Chapter 2
THE WILLFULNESS OF BELIEF[1]
As seen in the last chapter, it is James's contention that
2. Belief is an action.
which, it will be recalled, was the second premise of his syllogistic argument for the conclusion that
3. We are always morally obligated to believe in a manner that maximizes desire-satisfaction over the other available belief options.
For the argument to work, however, the second premise must be beefed up to assert that
2'. Belief is a free action.
the reason being that 3 morally obligates us to believe in a certain manner but we can have a moral obligation to act in a certain way only if we are free to do so. This chapter will concentrate on his argument for belief being an action, leaving its freedom for Chapter 3 and our justification for believing in its freedom to Chapter 4. His overall argument for belief being an action is based on his identification of belief with the will, and the will, at least in one of its senses, with effortful attention to an idea. Since effortful attention is something that we can do intentionally or voluntarily, it follows by Leibniz's Law of the indiscernibility of identicals that belief also is an intentional action, and thereby, provided it is free, subject to the casuistic rule
1. We are always morally obligated to act so as to maximize desire-satisfaction over the other options available to us.
It is via our acts of effortful attention that we are able to play the promethean role of cocreators of actuality, truth, value, meaning, personal identity, as well as the course taken by future history: The "co" qualification is inserted because James always recognized the demand of the realist for some kind of a given. But to be truly promethean beings our acts of attending, willing, and believing also must be free in the radical Libertarian sense that involves a creation ex nihilo; but again, as Chapter 3 will bring out, there is a concession to realism, since they are limited by a given situation, thereby failing to be a total causa sui.
That James identified attention, will, and belief, taken in a purely psychological sense, with each other is clear from the following quotations. He begins by claiming that "volition [will] is nothing but attention," and then completes the trilogy of identifications by stating that "Will and Belief, in short, meaning a certain relation between objects and the Self, are two names for one and the same PSYCHOLOGICAL phenomenon." (424 and 948) Although “attention,” “will,” and “belief” are coreferential, they have different senses or meanings and thus require separate treatment. That they are coreferential is a very bold and original thesis and will be found to be subject to many serious challenges. For the purpose of James's syllogistic argument for
3. We are always morally obligated to believe in a manner that maximizes desire-satisfaction over the other available belief options.
the thesis need not be true. All that is needed is that belief can be induced, either directly or indirectly, by willful attention, not that belief is identical with attention and the will. This is all that is needed for James's syllogistic argument for 3.
James's psychology employs two different ways of understanding a psychic state. "First, the way of analysis: What does it consist in? What is its inner nature? Of what sort of mind-stuff is it composed? Second, the way of history: What are its conditions of production, and its connection with other facts?" (913) The way of "analysis" involves introspecting our own mind so as to discover what goes on when we are conscious in the concerned manner. This will be called the method of "phenomenological or introspective analysis." The "way of history," is an objective inquiry into the causes and consequences of the psychic state and thus will be called a "causal analysis." Throughout The Principles of Psychology James tries to strike a proper balance between the two, but, as will be seen in the second part of this book on The Anti-Promethean Mystic, ultimately gives pride of place to the method of phenomenological analysis or introspection.
Although each of us can know what attention, will, and belief is from introspecting our own minds, we cannot define them in terms of any more basic conscious states. Each is a simple, sui generis state, similar to a sensation of green in this respect. For each of them we can phenomenologically distinguish between a simple and complex case. In the simple case our consciousness is filled with an idea of an act sans any other competing idea. By some preestablished neurological mechanism, this state of consciousness triggers the envisioned act. In the complex case, we are aware of conflicting ideas competing for the sole occupation of our consciousness, and herein there is room for an intentional action of making an effort to attend or consent to one of these ideas to the exclusion of the others. This effort or fiat also is phenomenologically vouchsafed. Thus, in both the simple and complex cases, the final conscious state is the same, some idea filling the mind without any competition; but in the complex case there is an initial competition between conflicting ideas that gets resolved by an effort to attend or consent. Another way to say this is that in the complex but not the simple case the final state of consciousness is brought about by an intentional action.
The reader is urged always to bear in mind James's distinction between the simple and complex cases of attention, will, and belief; for he sometimes makes seemingly general claims that he carelessly fails to restrict to one of the two cases. For example, he says that attention is "reactive spontaneity" and a "taking possession by the mind," which makes attention look like it is intentionally brought about in every case. (380 and 381) Similarly, he says without any restriction that will involves a "consent to the idea's undivided presence" and belief is an "acquiescence" or "consent" to an idea's presence in the mind, both of which again speak for the final state of consciousness being brought about intentionally. (1169 and 913) His claim that "Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will" also is misleading. (1167) Probably what he means by "essential" is that effortful attention is the important kind of attention.
Another example of such carelessness is James's account of the relation between will and desire. "If with the desire there goes a sense that attainment is possible, we simply wish; but if we believe that the end is in our power, we will that the desired feeling, having, or doing shall be real." (1098) James must have realized that if this claim is not suitably restricted, it is false, since there are things that we both desire and believe to be attainable but do not will to be realized because of conflicting moral or esthetic considerations. Judging by other things he subsequently says, it becomes clear that his claim must be restricted to desires that take place in the simple case in which there are no conflicting desires, for he later says that "What checks our impulses is the mere thinking of reasons to the contrary." (1164) Thus, if a desire clashes with a moral scruple, the subject might not will its satisfaction. That James was just being careless in failing to add the needed restriction to complex cases is clear from his repeated claims that it is only in some but not all cases that there is an effort, consent or fiat. "The immense majority of human decisions are decisions without effort," and "There is no express fiat needed when the conditions are simple." (1141 and 1134) With these preliminaries out of the way, a separate exposition can now be given in turn of James's specific accounts of attention, will, and belief.
