:: Event :: On July 10 at 11:00 Professor Alexander Klein will give a seminar From Action to Pragmatism: William James on Willing and Meaning at the Aula Tarello of the University of Genoa.
Professor Alexander Klein is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Humanities of McMaster University and Director of the The Bertrand Russell Research Centre.
Abstract:
Popular works like Pragmatism (1907) and The Meaning of Truth (1909) give us the skeleton of William James’s account of meaning. According to his famous example, my thought is about Memorial Hall in virtue of aiding me in finding the building, in talking about it, or more generally in acting successfully with respect to the thing. This account is (reasonably enough) thought to underwrite James’s radical tendency to transform philosophical problems into problems concerning the consequences of action. But how does James understand the nature of action?
In this talk I reconstruct James’s sophisticated account of action from the Principles of Psychology (1890) and connect it with his philosophy. I begin by framing his account of meaning as a forward-facing causal account. For James the question is not what objects have caused the mental state, as on more recent causal accounts. The question is what actions the mental state will cause—and in particular, what objects my actions would put me in contact with.
One problem causal theories have traditionally faced is the so-called “disjunction problem”—roughly, how to explain the possibility of misrepresentation. My idea of water may be triggered both by real water and by mirages, but we don’t want to say that my idea of water means either water or mirages. So traditional causal theories need a way to disambiguate representation-conferring from accidental causes.
James’s forward-facing causal account offers an elegant solution. It is precisely by appealing to his earlier ideo-motor theory of action from the Principles that the solution comes into focus. I highlight two aspects of that theory that are relevant to the disjunction problem.
First, genuine action begins with an agent hatching a goal for herself, for James. In the paradigmatic sort of case, hatching a goal means framing what he calls an “anticipatory image” (1890, 1111 – 1112)—this is an idea of what it will have felt like when an action has been performed. For example, an archer might hatch the goal of shooting an arrow at a target by thinking of what it will have felt like to have performed the relevant motions, or what it will have felt like to have seen the arrow hit the target (1890, 1100). Second, James argues that the conscious awareness of the goal representation naturally (as an evolutionary-physiological matter) tends to trigger an appropriate chain of muscular innervation (1890, 1135).
I argue that anticipatory images introduce a natural, normative standard into the causal processes that constitute representation, on James’s account. For actions can misfire with respect to the anticipatory goals that generated them (as when the archer misses the target). Meanings can misfire, too. And meaning misfire (misrepresentation) is just one type of action misfire, on James’s forward-facing causal account. For the parched traveler, the visual image of the mirage is a misrepresentation because when she navigates to the targeted spot and finds only sand, her experience doesn’t accord with her anticipatory image. In my talk I unpack and assess this solution.
Tarello Institute for Legal Philosophy 