wedge his way in between the two. Originally under the Cartesian account of consciousness thought and thing itself were very distinct. The soul was a separate nonphysical entity which perceived objects and objects were those which were perceived. This clear distinction is blurred by James in his account of consciousness where the mind is more closely related to the objects and not something entirely separate. This point can be seen in his take on sensible objects in the Stream of Thought. He looks at consciousness as a flow and one that is defined by a fluxuating interaction between subject and object. He like Descartes finds that beginning inquiry with the senses is inherently problematic. Their reasons for this are different, Descartes saw that they had constantly deceived him but James finds this problematic for another reason directly related to empiricism. It is a common notion that the different conditions of the mind in all of their complexity are built up from simple sensations which are assumed to remain the same. He writes it seems like a bit of metaphysical sophistry to deny that simple sensations are consistent and that we experience them repeatedly. However, James argues that there is in fact no proof that the same body of sensation gotten by us twice only the same object.(164) Our conscious experience is continually changing and no impression lands on an unmodified brain. The impact of previous experience weighs heavy and the way we experience the same object is changed by this. Even things that change daily being hungery tired full mold each experience.
His account of conscious seems pretty adequate and he explains his theory well. It seems to me that experience certainly changes constantly and things I used to view in one way become considerable different as time goes on. Often times I look back on situations and thought I must have been a different person to have thought in the way I did. James puts it better then I can he says, “From one year to another we see things in new lights. What was unreal has grown real, and what was exciting is insipid. The friends we used to care the world for are shrunk into shadow” (166). He describes conscious experience in a very realistic and pragmatic way. However, I think he strays a little when applies his theory in arguing against Hume. Hume discovered a profound problem in the way we think about our experience and that is the relations between sensible objects; ie causation. There is really no evidence for observing the relationship between event A and B in the external world. We turn our conscious to the relationship and discover there is no actually feeling of a connection between these events. This James argues that since consciousness is continuous and not like a train or chain that we should feel the relations like and, by and but just as strongly as blue or the feeling of cold. I don’t see how asserting that consciousness is an unbroken stream can really effect Hume’s argument. The language they use only focuses on the substantive aspect of thought as opposed to the transitive. He really only attributes the failings of the way empiricist’s look at the conception of though as divided by names and categorization of individual objects.

Faith and belief are great concern to James and he looks to find justification for faith outside of establishing the truth of these beliefs. He sees the complexity of human experience and looks to understand the way in which we come to hold are beliefs. In the most pragmatic sense the beliefs that we hold are those which we believe to be useful to us. However not just any opinion or belief can be truly adopted by our own volition. They are propositions that we hold but they are not based on reason. James is concerned with religious belief and extends his thought into it. In matters of religion one has to choose to believe based on insufficient evidence as to whether God exists. He has a problem with Pascal making the justification for belief in God a mere probability. It may be the prudent choice to believe but not just anyone can start going to mass and magically believe in something they didn’t before. The belief has to be a live option it has to have meaning to you and trigger some emotional response that is set up by your previous experience. These faith based beliefs can not be assessed solely in terms by ones intellect when reason can not verify the belief. It is like truth we desire to know that there is truth and we want our minds to match up with this concept but certain truth can not be had when there is no absolute it seems our desires, and passions are left to lead us in our choice. Although there is not possibility of being certain we must use the evidence we have choose what to believe. James exclaims “Believe truth! Shun Error!” He believes that these are two separate laws and it is absolutely worth the risk to make the leap and accept the possibility of being wrong.
I think his discussion of faith based beliefs says a lot about his take on rationality. I think it is good because it is a realistic portrayal of the decision making process. We often seem to absolutists is a world that contains inherently fallible knowledge. It seems to me that it is an intrinsic aspect of human nature to desire clear knowledge and we must often take a belief and run with it without relying on reason alone. He leaves reason in the equation because we need it to guide is in choosing what to believe based on the experiential knowledge we have. There will always be contending solution to these issues and our individual prejudices and desires weigh in to the equation heavily. James says even of logicians “This very law which logicians impose on us...is based on nothing but their natural wish to exclude elements for which they, in there professional quality of logicians, can find no use” (233). Surely a logician would find problems with the description and they would argue they are doing this because reason guides them to do it. It seems common in every day life that we are forced to make choices between conflicting ideas that are marked by their under determination. This can even be seen in science which is thought to be an entirely objective discipline. For example Ptolemy’s Aristotelian world view or Kepler’s Neo-Platonist beliefs lead to conflicting accounts of the way our solar system behaved and where we are located in it. Also practical consequences weigh heavily in the science, Einstein found something peculiar in Newtonian dynamics and found space and time aren’t absolutes for now that doesn’t changed the expedient belief in this world view.

Post 5

Of all the pieces we've covered so far, James' "The Will to Believe", has two considerable (and interesting) surprises to offer.  The first of which, this essay appears to be written a nod towards the noble goal of clarity, something notably lacking in some of the previous essays we've tackled.  This is only surprising because the subject matter is, as one might ascertain from the title, faith.  If this is surprising, it is only because a significant amount of the material offered by the discipline of philosophy on the subject of God, tends to be well concealed in haze of poor analogies and circular arguments.  For proof, re-examine Meditation Three (which I did last night, in an attempt to explain the argument to a non-philosophy-student), a experience the agony of attempting definition all over again.

The second surprise in this essay is that James' openly acknowledges that a student of logic is less apt to admit or argue their faith, once they realize the near impossibility in the task.  This immediately reminded me of a statement Dr. Smaw made to a class of freshman philosophy students I witnessed last year.  He told them that, as newly minted logicians, they should avoid engaging in God arguments.  At any point, when the God card was put on the table, they should simply let it go.  From that point, it's impossible to continue logically.  This is surprising simply because it lacks the smattering of philosophical arrogance that usually accompanies a God/faith-related essay.  But then, James isn't really a philosopher, is he?