Attention
James begins with the newborn baby's
awareness of the big, blooming, buzzing confusion, charmingly called "baby's
first sensation," as if it were a toy by Mattel. This is a sheer chaos, a
cotton-candyish mush, because the subject does not apply concepts or categories
that relate one part of it to another. "All of the 'categories of the
understanding' are contained," however, in this pure sensation, but there
is not yet any attending activity on
the part of the babe and thus no part of the sensory field stands out from its
background. (657) As Charlene Haddock Seigfried has correctly pointed out,
"The chaos is a result of an overabundance of relations, which are too
numerous to be grasped, rather than an absence of relations."[2]
(CC 28) There are not yet, for example, any indexically-based accents of now
and then, here and there, this and that, and I and you. (PP 381) No perception
has yet occurred, since, for James, a sensation becomes a perception
only when there is an application of a concept to its sensory content. The babe
sees all of the sensory contents and the relations between them but does
not see that these contents stand in relations, because no concepts are
applied. Since the application of a concept involves judgment or belief, the
babe does not yet have any beliefs about what is sensorily given. James is not
consistent on this point, for he says that if baby's first sensation is
"of a lighted candle against a dark background, and nothing else,"
the existence of the candle will "be believed in," will be
"known to the mind in question." (917) Since one cannot believe or know
without using concepts, this imputes to the babe the possession of concepts.
This is yet another example of his proclivity to engage in Robinson Crusoe
mythologizing, of a piece with his notion of a "moral solitude" in
Chapter 1.
The babe cannot attend to any part of the originally given chaos until it has acquired concepts and the ability to wield them in judgments. "The only things which we commonly see [perceive] are those which we preperceive, and the only things which we preperceive are those which have been labelled for us, and the labels stamped into our mind. If we lost our stock of labels we should be intellectually lost in the midst of the world." (420) A preperception is "nothing but the anticipatory imagination of what the impressions or the reactions are to be." (415) For James, concepts are acquired through abstraction from past sensations, which is to be a topic for Chapter 11. The babe has not yet had a sufficiently rich fund of past sensations from which to derive the concepts that are needed to label things.
It is unclear whether baby's first sensation counts as an experience at all. James first makes the Kantian claim that "Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience" because "My experience is what I agree to attend to." (380. my italics) This has the consequence that baby's first sensation is not an experience at all. But James immediately adds that "without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos," which seems to allow for an unattentive experience of the baby's-first-sensation sort. (381) The best way for James to resolve this terminological confusion is to reserve "experience" for attended consciousness and call baby's first sensation a mere case of consciousness. This squares with James's claim that without attention "the consciousness of every creature would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive." (381. my italics)
Again, it is important to stress that James recognized a distinction between simple and complex cases of attention. In the simple case, "Attention to an object is what takes place whenever that object most completely occupies the mind," (TT 69) there being no need for the subject to be an active agent in bringing about this state of consciousness. You could just find yourself attending to one part of the sensorily given to the exclusion of others; your idea of it just happens to stand out from the pack. Similar remarks are made about will and belief. "Volition...is absolutely completed when the stable state of the idea is there," and "Belief means only a peculiar sort of occupancy of the mind." (PP 1165 and 1166) But he also says that Attention is "reactive spontaneity" (380), a "taking possession by the mind." (381), which points to it being an intentional action. Again, the reader must make the suitable restriction to complex cases on James's behalf.
It might be urged that all cases of attention involve an intentional action on the grounds that since attention requires the application of a concept it involves the intentional action of making a judgment or forming a belief. The problem with this is that although we can at will join concepts together in our imagination into a propositional complex we cannot in most cases believe at will. James asks rhetorically, "If belief consists in an emotional reaction of the entire man on an object, how can we believe at will? We cannot control our emotions." (948) How James deals with the problem of self-inducing beliefs is to figure prominently in his account of the will to believe and thus will be considered later.
So far we have been considering only James's phenomenological analysis of attention. His causal analysis of attention in terms of interest contains an apparent inconsistency. He says, on the one hand, "The things to which we attend are said to interest us. Our interest in them is supposed to be the cause of our attending." (393) Yet he also says that "what-we-attend-to and what-interests-us are synonymous terms." (1164) But since the terms designating respectively a cause and effect are not synonymous, it follows that interest is not the cause of our attending, pace what James has just said on page 393. I believe that the account that makes interest the cause of attention squares better over-all with the text and thus is the one that will be employed . No doubt, whatever we attend to is of interest to us, either directly or through its association with things that have direct interest (you attend to a relative in whom you have no direct interest because you are interested in obeying the maxim that one should take care of one's relatives); however, this is not because attention and interest are one and the same but rather because attention, whether simple or complex, always is caused by interest, and thus they go together.
That attention always is caused by interest raises an active-passive, creating-discovering aporia, which will be found to run throughout James's promethean philosophy. In Chapter 1 it involved a clash between our creating value and obligation through our desirings or demandings and our discovering an objective moral truth, the casuistic rule, by appeal to our moral intuition. In the simple case we do not intentionally bring it about that we are in the attending state, since we make no previous effort to be in this state. It is only in regard to the complex cases that James speaks of our choosing to attend as we do. "Each of us literally chooses, by his ways of attending to things, what sort of a universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit." (401) This is the height of his prometheanism, according to which each of us chooses which one of the many possible worlds is to be the actual world, thereby usurping the Deity's prerogative of doing this.
