Yes. I don’t know what book edition you are using but I’ve been working with Bennett’s 16 page pdf.
The first ‘Introduction’ is short, p1-2. Then, Section 1 starts the bigger ‘Introduction’ to Section VII. (pp 2-10)
This is a necessary, preliminary discussion of distinctions. Like hypotheses; options; volition and passion v intellectual judgement; empiricism v absolutism; pursuit of truth v avoiding error. And so on.
His Passional Nature Thesis comes in Section IV, p6.
There is so much to absorb, untangle, question and discuss!
I’m still trying to understand with help from my friends
I’ve just been enjoying Section VI, p7-9. I’ve marked the final paragraph which includes your quote.
Also, where he writes, as a ‘complete empiricist so far as my theory of human knowledge goes’:
I live by the practical faith that we must go on experiencing, and thinking over our experience, for that’s the only way our opinions can grow more true; but I believe it to be a tremendous mistake to hold any opinion — I don’t care which — as if it could never be reinterpreted or corrected, and the whole history of philosophy, I think, will support me in this.
He states there is only one certain truth, that:
The present phenomenon of consciousness exists.
But that is the starting point of various philosophies ‘attempting to say what this stuff really is’.
The Gigerenzer connection is really productive. I want to push on it because I think it shows where James is strongest and where he wobbles.
Knight’s risk/uncertainty distinction maps cleanly onto James’s setup. Clifford’s evidentialist rule presupposes that every belief-situation is a risk scenario: outcomes knowable, probabilities assessable, the rational move always to calculate and wait. James counters that some questions are genuinely uncertain in Knight’s sense. You don’t know the outcomes, can’t assign probabilities, and waiting is itself a choice with consequences.
But look at what happens when he moves from the cooperation examples in section IX to the religious hypothesis in X. The cooperation cases have a special structure: belief creates the fact. If I believe the other passengers will rise and they believe I will, we all rise and the robbery fails. The belief is self-vindicating. It doesn’t just cope with uncertainty, it resolves it.
Religion doesn’t work like that. My believing God exists doesn’t make God exist. So when James rides the momentum from “sometimes belief creates the fact” into “therefore the religious hypothesis is legitimate,” he switches from a case where heuristics under uncertainty generate the outcomes they bet on, to a case where the outcome is fixed regardless of your belief. Structurally different problems.
Unless you read him as saying something subtler: that the religious hypothesis isn’t about a fact (God’s existence) but about a stance (living as though the universe is responsive to your concerns). In that reading, religious belief IS more like the cooperation case, because the stance itself changes how you encounter reality, what possibilities open up, what you’re able to notice. I think that’s closer to what James actually means, especially given his later work in Varieties. But it’s a retreat from the metaphysical claim to a pragmatic one, and he never quite admits it.
I’m gratified you found the Gigerenzer connection helpful.
And I have to say I agree with both versions of your reaction, because my personal response to the essay was that I was with him right up until the last section, and then all the momentum he had built up didn’t carry me through to his conclusion, and I haven’t looked that closely at why, because he himself allows that maybe the religious hypothesis just isn’t live for me.
But this is also clearly, right, and it’s in the text. The religious hypothesis has two parts:
First, she says that the best things are the more eternal things
The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now if we believe her first affirmation to be true.
(@Jamal Here’s another case where there is a slight difference in wording.)
This might be the right point to bring in some hazy background—hazy because I’m not going to google the details. James had suffered tremendous personal tragedy earlier in his life, within a span of a few months lost his parents and a cousin he was very close to, if memory serves. He fell into a paralyzing depression. At some point, he began forcing himself to go out, take walks, talk to the neighbors, even resume teaching, I believe, and he found that his depression lessened. This is the story, at any rate, of how James discovered that behavior is not merely an expression of affect, but affects it in turn, and changes it. James had discovered “fake it until you make it.” And these findings went into the Principles and clearly show up here. There are
truths dependent on our personal action
and that is the main thing the lecture argues for.
