Scholarship

New! Draft cover for Consciousness Is Motor ↓ OUP page is here

My piece on Russell's philosophy as a bulwark against nationalism is out at Aeon.

Books
1. (In Press). Consciousness Is Motor: William James on Mind and Action. New York: Oxford University Press. [Accepted in final form. Draft introduction here]
2. (2024). Oxford Handbook of William James. Alexander Klein, ed. New York: Oxford University Press. [Also online.]
3. (2024). Feminism & Philosophical Women in Russell’s Circle. Landon Elkind and Alexander Klein, ed. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan.

Selected Journal Articles and Book Chapters (see below for abstracts)
19. (2023). “Russell’s Representationalism About Consciousness: Reconsidering His Relationship to James. Russell Journal 43(1): 3-41.
18. (2023). “History as a Weapon: T. H. Green, Empiricism, and the New Science of Mind.” In Historiography and the Formation of Philosophical Canons, eds. Sandra LaPointe and Erich Reck. Abingdon: Routledge.
17. (2022). “William James.” Routledge Handbook of Pragmatism. Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse, eds. Abingdon: Routledge.
16. (2022). “Dialogic Density in the Books of William James and John Dewey.” Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6336256
15. (2021). "How American Is Pragmatism?" Philosophy of Science. 88: 849-859.
14. (2021). "Consciousness as Caring: William James's Evolutionary Hypothesis." The Oxford Handbook of William James. Alexander Klein, ed. New York: Oxford University Press.  [DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199395699.013.4]
13. (2021). "On the Philosophical and Scientific Relationship between Ernst Mach and William James." Interpreting Mach: Critical Essays. Ed. John Preston. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 103-122.
12. (2020). "The Death of Consciousness? William James's Case Against Psychological Unobservables." Journal of the History of Philosophy 58 (2):293-323.
11. (2019). "Reconsidering William James's Evolutionary Objection to Epiphenomenalism." Philosophy of Science 86(5): 1179-90.
10. (2019). "Between Anarchism and Suicide: On William James’s Religious Therapy." Philosophers' Imprint 19(32): 1-18.
9. (2018). "The Curious Case of the Decapitated Frog: On Experiment and Philosophy." British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26 (5): 890 - 917.
8. (2018). “In Defense of Wishful Thinking: James, Quine, Emotion, and the Web of Belief.” Pragmatism and the European Traditions: Encounters with Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology Before the Great Divide. Maria Baghramian and Sarin Marchetti, eds. London: Routledge.
7. (2017). “Russell on Acquaintance with Spatial Properties: The Significance of James.” Innovations in the History of Analytical Philosophy. Christopher Pincock and Sandra Lapointe, eds. (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK): 229 - 263.
6. (2016). "Was James Psychologistic?" Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 4(5).
5. (2015)." Science, Religion, and 'The Will to Believe.'" HOPOS 5(1): 72-117.  *Featuring a response from Cheryl Misak.
4. (2015). "Hatfield on American Critical Realism.” HOPOS 5(1): 154-166.
3. (2013). “Who Is in the Community of Inquiry?” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 49 (3): 413-423.
2. (2009). "On Hume on Space: Green's Attack, James's Empirical Response." Journal of the History of Philosophy 47 (3): 415-49.
1. (2008 [actual pub’n date: 2010]). “Divide et Impera! William James and Naturalistic Philosophy of Science.” Philosophical Topics, 36 (1): 129–166.

Articles Under Review / Development
1. [Paper under review on historical and philosophical links between some nonreductive naturalist views on consciousness, today, and G. H. Lewes's emergent vitalism in the 19th century.]
2. [Book chapter under development on the history of the journal Mind, focusing on the way three seminal figures in that journal's early days conceived of the relationship between psychology and philosophy: Bain, Robertson, and James.]
3. [Book chapter under development on pragmatism's contributions to the history of the philosophy of science.]
4. [Book chapter under development for a Gary Hatfield festschrift.]

