Ideas from 'The Sentiment of Rationality' by William James [1882], by Theme Structure

[found in 'Selected Writings of William James' by James,William (ed/tr Bird,Graham) [Everyman 1995,0-460-87557-4]].

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1. Philosophy / A. Wisdom / 1. Nature of Wisdom
It is wisdom to believe what you desire, because belief is needed to achieve it
                        Full Idea: Clearly it is often the part of wisdom to believe what one desires; for the belief is one of indispensable preliminary conditions of the realisation of its object.
                        From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.43)
                        A reaction: Roughly, action is impossible without optimism about possible success. This may count as instinct, rather than 'wisdom'.
1. Philosophy / D. Nature of Philosophy / 1. Philosophy
All good philosophers start from a dumb conviction about which truths can be revealed
                        Full Idea: Every philosopher whose initiative counts for anything in the evolution of thought has taken his stand on a sort of dumb conviction that the truth must lie in one direction rather than another, and a preliminary assurance that this can be made to work.
                        From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.40)
                        A reaction: I would refer to this as 'intuition', which I think of as reasons (probably good reasons) which cannot yet be articulated. Hence I like this idea very much, except for the word 'dumb'. It is more like a rational vision, yet to be filled in.
1. Philosophy / E. Nature of Metaphysics / 3. Metaphysical Systems
A complete system is just a classification of the whole world's ingredients
                        Full Idea: A completed theoretic philosophy can never be anything more than a completed classification of the world's ingredients.
                        From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.23)
                        A reaction: I assume this is not just the physical ingredients, but must also include our conceptual scheme - but then we must first decide which is the best conceptual scheme to classify, and that's where the real action is. [He scorns such classifation later].
2. Reason / A. Nature of Reason / 5. Objectivity
A single explanation must have a single point of view
                        Full Idea: A single explanation of a fact only explains it from a single point of view.
                        From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.23)
                        A reaction: I take this to imply that multiple viewpoints lead us towards objectivity. The single viewpoint of an expert is of much greater value than that of a novice, on the whole.
2. Reason / B. Laws of Thought / 6. Ockham's Razor
Our greatest pleasure is the economy of reducing chaotic facts to one single fact
                        Full Idea: Our pleasure at finding that a chaos of facts is the expression of single underlying fact is like a musician's relief at discovering harmony. …The passion for economy of means in thought is the philosophic passion par excellence.
                        From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.21)
                        A reaction: We do, though, possess an inner klaxon warning against stupid simplistic reductions. Reducing all the miseries of life to the workings of the Devil is not satisfactory, even it it is economical. Simplicities are dangerously tempting.
7. Existence / E. Categories / 2. Categorisation
Classification can only ever be for a particular purpose
                        Full Idea: Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose. Conceptions, 'kinds', are teleological instruments.
                        From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.24)
                        A reaction: Could there not be ways of classifying which suit all of our purposes? If there were a naturally correct way to classifying things, then any pragmatist would probably welcome that. (I don't say there is such a way).
14. Science / A. Basis of Science / 1. Observation
Scientific genius extracts more than other people from the same evidence
                        Full Idea: What is the use of being a genius, unless with the same scientific evidence as other men, one can reach more truth than they?
                        From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.40)
                        A reaction: This is aimed at Clifford's famous principle. He isn't actually contraverting the principle, but it is a nice point about evidence. Simple empiricists think detectives only have to stare at the evidence and the solution creates itself.
14. Science / A. Basis of Science / 6. Falsification
Experimenters assume the theory is true, and stick to it as long as result don't disappoint
                        Full Idea: Each tester of the truth of a theory …acts as if it were true, and expects the result to disappoint him if his assumption is false. The longer disappointment is delayed, the stronger grows his faith in his theory.
                        From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.42)
                        A reaction: This is almost exactly Popper's falsificationist proposal for science, which interestingly shows the close relationship of his view to pragmatism. Believe it as long as it is still working.
14. Science / C. Induction / 3. Limits of Induction
We can't know if the laws of nature are stable, but we must postulate it or assume it
                        Full Idea: That nature will follow tomorrow the same laws that she follows today is a truth which no man can know; but in the interests of cognition as well as of action we must postulate or assume it.
                        From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.39)
                        A reaction: The stability of nature is something to be assessed, not something taken for granted. If you arrive in a new city and it all seems quiet, you keep your fingers crossed and treat it as stable. But revolution or coup could be just round the corner.