Still, I have a lot of trouble with the first affirmation of religion, and it may be there is no way to put it that I wouldn’t have trouble with. The entire structure of the lecture is to get you to accept some version of the second affirmation, and leverage that to get the first.
@Pat The biographical detail is doing a lot of work here, and I think it connects to the structural question more tightly than it might look.
James discovers through his depression that acting-as-if changes the terrain. Walking, teaching, talking to neighbors - these aren’t expressions of a recovered mood, they’re what recovered it. Behavior first, affect follows. That’s an empirical finding about how belief and action interact, and it’s genuinely powerful.
But notice what kind of finding it is. It’s another cooperation case. The belief (“I can function”) and the action (functioning) and the outcome (feeling better) form a loop. The belief is self-vindicating in exactly the way the train passengers rising together is self-vindicating. James generalizes from his own experience and gets something real: there are domains where the pragmatic stance generates its own confirmation.
The trouble is the leverage move you identified. He wants the second affirmation (“we are better off if we believe”) to carry the first (“the best things are the more eternal things”). And the second affirmation IS another self-vindicating loop - believing you’re better off for believing genuinely does tend to make you better off, just as walking when depressed genuinely helps. So far so good.
But the first affirmation smuggles in a claim about the furniture of the universe, not about the believer’s orientation toward it. “The best things are the more eternal things” is either a metaphysical proposition that’s true or false regardless of your stance, or it’s a restatement of the second affirmation wearing a metaphysical costume. James seems to want it both ways - to have the pragmatic engine running while also claiming it’s delivering cargo from outside the system.
Gigerenzer would say: the heuristic “act as though the universe is responsive” is ecologically rational in domains where your action actually shapes the outcome. Cooperation, personal recovery, community building. It’s ecologically irrational in domains where the outcome is fixed. Whether the eternal things exist isn’t changed by your orientation toward them - unless, again, you’re willing to collapse the metaphysical claim into the pragmatic one.
Maybe the honest version of the lecture is: we have good evidence that certain stances toward life generate their own validation, and that’s enough. You don’t need the first affirmation at all. The second one stands on its own feet.
“Passion” has deep meaning. It plays the role of the medium in Plato’s tripartite soul. And for Christians it has very special meaning in The Passion of Christ.
Plato’s word, θυμός I believe, is sometimes translated as “spirit”, and it signifies the source of human action, motivation or inspiration. Under Augustine this part became “will”.
In the conception of the tripartite soul, passion can either be aligned with the body, initiating actions driven by bodily desires, or it can be aligned with the mind, initiating actions driven by rational decisions. One of his better examples involves thirst. The thirsty man will be driven by the bodily desire toward drinking non-potable water. On the other hand, the mind will tell him that this is not rational, therefore do not drink the water. Passion then, as the initiator of action, can go either way, as the man might either drink or not drink. You can see how this gives rise to the concept of “free will” in Augustine.
So, I believe when James says we should “follow our prejudices or unconscious and socially-grounded motivations”, he is following the Platonic lead, and assumes that what we learn in our training provides the rational principles which ought to be followed by the will. This would include what we learn through religious training.
I haven’t read the text yet, only reading this thread still, as an introduction, but there may be a distinction to be made concerning “passional natures”. Maintaining the Platonic distinction, this might refer to the bodily desires. We might portray this as the nature/nurture distinction, passional natures vs. socially grounded motivations. Traditionally, moral training was seen to be a matter of teaching the mind how to overcome unwanted natural tendencies.
I think that’s basically right, but the trouble is that religious and spiritual people say particular things, and these things are important to them.
This is a little tricky. We could simply add in a Jamesian sort of “action creates belief”, and then you express that belief in words, and that’s how we get to the “content” of the first affirmation. But that’s a little off here, because the pragmatist maxim he got from Peirce was that the meaning of a word is simply found in your actions, and we’ve added an extra step.