Upcoming and Recent Talks (selected)

Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness Annual Meeting: "The Bodily Basis for the Feeling of Effort: Condemned to Repeat the Past?" (University of Tokyo; July 2024) [handout]
Shanxi University [山西大学] School of Philosophy and Sociology, Pragmatism Conference: “James and Epiphenomenalism” (invited: September 2023)
The Yerevan Academy for Linguistics and Philosophy (YALP): Consciousness in Historical Perspective. Three-Part Series of Teaching Lectures (invited: American University of Armenia, Yerevan. August 2023)
KEYNOTE / Society for the History of Analytical Philosophy Annual Meeting: “James, Epiphenomenalism, and the Hard Problem” (invited: Humboldt University, Berlin. July 2023) [handout]
Tarello Institute for Legal Philosophy, University of Genoa: “From Action to Pragmatism: William James on Intending and Intention” (invited: July 2023)
Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness Annual Meeting: “The Measurement Problem: Its History and Solution” (refereed: New York University. June 2023)
The Canadian Philosophical Association Annual Meeting: “G. H. Lewes: Emergentism and The Vitalist Roots of Non-Reductive Physicalism” (refereed: York University. April 2023)
Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy: “Pragmatism and Imperialism” (refereed: Denver. March 2023)
Cheryl Misak’s work-in-progress group: “Meaning and Meaningfulness: Remarks on Christoph Limbeck-Lilienau” (invited: University of Toronto. October 2022)
Exiled Empiricists, Opening Conference: “The Rise of Empiricism” (refereed: Tilburg University, Netherlands. August 2022)
Society for the History of Analytical Philosophy: “Introspection: From Jamesean to Russellian Monism” (invited: July 2022)
5th TiLPS History of Analytic Philosophy Workshop: “G. H. Lewes: The Vitalist Roots of British Emergentism” (August 2022)
Fourth European Pragmatism Conference: “From Action to Pragmatism: James on Willing and Meaning” (August 2022)
Analysis of Mind Centenary: “Introspection: From Jamesean to Russellian Monism” (June 2022)
HOPOS biannual meeting: “William James and the Search for Consciousness Criteria” (June 2022)
ReproducibiliTea McMaster: "19th-Century Vivisection: Foundational Experiments we Can't Reproduce" (March 5, 2022)
Erik Banks Memorial Lecture, Wright State University: "Bertrand Russell, William James, and the Politics of Truth" (April 7, 2022)
Séminaire d’histoire et philosophie du vivant et des sciences de la vie (Toulouse): “G. H. Lewes on Vitalism and Emergence” (January 2022)
Philosophy of Science Association (Baltimore): “How American Was Pragmatism?” (Meeting Postponed to November 2021 due to covid.)
Society for the History of Analytical Philosophy Annual Meeting: “From Willing to Meaning: William James on Mental Content” (July 2021)
HOPOS Meeting (Singapore): “Russell’s Pragmatism? On his Representationalism about Consciousness” (June 2020. Meeting canceled due to covid)
Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science Annual Meeting (York): “Text Mining Bertrand Russell” (June 2020. Meeting canceled due to covid.)
Bertrand Russell Research Centre and Journal for the History of Analytic Philosophy Seminar: "History as a Weapon" (October 2020).
Bertrand Russell Society Annual Meeting: "Russell’s Pragmatism? On his Representationalism about Consciousness" (June 2020)
Les Approches Numériques en Histoire et Philosophie des Sciences (UQAM): “Two Challenges for Digital Historians: Modeling Causes and Propositional Attitudes” (November 2019)
Philosophy of Science Association (Seattle): "Reconsidering James's Objection to Epiphenomenalism" (November 2018)
HOPOS Meeting (Groningen): "William James’s “Dangerous Argument”: His Dispute with Ernst Mach over the Physiology of Will" (July 2018) [[appearance canceled due to temporary CSULB freeze on travel funds]]
Univ. of Vienna, European Pragmatism Conference: "A Cosmopolitan James: On Mach and other Central Europeans" (April 2018)
Central APA: “An ‘Icy Bath in the Waters of Uncertainty’: James and Mach on the Psychology of Will” (February 2018)
École Normale Supérieure: Four Lectures on James and Consciousness (June 2017)
University of Vienna: "James and Herbart" (April 27, 2017)
British Society for the History of Philosophy: "Emotion and the Web of Belief" (April 8, 2017)
Gresham College, London: "The Curious Case of the Decapitated Frog" (December 1, 2016)
University of Sheffield: "The Curious Case of the Decapitated Frog" (November 25, 2016)
Yale Workshop on the History of Experimental Philosophy (hosted by NYU): "Consciousness in the Hemisphereless Frog: The Case of Pflüger and Lewes" (February 2016)
NYU Conference on Issues in Modern Philosophy: "What Does 'God Is Real' Pragmatically Mean? " (November 2015)
Sheffield Conference on Rethinking Modern Philosophy: "History as a Weapon: T. H. Green, Early Modern Empiricism, and the New Science of Mind" (June 2015)
Summer Institute for American Philosophy (UCD, Ireland): "The Rise of Empiricism--Precis" (Summer Institute for American Philosophy, Dublin)
McMaster, Innovations in Analytical Philosophy Workshop: “Russell on Acquaintance with Spatial Properties: The Significance of James” (January 2015)
HOPOS Meeting (Ghent): "Hypothetical Reasoning and 'The Will to Believe.'" (July 2014)
UC San Diego History of Philosophy Roundtable: "Science, Religion, and 'The Will to Believe.'" (March 2013)
St. Andrews: Truth, Morality, and Democracy Conference: "A New James? Science, Religion, and 'The Will to Believe.'" (December 2012)
Harvard: History of Consciousness Workshop: "Consciousness in the Late 19th Century." (October 2012)
HOPOS Meeting (Halifax): "Russell's External World Program and the Psychology of Spatial Perception: The Significance of James" (June 2012)
Univ. San Francisco: Pragmatism in the Philosophy of Science Conference: "Does William James Have a Pragmatist Philosophy of Science?" (March 2012)
UC Riverside: "Experiments in History: William James, T. H. Green, and David Hume on Spatial Perception" (December 2010)
École Normale Supérieure: "William James, Metaphysical Commitments, and the Object of Psychology" (July 2010)

