Pluralism

The Philosophy and Politics of Diversity

Maria Baghramian, Attracta Ingram

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415227131
• eBook ISBN: 9781317835066
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

Cultural, moral and religious diversity is a pervasive feature of modern life, yet has only recently become the focus of intellectual debate. Pluralism is the first book to tackle philosophical pluralism and link pluralist themes in philosophy to politics. A range of essays investigates the philosophical sources of pluralism, the value of pluralism and liberalism, and difference in pluralism, including writings on women and the public-private distinction.
This is a valuable source for students of philosophy, politics and cultural studies.

I PHILOSOPHICAL SOURCES OF PLURALISM

1 SOURCES OF PLURALISM IN WILLIAM JAMES

James R. O’Shea

DOI: 10.4324/9781315824505-2

William James held that the ‘difference between monism and pluralism is perhaps the most pregnant of all the differences in philosophy’ (James 1979: 5), and he himself came down firmly on the side of a thoroughgoing philosophical (epistemological, metaphysical, and value) pluralism. A century later discussions of pluralism are now infused with a sense of political urgency, which makes it all the more important to step back and reflect critically on the fluency with which our current discussions of pluralism, whether in political philosophy or general epistemology, have come to be conducted in the language of ‘alternative conceptual frameworks’. No single figure merits a more prominent place in any such intellectual history than William James, who was one of the first thinkers to articulate a comprehensive philosophical vision incorporating what we would now find it natural to call a conceptual scheme pluralism. In doing so he introduced conceptions that have since become the mother tongue of our philosophical thought.

In this essay I propose to examine the nature and sources of James’s wide-ranging pluralism by focusing in particular on the account he offers of the role of concepts within perceptual experience. What view of the nature of concepts separated James from his monistic philosophical opponents and underpinned his own attempts to defend a general philosophical pluralism? In addition to its intrinsic historical interest as a prime mover in the development of pluralist conceptions throughout the twentieth century, the case of James will also serve to underscore the fact that some of the most difficult and important issues raised by the concept of pluralism have their sources in the seemingly more arcane question of how exactly it is that concepts enable us to grasp any truths at all.

In the first section I offer an exposition and analysis of what I see as James’s functionalist account of the nature of conceptual representation. In the second section I then examine the limits of conceptual understanding established by James’s critique of ‘vicious abstractionism’ and his account of the ‘perceptual flux’, and I show how on the basis of these limits James mounted important criticisms of various monistic theses and arguments, thereby providing support for his own fallibilist and empiricist hypothesis of pluralism. In the final section I then turn to James’s own constructive account of the alternative conceptual schemes by means of which we apprehend reality, and conclude by distinguishing and briefly commenting upon four different Jamesian lines of response to the problem of conflicting schemes that is raised (and continues to be raised) by this pluralist outlook.

The function of concepts within experience

Percepts and concepts

Throughout his writings James operates with a fundamental epistemological distinction between percepts and concepts. Roughly synonymous terms for the percept side of the distinction, he tells us, are ‘sensation’, ‘feeling’, ‘sensible experience’ and the ‘immediate flow of conscious life’; and for ‘concept’ he indicates that he freely substitutes ‘thought’, ‘idea’ and ‘intellection’ (James 1996: 48n). By means of percepts we are said to enjoy knowledge by acquaintance with particular sensible realities, while concepts enable us to signify or represent those same realities in thought and thus have knowledge about them (James 1975b: 18–20, 35). James regards both percepts and concepts as indispensable throughout all human experience. ‘The world we practically live in is one in which it is impossible, except by theoretic retrospection, to disentangle the contributions of intellect from those of sense’ (James 1996: 108); and we ‘use both perception and conception in philosophy as we use both blades of a pair of scissors’ (James 1978: 273–4).

