William James, the topic of this morning’s program, is one of America’s greatest philosophers. His career spanned the turn of the Twentieth century; he actually was teaching at Stanford at the time of the 1906 earthquake, and wrote an interesting essay about his experiences and feelings during the quake.

James was a precursor to contemporary philosophers, in that he was really a cognitive scientist / philosopher. He was inbothdepartments at Harvard. His two-volumePRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGYwas the bible of psychologists at the time. It still makes fascinating and rewarding reading. His bookTHE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, which is a combination of philosophy, psychology and sociology, virtually originated the serious study of the psychology of religion.

As a philosopher, James is best known for pragmatism. I think there are two sides to pragmatism, one pretty plausible, one not so plausible

似是而非的一面是他的实用主义意义理论。詹姆斯用一个故事说明了这一点。一些营员正在就这种情况发生争论。一只松鼠正绕着树朝某个方向跑。一个人正沿着同一方向绕着树跟着松鼠。很明显，松鼠和男人都在绕着树走。但是这个人是在绕着松鼠走吗?它肯定是，因为它在绕一个圈，松鼠就躺在里面。但他肯定不是，因为他总是盯着松鼠的后背。如果你绕着一只松鼠转，你首先会看到它的背面，然后是侧面，然后是正面，等等……

You can see that James hung around with a very intellectual crowd. Apparently, instead of drinking beer and talking about sports, or movies, or even politics, they chose to discuss this rather arcane subject. Anyway, according to James, there was a spirited argument, about whether it was true or not that the man went around the squirrel. But James pointed out that the two hypotheses --- that the man goes around the squirrel and that he does not --- don't lead to different observable consequences.

So he asked his friends: what evidence, what observation, would show that one hypothesis was correct and the other incorrect. And the couldn't come up with anything. So they were really arguing about nothing.The pragmatic theory of meaning points out that both hypotheses have the same observable consequences; or, as one might put it, they both do the same work in predicting the future. So they have the same meaning and the argument is empty.

这类似于休谟所说的，以及后来的哲学家，如卡尔纳普所说的意义可验证理论。一个句子的意思基本上就是能证明它是正确的观察结果。威廉·詹姆斯是早期经验主义者如休谟和现代经验主义之间的桥梁。休谟寻找一种观念的意义，或者在一种观念产生的原因中寻找信仰，即产生这种观念的“感觉印象”。20^thcentury empiricists, following James, look to later sense-impressions, the sense-impressions you will expect to have, if the belief is true.

我不认为意义的实用主义理论能解决我们所有的问题，但它有一些貌似合理的东西。在我看来，真理的实用主义理论就不能这样说了。This is the idea that what makes a belief true is that itworks. Here’s a quote:

Truths are goods because we can "ride" on them into the future without being unpleasantly surprised. They "lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse. They lead away from eccentricity and isolation, from foiled and barren thinking"

This seems to me to have things just backwards. If you hold true beliefs you won’t be surprised by experience. But the lack of surprise isn’t what makes the beliefs true. It’s their truth that accounts for the lack of surprise. At any rate, this dubious idea gave James an opening for beliefs like immortality and God; these beliefs may help your life go well …. But that doesn’t, in my humble opinion, make them true.

Our guest will be Russell Goodman from the University of New Mexico, who can take us a little deeper, and perhaps make James theory of truth a little more plausible.