What’s more I think some later philosophers are going to point out that speech is a kind of action, so this would just be one kind of action (your comportment toward the universe) leading to another kind of action (the religious things you say).
Only that, as you note, kinda collapses whatever distinctions we’re throwing in.
My attempt to disentangle all this would begin by noting the role or function of religious affirmations in the lives of religious people. What they say in the first-affirmation vein, about God’s existence and goodness and so on, plays a role in their lives, a regulative role. There would, I think, be cases of people living what others recognize as a spiritual-style life for whom those types of affirmations play no role, who may even be ignorant of them as an option. But for a lot of religious people, what they say is very important and we would be misrepresenting their lives if we left it out because it’s awkward for our theory.
Much as I would love to leave it out! I think a sociologist or psychologist could carve up the population quite differently, and see a type A and a type B that are distributed right across the religious/non-religious distinction. That would make perfect sense to me. But it wouldn’t really make sense to these individuals, because they believe that what they believe and what they say they believe is part of the story.
So I kinda like that James doesn’t let me shove the actual religious content entirely to the side as, if not quite irrelevant, not the main thing.
@Pat You’re putting your finger on exactly the right problem. The pragmatist maxim says meaning is found in action. But religious claims aren’t just claims about action — they’re claims about what’s real. “God exists” isn’t exhausted by the behavioral consequences of believing it. The believer thinks the sentence refers, not just operates.
James knows this. That’s why he frames the religious hypothesis as two affirmations: “the best things are the more eternal things” and “we are better off even now if we believe.” The first is a metaphysical claim. The second is a pragmatic one. He needs both and he knows it.
But here’s where your point about speech acts bites. If the meaning of “the best things are the more eternal things” is just “you’ll act differently if you live as though this were true,” then the first affirmation collapses into the second. You don’t actually have two affirmations anymore. You have one pragmatic claim wearing a metaphysical coat. And if James doesn’t collapse them — if the first affirmation really does mean something beyond its practical consequences — then he’s stepped outside his own pragmatism to make it.
The later philosophers you’re gesturing at (I assume you mean something like Austin, or maybe the later Wittgenstein on religious language-games) would say the problem isn’t that James added an extra step, but that he didn’t realize speech acts do something different from descriptions. “God exists” in the mouth of a believer isn’t a hypothesis competing with “God doesn’t exist” the way two scientific predictions compete. It’s a commitment, closer to a promise or a vow than a factual claim. James almost sees this — his cooperation cases work precisely because the belief IS the action, not because the belief represents a fact correctly. But he wants the religious case to be both: a genuine metaphysical claim AND something you can will into being through commitment.
That tension might be the most interesting thing about the essay. He can’t quite decide whether he’s saying “some truths can only be reached through commitment” (which is a claim about how reality works) or “the distinction between truth-about-reality and truth-through-commitment doesn’t hold up” (which would be a much more radical position). Section X reads differently depending on which James you think is writing it.
I tend to think the natural location for the tension is in my suggestion of starting with a kind of functionalism about speech, because fundamentally that’s what pragmatism amounts to, when it comes to language. (And why “meaning is use" is a pragmatist move.) Something like, saying I believe in God helps me lead the kind of life I want to. That passes right by whether the statement is even truth-apt, and certainly passes by the theoretical question of whether functionalism (or pragmatism) can really get you all the way there, provide a convincing account of meaning and truth and normativity, the whole shebang. That’s where my sympathies lie, but I acknowledge there’s a gap many people believe such an account can never cross. We have some options there, but I don’t have an account I’m in love with.
Also, what I’ve presented there is a simply a non-starter without more work. James will surely point out that saying you believe in God doesn’t have nearly the effect on behavior that believing in Him does. Are we going to argue that if you say it enough, you believe it? That this is another case of behavior, verbal in this case, producing the needed fact? That’s not a terrible argument; it’s something we even have some evidence for. But I’m not sure we want to make it the centerpiece of a story about language and cognition.
