russill - the road not taken
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The Road Not Taken: WilliamJames’s Radical Empiricism andCommunication TheoryChris Russill aa Department of Communication Studies, Universityof Otago
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To cite this article: Chris Russill (2005): The Road Not Taken: William James’s RadicalEmpiricism and Communication Theory, The Communication Review, 8:3, 277-305
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The Communication Review, 8: 277–305, 2005Copyright © Taylor & Francis, Inc.ISSN 1071-4421 print / 1547-7487 onlineDOI: 10.1080/10714420500240474
GCRV1071-44211547-7487The Communication Review, Vol. 08, No. 03, August 2005: pp. 0–0The Communication Review
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN: WILLIAM JAMES’S RADICAL EMPIRICISM AND COMMUNICATION THEORY
The Road Not TakenC. Russill Chris Russill
Department of Communication Studies, University of Otago
This essay examines how William James’s radical empiricism deals withindeterminism and formulates a central issue in contemporary communi-cation theory; incommensurability. A close textual reading of James’sinitial approach of indeterminacy as chaos is provided and I argue Jamessubsequently reformulates this as the problem of incommensurability inhis radical empiricism. In this way, James overcomes a chaos/order dual-ism that continues to orient much communication theory. I examine threepost-positivist theories of communication — Pearce & Cronen’s CoordinatedManagement of Meaning, Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action,and Mosco’s Political Economy of Communication – in light of this findingand consider its implications for pragmatist projects in communication. Itis suggested that although John Durham Peters’s Speaking into the Airanticipates many of these findings, recovering James’s radical empiricismcan facilitate the reconstruction of a pragmatist tradition of thougt subse-quently developed through George Herbert Mead and John Dewey.
It has been about one hundred years since William James set to work onthe most systematic statement of his views known as radical empiricism.Although his radical empiricism has not enjoyed the acclaim and contin-ued readership his writings on pragmatism and religion have beenaccorded, it turns out James has a lot to say in these writings on problemsof central importance to communication scholars and the social sciencesmore generally. If these views often appear dated in ways his other workdoes not, it is largely the result of James’s attempts to employ a more for-mal style of academic discourse and to address the now unfamiliar vocab-ularies and arguments of thinkers that were his contemporaries. However, theproblems James set out to escape and reformulate in his radical empiricism
Address correspondence to Chris Russill, Department of Communication Studies, University ofOtago, PO Box 56, Dunedin, Aotearoa, New Zealand. E-mail: [email protected]
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are still with us today. In fact, I will argue that a number of post-positivistcommunication theories are still inhibited by basic categories of meta-physical thinking that James’s radical empiricism points us beyond.
What is radical empiricism? What are the broader scientific and philo-sophical projects of which it is a part? What problems does it set out toresolve, through which intellectual debates, and with what kinds of theo-retical and practical implications for its time and our present? James wassensitive both to demands of his immediate critics and the long-term cul-tural implications of his way of thinking should it win out. Unfortunately,the demands of his contemporaries and immediate critics often distractedhim from the task of finishing his radical empiricism, such that piecingtogether a fuller expression in its many implications requires studyingJames’s private notebooks in conjunction with published articles. This isno easy task. Furthermore, the most recognizable and accessible expres-sion of this view is the posthumous publication put together by RalphBarton Perry in 1912, under the title Essays in Radical Empiricism. Thisintroduces its own special set of problems for interpreting James’s alreadydifficult views. Therefore, not only is James’s radical empiricism unfin-ished, it has been widely circulated in a format not of James’s choosing orapproval (although the publication does seem relatively faithful toJames’s design).1
Although no single essay can take on the entire task of reconstructingJames’s radical empiricism, I hope to demonstrate both the plausibilityand benefits of doing so by focusing on James’s central theoretical inno-vations: his dissolution of the problem of how two minds can know thesame thing, his reformulation of the deterministic assumptions underpin-ning such a problem, and his characterization of the problem of incom-mensurability.2 My goals are to develop James’s responses to the issue ofindeterminacy, to demonstrate the relevance of this for contemporarycommunication scholars, and to suggest the consequences this might havefor pragmatist approaches to communication and cultural studies. There isgreat potential in returning to James’s radical empiricism since, despitethe currency of pragmatist approaches among many noted scholars,James’s influence has been slight or, at best, indirect.3 Occasionally theimpetus to interesting essays (Peters, 1999; Shepherd, 2001a), onlyLeonhirth (2001) and Slater (2003) argue that the resources for a newapproach to communication are recoverable from James’s work—andneither proceeds beyond offering initial suggestions.4 Ironically, perhapsthe most systemic examination of what a Jamesian approach might looklike is Stuart Hall’s (1980) at times dismissive characterization of a “cul-turalist” paradigm in cultural studies. The stakes in formulating a morepositive characterization are considerable since Hall’s identification ofthe core problem of cultural studies as the search for “a non-reductive
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determinacy” which will “supercede the endless oscillations between ide-alism and reductionism” is the core problem driving James’s radicalempiricism (Hall, 1980, p. 72). James attempts, as Hall insists, “on tryingto think both the specificity of different practices and the forms of thearticulated unity they constitute” (p. 72, emphasis in original). Whereasthe vast and varied bodies of work addressing this problem in communi-cation and cultural studies have tended toward some version of Gramsci’snotion of “hegemony,” James opens up another pathway.