The problem is that our choice to attend to one universe or object over its competitors is caused by our interest, but our interest, in turn, being an emotional state, is not subject to our wills. We can no more control at will what interests us than we can what we love. James seems to agree: "The accommodation and the resultant feeling are the attention. We don't bestow it, the object draws it from us. The object has the initiative, not the mind." (425) This clashes with his activistic claim that attending in the complex case involves a "taking possession by the mind," a "reactive spontaneity." The best expression of the aporia comes from James's own pen. In both the simple and complex cases the mind "turns to it [the object that is to be attended to]...in the interested active emotional way." (948. my italics) The agent discovers rather than creates its emotionally based interest. An attempt will be made on James's behalf to resolve this aporia in the next chapter.
Will
Everything that has been said about attention has a parallel with respect to the will, since “attention” and “will” refer to one and the same psychological phenomenon for James, although they differ in sense. , As he did in his account of attention, James will again distinguish between an active and passive case, though at times he writes carelessly as if all cases of will involved an intentional effort or fiat. His exposition begins with the simple or passive case of willing, called "ideo-motor action," which has no fiat or effort to attend. He then goes on to consider the complex case of a conflict between ideas that requires for its resolution a fiat or effort.
All human behavior initially is involuntary. Incoming sensations are followed by bodily behavior either through instinct, reflex or accident. That sensations will lead to a motor discharge is due to the fact "that consciousness is in its very nature impulsive....Movement is the natural immediate effect of feeling, irrespective of what the quality of the feeling may be." (1134-5) The organic material of the human brain is highly plastic, permitting new neural pathways to be dug in it. "An acquired habit, from the physiological point of view, is nothing but a new pathway of discharge formed in the brain, by which certain incoming currents ever after tend to escape." (9) When there is a constant conjunction between a sensory input and a motor discharge, this causes a new habit to be formed, consisting in a new pathway from that part of the brain in which the incoming sensory input is registered to some motor response. (11)
The bodily behavior, say the moving of your arm, caused by the incoming sensation has experiential accompaniments consisting in kinaesthetic and visual sensations of your arm moving and some of its effects. Thus, there will result another constant conjunction, this one between your sensory ideas of your arm moving and its moving. By a complex physiological law, which I will not formulate here (see 1183-88 for the details), your having the idea of your arm moving can take the place of the original incoming sensation as the triggering event of your arm's moving. Thus a new habit is formed that enables your having kinaesthetic and visual ideas of your arm moving and its effects to discharge into the motor organs that move your arm. Notice that there is no mysterious sort of backward causation going on here. Initially, these ideas came after or while your arm moved, but now, after the formation of this secondary habit, they come before the movement and thus cause it in an ordinary forward-directed manner.
Once the secondary habit has been formed, the subject can voluntarily or willfully move his arm. He does so by activating his memories of what it felt like when his arm moved, thereby consciously ideating in a my-arm-is-moving manner. If there is no conflicting idea in his mind to that of his arm moving, such as the thought that he must not move his arm because it is broken, his arm will move in virtue of the secondary habit. "A supply of ideas of the various movements that are possible, left in the memory by experiences of their involuntary performance, is thus the first prerequisite of the voluntary life," the other prerequisite, in the simple case of ideo-motor action, being the lack of any competing idea. (1099-1100)
That the mere thought of the sensations you have when your arm moves is sufficient to cause your arm to move challenges Wundt's innervation theory, which holds that in every case there must be a fiat or volitional mandate that comes after the having of the thought of the action in question. James advances both introspectively- and a priori-based objections to this theory. In the case of an ideo-motor action, "An anticipatory image...of the sensorial consequence of a movement...is the only psychic state which introspection lets us discern as the forerunner of our voluntary acts. There is no introspective evidence whatever of any still later or concomitant feeling attached to the efferent discharge." (111-2) The innervationists confound the feelings of effort that are sometimes caused by the movement with the fiat that triggers the movement, thereby reversing cause and effect.
The a priori objection is that the innervation theory violates the logical principle of parsimony. "There is a certain a priori reason why the kinaesthetic images OUGHT to be the last psychic antecedents of the outgoing currents, and why we should expect these currents to be insentient; why, in short, the soi-disant feelings of innervation should NOT exist." (1107) Once the subject has acquired the secondary habit that enables his idea of a movement to replace the original sensory input as the cause of the movement, there is nothing left for any additional conscious state, such as a fiat, to do. "It is a general principle in Psychology that consciousness deserts all processes where it can no longer be of use....by virtue of this principle of parsimony in consciousness the motor discharge ought to be devoid of sentience." (1107-8) The innervationist could accept the principle of parsimony but challenge James's empirical claim that the mere conscious thought of the movement, even when there is no competition, alone is causally sufficient for the movement to ensue. In the absence of hard empirical evidence for the theory of ideo-motor action, an appeal to the principle of parsimony is premature.
James holds that it is a brute contingent fact that our will is efficacious over only our own body, that we can cause our arm but not the table to move by thinking of it as moving. (947-8 and 1165) As an avid psychical investigator, he took seriously the possibility of telekinesis, though he didn't find the evidence for it very strong. James adds the rather startling claim that he is able to will or exert a volition that a table should move, and is surprised that others report themselves unable to do so. He speculates that the reason why they think they cannot do so is that they know it is not in their power to move the table and this "sense of impotence inhibits the volition." (1165) If they were to have a desire for the table to move, it would be a mere wish, not a want, since the desire is a conflicted one.
