Class Notes 4/5

Notes House of Wits 4/5/10
Professor Jefferson, Day II

Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark: A brief for close reading

James [empiricist psychologist and philosopher] mis[?] “reads” Peirce [Logician and “scholastic realist”]
Sequence of texts [reculer pour mieux sauter= back up in order to gather haunches so as to leap more effectively forward]:

I.      Peirce “Fixation of Belief” [1877] only p. 4-8
Doubt-belief theory of inquiry: 3-4,
4 methods of “fixing belief”: “method of tenacity” 4-5, 7-8.
“Method of authority”: 5,7
“A priori method” : 5-6, 7
“method of science [Peirce as “scholastic realist”]: 6-7, 8

“How to Make our Ideas Clear” [1878]
His main points, 3-5. Peirce on Realism and the method of science: 9.

II.     James, “Philosophical Conceptions…”[1989]: 348 “sensations”- pragmatism “expressed more broadly” [349- implications?]
God talk [with apologies to the devout]: 350-354; back to [what he considers] the basics: 360-362

What Pragmatism Means [1907]
376-377: famous squirrel example
377-378: recycled from “Philosophical Conceptions…”
379-380: characterizations of pragmatism, departs from Peirce in authoring a pragmatic “theory of truth”
381-383-384: non Peircian notes
385: pragmatism characters

NOTA BENA (note well) James; saving [but oft ignored] qualifications [387, 389]
His definition of truth [388]
James self-discloses [389-390]

Paul Jefferson:
Reconciling religious beliefs with modern science (which increasingly became a model of trustworthy knowledge and acquired increasing cultural authority) is difficult because every aspect of late 19th century-WWII represented this country’s modernist coming of age (which includes the growing assumption that social policy/politics should be grounded on science and solid foundations for beliefs)

If you seek to approach James without attending to what the man thought/pragmatism, you’re dealing with Hamlet without the prince of Denmark… you can’t do it. You’ve got to be bored with it, but you’ve got to do it.

Texts are an essential foundation for understanding pragmatism and the ways in which James  (a pragmatist) agrees with Peirce and differs from him on the other hand.

The Beauty of Intellectual History: I came of age studying pragmatists, wrote PhD thesis on pragmatists, learned how to think by going to the school of the Pragmatists… Holmes Jr, Dewey, the richness of the members, the range of events coming across, gave an incredibly condensed lesson on human nature. Pragmatism is making itself known in every intellectual discipline of modern life. Another route on how to think about thinking has been through studying the history, sociology, and philosophy of the natural sciences.


Let’s go back to an absolutely fundamental text that James himself doesn’t give enough attention to. James quite properly cites the beginning of pragmatism as Peirce’s How to Make Our Ideas Clear, but let’s return to Fixation of Belief: insight into the syntax of great thinkers, how their minds are structured, but more, understanding that these thinkers yield ideas about thinking that are more than contingent and time-bound, that give us insight into the nature and syntax of the people we are studying as well as ourselves. This is often the case with the oft-overlooked Fixation of Belief.
What he outlines (post-Darwinian), is the famous doubt-belief theory of inquiry. Darwin brought humans within the horizon of evolutionary science, and all the things that classical philosophers thought made us unique (human capacity for thought/language/ etc) and Darwin brought human beings back into the horizon of understanding the natural/social/human world. That perspective enabled the pragmatists to understand capacity for thought/language/recollection/inquiry/research and see this as an emergent evolutionary phenomenon: thinking is essential and required for productively making sense of/thriving in our environment.