Describe William James’ views on indeterminism.
William James, one of the most well known American philosophers and psychologists, was a proponent of the idea of free will. What was interesting about James’ position on the question of free will as opposed to determinism as that he simply asserted his position and justified it from a pragmatic perspective. One of the key points of this pragmatic perspective, as presented in James’ hallmark work “The Dilemma of Determinism,” is that determinist philosophy, by dint of what it is, ends up minimizing and trivializing mistakes, regrets, evil, and more. If human societies were to hold determinism as essentially true, then by a pragmatic perspective, what sense would there be in lamenting any evil action, regretting any terrible mistakes? If determinism is true, then nothing could have stopped that murder from happening, or that beverage from falling. The implications of determinism being correct would mean that much of how society operates would be untenable and wrong. Laws would be pointless because everything that would happen would happen anyway, so why even bother trying to prevent crime? For all that alone, James contends that the most pragmatic position is to commit to indeterminism and a belief in free will.
As part of his arguments against determinism, James was responsible for creating the distinction of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ determinism in the very same aforementioned literary piece. He established that ‘hard determinism’ was much more unforgiving, the true determinism philosophy wherein all is predetermined and cannot be controlled or curtailed. ‘Soft determinism,’ then, as he explained, is a determinism that is even reticent to a core part of determinist belief, that belief in predetermination. To contradict both of these, James presented indeterminism as the explanation for all the actions of the world, as an explanation of the chance the world experiences. Beyond describing it as a pragmatic belief, James also provided many of the foundations of future indeterminist, incompatibilist thinking.
James provided explanation of decision processes under an indeterminist worldview, wherein there is a chance of choosing random alternatives that leads to a choice of one of those alternatives. There is chance, yes, but humans are responsible for making choices, and it is those choices that make what was once an uncertain future a concrete past. The example that James provides in “The Dilemma of Determinism” to illustrate the pragmatism of indeterminist philosophy and the reality of choice is one in which he is deciding which street to take home. He argues that determinist thinking makes no sense b being unable to say which street he will take while simultaneously saying whatever path he does take was the only path he could have ever taken. His argument for indeterminism is that when he was presented with two options, each had a chance of being selected, but he chose one. Not only that, but if he regretted the option, he could only regret it if he believed he could have chosen differently, rendering determinism an insensible position.
The conclusion that James arrives at, in all his arguments, is that indeterminism is the pragmatic philosophy because free will must exist for a normative society to exist.