Abstracts

19. (2023). “Russell’s Representationalism About Consciousness: Reconsidering His Relationship to James.

While Russell famously rejected the pragmatist theory of truth, recent scholarship portrays his post-prison accounts of belief and knowledge as resembling James’s. But deeper divisions in fact persisted between Russell and James concerning the nature of mind. I argue 1) that Russell’s neutral monist approach to consciousness in The Analysis of Mind constitutes an early form of representationalism in that he took states to be phenomenally conscious partly in virtue of (truly) representing an antecedent (typically just-passed) sensation; 2) that although James also saw representation (typically of expected kinaesthetic sensation) as a crucial component of consciousness, he contended that representation is a matter of affording future-directed action control that aligns with the agent’s interests; and 3) that what divides these contrasting approaches to consciousness and representation is precisely what Russell would continue to reject in the pragmatist theory of truth, namely the productive role James assigned to an agent’s interests.

18. (2023). “History as a Weapon: T. H. Green, Empiricism, and the New Science of Mind.”

This paper examines the surprising role a late 19th-century controversy over the scientific status of psychology played in scholarship written during that era on the history of philosophy. One side—led by T. H. Green and other erstwhile students of the Plato scholar Benjamin Jowett—contended that the history of philosophy shows that philosophical assumptions that underpin the purported science of mind dead-end in skepticism. Defenders of naturalistic psychology—including G. H. Lewes, T. H. Huxley, E. B. Titchener, and later Norman Kemp Smith—looked to admired historical figures of their own to substantiate the view that philosophical reflection must be intimately connected with a properly empirical science of mind. The upshot is that the controversy over psychology’s viability as a natural science was partly fought on the battlefield of historical interpretation. This battle has an under-appreciated legacy: I contend that our contemporary concept of empiricism—including the idea of a British tradition whose central figures are Locke, Berkeley, and Hume—is in part a by-product of this now-forgotten fight over psychology. In making my case, I offer a new analytical framework for tracing historical-theoretical concepts (like empiricism) through time. These concepts are bicephalous in that they typically pick out both a canonical set of authors, and a shared set of ideas that are supposed to tie the authors into a single tradition. It can be hard for historians to trace the evolution of such concepts because the two aspects of such concepts can change independently, as they apparently did in the case under consideration. The framework I develop in this paper is designed to help investigate the evolution of tradition-concepts generally, and I put it to work in my examination of how the concept of empiricism evolved.

17. (2022). "William James"

At the center of William James’s pragmatism was a provocative account of mental representation. For James, ideas do not represent in virtue of either resembling or having been caused by their objects. Instead, James developed a voluntaristic, forward-looking approach that explained representation in terms of causal consequences. In this chapter, I offer a brief examination of James’s approach to mental representation, explaining what makes his view “voluntaristic,” what makes it “forward-looking,” and how it sets the tenor for his general approach to philosophy.

16. (2021). "How American Is Pragmatism?" Philosophy of Science.