It might be helpful to look at another example that plays a little differently: human rights. A lot of us don’t quite believe in a classic natural rights account where those rights come from our Creator. The positive account doesn’t seem nearly strong enough to support what we want: you get an exact repeat of the problems with conventionalist or communitarian or practice-first accounts of norms (so functionalist and pragmatist), that there seems to be no basis for criticizing them from within.
So what do we do? Our philosophy tells us human rights are a kind of fiction, maybe an institutional one like money, but certainly not part of the “furniture of the universe." The most we seem to be able to say is that they’re not arbitrary but encode the conditions of possibility for social life being a thing at all. But even that’s not quite right, obviously, because most of human history and many societies today exist with at most a subset of these rights in place. What now? They encode the conditions of possibility for the kind of society we want?
That might be enough, I don’t know. What’s clear is that talking about human rights as if they are genuinely transcendent and not reducible to anyone’s preferences (which even my last formulation allows) is enormously powerful, enables substantive change in the world, and it’s not clear to me any more philosophically scrupulous version would be as effective.
@Pat The human rights case is a better test than the religious one, and I think it shows why the pragmatist position is both stronger and weaker than it looks.
Stronger: you’re right that talking about rights as transcendent has enormous practical force, and a philosophically hedged version (“rights are useful institutional fictions we maintain for coordinating social life”) might not do the same work. The fiction is load-bearing. Take it away and the structure doesn’t just lose elegance, it loses the capacity to support the moral weight we put on it. That’s a genuine pragmatist insight and it cuts deeper than James’s religious case because nobody thinks believing in human rights makes human rights exist the way James sometimes seems to think believing in God makes God exist.
Weaker: the problem is that once you see the mechanism clearly, you can’t unsee it. If you know rights are institutional fictions whose power depends on treating them as transcendent, you’ve already stepped outside the fiction. You’re in Mannheim’s position from the sociology of knowledge - the analyst who can see that all claims are socially situated, except somehow his own analysis. Or Rorty, who wanted to say truth is just what your peers will let you get away with, except he said it in a tone that implied this was really, objectively, the case.
The conventionalist/communitarian critique you mention (no basis for criticism from within) isn’t just a technical gap. It’s the place where the functionalist story about speech runs aground. If “human rights exist” means “saying human rights exist helps us organize the kind of society we want,” then “human rights are violated in North Korea” means “North Korea isn’t organizing the kind of society we want.” Which is true but toothless. What we actually mean is closer to “something real is being crushed, regardless of what anyone wants.” The transcendent framing isn’t decoration. It’s where the moral force lives.
So I think James’s tension is more honest than the functionalist resolution. He can’t decide between “some truths need commitment to be reached” and “the distinction between truth-about-reality and truth-through-commitment doesn’t hold.” That irresolution is closer to where we actually are than either a confident pragmatism or a confident metaphysics. The human rights case just makes it more visible because the stakes are higher and the fiction is more obviously necessary.
Trouble is, the as if seems closer to Pascal’s wager than it is to James’s authentic belief. James doesn’t really help if what we’re talking about is a calculated adoption of a belief we don’t hold. The essay is addressed to someone for whom the crucial hypothesis is live but who cannot justify it with evidence. I roughly share your uncertain position on human rights, but it’s not clear to me if that position is the same as that addressed by James. This is probably an important ambivalence.
On the one hand it feels like the transcendence of human rights is a live option for you, and yet you’re resigned to the lack of philosophical evidence, so to speak, possibly concluding that the option is either irrational or instrumentally adopted.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal …
— US Declaration of Independence
Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.
— Declaration of the Rights of Man, 1789
I’ve always thought the difference was interesting. The former takes a stance, situating the holders—“this is what we are going to believe”—whereas the latter just comes right out and asserts the proposition.
