Criticism
James' doctrine has taken a lot of criticism. In 1907 University of Michigan Professor Alfred Henry Lloyd published "The Will to Doubt" in response, claiming that doubt was essential to true belief.
C.S. Peirce ends his 1908 paper 'A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God' complaining generally about what other philosophers had done with pragmatism, and ends with a criticism specifically of James' will to believe:
It seems to me a pity they should allow a philosophy so instinct with life to become infected with seeds of death in such notions as that of the unreality of all ideas of infinity and that of the mutability of truth, and in such confusions of thought as that of active willing (willing to control thought, to doubt, and to weigh reasons) with willing not to exert the will (willing to believe).
Walter Kaufmann wrote:
Instead of admitting that some traditional beliefs are comforting, James argued that "the risk of being in error is a very small matter when compared with the blessing of real knowledge", and implied that those who did not accept religious beliefs were cowards, afraid of risking anything: "It is like a general informing soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound" (Section VII). James' appeal depends entirely on blurring the distinction between those who hold out for 100 percent proof in a matter in which any reasonable person rests content with, let us say, 90 percent, and those who refuse to indulge in a belief which is supported only by the argument that after all it could conceivably be true.
Some specific objections to James' doctrine include:
- the necessity of positing a hypothesis without personally adopting it as a belief
- the epistemological problems of belief voluntarism
- success in the world verifies a belief, rather than restricting verification to predictive success
- the separation of belief adoption from truth and epistemic justification
James addresses objection (1) in a footnote of his "The Will to Believe" essay where he argues that for a chemist to devote years of his life to verifying a hypothesis, the chemist must also believe his hypothesis. However, the chemist adopting a hypothesis to guide years of study is certainly only a special case of hypothesis adoption. A more general defense of (1) could also be constructed from James' behaviorist theory of belief. James takes believing a proposition to consist in acting as if it were true, so if James considers testing a proposition as acting as if it were true to see if it leads to successful action, then James would be committed to seeing an act of hypothesis adoption as necessarily an act of belief adoption as well.
Objection (2) seems to presuppose the ability to will a belief. James believed that when evidence was insufficient to determine the truth or falsehood of a proposition, this uncertainty allowed a person to be able to will a belief by acting as if that belief were true. Objection (2) warrants further discussion over "voluntarism".
Objection (3) strikes at James' pragmatic theory of truth, which his will to believe doctrine seems to presume. James' main defense of his theory of truth is his claim that no other account of "truth" or "correspondence" or "agreement with reality" can be given except for the pragmatist account. James sees traditional accounts of truth as explaining one mysterious term ("truth") with nothing more than equally mysterious terms (e.g. "correspondence"). The only sense James believes we can make of the concept of "truth" is if we count as true the beliefs that lead us to perform actions that "agree" with the world. Those that fit with the world will lead to successful action, those that do not agree with the world will entail actions that lead to failure (e.g. if one believes he can fly, he'll jump off a building). With truth analyzed in this way, James sees no reason to restrict success to predictive success (objection (2)) and is fully comfortable with the fact that certain beliefs will lead one person to success in the world while failing someone else (objection (3)). However, this reply to both objections is not open to James since he explicitly claims that his will to believe doctrine does not depend on his pragmatist theory of truth.
Read more about this topic: The Will To Believe
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
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