Philosophy Talk: The Blog: William James and the Squirrel Example.
Philosophy Talk: The Blog: William James and the Squirrel Example.
Yes, James does seem to be confounding a number of issues in that lecture
His resolution of the squirrel dispute (“Which party is right,” I said, “depends on what you practically mean by ‘going round’ the squirrel”) looks more like linguistic analysis than anything else, and his description of of the ‘pragmatic’ principle in the second paragraph as ‘If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle’ sounds more like a version of positivism.
It is only later in the piece that he identifies pragmatism with the kind of provisionalism that most scientists take towards their theories as being useful pro tem until they need to be refined in order to accommodate further observations ‘less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed’.