Those two things aside, James' actual essay approaches the subject from a, yes, truly pragmatic perspective (and one that perhaps only a psychologist could so casually execute).  He establishes the language of the essay, that is, the token words he's going to redefine for the purposes of his discussion.  Then he proceeds to declare an argument made by Pascal to be "dead", or Jamespeak, for one which has no sufficient grounding to appeal to us.  These distinctions are pleasantly practical ones, for they seem to examine faith much like a cultural anthropologist might, rather than a philosopher.  James' resurrects the Pascal argument moments later, however, to introduce the central thesis of his essay.

 

In the end, James' discussion here is really less about God and more about reconciliation.  The attempt to reconcile the absolutist nature of man with the empiricist tendency he may espouse.  James' spends an enormous amount of his time here, more or less setting up a practical, dare we say pragmatic, argument for the empiricist perspective.  Frankly, this essay might serve as an excellent primer for the argument, if only because it's so perfectly clear.  But James' real question, and the real purpose of the essay, is how to cope with the fact that man (by nature) seems to long for the absolute, even when he acknowledges the virtues of empiricism.  This essay seems to be more or less James' vehicle for attempting to explain how he might still consider himself an empiricist and yet a man of faith.  And, one must admit, the argument is good.  Perhaps it is only good because it is mercifully clear and lacks any sort of tricky absolutes (often hidden under the veil of empiricism).  James' simple argues that for man, faith can be quite pragmatic, because it offers for us a number of unrevealed benefits.  If we believe we may someday reap those benefits, we have acknowledged a pleasant possibility that may ultimately yield an enormous amount of good.  If the benefits of faith prove never to materialize, we've lost nothing from it except the possibility of having been mislead.  James' more or less bases his discussion on resolving the odds of belief.  In the end, he determines that there is no harm, and it is in fact practical, to believe.  The odds are positively split, but the alternative of pure disbelief will never yield any real good.  

It seems, in the end, a critique on the schools of empiricism that may reject faith based on a lack of immediately or conclusive evidence.  James' pleads with the empiricists to understand that a school of thought that would prevent an individual from acknowledging certain truths, should those truths appear evident, lacks the sort of freedom that should define it.  It's a good argument, despite the fact that some that there are some obvious flaws to that kind of reasoning.  But it's not really meant to be the sort of argument one is intended to critique or attempt to tear down to the best of the philosophic knowledges.  It's more of an internal justification.  Or at least I'm electing to view it as such.  The crux of his argument, that there is a practical purpose to weighing the odds on belief, has an odd sort of appealing practicality to it that I find fits extremely well within the pragmatist frame.   

post 5

Rob Hoffman

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.

Post 5 Presentation

William James’s work “The stream of thought” presents a fascinating piece that explores the physiology of the mind from a pragmatic standpoint. James’s begins his piece by stating that previous attempts to explore physiology were invalid because they started with sensations which he argues aren’t the basic building blocks of the mind. He also argues that a simple sensation doesn’t really exist. James argues that instead of sensations we must approach the mind from the stand point of thoughts. Thoughts, James’s argues go on through five distinct “characters”.

The first “character” that he refers to is the idea that “Thought tends to personal form”. By this James means that thought is localized with an individual conscious. Thought’s don’t leave Mike’s head and enter John’s, they don’t trade between consciousnesses, and they certainty don’t collide with one another from different consciousnesses. In fact James’s says that the divide between consciousnesses is one of the greatest gulfs in nature. James also says that thoughts can’t come into being without being associated with a personal consciousness.

James’s second “character” refers to the idea that thought is in constant change. James doesn’t mean that thoughts only have a limited duration. What he means is that thoughts can never reoccur precisely as they did the first time. In other word’s he’s saying that every thought has to be different. This concept really isn’t that surprising if you consider that even small changes can have a big impact on future events and that when something is carefully examined it is changed. James believes that sensations and thoughts only appear identical and repetitive because our mind averages them in order to bring order in a chaotic world. Another way of looking at this is too say that our mind isn’t able to tell the difference between two similar sensations and it only possesses the resolution to tell the difference between objects. This would be akin to looking at two different pieces of ocean from a distance and not being able to tell the difference between the two. One of the reason’s James gives for this is that past experiences ensure that future thoughts are processed in a different manner.

The third “character” of thought relates the fact that consciousness is a stream like flow rather than a choppy gap filled path. James describes this as “within each personal consciousness, thought is sensibly continuous.” To James this means that consciousness feels unbroken from the prospective of our mind, and that even after we sleep we can resume our previous stream of consciousness and only our own stream. He also infers that this means that thought ebbs and flows in a pattern of transitions that lead to conclusions. This means that the transitions between different thoughts are seamless and fluid with each thought leading to new thoughts and conclusions.

The fourth “character”, “thought appears to deal with objects independent of itself; that is, it is cognitive, or possesses the function of knowing” simply means that a single object is the target of many human thoughts and that the human conscious thinks about the object differently then it thinks about thoughts of the object.

The final “character”, “It is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks” refers to an idea that many people are unaware of. The idea is that we ignore most of the sensory inputs that are given to us and instead look for the inputs that are most important. A great example of this is driving and seeing red. When we see red it signals us to stop even if we aren’t paying attention to all the other details of what is happening around us. This idea also transcends art and philosophy because artists reject anything that doesn’t belong in their masterpiece and philosophers are in search of the supreme idea.