I very much doubt that this is the right account of why these people, and James ought to be among them, are unable to will that the table move. The crucial idea of a movement in the case of ideo-motor action is of the resident kinaesthetic sensations that accompany the movement, rather than just the idea of the visual sensations occasioned by the movement or its effects, such as one could have of the table moving. Obviously, we have no idea of the kinaesthetic sensations that are resident in a table's moving and thus have no idea of what it is like for a table to move voluntarily. And as a result we have no idea of the manner in which we should ideate so as to cause the table to move. We just don't know, in general, what it is like to be a table and do tablely things, like stoically remaining immobile when someone thumps on us to emphasize the point that it is this very table that he refers to when he makes counter-factual claims about it.
In a complex case of will there is a competition between warring ideas to be the sole, steadfast occupant of the mind and thereby to get satisfied. In such a case our idea of each action is inhibited from discharging into the appropriate motor response by its competitor. This produces in us a state of indecision. James wrongly says that "As long as it lasts, with the various objects before the attention, we are said to deliberate," for to deliberate requires that in addition to being conflicted we examine each of the conflicting ideas in regard to its suitability for realization. (1136) While deliberating we oscillate between the different futures portrayed by the ideas. We are in a state of tense unrest and thus desire to get the issue decided so that we can take repose in action. But this desire is countered by the "dread of the irrevocable." (1137)
James outlines five ways in which a decision finally is made. First, there is the "reasonable type" of decision that comes after rational deliberation in which one of the alternatives emerges as the one best supported by the facts. In the next two types of decision, the final fiat occurs before the completion of a rational inquiry. We let ourselves indifferently drift in one of the directions on the basis of either an external or internal accident. In the fourth some outward experience causes us suddenly to undergo a radical change of mood, say from the easy going to the strenuous mood. It is in the fifth type that an express volition or effort decides the matter. We feel a "heave of the will" that succeeds in inclining the beam in one of the directions. Even after we have settled on one of the possible courses of action, the thought of the denied possibilities tortures us. Herein we motivelessly make one of the competing motives emerge as the decisive one through our effort to attend to it. What this portends for the freedom of the will is to be the topic of Chapter 3.
Some of the very best commentators have found James's theory of the will wanting. T. L. S. Sprigge finds James's account too loose, since it gives "the impression that...we have a case of ideo-motor action wherever an idea causes a movement through having been associated with it in the past." (JB 99) Thus, if the ideas of going to bed and Latin words, respectively, have become associated with drinking a cup of tea and yawning, it would seem that James is committed to saying that the former ideas respectively will the latter occurrences, but this is wrong because the ideas are not even of them, though they are a cause of them. It is only a conditioned ideational reflex. To get around this difficulty, James must explicitly restrict his theory of ideo-motor action to conscious states that not only cause a subsequent action but also are of them. "The idea must in some genuine sense envisage either the movement or its likely results....Some distinction is required, then, between ideas which produce behaviour which actualises their content and those which produce behaviour with which they have no direct intentional connection." (JB 100) There could be a case in which the willer, remembering that his tea drinking always is followed by his retiring, wills that he retire by thinking of his drinking tea, but this requires a conscious intent to bring about his retiring by intending that he drink tea. Sprigge also points out that James must enrich his theory so as to allow the ideational state to consist of words as well as images, for we often form intentions in terms of sentences rather the sensory ideas.
Both of Sprigge's points are good ones; however James has developed elsewhere the resources to enrich his theory so as to meet them. He has a theory of the of-ness relation between an idea and its referent, which will be considered in Chapter 6, and an account of how we associate images with words so that the words are able to replace images in our thinking.
Gerald Myers objects to James's general linking of attention and will:
But the connection between the attending, the willing, and the acting is much too loose for the theory of ideo-motor action to be built upon. There is no basis for James's contention that the action of will upon behavior is always through the intermediary of ideas. We are less likely to cause an act by first fixing attention on an idea of it than we are by deciding to do it without being aware that any act of attention or crucial idea is involved. (WJ 209)
There is no doubt that James is a suitable target for this objection, since he explicitly says that "the terminus of the psychological process in volition, the point to which the will is directly applied, is always an idea." (1171) Myer's objection aptly could be called the "Just do it" objection. The issue, I take it, is not whether the willer has a prior idea or thought of his intended action, though Myers is skeptical about this, it; concerns rather what he does intentionally. According to Myers, he typically intends to perform the action rather than have this idea. The easiest way to move your arm is just to move it rather than intentionally bringing it about that your consciousness is steadfastly occupied by the image of your arm moving. Furthermore, you could bring about the latter but still not move your arm. For example, you might know your arm will move if you get into this state of consciousness but be unable to ideate in this my-arm-is-moving manner so you hire a brain surgeon to bring about this ideating by exciting your brain with a probe. You bring it about that your arm moves but you do not move your arm. A lawyer once sent me a document to sign, and instead of saying, "Sign your name at the bottom," as would some ordinary riff-raff off the street, requested that I bring it about that my signature appears at the bottom, so I thought of hiring a hypnotist to put me in a trance and give me the post-hypnotic suggestion to write my name at the bottom.
Certainly, Myers is right. But all is not lost for James. Although his theory is not true in general, it does apply to some cases that are among the most important ones in our lives because we in effect decide what kind of persons we will become. As Ruth Anna Putnam aptly put it, these cases require "not only the ability to picture to oneself vividly what one is about to do and its immediate consequences for oneself and others, but also the ability to visualize the kind of person one will be...if one pursues this path rather than that, commits oneself to this ideal and not that one." (LI 288) These are complex cases in which we are not able to "just do it" but instead first must work on our own minds so that we become vividly conscious in a certain manner. In the important character-determining cases we need to dramatically envision our performing the competing alternative actions and the consequences of doing so. Not only can this be the key factor in determining us to pursue one of the alternatives, it also can greatly increase the chances of our successfully pursuing it.