14. Science / C. Induction / 6. Bayes's Theorem
Trying to assess probabilities by mere calculation is absurd and impossible
                        Full Idea: The absurd abstraction of an intellect verbally formulating all its evidence and carefully estimating the probability thereof solely by the size of a vulgar fraction, is as ideally inept as it is practically impossible.
                        From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.40)
                        A reaction: James probably didn't know about Bayes, but this is directed at the Bayesian approach. My view is that full rational assessment of coherence is a much better bet than a Bayesian calculation. Factors must be weighted.
14. Science / D. Explanation / 2. Types of Explanation / j. Explanations by reduction
We have a passion for knowing the parts of something, rather than the whole
                        Full Idea: Alongside the passion for simplification …is the passion for distinguishing; it is the passion to be acquainted with the parts rather than to comprehend the whole.
                        From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.22)
                        A reaction: As I child I dismantled almost every toy I was given. This seems to be the motivation for a lot of analytic philosophy, but Aristotle also tended to think that way.
15. Nature of Minds / A. Nature of Mind / 1. Mind / b. Purpose of mind
The mind has evolved entirely for practical interests, seen in our reflex actions
                        Full Idea: It is far too little recognised how entirely the intellect is built up of practical interests. The theory of evolution is beginning to do very good service by its reduction of all mentality to the type of reflex action.
                        From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.34)
                        A reaction: Hands evolved for manipulating tools end up playing the piano. Minds evolved for action can be afflicted with boredom. He's not wrong, but he is risking the etymological fallacy (origin = purpose). I take navigation to be the original purpose of mind.
15. Nature of Minds / A. Nature of Mind / 7. Animal Minds
Dogs' curiosity only concerns what will happen next
                        Full Idea: A dog's curiosity about the movements of his master or a strange object only extends as far as the point of what is going to happen next.
                        From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.31)
                        A reaction: Good. A nice corrective to people like myself who are tempted to inflate animal rationality, in order to emphasise human evolutionary continuity with them. It is hard to disagree with his observation. But dogs do make judgements! True/false!
18. Thought / A. Modes of Thought / 5. Rationality / a. Rationality
How can the ground of rationality be itself rational?
                        Full Idea: Can that which is the ground of rationality in all else be itself properly called rational?
                        From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.25)
                        A reaction: This is the perennial problem in deciding grounds, and in deciding what to treat as primitive. The stoics see the whole of nature as rational. Cf how can the ground of what is physical be itself physical?
18. Thought / A. Modes of Thought / 5. Rationality / b. Human rationality
It seems that we feel rational when we detect no irrationality
                        Full Idea: I think there are very good grounds for upholding the view that the feeling of rationality is constituted merely by the absence of any feelings of irrationality.
                        From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.20)
                        A reaction: A very interesting proposal. Nothing is more basic to logic (well, plausible versions of logic) than the principle of non-contradiction - perhaps because it is the foundation of our natural intellectual equipment.
22. Metaethics / A. Ethics Foundations / 2. Source of Ethics / d. Biological ethics
Evolution suggests prevailing or survival as a new criterion of right and wrong
                        Full Idea: The philosophy of evolution offers us today a new criterion, which is objective and fixed, as an ethical test between right and wrong: That is to be called good which is destined to prevail or survive.
                        From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.44)
                        A reaction: Perceptive for its time. Herbert Spencer may have suggested the idea. James dismisses it, because it implies a sort of fatalism, whereas genuine moral choices are involved in what survives.
26. Natural Theory / C. Causation / 8. Particular Causation / d. Selecting the cause
Understanding by means of causes is useless if they are not reduced to a minimum number
                        Full Idea: The knowledge of things by their causes, which is often given as a definition of rational knowledge, is useless unless the causes converge to a minimum number, while still producing the maximum number of effects.
                        From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.21)
                        A reaction: This is certainly the psychological motivation for trying to identify 'the' cause of something, but James always tries to sell such things as subjective. 'Useless' to one person is a subjective criterion; useless to anyone is much more objective.
29. Religion / B. Monotheistic Religion / 4. Christianity / a. Christianity
Early Christianity says God recognises the neglected weak and tender impulses
                        Full Idea: In what did the emancipating message of primitive Christianity consist but in the announcement that God recognizes those weak and tender impulses which paganism had so rudely overlooked.
                        From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.36)
                        A reaction: Nietzsche says these are the virtues of a good slave. Previous virtues were dominated by military needs, but the new virtues are those of large cities, where communal living with strangers is the challenge.