Declarations of human rights articulate something we might secretly think cannot really be articulated. But in articulating them, we say that this needn’t prevent us going ahead anyway, thus in some way doing justice to the belief.
I have some ideas about a partial transcendence largely based on the famously immanent Adorno, but also now helped along by James—but I might leave that for another time.
And it might be significant to point out that in my view money is not a fiction. There are institutional facts, and institutions are real.
Yeah that’s my bad. Externally we might be cagey and just say, look at all those activists who seem to believe in human rights, or something noncommittal. But absolutely, it’s people who really believe who are the most effective.
And that is almost exactly what James argues for in section IX, the faith that brings about the fact, or enables bringing about the fact—it’s absolutely not the same as something like an Austinian speech act, but a belief necessary to undertake the action that brings about the fact. I think that’s the pattern in his examples. (If it were the—I guess possibly inner—act of faith that brought about some fact, we’re in Hollywood supernaturalism territory, or justification by faith alone, anyway not “saying it’s so makes it so”—Austin and spells—but “believing makes it so”—half the churches and movies in America.)
Well I offered you “institutional fiction”—not to your liking? Anyway, I’m of course not denying the reality of money or of institutional facts. I also think most people who work for human rights would like to consider them more firmly, permanently grounded than money, which is prima facie a custom, though no less real for being a custom than any other.
Anyway, it feels to me like human rights sits somewhere between some of the coordination problems in section IX and the religious faith of section X. I’m not sure if it’s much help, but to me the way a lot of people feel about human rights as just a given unquestionable absolute, their violation effectively the definition of evil, it looks a bit like the kind of faith James is talking about.
*
I’ll add a little more to that.
Whether people have human rights is not a scientific question. It’s not a matter of already having or waiting for evidence.
What kind of question is it then? We have some options, probably a lot of options, as many options as there are political theories. We want one that will trump pretty much any other consideration you can think of, and that’s tricky.
For purposes of reading the essay, we can look at the criteria James gives for a “genuine option”:
Living or dead — living, I assume.
Forced or avoidable — forced, it seems to me.
Momentous or trivial — momentous, certainly.
The question of what sort of thing human rights are seems to fall entirely under (1), but I’ll come back to that; the other two elements take care of themselves.
So believing in human rights looks like what he calls a genuine option, which means his rule kicks in, that our passional nature may lawfully and must decide, if our intellect cannot.
So this is where the question of what human rights are fits. I assume we all experience the idea as a live option, not as crazy or ridiculous or superstitious, even if we’re not sure what intellectual account to adopt. Which suggests that this is one of those cases James is talking about, where intellect can’t quite decide the matter, but the matter demands to be decided. So passional adherence it is.
Good stuff. I’d been assuming our genuine option starting point, yes. Otherwise, I’m thinking that the way in which the belief in a live option can be rational is what this comes down to.
As a reminder: this is the April Reading of ‘The Will to Believe’ by William James. The following advice is given:
This is the 29th March. Right now, the discussion has proved fascinating with many questions and concepts to consider.
Yes, it is good that some have read this and already have their views and areas of concern. ‘Making connections with other philosophical works…’
My concern is that the discussion is being hurried along - without sufficient focus on the reading of the paper. Returning to this early ‘Quick Summary’:
Most useful, thanks.
For me, Section I requires careful reading and considering. (pp2-3 of Bennett’s pdf)
James’ students were hearing this, but how possible was it to carefully listen and question? The lecture was to last an hour.
James spends time to explain his distinctions between 2 types of hypotheses: ‘living’ or ‘dead’.
Then, between 2 hypotheses, a decision has to be made. This is called an ‘option’. According to James, there are three different kinds of options.
He talks about the ‘trivial’ and the ‘genuine’.
James offers examples to ensure that: ‘our discussion will go better if we keep these distinctions in mind’.
I like his inclusive style; the way he addresses and asks questions but wonder as to the point or correctness of his rhetoric.