We are like an actor to whom many scripts are presented from which we must choose one in which to star. Some scripts are immediately rejected because we cannot seriously entertain playing that role. Getting ourselves eventually to accept one of the scripts over its serious competitors consists in vividly playing over one of the roles in our imagination until it dominates, this amounting to the that's-me feeling and thereby the decision to play that role.
The same sort of aesthetic ideating is crucial, at least for many persons, in picking the character they will play in real life. Consider James's marvelous case of the reformed alcoholic who is offered a drink by his host.
His moral triumph or failure literally consists in his finding the right name for the case. If he says that it is a case of not wasting good liquor already poured out, or a case of not being churlish and unsociable when in the midst of friends, or a case of learning something at last about a brand of whiskey which he never met before, or a case of celebrating a public holiday, or a case of stimulating himself to a more energetic resolve in favor of abstinence than any he has ever yet made, then he is lost; his choice of the wrong name seals his doom. But if in spite of all the plausible good names with which his thirsty fancy so copiously furnishes him, he unwaveringly clings to the truer bad name, and apperceives the case as that of "being a drunkard, being a drunkard, being a drunkard," his feet are planted on the road to salvation; he saves himself by thinking rightly. (TT 110)
More than just finding the right name is involved. There also is the dramatic envisionment of his future as a sober man and as a drunkard. On the one hand, he can form comforting pictures of himself being the carefree, hard-drinking bon vivant or even the sullen, self-destructive alcoholic who is so irresistible to women and novelists, maybe even one of the delightful characters in O'Neil's The Ice Man Cometh who says, "What have you done to the booze, Hickey? It's lost its life." On the other hand, he could vividly ideate about his future life as a drunkard in a way that would deter him from electing to play this role. He imagines the deleterious physical effects of drinking, being an object of derision and contempt, letting down his loved ones. Or, even better for James, he could form positive images of his future sober life in which he experiences "the blessings of having an organism kept in lifelong possession of its full youthful elasticity by a sweet, sound, blood, to which stimulants and narcotics are unknown, and to which the morning sun and air and dew daily come as sufficiently powerful intoxicants." (TT 114) It is clear that the man does not reject the offer of a drink in this case by "just doing it," but rather by the complicated, circuitous process of dramatic projection into alternative future roles that will be determinative of what sort of a person he will become.
Many of our important moral decisions are made through aesthetic ideational projection into different roles. This could be called the theory of "Hollywood Ethics." A person might not steal, for example, not because he feels constrained by the moral law, but rather because he can't see himself playing the role of someone who cares that much about material possessions. Unlike other ethical theories, Hollywood Ethics does not purport to tell us what is the ethically good or right thing to do, but when practiced seriously and honestly, it can help us to find our authentic self and a way of life that is right forus. According to the “ideal observer theory” of ethics, the morally right or good thing to do is what the ideal observer, who is completely rational and possessed of all the relevant facts, would choose to do. The fully dedicated and honest performer of the thought experiment required by my Hollywood Ethics, is not the "ideal observer," but he is the closest that we mortals can come to achieving this status. That James's theory of complex cases of will neatly fit in with Hollywood Ethics is, I take it, a point in its favor.
Belief
Finally, we come to the major concern of this chapter, belief, and in particular whether it is inducible at will, thereby making it subject to James's casuistic rule, provided it also is free. Belief, like will, is nothing but the attending to an idea sans competitors and admits of the same distinction between simple and complex cases, depending on whether or not the attending state results from an effort. There is, of course, a difference between belief and will in that we can have beliefs about things, such as a table moving, that we don't or, some would say, can't will, due to our will directly controlling only our own body. This, however, is only a physiological, not a psychological, difference. The reader of the Chapter on "The Perception of Reality" in The Principles of Psychology must be especially alert to the distinction between the two senses in which James uses "belief": (i) the stable occupancy of an idea in consciousness sans competitors; and (ii) a propositional attitude of consent or acceptance taken to an idea, resulting in a state of type (i). Whereas it is made clear that every case of belief must involve a type (i) state, he fluctuated on whether every act of believing also requires a type (ii) consensual act. If it does, belief hardly is the same as the will, since, as several quotations have attested, there can be a case of will that is only of type (i).
The following quotation brings to a head James's waffling on whether there can be a belief state without an act of consent that brings this state about.
In its inner nature belief, or the sense of reality, is a sort of feeling more allied to the emotions than to anything else. Mr. Bagehot distinctly calls it the 'emotion' of conviction. Consent is recognized by all to be a manifestation of our active nature. I just now spoke of it as acquiescence. It would naturally be described by such terms as 'willingness' or the 'turning of our disposition.' What characterizes both consent and belief is the cessation of theoretic agitation through the advent of an idea which is inwardly stable, and fills the mind solidly to the exclusion of contradictory ideas. (PP 913)
The first two sentences clearly speak for the possibility of there being a type (i) belief state without any type (ii) act of consent. Notice that he uses "conviction" to characterize the belief state. A conviction or being convinced, unlike acquiescence and consent, is not an action, it being absurd to say that you became convinced, as opposed to consented or acquiesced, intentionally, on purpose, voluntarily, carefully, and so on for all the other intentional action modifiers. The charitable way to interpret this passage is to say that when he switches in the third and fourth sentences to speaking respectively about acquiescence and consent, he shifts from talking about the passive type (i) beliefs to the active type (ii) beliefs. Unfortunately for this interpretation, the third sentence, "I just now spoke of it as acquiescence," through its use of the anaphoric "it," refers back to the type (i) beliefs of the previous two sentences. James certainly did not mean to require that every belief state result from an act of consent. Other passages of similar ilk could be quoted.