This essay examines the provenance of a single, curious term that William James often used in connection with his own pragmatism. The term is “Denkmittel,” an uncommon German contraction of “Denk” (thought) and “Mittel” (instrument). James’s Central European sources for this now forgotten bit of philosophical jargon provide a small illustration of a bigger historical point that too often gets obscured. Pragmatism—James’s pragmatism, at least—was both allied with and inspired by a broader sweep of scientific instrumentalism that was already flourishing in fin de siècle European philosophy.

15. (Forthcoming). “History as a Weapon: T. H. Green, Early Modern Empiricism, and the New Science of Mind.” In Method in the History of Philosophical Knowledge, eds. Sandra LaPointe and Erich Reck.

This paper examines the surprising role a late 19th-century controversy over the scientific status of psychology played in scholarship written during that era on the history of philosophy. One side—led by T. H. Green and other erstwhile students of the Plato scholar Benjamin Jowett—contended that the history of philosophy shows that philosophical assumptions that underpin the purported science of mind dead-end in skepticism. Defenders of naturalistic psychology—including G. H. Lewes, T. H. Huxley, E. B. Titchener, and later Norman Kemp Smith—looked to admired historical figures of their own to substantiate the view that philosophical reflection must be intimately connected with a properly empirical science of mind. The upshot is that the controversy over psychology’s viability as a natural science was partly fought on the battlefield of historical interpretation. This battle has an under-appreciated legacy: I contend that our contemporary concept of empiricism—including the idea of a British tradition whose central figures are Locke, Berkeley, and Hume—is in part a by-product of this now-forgotten fight over psychology. In making my case, I offer a new analytical framework for tracing historical-theoretical concepts (like empiricism) through time. These concepts are bicephalous in that they typically pick out both a canonical set of authors, and a shared set of ideas that are supposed to tie the authors into a single tradition. It can be hard for historians to trace the evolution of such concepts because the two aspects of such concepts can change independently, as they apparently did in the case under consideration. The framework I develop in this paper is designed to help investigate the evolution of tradition-concepts generally, and I put it to work in my examination of how the concept of empiricism evolved.

14. (Forthcoming). "Consciousness as Caring: William James's Evolutionary Hypothesis." The Oxford Handbook of William James. Alexander Klein, ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

Between 1872 and 1890, William James developed an evolutionary account of phenomenal consciousness. He contended that consciousness involves actively evaluating what is in (or might be in) one’s environment, attending to what one deems important, and ignoring much else. In other words, being conscious involves caring about one’s own actual or potential circumstances, typically; and James hypothesized that this caring capacity was selected (in the Darwinian sense) because it regulated the behavior of vertebrates with highly-articulated brains. His hypothesis was intended to explain some surprising results in physiology, particularly a series of experiments purporting to show purposive behavior in (of all things) decapitated frogs. I reconstruct and evaluate James’s evolutionary hypothesis, showing how it would explain those surprising experiments. His account requires interactionism, so he also developed what would become an influential objection to epiphenomenalism: that the latter cannot explain the evolution of our natively-patterned, phenomenal pleasures and pains.

13. (2021). "On the Philosophical and Scientific Relationship between Ernst Mach and William James." Interpreting Mach: Critical Essays. Ed. John Preston. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Because one can find distinct pragmatist threads in early Logical Positivism, some historians have claimed that the movement should count Peirce and James among its intellectual inspirations. But new research suggests that those pragmatist threads owe more to a homegrown influence from Mach than to direct and sustained engagement with American figures. Still, Mach and James were personal friends and intellectual allies, and without studying their relationship it is difficult to say whether there might have been an American pragmatist influence on positivism viaJames’s influence on Mach. Accordingly, this paper explores the relationship between these two friends, arguing that Mach’s instrumentalism about science actually influenced James far more than James’s pragmatism influenced Mach. What is more, empirical and not philosophical issues dominated their intellectual exchanges, and I examine the three topics about which they most frequently engaged one another: the role of the semi-circular canals in the perception of bodily orientation, the question of whether there is a distinctive “feeling of effort” (Innervationsgefühl), and the nature of visual spatial perception. The debate over the Innervationsgefühl is particularly interesting because James apparently convinced Mach to reverse his position on the matter. In short, we remember Mach as a master experimentalist and James as a philosophical popularizer. So it is a surprise to learn that the main philosophical influence apparently flowed from Mach to James, while the main influence when it comes to matters of empirical interest actually flowed the other way.

