by Bruce E.R. Thompson.
Sometime around the year 1890, Charles Sanders Peirce, the father of American Pragmatism, changed his name to Charles Santiago Peirce – or Charles Santiago Sanders Peirce, or sometimes just Charles S. Sanders Peirce. The reason for this name change is not definitively known. There is no strong reason to think that Peirce suddenly became smitten with a love for Hispanic culture, although it has been suggested that his wife, Juliette, had Spanish gypsy blood in her heritage. The more likely explanation is that he was renaming himself in honor of his old friend, William James. “Santiago” is Spanish for “Saint James.”
Charles Peirce and William James had been friends from their college days. Peirce was born in 1839, while James was born in 1842, so Peirce was slightly older, and ahead of James in the study of chemistry at the Lawrence Scientific School (a branch of Harvard College), where they met. In a letter home, James describes Peirce as, “a very ‘smart’ fellow with a great deal of character, pretty independent & violent though.” One can imagine their relationship: Peirce the dominant personality and James an admiring follower, but smart enough and interesting enough in his own right to be accepted into Peirce’s narrow circle. Peirce suffered from a painful facial neuralgia which tended to make him irascible and short-tempered. Even as a young man he was a curmudgeon. Only those who valued his incisive intellect were able to look past his difficult personality to count him as a friend.
Around 1874 Peirce and James founded a discussion group that named itself the Metaphysical Club – a sort of Dead Poet’s Society for philosophers. The group met either in Peirce’s study or in James’. They were a diverse group of thinkers – scientists, lawyers, philosophers. I would add psychologists, except that at the time psychology was not considered a separate discipline from philosophy. Indeed, it was William James, who was responsible for giving psychology the scientific legs it needed to become its own discipline. Peirce counted himself and James among the scientists of the group. The lawyers included Oliver Wendell Holmes, who later became a chief justice of the U. S. Supreme Court, and Nicholas St. John Green, who did not. The philosophical genius of the group was an older student, Chauncy Wright, whom Peirce describes as “something of a philosophical celebrity in those days.” Wright insisted that philosophers must give up Descartes’ quest for certainty and accustom themselves to uncertainty. That thesis formed the framework for the group’s discussions.
James gave Peirce credit for developing the philosophical view named “pragmatism.” Peirce may have coined the term, but he gave credit to the Metaphysical Club for the view itself. The Scottish philosopher Alexander Bain had defined ‘belief’ as “that upon which a man is prepared to act.” Nicholas St. John Green repeatedly urged the application of this definition to Metaphysical Club discussions. Peirce remarks, “From this definition, pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary.” Pragmatism grew out of Green’s insistence that Bain’s definition of belief be applied to the epistemological questions being raised by Chauncy Wright.
Later in life, Peirce and James quarreled. Their quarrel was sufficiently serious that it is widely held that they broke off their friendship. The nature of their quarrel was over a point in philosophy, although there may have been some jealously involved as well. James eventually joined the faculty of Harvard University, where he founded the school of psychology. He wrote numerous articles on “pragmatism,” and is today considered the preeminent theorist behind that school of philosophy. Peirce taught for five years at Johns Hopkins University. Thereafter – because (unbeknownst to Peirce) he had made an enemy of Simon Newcomb while they were at Harvard – he never held another permanent academic position. He spent much of his life in poverty, writing (and being paid for) some articles, doing some book reviews, and giving some lectures. He was largely forgotten. After his death scholars discovered his vast contributions to science, mathematics, and philosophy contained primarily in unpublished papers.
What philosophical dispute could be so serious as to break up a friendship? Peirce and James agreed that beliefs have practical value. The corollary to Bain’s principle that belief is “that upon which a man is prepared to act” is that what a person believes will determine how that person acts. Chauncy Wright had insisted that people (and even philosophers) do not need to seek certainty. The object of inquiry (even philosophical inquiry!) is not to remove all possible doubts from our views, but only to arrive at beliefs in which we are sufficiently confident that we are prepared to act upon them.
But…
James understood this to mean that we can define ‘truth’ as “those beliefs that guide our actions successfully.” This is what modern philosophers call the Pragmatic theory of truth: truth is what works for us. James illustrated his idea by means of a thought experiment: imagine a dog chasing a squirrel that is clinging to a tree. The squirrel successfully manages to keep the tree between itself and the dog, so the squirrel and the dog are constantly facing each other as they move in circles around the tree. Now, everyone will agree that the squirrel and the dog both “go around” the tree, but the question is this: does the dog “go around” the squirrel? James claims that the truth of the matter depends upon what practical question we are attempting to ask. Are we interested in whether the dog is at one point in front of the squirrel and later behind the squirrel? In that case, the dog does not “go around” the squirrel. Or are we interested in which of the two has the wider orbit? In that case, since the orbit of the dog around the tree encloses the orbit of the squirrel around the tree, the dog clearly does “go around” the squirrel. This is not that different from asking whether the sun goes around the earth or the earth around the sun. For tens of thousands of years humans believed that the sun moved around the earth. They were prepared to act upon that belief, and the results of their actions in that regard were judged to be entirely satisfactory. Hence, their belief was true – for them. From this James drew the conclusion that there is no such thing as ultimate truth. Truth is just a human construct, relative to what humans find it useful to believe when they choose to believe it.
Peirce disagreed. Of course, he agreed with James that there can be nothing more useful than having true beliefs. But he thought James had gotten it backwards. It is not the fact that a belief is useful that makes it true; it is the fact that it is true, or at least approximately true, that makes it useful. He agreed with James that inquiry (even philosophical inquiry) has no obligation to reach an ultimate truth. But this is not because there is no such thing as ultimate truth; it is merely because, at some point, we find ourselves satisfied with the answer we have. To illustrate his point Peirce was fond of using mathematical examples involving probabilities, statistical sampling, and the “law of large numbers,” which asserts that the more samples we take, the closer we get to the answer we are seeking. We may never get to the ultimately correct answer, but the law of large numbers guarantees that we can eventually get close enough to have a useful answer. At that point, funding for further research is likely to dry up and the ultimate truth may never be found. It would be incorrect to conclude from this that there is no ultimate truth, or that truth is merely a human construct. It is just that we are unwilling to commit further time and resources to finding it when a reasonably useful half-truth will do for now.
In 1905 Peirce became so irritated with what he took to be James’ misinterpretation of the old Metaphysical Club’s philosophy – and with the fact that James had the standing to popularize his version of that philosophy – that he disavowed the term ‘pragmatism’ altogether. He declared that he would henceforth call his philosophy ‘pragmaticism’, saying this was a term “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers.”
Old friends do sometimes quarrel. But, while Peirce was keen to distinguish his philosophical views from those of James, I am not aware that he ever disavowed his self-given middle name. During his years in poverty, it was often the kindness of James that allowed Peirce to endure. James arranged the paid lectures that Peirce was hired to give, and often James simply “loaned” Peirce the money he needed to pay his bills. Peirce was justified in thinking of him as his personal “Saint James.”
William James died in 1910; Charles Peirce died three and a half years later in 1914. I believe that Peirce valued his friendship with James to the end of his days. If James is right, my belief is true simply because I find it comforting and therefore useful. If Peirce is right, I might be wrong. But Peirce certainly valued James’ friendship for most of his life, and that makes my belief approximately true, and so worth believing until further evidence comes to my attention.