There are passages, however, in which James clearly allows for an exclusively type (i) belief, for example his highly mythologized "baby's first sensation" of the lighted candle that is believed (!) by the babe to be existent because "Any object which remains uncontradicted is ipso facto believed and posited as absolute reality." (918) James's attempt to make this sound plausible appeals to a false dichotomy between believing and disbelieving -- Since the babe doesn't disbelieve the reality of the candle, it must believe in its reality -- which overlooks the third possibility of having no belief at all. James might have been misled into accepting this false disjunction because he confounded it with his other thesis that "The sense that anything we think of is unreal can only come, then, when that thing is contradicted by some other thing of which we think," and "We never disbelieve anything except for the reason that we believe something else which contradicts the first thing." (914 and 918)
James asks us to "compare this psychological fact with the corresponding logical truth that all negation rests on covert assertion of something else than the thing denied." (PP 914) Herein we see James's penchant to semanticize and ontologize a genetic analysis of the psychological cause of our taking something to be the case, just as he did in Chapter 1 with his genetic analysis of the conditions under which we take something to be good or obligatory. Since we are led to deny the existence of something when we discover or believe that there is some positive reality that logically excludes it, what we mean by, for example, "The table is not red" is "There is some positive property of the table, F-ness, that is incompatible with redness," and, furthermore, the very being of a negative state of affairs -- a lack, absence, want, or privation -- is logically dependent upon there being some positive reality whose properties are incompatible with its properties.[3]
Not only does the incompatibility theory seem false in general, since I might believe that some man lacks an odor without believing that he has has some positive property that logically excludes his having an odor, and even be right about this, it also is inconsistent with James's prized and oft-repeated doctrine of the mystery of existence. James was intent on showing that, pace absolute idealism, there must be some fact that defies explanation, namely that there is something rather than nothing. (See primarily EPH 58-64 and WB 107-8, as well as PP1269, SPP 27 and ML 412.) As Bergson showed in his Creative Evolution, the incompatibility theory of negation, when interpreted ontologically, entails, pace the doctrine of the mystery of existence, that it is necessary that there exist some positive reality, and thus that there is something rather than nothing, since something can fail to exist only if there exists in its place some positive reality that logically excludes it. This constitutes an ontological argument for the existence of positive entities.[4] James read this book in 1907 and heaped lavish praise upon it, but he still adhered to the mystery of existence in Some Problems of Philosophy, which he began to write two years later. I believe that the best way for James to resolve this inconsistency between the mystery of existence and the incompatibility theory of negation is to give up the latter, for, not only does it seem false, it goes too far in the direction of rationalism, being only a stone's throw from the principle of sufficient reason in demanding an explanation for every negative fact in terms of positive facts alone.
James makes use of Brentano's theory of judgment to account for the active, type (ii) beliefs. There are various propositional attitudes, called "psychic attitudes" by James, that the mind can adopt to a proposition, understood as a "combination of 'ideas' by a 'copula.'" (917 and 916) There is that completely neutral attitude of merely entertaining or thinking of the proposition, which can then give way to a believing, denying, or questioning of the proposition. James's remark that "All that the mind does is in both cases [will and belief] the same; it looks at the object and consents to its existence, espouses it, says 'it shall be my reality'" seems to equate the belief and will psychic attitudes. (948)
It is crucial that a proposition can retain its identity from one manner of being attended to by a psychic act to another, for otherwise certain valid argument forms would not be valid. Consider the valid argument form of modus ponens: If p, then q. p. Therefore, q. The proposition p is not asserted or consented to in the hypothetical premise, but it is in the second premise. Unless p is the very same proposition in both of its appearances, the argument fails to be valid through equivocation.
James is quite explicit that the Brentano theory applies only to complex cases of type (ii). "Often we first suppose and then believe...But these cases are none of them primitive [simple] cases. They only occur in minds long schooled to doubt by the contradictions of experience." (946) It is when there is a conflict between two or more ideas competing for sole occupancy of our mind that there is a need for a psychic attitude or act of belief, in the form of a consent, acceptance, or acquiescence to one of the competing ideas.
Once the act of consent has succeeded in bringing about a type (i) state of consciousness, neurophysiology will take over and lead to a motor response. When the state consists in thinking of one of our own actions, the action will follow in just the same way as if we had willed it, but if it consists instead in a thought of some object other than our own body behaving in a certain way, the behavior will not follow.
That action is the normal outgrowth of belief can help to explain James’s startling remark that "We would believe everything if we only could." (PP 928) This preference cannot be explained in terms of the belief state's peace of mind vis a vis that of indecision -- our "proneness to act or decide merely because action and decision are, as such, agreeable, and relieve the tension of doubt and hesitancy." (1137) This explains only why we want to be in a belief state, not why we want to believe everything. Nor is the explanation to be had in terms of our having a National Inquirer type mentality that delights in believing "everything" about everybody. I believe an explanation can be found in terms of James's promethean quest to actualize all of his many selves. To actualize all these selves, an incredible diversity of acts must be performed. Since belief leads to action, the more beliefs we have, the more actions we perform and thus the more headway we make on this grand promethean quest. There also is an appeal to James's hipsterism, since each action occasions its own special tingle or thrill.
One gets the feeling that James's reasons for insisting that a belief lead to action were not based exclusively on neurophysiological facts, which were exceedingly sparse at that time, but on normative considerations as well. At the heart of the pragmatism of both Peirce and James is Bain's claim that a belief is what a man is willing to act on. For James this was not a purely descriptive claim based on conceptual analysis or neurophysiology but in part normative. A man ought to act on his beliefs.
James had an intense disdain for the idle dreamer and aesthete. "There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed."[5] (129).