12. (2019). "Between Anarchism and Suicide: On William James's Religious Therapy." Philosophers' Imprint 19(32): 1-18.

William James’s religious writing displays a therapeutic concern for two key social problems: an epidemic of suicide among educated Victorians who worried (he thought) that a scientific worldview left no room for God; and also material poverty and bleak employment prospects for others. James sought a conception of God that would comfort his melancholic peers while also girding them to fight for better social conditions—a fight he associated with political anarchism. What is perhaps most unique about James’s approach to religion emerges when we consider the relationship of his therapeutic project to his treatment of religious epistemology. For James takes his suicidal peers to need more than tea and sympathy. They need to be convinced, through rational argument, that religious faith is epistemically permissible in light of their methodological naturalism. That is to say that theoreticsuccess in James’s treatment of religion is to be measured by therapeuticsuccess. His argument for epistemic permissibility begins by treating religious faith as a “hypothesis.” He takes naturalism to permit entertaining a hypothesis just in case it is testable, and not contradicted by available evidence. So he develops a distinctive conception of God—what he calls the “pluralistic hypothesis”—which proposes a plurality of independent entities in the universe, only one of which is God. In contrast to the monistic hypothesis (roughly what we would call “pantheism”), pluralism is actually meant to be empirically testable, and yet underdetermined by any evidence available now. This purported, in-principle testability would make religious pluralism epistemically permissible to entertain (and so potentially a source of consolation for the scientifically educated). And since salvation is possible on this view without being guaranteed, the pluralistic hypothesis stands to discourage social and political quietism (and so it is also a potential spur to fight material poverty).

11. (2020). "The Death of Consciousness? William James's Case Against Psychological Unobservables." Journal of the History of Philosophy.

Like heartburn, a pronounced discomfort with the very idea of consciousness followed the early days of experimental psychology. Received wisdom has it that psychologists (and allied philosophers) came to mistrust consciousness for largely behaviorist reasons. But by the time John Watson had published his behaviorist manifesto in 1913, a wider revolt against consciousness was already underway. I begin by canvassing some of the lesser-known, pre-behaviorist angst about consciousness. Then I delve into the case of William James—an important early source of unease about consciousness. James’s rejection of consciousness (as traditionally understood) grew out of his critique of perceptual elementarism in psychology. This is the view that most mental states are complex, and that psychology’s goal is in some sense to analyze these states into their atomic “elements.” Elementarism came in for intense criticism in James’s Principles of Psychology, and I argue that his later rejection of consciousness is an extension of the earlier critique. Just as we cannot (according to James) isolate any atomic, sensory elements in our occurrent mental states, so we cannot distinguish any elemental consciousness from any separate contents. The view he comes around to is not eliminativism or reductionism, but a kind of pluralism: James denies that there is any one thing it is like to be conscious.

10. (2019). "Reconsidering William James's Evolutionary Objection to Epiphenomenalism." Philosophy of Science 86(5): 1179-90.

James developed an evolutionary objection to epiphenomenalism that is still discussed today. But epiphenomenalists have offered responses that do not grasp its full depth. I thus offer a new reading and assessment of James’s objection. Our life-essential, phenomenal pleasures and pains have three features that suggest that they were shaped by selection, according to James: they are natively-patterned, those patterns are systematically linked with antecedent brain states, and the patterns are “universal” among humans. If epiphenomenalism were true, phenomenal patterns could not have been selected (because epiphenomenalism precludes phenomenal consciousness affecting reproductive success). So epiphenomenalism must be false.

9. (2017). "The Curious Case of the Decapitated Frog: On Experiment and Philosophy." British Journal of the History of Philosophy.

Physiologists have long known that some vertebrates can survive for months without a brain. This phenomenon attracted limited attention until the 19th century when a series of experiments on living, decapitated frogs ignited a controversy about consciousness. Pflüger demonstrated that such creatures do not just exhibit reflexes; they also perform purposive behaviors. Suppose one thinks, along with Pflüger’s ally Lewes, that purposive behavior is a mark of consciousness. Then one must count a decapitated frog as conscious. If one rejects this mark, one can avoid saying peculiar things about decapitated animals. But as Huxley showed, this position leads quickly to epiphenomenalism. The dispute long remained stalemated because it rested on conflicting sets of intuitions that were each compatible with the growing body of experiments. What eventually resolved it is that one set of intuitions supported a research program in physiology that came to seem more fruitful on the whole. So my case study suggests an alternative model for experimental philosophy as compared with more recent practice. Rather than using experiment to bolster our philosophical intuitions directly, we should explore how our philosophical intuitions might bolster (or block) fruitful experimental inquiry in science.

