If there is one person who has the deepest influence on the spiritual beliefs and values of Americans today, William James should be one of them. It was named one of the 100 people who influenced the United States in 2006 by The Atlantic.
James was a philosopher and a psychologist. He was one of the earliest experimental psychologists in the United States, elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1904, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1906, and published Principles of Psychology in 1890, which is the standard textbook for psychology in American universities. James is also a philosopher, he is the representative of the American "pragmatism philosophy", pragmatism philosophy is also known as the semi-official philosophy of the United States, but also the values of the bottom of today's Americans, today we will introduce the philosopher and psychologist's ideological views.
James published a masterpiece of pragmatism in 1907: Pragmatism. In this book, James points out that truth is not absolute, and that it changes with the circumstances of the times. Truth is formed depending on its practical utility. That is, if it can be adapted to the circumstances of the time, then it is the truth; if it is not suitable, then this truth will no longer exist, which is similar to Peirce's "useful is truth".
Philosophically, James developed empiricism into pragmatism, proposing a "pure empiricism," also known as a "thorough empiricist." In the traditional empiricist view, the specific sensory experiences that people perceive are separated from each other, such as the color of seeing, the smell of smell, the feeling of touching, and so on. Traditional empiricism holds that these experiences are separate and static, and then integrates the specific sensory experiences together to form a whole experience, but this integration obviously requires the role and processing of rational thinking. As the empiricist philosopher Berkeley said: Things are collections of ideas.
For example, when we see an apple, we need to integrate the intuition and experience of the apple's color, shape, smell and everything else, as well as our concept of apple, to form an intuitive experience of an apple. James saw this as a problem of traditional empiricism, an impure empiricism, because the process required rational participation. James proposed "radical empiricism", in which he saw the whole of things as experience itself, and the individual sensory elements were not independent and separate from each other, but a changing whole. He also believes that there is a primitive pure experience in the world, a fusion of reason and experience, and this pure experience is not formed by people's reflection, but exists before reflection, and this pure experience is in a flowing natural state, it is a stream of life.
In fact, here we can see that James actually integrated the traditional empiricism and rationalism, and this integrated philosophy is the philosophy of pragmatism. James said that pragmatist philosophy can maintain its religious character like rationalism, but at the same time maintain the richest and closest relationship with facts like empiricism. However, although James's pragmatism combined empiricism and rationalism, he still believed that philosophical theories were to be useful, and to judge whether a proposition was true or not, to see whether it was "useful", to see whether it could help us solve problems, whether it could benefit our lives. This is a typical "pragmatic" view of truth.
The pragmatic view of truth is different from the traditional view of truth, which has two kinds: one is the theory of truth conformity, and the other is the theory of truth fusion. Truth conformism holds that there is objective truth in the objective world, and to judge whether a point of view is true or not, it is enough to see whether it is consistent with objective facts, such as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west, and we see it like this every day, so this is a truth, and this view of truth is obtained from the "inductive method".
The theory of truth fusion holds that whether a proposition is true depends on whether it is integrated with the entire propositional system, that is, to judge whether a point of view conforms to the existing truth system in the past, and this view of truth is derived from the "deductive method". For example, we all know that everyone dies, and Socrates is human, so Socrates will die, and that conclusion is that it fits into a larger, more fundamental system of truth, so it is truth.
But James judged whether an idea is true from the question of whether it is useful or not, which is actually a bit counterintuitive, so why judge the truth by whether it is useful or not? For this is the only way to be more objective, on the one hand, our experience and reason are limited, and in reality we cannot distinguish between experience and reason, which is his "pure empiricism", or thorough empiricism. James once said, "I think there is only one origin in the world, and everything is made up of it, and I call it 'pure experience.'" He believes that everything with various prescriptive qualities is only the result of people's transformation of "pure experience". He argues that our experience is what we pay attention to, that there are always innumerable things that appear before my senses, but that as long as we have no interest in them, they cannot enter into my experience at all, and that my experience is what I pay attention to.
He also said that "reality is what I pay attention to" and that "the basis and origin of a reality are subjective, i.e., my own, from both absolute and practical point of view." It can be seen that in fact, James's "pure empiricism" is actually the subjective idealism of experience, which is a bit like the subjective idealist philosopher Bakeley said: "Existence is perceived", and the things that we can perceive in experience are real. The purification of experience, the more attention to the perceived experience of the moment, and more to the practical effects of practice, is the characteristic of James's pragmatic philosophy.
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