1020 WILLIAMJAMES
In 1878, James married Alice Howe Gibbens, and they had five children. Although
James had experienced ill health as a young man (including smallpox contracted in
Brazil), his strength seemed to improve following marriage.
In 1890, William James published his first major work,The Principles of
Psychology. A two-volume work,Principleswas one of the first attempts to treat
psychology as a legitimate, experimental science, and it quickly became the standard
work in the field. James did intense philosophical research over the next seventeen
years and published his results:The Will to Believe and Other Essays(1897),
Varieties of Religious Experience(1902), and Pragmatism(1907). During this
period, he continued to teach at Harvard and to lecture throughout the United States
and Europe. Resigning from Harvard in 1907, James gave a series of lectures pub-
lished as A Pluralistic Universe(1909) and The Meaning of Truth(1909). James died
in 1910, and his last complete work,Essays in Radical Empiricism,was published
posthumously.
At the time of his death, James was considered the embodiment of American
philosophy. All accounts indicate that in addition to his large intellect and breadth of
learning, James was a generous, open-minded, and sociable person. One historian
of philosophy went so far as to describe him as “one of the sweetest men who ever
lived.”In his most famous work, the series of lectures published as Pragmatism,James
develops pragmatism as “a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise
might be interminable.” As a theory of meaning, pragmatism asks what practical
effects a belief has, whether that belief is tough- or tender-minded. To discover what
a belief meansis to find what difference such a belief makes “in concrete fact and in
conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere,
and somewhen.” The proper goal of philosophy is to discover “what definite differ-
ence it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula
or that world-formula be the true one.”
But James went further than Peirce and claims that pragmatism provides a theory
of truthas well as of meaning. Peirce had continued to hold a traditional
correspondence theory of truth: An assertion was true if it corresponded with a fact.
Instead, James says that an idea becomestrue if it allows the individual to gain
“satisfactory relations with other parts of our experience.” These relations are not
fixed—they are dynamic, just as our experience is dynamic.
Critics have pointed out that James’s theory of pragmatism could be used to make
any belief true—provided it produced beneficial results. As H.S. Thayer pointed out,
“Standards of veracity thus go slack on the very occasions in which, ordinarily, they
need the tightest rein, where passion and personal interests are most in play.”* This
fact, along with a number of other objections, led Peirce to change the name of his
philosophy to “pragmaticism,” to distinguish it from James’s thought. For his part,
James claimed that he was only presenting a way of discovering truth, not redefining it.*H.S. Thayer, “Pragmatism,” in D.J. O’Connor, ed.,A Critical History of Western Philosophy
(New York: The Free Press, 1964), p. 451.