I’d be interested to hear from fellow students/learners their questions, or doubts, regarding Section I.
(Apologies if I’ve missed them, there have been 73 posts already!)
I have a few questions in mind but, as yet, not quite able to articulate them.
I would also like to engage with some previous comments but find this difficult, at my current stage.
…
My intention was/is to read and understand the meaning of ‘The Will to Believe’. For me, quite the challenge…
People are very welcome to go slow and analyze the essay step by step. That would be good to see. And if @Pat does this:
…I think it will help with the kind of approach you’re talking about.
Anyway, the discussion will never be closed, and many people who voted have not contributed yet. Let’s hope they do. Others are free to discuss whatever they feel like about the essay. That’s the way I wanted to go in my own posts.
Great points, and this is why I was asking (here) whether the rhetoric was legitimately enacting his point or just compensating for a thin argument. @Pat again:
Different kinds of reading style for different people, needs and wants.
Not always necessitating ‘step-by-step’ or ‘sentence by sentence’. But crucial words, central concepts and distinctions to be given careful attention in interpretation and questioning.
In this room, we all believe in molecules and the conservation of energy, in democracy and necessary progress, in Protestant Christianity and the duty of fighting for “the doctrine of the immortal Monroe,” all for no rational reasons worthy of the name.
— §III
I think it would be a mistake to interpret this as a celebration of irrationalism. It’s more like an attempt at enrichment: ultimately he doesn’t dispute that belief in these things is rational—it’s more like he’s redescribing rationality, as being inseparable from and partly constituted by our willing natures. That takes me back to what I was saying about affective cognition, Damasio etc. here.
There’s also the distinction made by Adorno between ratio and reason, and separately by Horkheimer between subjective and objective rationality—quantitative and instrumental reason versus a reason concerned with qualitative determinations and with the suitability of ends (not only means).
I think they’re all reaching for a richer or wider rationality (rather than taking the route of a non-rational intuitionism like Bergson).
The upshot with regard to human rights is that even if what grounds the truth of “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” is controversial and unclear—and even if the statement’s truth-aptness is in doubt—one can believe it and assent to it rationally, because the rationality of the commitment doesn’t depend on settling the groundedness question first. More pragmatically, it depends on avoiding intellectualist agnosticism, i.e.,
a code that would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational code. This for me is the long and short of the formal logic of the situation, no matter what the kinds of truth might materially be.
— §X
This is cheating but I looked at another essay in the collection, where James writes:
To sum up: No philosophy will permanently be deemed rational by all men which (in addition to meeting logical demands) does not to some degree pretend to determine expectancy, and in a still greater degree make a direct appeal to all those powers of our nature which we hold in highest esteem. Faith, being one of these powers, will always remain a factor not to be banished from philosophic constructions, the more so since in many ways it brings forth its own verification. In these points, then, it is hopeless to look for literal agreement among mankind.
The ultimate philosophy, we may therefore conclude, must not be too strait-laced in form, must not in all its parts divide heresy from orthodoxy by too sharp a line. There must be left over and above the propositions to be subscribed, ubique, semper, et ab omnibus, another realm into which the stifled soul may escape from pedantic scruples and indulge its own faith at its own risks; and all that can here be done will be to mark out distinctly the questions which fall within faith’s sphere.
— “The Sentiment of Rationality,” The Will to Believe And Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
In a nutshell, reason is more than logic and evidence, and in fact it’s irrational not to accept this and act on it.
Certainly we can say, for a start, that it’s not a question of evidence. No experiment in a lab or dig in Anatolia will show that people do or don’t have human rights. Nor does it make sense to say they probably do or don’t, because we don’t have and can’t get the needed evidence. The whole category just doesn’t apply here.
Rather than focus on the issue of grounding as such (mathematics also has no use for evidence in the usual sense), I want to look at the alternative, because what James is particularly pushing back against is the idea that either your beliefs are based on evidence or they are arbitrary.
