AndrewJohnson

I think the most important idea that I took from Jame's artical was the radical empiricism that the Pramatics seem to ascribe to. While in most of our discussions to this point about pragmatism we tried to place the philosophy somewhere between empiricism and rationalism. While this is certainly not a wrong way to see it, it seems to me that James, and pragmatism lean more to the empirical side than they do the rational side. James, like Peirce and Dewey (particularly Dewey) believes that we cannot ignore what we bring to the table when discussing our experience. We inevitably have prior opinions and notions that actually effect the way we see the world in a very real way, and directly effect the way we experience the world. This in turn reflects our notions of truth. Most critics would identify this as the area that James bridges empiricism and rationalism, asserting that while reason is extremely important, it is not unaffected by the experiences of the world that we bring to the table with us, and therefore the ideas of reason and experience are not entirely separate from one another. By in essence bridging this gap, James feels that he has created "a more familiar and less objectionable" form of empiricism. This explains why it seems that James is more kindred to this line of thought than to rationalism.

I have a couple issues with the James: the first being that I was never a fan of being different for the sake of different. It seems James goes out of his way to seperate Pramatism from other schools, so much so that it is almost damaging. He is almost trying too hard to create something new and totally American. While that is a small problem, I agree a little with Dan about some of the bigger problems. While I am changing in my opinions some, I am still distrustful of coherence theories of truth rather than correspondence. Not for any particularly new or interesting reasons, mainly for the classic critique that it seems an aweful lot like relativism to me.

While I have critiqued Pragmatism alot in this post, that doesn't mean I don't see it as an interesting school of philosophy with alot to offer. James' focus on the effect the observer has upon what he observes is an extremely important idea in philosophy and one that pragmatism certainly has right to claim as its own. Without this ideological invention education would be sadly different. I also agree with their focus on what is practical and effects us directly as being the most important. But here, like Rob, I see that classic church argument comming up. Peirce seemed to gloss over it in his essay as well, can we really know what is going to be important. It is not uncommon for things that at first seem irrelavent or useless to turn out to be very handy. If we abandoned every scientific inquiry that did not seem practical, would we have plastics, rubber or any number of things we enjoy in our everyday life. Plus in a deeper philosophical sense, what if Truth (with a capital T) is not practical or important to us. THe fact is there are moons around Jupiter, whether it effects us or not. ANd in our unceasing philosophical quest for truth we can't simply ignore that fact. In the future it may become very helpful to us, you never know.