While James thus highlights the essential interplay between concepts and percepts he also argues in favour of what we might call the primacy of percepts. In the first place he defends the strong empiricist-abstractionist thesis that all human concepts are ‘abstracted and generalised from … perceptual instances’ (James 1996: 52; cp. 68–9). ‘All conceptual content is borrowed’ from the perceptual flux, he holds, and this ‘applies as much to concepts of the most rarefied order as to qualities’ (James 1996: 79–80). He then argues further that conceptual understanding can in principle never fully adequately represent perceptual experience itself, and that in fact conception by its nature tends to ‘falsify’ the immediate flux (more on this below). In sum, he writes, ‘concepts are secondary formations, inadequate and only ministerial; and … they falsify as well as omit, and make the flux impossible to understand’ (James 1996: 79).

These limitations on conception will form an important part of James’s overall defence of philosophical pluralism, but in order to see how this is so we shall have to take a closer look first at just what a concept is, according to James, and at the indispensable and beneficial role that concepts play in human knowledge. James himself suggests that in order ‘to understand the nature of concepts better, we must now go on to distinguish their function from their content’ (James 1996: 58). What does he mean by this distinction?

James's functionalist theory of conceptual content

‘The perceptual flux as such … means nothing’, writes James, ‘and is but what it immediately is … [It] contains innumerable aspects and characters which conception can pick out, isolate, and thereafter always intend’ (James 1996: 49). The stream of experience during any given passing moment is an indefinitely complex presentation of aspects and characters potentially available for conceptual isolation and generalisation. As to their origin, concepts arise from our attending to such aspects and (as James puts it) ‘naming’ them, thereby adding to ‘the store of nouns, verbs, adjectives, conjunctions, and prepositions by which the human mind interprets life’ (James 1996: 52). Thus arise the various conceptual ‘worlds’, as he calls them, of commonsense ‘things’, of mathematical forms, of ethical propositions, and so on, ‘all abstracted and generalised from long forgotten perceptual instances …. By those whats we apperceive all our thises. Percepts and concepts interpenetrate’ (James 1996: 52).

More important for James than this question as to the origin of concepts, however, ‘is that as to their functional use and value’ (James 1996: 55–6, italics added), and in particular the ‘question of whether the whole import of the world of concepts lies in its relation to perceptual experience, or whether it be also an independent revelation of reality’ (James 1996: 63). It is toward answering this question that James develops his broadly functionalist account of the nature of concepts.¹

James puts forward the view that the concept of an F (his example is ‘man’) ‘is three things’: (1) ‘the word itself’; (2) the mental image or picture (perhaps vague) that one might form of an F; and (3) the functional aspect of the concept as ‘an instrument for symbolising certain objects’ (James 1996: 58; cp. James 1976: 28–9). James refers to the mental image as the ‘content’ or ‘the substantive part of the concept’ (James 1996: 59, 61). The term ‘content’ in this context refers not to what we would call the ‘intentional content’ of the concept (though it may have a part to play in generating such content) but rather to the ‘static’ (James’s term), non-relational properties of whatever mental images or pictures might regularly accompany our conception of an F. Years earlier in The Principles of Psychology he had similarly distinguished ‘between two aspects, in which all mental facts without exception may be taken; their structural aspect, as being subjective, and their functional aspect, as being cognitions’ (James 1983: 452n).² As James’s analysis proceeds, it becomes clear that on his view the meaning or intentional content of a concept derives from its functional role as a sign or symbol capable of standing in for certain objects and representing them as standing in various relations.³ Although the purposes of this essay preclude a full treatment of the issue here, this interpretation demands at least a bit more spelling out.

James claims that in the case of some concepts (e.g. ‘God’, ‘number’, ‘substance’) ‘their whole value seems to be functional’: they ‘suggest no definite picture’ and ‘their significance seems to consist entirely in their tendency, in the further turn which they may give to our action or our thought’ (James 1996: 59). In cases where there are definite pictures or images associated with a concept, James argues that their ‘value’ is primarily aesthetic (in a broad sense), and that this is a less important part of the concept’s significance than are its relational or functional ‘consequences’:

[H]owever beautiful or otherwise worthy of stationary contemplation the substantive part of a concept may be, the more important part of its significance may naturally be held to be the consequences to which it leads. These may lie either in the way of making us think, or in the way of making us act. Whoever has a clear idea of these knows effectively what the concept practically signifies, whether its substantive content be interesting or not.

