When using any part of this text - by Witold Marciszewski - refer, please, to the above original URL.
Mathesis Universalis No.4, Autumn 1997 http://www.pip.com.pl/MathUniversalis/4/
A Note on James' Pragmatist Approach
to the Concept of Belief
Let in the moment just one James' point in his The Will to Believe" be highlighted, as specially "irritating" (Peirce's expression to denote stimulation for research).
In the domain of propositional attitudes (unlike in classical logic), one acknowledges three, so to speak, values: acceptance, rejection, neutrality. James challenges this common tenet. Like Peirce, he defines belief pragmatically (operationally), that is, by mentioning a specific behaviour produced by the belief in question. This criterion reduces neutrality to rejection. For, neither a person who rejects a view nor one who suspenses his or her judgment, takes any action motivated by that view. In other words, James refuses to distinguish two cases of the propositional attitude described by the phrase "x does not accept p", namely:
x rejects p
x accepts neither p nor non-p.
His refusal is substantiated by the fact that either attitude results in the same lack of action, and - according to the pragmatist criterion - the identity of behaviour implies identity of things (here, attitudes) as defined by the descriptions of their behaviour.James himself applies that pragmatic conception of belief to religious faith. However, let us take a less controversial case to clarify his point. Suppose, there is a mathematician who accepts the axiom of choice, there is one who rejects it, and there is one who did not make up his mind as yet. The second and the third do behave in the same way, namely, they do not use the axiom of choice for producing proofs. In this sense, their propositional attitudes are equivalent.
This approach, though, does not render what can be called degrees of preciseness of identification. At some level, the propositional attitudes of the second and the third mathematician can be deemed as identical as leading to the same proof procedures. However, at a deeper (or, more precise) level this does not work. The behaviour of their brains - obviously, as real as the overt one - must be different. To wit, the one who neither rejects the axiom of choice nor believes in it, unlike the one who firmly disbelieves, may be willing to check its validity; this attitude has to be reflected in a state of his brain.
Thus, when more factors are taken into account, the attitudes in question do not prove identical. This does not necessarily mean that Peirce's and James' pragmatist approach is wrong or useless; however, it ought to become more sophisticated. One should examine a fair sample of cases in which both the rejection of a view and the lack of its acceptance result in a similar overt behaviour when observed at some level of detailedness. Next it should be checked whether the likeness remains when the behaviour is examined in greater detail, including internal states and dispositions of the subject in question.
