James’ and Jamesian Views of Intentionality and Truth

Abstract

William James’ pragmatism is often dismissed by contemporary philosophers. In my dissertation I show that Jamesian pragmatism can do good philosophical work and is worth taking seriously by elucidating and defending James’ views of intentionality and truth, and by drawing from James’ pragmatist methodology to develop James’ ideas with greater thoroughness and rigor. The two major features of James’ pragmatist methodology that I rely upon are i) a commitment to understanding concepts such that every application of the concept comes with some experiential difference obtaining relative to the concept not applying, and ii) a commitment to centering humanity and human interests in philosophizing and understanding concepts in such a way as to make clear what role the concepts play in our lives and why they matter to us. I develop a Jamesian account of intentionality by drawing from James’ remarks about conceptual knowledge. James’ key move is to link a subject to the object of their knowledge not by backward-looking causal chains capturing some causal impact the object has made on the subject, but by forward-looking “chains of experience” capturing the subject’s ability to lead themselves from a thought of the object to a perception of the object. By connecting a subject’s thinking of an object to a genuine ability they have to orient themselves to the object’s location, we ensure that our understanding of intentionality makes clear why intentionality matters to us: to be able to think of something is to have a practically significant ability relating to that thing. James’ view of truth is anti-realist, entailing that truths are not determined by the objective facts of the world. James’ neutral monist metaphysics deny that there is an objective, mind-independent world at all, but I take James’ metaphysical commitments to be independent of his understanding of truth and develop a Jamesian view of truth compatible with a common sense understanding of the world as objective and mind-independent. I understand a Jamesian anti-realist view of truth as involving a commitment to two principles. First, that representational states are prior to representational content. Second, that the accuracy of a representation is constituted by factors internal to the experience of the representers. The first principle entails that all representations are of our own making, which opens the door to arguing that the accuracy of our representations can only be determined by our own standards and abilities, as suggested by the second principle. I defend the two principles and show how they follow from a Jamesian pragmatist methodology. I offer a heterodox reading of James’ anti-realist view of truth, arguing that James’ understanding of truth is closely related to his understanding of taking true, i.e. believing. I suggest that since to believe a claim is to believe it to be true, James understands claims about truth as claims about what is believed or would be believed under certain conditions, and that in particular James approximates the objectivity and eternality that we associate with truth by equating truth with long-term consensus of belief. James offers little detail on these matters, so I develop a rigorous characterization of long-term consensus of belief to clarify what a Jamesian view of truth entails, and to show that Jamesian pragmatism works.