8. (2018). “In Defense of Wishful Thinking: James, Quine, Emotion, and the Web of Belief.” Pragmatism and the European Traditions: Encounters with Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology Before the Great Divide. Maria Baghramian and Sarin Marchetti, eds. London: Routledge.

What is W. V. O. Quine’s relationship to classical pragmatism? Although he resists the comparison to William James in particular, commentators have seen an affinity between his “web of belief” model of theory confirmation and James’s claim that our beliefs form a “stock” that faces new experience as a corporate body. I argue that the similarity is only superficial. James thinks our web of beliefs should be responsive not just to perceptual but also to emotional experiences in some cases; Quine denies this. I motivate James’s controversial view by appealing to an episode in the history of medicine when a researcher self-experimented by swallowing a vial of bacteria that at the time had not been studied in much detail. The researcher’s commitment to his own as-yet untested hypothesis was based in part on emotional considerations. Finally, I argue that Quine’s insistence that emotions can never be relevant to adjusting our web of belief reflects a tacit holdover of one of logical positivism’s crucially anti-pragmatist commitments—that philosophy of science should focus exclusively on the context of justification, not the context of discovery. James’s emphasis on discovery as a (perhaps the) crucial locus for epistemological inquiry is characteristic of pragmatism in general. Since Quinean epistemology is always an epistemology of justification, he is not happily viewed as a member of the pragmatist tradition.

7. (2017). “Russell on Acquaintance with Spatial Properties: The Significance of James.” Innovations in the History of Analytical Philosophy. Christopher Pincock and Sandra Lapointe, eds. Palgrave Macmillan.

The standard, foundationalist reading of Our Knowledge of the External World requires Russell to have a view of perceptual acquaintance that he demonstrably does not have. Russell’s actual purpose in “constructing” physical bodies out of sense-data is instead to show that psychology and physics are consistent. But how seriously engaged was Russell with actual psychology? I show that OKEW makes some non-trivial assumptions about the character of visual space, and I argue that he drew those assumptions from William James’s Principles. This point helps us take a fresh look at the complex relationship between the two men. In light of this surprising background of agreement, I highlight ways their more general approaches to perception finally diverged in ways that put the two at epistemological odds.

6. (2016). "Was James Psychologistic?" Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 4(5).

As Thomas Uebel has recently argued, some early logical positivists saw American pragmatism as a kindred form of scientific philosophy. They associated pragmatism with William James, whom they rightly saw as allied with Ernst Mach. But what apparently blocked sympathetic positivists from pursuing commonalities with American pragmatism was the concern that James advocated some form of psychologism, a view they thought could not do justice to the a priori. This paper argues that positivists were wrong to read James as offering a psychologistic account of the a priori. They had encountered James by reading Pragmatism as translated by the unabashedly psychologistic Wilhelm Jerusalem. But in more technical works, James had actually developed a form of conventionalism that anticipated the so-called “relativized” a priori positivists themselves would independently develop. While positivists arrived at conventionalism largely through reflection on the exact sciences, though, James’s account of the a priori grew from his reflections on the biological evolution of cognition, particularly in the context of his Darwin-inspired critique of Herbert Spencer.

5. (2015)." Science, Religion, and 'The Will to Believe.'" HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society of the History of the Philosophy of Science Society 5(1): 72-117. *Featuring a response from Cheryl Misak.

Do the same epistemic standards govern scientific and religious belief? Or should science and religion operate in completely independent epistemic spheres? Commentators have recently been divided on William James’s answer to this question. One side depicts “The Will to Believe” as offering a separate-spheres defense of religious belief in the manner of Galileo. The other contends that “The Will to Believe” seeks to loosen the usual epistemic standards so that religious and scientific belief can both be justified by a unitary set of evidentiary rules. I argue that James did build a unitary epistemology, but not by loosening cognitive standards. In his psychological research he had adopted the Comtean view that hypotheses and regulative assumptions play a crucial role in the context of discovery even though they must be provisionally adopted before they can be supported by evidence. “The Will to Believe” relies on this methodological point to achieve a therapeutic goal—to convince despairing Victorians that religious faith can be reconciled with a scientific epistemology. James argues that the prospective theist is in the same epistemic situation with respect to “the religious hypothesis” as the scientist working in the context of discovery.

