James, Clifford, and the scientific conscience

Abstract

However diverse our opinions of William James today, we generally agree that the great pragmatist was right about one thing: the pretensions of the Victorian “positivists.” James exposed the epistemological naivete of these cultural imperialists. He celebrated openness of mind over the arrogant, dogmatic closures we associate with the nineteenth-century scientific intelligentsia. These contemporaries of Darwin ascribed to the sciences a God's-eye view, and to the world a set of hard features discoverable by men and women bold enough to replace fantasy and superstition with facts. These Huxleys and Tyndalls and Cliffords thought themselves a new priesthood, and, while telling everyone what to believe, functioned as the thought-police of their age. So deep were the roots sunk in the western mind by this vine of conceits that we seem never to be able to get it out of our system. We attack it and attack it and attack it, and quote modern thinkers as diverse as Quine and Kuhn and Wittgenstein and Foucault against it. And we quote James. We honor him for being one of the first to take up the cause, for being among the great prophets of epistemic humility, a founder of truly “modernist” or even “postm modernist” thought.

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