(James 1996: 59)

Immediately after this passage, James calls upon his general pragmatic ‘method of interpreting concepts’, which he here calls ‘the Pragmatic Rule’ (James 1996: 60; cp. James 1975a: 27–30), and the result is that what he has just called ‘knowing what the concept practically signifies’ in terms of its functional consequences comes finally to be identified with the meaning of a concept:

The pragmatic rule is that the meaning of a concept may always be found, if not in some sensible particular which it directly designates, then in some particular difference in the course of human experience which its being true will make…. In obeying this rule we neglect the substantive content of the concept, and follow its function only.

(James 1996: 60, 61; italics added)

He concludes that ‘particular consequences are the only criterion of a concept’s meaning, and the only test of its truth’ (James 1996: 62). What needs to be further clarified, then, is what James means by the ‘functional consequences’ that constitute the meaning of a concept.

For James the most basic function of conception concerns what he calls the ‘exclusively practical use’ of concepts, which he conjectures to have characterised ‘the earliest stages of human intelligence’:

Men classed their sensations, substituting concepts for them, in order to ‘work them for what they were worth’, and to prepare for what might lie ahead. Class-names suggest consequences that have attached themselves on other occasions to other members of the class – consequences which the present percept will also probably or certainly show. The present percept in its immediacy may thus often sink to the status of a bare sign of the consequences which the substituted concept suggests.

(James 1996: 63–4)

I take James’s overall functionalist theory of conceptual content to be something like the following. For a person S to have the concept of a given kind of thing K is for S to be so habituated (paradigmatically, if not necessarily,)⁴ through social linguistic training) that S’s utterance or mental-tokening of ‘this is a K’ will be associated in S’s mental set with a general pattern of ready-to-be-triggered inferences involving the term ‘K’ (or involving the relevant ‘substantive’ mental imagery – whatever the particular ‘structural’ realisation of the concept happens to be in any given case). As a result of the linguistic training and other continuing modes of social inquiry S’s patterns of inferences will to a large degree become ‘adapted’ (James’s term) to S’s environment in the sense that those patterns will have come to systematically reflect or ‘map’ the regularities exhibited by Ks both in S’s own experience and according to the generally shared testimony of others. (The ‘practical adaptation’ and ‘mapping’ here are discussed by James [1996: 63–74].)

To have the concept of a knife, for instance, is not a matter of one’s adroitness in forming clear mental images of knives (although images may form a part of the substantive, structural realisation of the concept in any given instance), nor is it a matter of a supposed ability to ‘reach out mentally and intend’ or ‘mentally point to’ knives with the ‘mind’s eye’ (to take two timehonoured but, for James, ultimately unsuccessful ways of explaining the intentionality of concepts).⁵ Rather, to put it baldly, for S to have the concept of a knife just is for S to be one whose perceptual responses, inferences, actions concerning knives can be relied upon (ceteris paribus) to satisfactorily reflect the characteristic ‘habitudes’ or properties of knives, and consequently for S to be one whose inferences and actions generally lead to successful dealings (both theoretical and practical) with knives. Whatever subjective ‘psychic body or structure’ concepts and images may genuinely possess for an experiencer at any given time, then, the idea of their having a general signification ‘only has a meaning when applied to their use, import, or reference to the kind of object they may reveal’ (James 1983: 452–3n). In sum, particular linguistic items or particular mental events have their meaning, intentional content, or ‘representative function’ (James 1983: 452n) constituted solely by their regular pattern-governed relationships (including various mediating chains of inference) ultimately in relation to the objects we perceptually encounter and act upon.⁶

On this general view we can now understand more clearly James’s statement (quoted earlier) that ‘the present percept in its immediacy may thus often sink to the status of a bare sign of the consequences which the substituted concept suggests’ (James 1996: 63–4; cp. James 1983: 954 on ‘recepts’). As we have seen, James holds that human experience is a combination of percepts and concepts wor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Philosophical sources of pluralism
• PART II Value pluralism and liberalism
• PART III Accommodating pluralism
• Bibliography
• Index