3. (2013). “Who Is in the Community of Inquiry?” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 49 (3): 413-423.

A central theme of Cheryl Misak’s new history is that there are two key strands in the pragmatist tradition. The Peircean strand does “justice to the objective dimension of human inquiry,” she thinks, while the Jamesian strand allegedly does not. I argue that at least when it comes to philosophical inquiry, just the opposite is true. Peirce advocates adopting technical vocabulary in philosophy. But in practice, extensive use of jargon means only trained specialists can participate in inquiry. There is no assurance that consensus in such a restricted community would transcend individual and small-group bias—an important requirement for objectivity. In contrast, James’s Darwinian account of inquiry requires him to practice philosophy with an audience of what he calls the “seriously inquiring amateur.” A community of inquiry that includes amateurs would contain a greater variety of temperaments, James argues, and would thus be proportionately more likely to produce a consensus that transcends individual and small-group bias.

2. (2009). "On Hume on Space: Green's Attack, James's Empirical Response." Journal of the History of Philosophy 47 (3): 415-49.

Associationist psychologists of the late 19th-century premised their research on a fundamentally Humean picture of the mind. So the very idea of mental science was called into question when T. H. Green, a founder of British idealism, wrote an influential attack on Hume’s Treatise. I first analyze Green’s interpretation and criticism of Hume, situating his reading with respect to more recent Hume scholarship. I focus on Green’s argument that Hume cannot consistently admit real ideas of spatial relations. I then argue that William James’s early work on spatial perception attempted to vindicate the new science of mind by showing how to avoid the problems Green had exposed in Hume’s empiricism. James’s solution involved rejecting a basic Humean assumption—that perceptual experience is fundamentally composed of so-called minima sensibilia, or psychological atoms. The claim that there are no psychological atoms is interesting because James supported it with experimental data rather than (as commentators typically suppose) with introspective description or a priori argument. James claimed to be the real descendant of British empiricism on grounds that his anti-atomistic model of perception fortified what Green had perhaps most wanted to demolish—the prospect of using empirical, scientific methods in the study of mind.

1. (2008 [actual pub’n date: 2010]). “Divide et Impera! William James and Naturalistic Philosophy of Science.” Philosophical Topics, 36 (1): 129–166.

May scientists rely on substantive, a priori presuppositions? Quinean naturalists say "no," but Michael Friedman and others claim that such a view cannot be squared with the actual history of science. To make his case, Friedman offers Newton's universal law of gravitation and Einstein's theory of relativity as examples of admired theories that both employ presuppositions (usually of a mathematical nature), presuppositions that do not face empirical evidence directly. In fact, Friedman claims that the use of such presuppositions is a hallmark of "science as we know it." But what should we say about the special sciences, which typically do not rely on the abstruse formalisms one finds in the exact sciences? I identify a type of a priori presupposition that plays an especially striking role in the development of empirical psychology. These are ontological presuppositions about the type of object a given science purports to study. I show how such presuppositions can be both a priori and rational by investigating their role in an early flap over psychology's contested status as a natural science. The flap focused on one of the field's earliest textbooks, William James's Principles of Psychology. The work was attacked precisely for its reliance on a priori presuppositions about what James had called the "mental state," psychology's (alleged) proper object. I argue that the specific presuppositions James packed into his definition of the "mental state" were not directly responsible to empirical evidence, and so in that sense were a priori; but the presuppositions were rational in that they were crafted to help overcome philosophical objections (championed by neo-Hegelians) to the very idea that there can be a genuine science of mind. Thus, my case study gives an example of substantive, a priori presuppositions being put to use—to rational use—in the special sciences. In addition to evaluating James's use of presuppositions, my paper also offers historical reflections on two different strands of pragmatist philosophy of science. One strand, tracing back through Quine to C. S. Peirce, is more naturalistic, eschewing the use of a priori elements in science. The other strand, tracing back through Kuhn and C. I. Lewis to James, is more friendly to such presuppositions, and to that extent bears affinity with the positivist tradition Friedman occupies

Other Online Work
The Rise of Empiricism: William James, T. H. Green, and the Struggle over Psychology
[my dissertation: 2 MB]

The background is from Max Verworn, Physiologisches Praktikum für Mediziner. 2nd ed. Jena: G. Fischer, 1912, p. 198.

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