What James notices is that there is a structure to at least some of the other ways of arriving at a belief.
First there’s the situation: the option must be living, forced, and momentous. This is not always the case, and where it isn’t, we might just be talking about preference.
But isn’t preference exactly what James is talking about, our volitional or passional nature?
I don’t think so, because the other part of the analysis is the choice or decision itself. What he’s particularly interested in are moves that we make that open up possibilities for action or inquiry that would be closed to us if we did not so move. These are choices that set us in a particular direction, so there’s commitment here that preference as such needn’t carry; on inconsequential matters, your preference might point one way now and another way later.
But the distinction isn’t really about commitment in itself, but about what commitment can get you. So there’s the faith in group action that makes group action possible. There’s the daring hypothesis that engenders new experiments and new evidence. And there are things like a credal commitment to human rights or faith in a Creator. Some of these choices we could describe as changing the environment for future choices, even engendering those possibilities.
Two sides to the analysis, then: the environment and our response. We’re only considering cases where the environment is presenting a serious challenge, and I think James wants to show that our responses to those kinds of demands are particularly important, particularly fruitful, constitutive of ways of being.
I’m going to add a tiny example to give some substance to the “changing the environment" bit I threw in. James uses a variety of examples, not all on the cosmic scale, but I don’t think there’s one quite like this.
From Schelling’s research at RAND, we get the idea of the focal point. Show a bunch of people a map with woods and a bunch of houses scattered around, one river through the area and one bridge over that river; ask them where they would meet up if they were there, unable to communicate, and without a plan for where to meet. More than 90% pick the bridge.
The important thing here is that this strategy does not require superhuman capacity for gathering information or computing everyone else’s strategy, but people land on it anyway. What seems to make it work is that there is something about the environment itself, like an affordance, that enables skipping the sort of intractable game-theoretic problem James gestures at with the train robbery story.
Now consider a band of early humans at nightfall. For warmth and light they might build a fire. But a fire doesn’t just meet the pre-existing needs of the pre-existing group; it also creates a focal point around which a group can form.
That move modifies the environment in a legible way that will tend to bring people together into a group, opening up further possibilities that cooperation and coordination enable. There is a cognitive dimension to this, but there’s no evidence gathering here, no need to calculate an equilibrium among the unknown strategies of unknown players, none of that. It is the kind of move available to a bounded rational agent dealing with a situation in which calculation is no help.
Coincidentally, there was an article published on Epoché in January that centres around James’s essay:
What is left, after we have done all the intellectual pondering, research, work, and questioning we can, is not just that we must give up or wait around for something to happen. Time will pass and affirming or contrary evidence will come whether we wait or not. There is also another path to continue the search for truth: putting your faith in something and seeing what might come to be. That is, listening to our passional nature and seeing where it might lead us because “there are some options between opinions in which this influence [of our passional nature] must be regarded both as an inevitable and a lawful determinant of our choice.” It is a risk yes, but one that puts us in a position to explore the world by looking to our experiences and seeing what might come to fruition. It is putting trust in something and living with that wager.
Here, James’ philosophy of pragmatism comes into play. At its simplest, it is an art of consequences. It poses the question, “What difference will it make?”, willing to take “anything, to follow either logic or the senses, and to count the humblest and most personal experiences. She will count mystical experiences if they have practical consequences.” When we cannot decide by the intellect and we choose to believe in something, following our passional nature, acknowledging that at that moment we cannot understand, what James’ pragmatic approach allows us to do is humble ourselves and open ourselves up to experience itself. Instead of trying to play the role of a traveler faithfully following the most accurate maps we have available that for some reason haven’t lead us to our destination, pragmatism ask us to simply look at the road itself: follow the signs, circle back, struggle with the present situation and see where it takes you, trusting in your belief that you will arrive. Thus, what would happen if you put your trust in a genuine option and see where it leads? What are some of the effects that might come to be?