The habit of excessive novel-reading and theatre-going will produce true monsters in the line. The weeping of a Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside, is the sort of thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale. Even the habit of excessive indulgence in music, for those who are neither performers themselves nor musically gifted enough to take it in a purely intellectual way, has probably a relaxing effect upon the character. One becomes filled with emotions which habitually pass without prompting to any deed, and so the inertly sentimental condition is kept up. The remedy would be, never to suffer one's self to have an emotion at a concert, without expressing it afterwards in some active way"[6] (129).
By identifying the type (i) belief state, which is an emotional state, with the will state, James assured that belief would find its proper hookup with "concrete manly deeds." No sniveling, effeminate beliefs need apply!
James's causal analysis of belief deals with its causes as well as its effects, which are or, better, ought to be, overt actions of a "manly" sort. His analysis of the causes of belief also parallels that of the causes of the will. Any uncontested thought constitutes a belief, as well as a will. There are two different ways, one active and the other inactive, in which one can have an uncontested thought, whether or not it is preceded by a conflict between rival thoughts. It can be caused in a nonactive way by the thought having emotional sting based on its: "coerciveness over attention, or the mere power to possess consciousness;" "liveliness, or sensible pungency;" "stimulating effect upon the will;" "emotional interest, as object of love, dread, admiration, desire;" "congruity with certain favorite forms of contemplation;" or "independence of other causes." (PP 928-9) Plainly, none of these causes involve intentional agency. The believer does not control them at will. James's claim that "the more a conceived object excites us, the more reality it has [for us]" also makes the cause a nonaction, since we cannot control at will what excites us. (935) This is the first leg of the creating-discovering aporia.
There is, however, an active way in which a belief state can be caused and that is through the effort to attend to an idea. The act of consent, acceptance, or acquiescence are things that an agent does intentionally. In the conflicted cases the act of consent often comes as a result of effort, and this raises the question of what causes this effort. This will be discussed in the next chapter, since it gets to the root of James's theory of freedom.
In some cases, try as we will to attend to an idea, we are unable to establish its steadfast, uncontested presence in our mind. As James puts it, "a man cannot believe at will abruptly." (948) Fortunately, there is an indirect way of willfully inducing such recalcitrant beliefs, namely by acting as if we believed, which is just what Pascal enjoined nonbelievers to do who want to acquire real faith. "We need only in cold blood ACT as if the thing in question were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real." (949) This acting-as-if-you-believe recipe for self-inducing a belief is given in a letter written eighteen years earlier, in 1872, to brother Bob: "Have faith and wait, and resolve whatever happens to be faithful 'in the outward act' (as a philosopher says) that is do as if the good were the law of being, even if one can't for the moment really believe it. The belief will come in its time." (CWJ, 4, 432) In "The Gospel of Relaxation" James says that "Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not." (TT 118) Given that belief is a feeling of conviction for James, this recipe applies also to belief. For this chapter's purpose of establishing that James held belief to be an action, this is all that is needed. Although belief is not always a "basic action" in the sense of something that we just do without first intentionally doing anything else, it is self-inducible by basic actions and thereby becomes subject to our will. Accordingly, the second premise of James's master syllogism must be understood as asserting that
2'. Belief is a free action or inducible by free actions.
but for the sake of brevity the final disjunct shall be omitted. The conclusion is:
3. We are always morally obligated to believe or get ourselves to believe in a manner that maximizes desire-satisfaction over the other available belief options.
There is a curious anomaly in James's text that has escaped all of the commentators. Seven years after he wrote this, in "The Will to Believe," James raises the objection that we cannot believe at will.
Does it not seem preposterous on the very face of it to talk of our opinions being modifiable at will? Can our will either help or hinder our intellect in its perceptions of truth? Can we, by just willing it, believe that Abraham Lincoln's existence is a myth, and that the portraits of him in McClure's Magazine are all of someone else?...We can say any of these things, but we are absolutely impotent to believe them. (WB 15-6)
James responded to this objection by arguing that all of our beliefs, even scientific ones, are passionally or emotionally caused. "Our non-intellectual nature does influence our convictions. There are passional tendencies and volitions which run before and others which come after belief, and it is only the latter that are too late for the fair; and they are not too late when the previous passional work has been already in their own direction." (WB 19-20)
This is a disastrous response that leads right into the creating-discovering aporia. We are supposed to be able to create some of our beliefs by making the effort to attend, but now we are told that the cause of all beliefs is passional, and since we cannot control our passions at will neither can we control at will our beliefs. This makes us into passive registerers or discovers of our beliefs.
Why, for heavens sake, did James not avail himself of his earlier causal recipe for indirectly inducing belief by acting as if we believe? This would have sufficed to blunt the force of the belief-is-not-an-action objection to his will to believe doctrine, for the doctrine need not require that we can believe at will, only that we can at will do things that shall self-induce belief. I am not sure what the answer is. Certainly, it is not due to his not remembering what he wrote seven years earlier. Probably, it was due to the fact that "The Will to Believe" was presented as a popular lecture, and for this occasion he was satisfied to win a debator's victory over the scientisitic objector, the Cliffords and Huxleys, by the tu quo que response that their scientific beliefs are just as emotionally based as are those of the theist.
Before considering James's account of freedom of the will, and thereby of attention and belief as well, I will raise some objections that are intended to show: first, that there are no type (ii) or exclusively type (i) beliefs; and, second, that every belief involves a psychic or propositional attitude that is different from that involved in a case of willing, which should not come as a surprise since we knew all along, pace James, that belief and will are different.
That there are no type (ii) beliefs in the sense of a consenting to, acquiescing in, or accepting of a proposition is due to the fact that none of the italicized terms are the same as believing. That they are not is due to the fact that they are intentional acts but believing is not. The evidence for this is that whereas it makes sense to say that someone voluntarily consents, acquiesces, or consents, it makes no sense to say that he voluntarily believes. It is for this reason that there is an Austinian performatory use as illocutionary force indicator for "consent," "acquiesce," and "accept" but not for “believe,” "I hereby believe" being out of order. By publicly saying the former in the proper social conventional circumstances one brings it about that one consents to or accepts a proposition, but by saying the latter one does not bring it about in virtue of a social convention that one believes the proposition. The social convention qualification is needed to ward off certain counter-examples, such as the following one that I owe to Alexander Pruss in conversation.. A person has had a serious accident and is worried that he has lost the power of speech. To test the matter, he tries to utter the sentence, "I believe that I can speak." If he succeeds, the uttering of the sentence brings about the belief described in it, but not in virtue of a social convention. Furthermore, one can consent to or accept a proposition that he does not believe, as might happen in the course of a debate in which one consents to or accepts a proposition just for the sake of argument. Thus, James is wrong to identify belief with consent; and this holds even for internal acts of consenting in which one commits oneself to treating a certain proposition as if it were true, for one can do this without believing the proposition.
That there are no beliefs that are exclusively of type (i), that is, an uncontested ideational state sans any psychic attitude, is due to the fact that without the attitude there is no way to distinguish between believing and willing, which we already know to be different. That they are different can be established by showing the possibility of a person believing without willing or vice-versa, when what is in question is the movement of the person’s own body. A person could have an uncontested idea of their arm moving and believe but not will that their arm will move, because he knows that he cannot move it and the physical therapist shortly will move it for him. (Remember my verbose lawyer in this connection.) Or, contrariwise, he could be ideating in exactly the same way but now will that his arm move but not believe that it will; he has just recovered from surgery to restore the use of his arm and thus tries to move it without having sufficient assurance that he will succeed and thus does not believe that his arm will move.
The only thing in favor of James's identification of belief and will is that it, in conjunction with Berkeley's idealism, gives us a good theodicy, according to which all the evils of our world are attributable to an innocent mistake on God's part. It will be recalled that Berkeley's God creates the heavens and earth by simply ideating in a heavenly and earthly way. Unfortunately, he was not apprised of the truth of James's theory, a minor chink in his omniscience, (which is understandable since James'stheory is false) and thus did not realize that by simply ideating in this manner, as he might have done while day dreaming or envisioning different possible worlds that he might actualize, he was in effect willing, and thereby creating, given the absolute efficacy of his will, this heaven and earth with all the evils therein contained. He mistakenly thought that to create he must add a fiat to the ideas he entertains. In fact, right after he finished ideating in this heaven and earth manner, he said, "Damn if I can't do better than that!", which was followed by a horrified "Oops! Sorry about that."
Attractive as this theodicy is, it is not enough to save James's identification of belief and will. Fortunately, James's theory can easily be patched up. The best way to do it is to require that every belief involve a unique belief-type psychic attitude directed toward a proposition that is different from the sort of psychic attitude that occurs in a case of will. All cases of believing and willing are of type (ii), differing in their operant psychic or propositional attitude. That a unique sort of fiat or willing attitude is required for a case of will goes a long way in the direction of the innervation theory. The difference between the case in which I believe but do not will that some proposition be true and the one in which I will but do not believe that this proposition will be true is that in the former I adopt a believing but not a willing attitude toward the proposition, whereas in the case in which I will but do not believe this proposition the reverse is the case.
James himself, at times, seemed to recognize a difference between the believing and willing psychic attitudes.
We stand here [in the case of the will] exactly where we did in the case of belief. When an idea stings us in a certain way, makes as it were a certain electric connection with our Self, we believe that it is a reality. When it stings us in another way, makes another connection with our Self, we say, let it be a reality. To the word 'is' and to the words 'let it be' there correspond peculiar attitudes of consciousness which it is vain to seek to explain. The indicative and the imperative moods are as much ultimate categories of thinking as they are of grammar. (PP 1172-3)
This seems, by its use of the plural "attitudes of consciousness," to make the believing attitude different from the willing or "let it be" attitude, even when directed toward one and the same proposition. This passage, however, conflicts with others in which James identifies both the believing and willing attitude with the act of consent.
My slightly amended version of James's theory is a three tiered affair. On the first level is the entertaining of a proposition in a manner that is neutral between different psychic or propositional attitudes. The second tier involves a psychic or propositional attitude toward this proposition of believing, willing, questioning, doubting, hoping, and the like, each of which is unique. On the third level is the effort to adopt one of these psychic attitudes toward the proposition, which might consist in an effort to attend in a certain manner, as for example to ideate in the manner required by my Hollywood ethics. It will be shown in the next chapter that for James freedom enters on the third level, it being the amount of effort that is expended that is subject to the free will of the person. As a result of this third tier freedom, a person has the freedom to control what he believes, sometimes by just making an extra effort either to attend to an idea to the exclusion of its competitors or to adopt a believing psychic attitude toward it, and, at others, by making an extra effort to will to do things that will indirectly induce belief.
For the purpose of James's master syllogism it is necessary that belief is not just an action but also a free action, or inducible by free actions. Since the conclusion of the syllogism
3. We are always morally obligated to believe in a manner that maximizes desire-satisfaction over the other available belief options.
obliges us to believe in a certain manner, it is is required that we are free to believe in this manner. For ought implies can in its most full-blooded sense of being free to do what is morally required. The major burden of the next chapter is to show how James analyzes freedom and establishes through his will to believe doctrine our right to believe that we have freedom of belief.