The study of communication and culture is no stranger to attempts torewrite its history on the basis of forgotten or excluded traditions ofstudy. This is likely a result of the fact, well documented by Peters(1986, 1988, 1989, 1996) over a series of essays, that there is a “mis-match between fragmentary institutionalization and vast intellectualinheritance” (1996, p. 85). Peters’s (1999) own subsequent book-lengthstudy goes some distance in recovering a “spiritualist” tradition of think-ing on communication drawn from a Hegelian lineage. A reconstructionof James’s radical empiricism can establish continuity with otherresources in this intellectual heritage and advance our thinking on a cen-tral problem only inconsistently addressed at present: the problem ofincommensurability. In this essay, I focus on James’s shifting positionswith respect to indeterminacy, a central issue in radical empiricism, andone with several implications for advancing pragmatist approaches tocommunication.
The obstacles potentially impeding such an advance are clearly formu-lated in several essays by Gregory Shepherd (1993, 1999, 2001b), animportant contemporary writer on pragmatism, pluralism, and communi-cation. Shepherd provides us with a clear account of the well-ingrainedassumptions that habitually guide many formulations of communication:scientism (truth unchangingly exists and can be procedurally found),psychologism (the individual is the source of meaning and ontologicallyprimary), and mechanism (reality is known and explicable on mechanisticprinciples). Not only do such assumptions guide John Locke’s still influ-ential model of communication as the transmission of ideas from mind tomind (Peters, 1989, 1999; Shepherd, 1999, 2001b), they continue to per-sist despite an unraveling of their seamless interrelation in the late nine-teenth century. Shepherd (2001b) links this unraveling to vocal criticismconcerning the nature of truth and the rise of constructivist approaches, atendency that initially emerges through the work of William James andFriedrich Nietzsche (p. 27).
That tendency seems to have established some currency, as scientismand capital T Truth have been largely overrun by constructivistapproaches, yet the assumptions of psychologism and mechanism remainwell entrenched, particularly in prevailing conceptions of communication.
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This condition speaks to relevance of James’s work under examinationhere. For although debates on the nature of truth and epistemology con-cerned James a great deal (perhaps at the expense of more fully complet-ing his radical empiricism) it is clearly the assumption of mechanisticdeterminism James tackles in his radical empiricism and the path subse-quently pursued by Dewey (1919/1969, 1925/1988) in carrying forwardJames’s work (Stuhr, 1997; Westbrook, 1991). Put simply, James’sapproach is to dissolve or move beyond such issues by abandoning theassumptions underpinning scientism, psychologism, and mechanism—and by forwarding alternatives in his pragmatist theory of truth, his rela-tional view of experience, and his practical approach to indeterminism.However, not all assumptions are easily abandoned or reformulated.Whereas his views on scientism and truth came rather easily to James,such that he was often perplexed by the unremitting and vociferous natureof the criticism challenging his work, James’s notebooks illustrate thelengthy struggle he underwent to abandon mechanistic determination andavoid idealism.5 My sense is the theoretical gain won by James has notyet been adequately recognized by communication scholars, particularlythose most quick to affirm the priority of indeterminacy.6 This raises thequestion of what may become of our theories of communication if weprove adequate to the challenge of reconstructing James’s radicalempiricism.
I take up this question in reconstructing James’s formulation of inde-terminism within the context of communication and cultural theory. Asstated, my goals are to present James’s reformulation of indeterminacy inits relevance to contemporary communication scholars and to suggest itsconsequences for pragmatist approaches to communication and culture.To this end, I proceed as follows: (1) I review James’s initial critique andrevision of John Locke’s assumptions, an important step if scholars asvaried as Peters and Hall are correct about how thoroughly liberal concep-tions guide our thinking on communication, and sketch out James’s pro-gression toward a radical empiricist handling of indeterminacy; (2) Ipursue a close and innovative textual reading of James’s approach toindeterminacy as chaos and trace the transformation of this view into theproblem of incommensurability in his radical empiricism; (3) I explorethe initial relevance of this for three post-positivist communication theo-ries of communication well acquainted with Dewey, Mead, and James,respectively—namely, Pearce and Cronen’s coordinated management ofmeaning, Habermas’s theory of communicative action, and Mosco’spolitical economy of communication—to see how their philosophies ofsocial science handle indeterminacy and to evaluate whether James pre-sents a theoretical gain; and (4) I consider the implications of this findingfor communication studies.
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JAMES’S RADICAL EMPIRICISM
Locke as the “Entering Wedge”
Situating James’s views with respect to John Locke is useful for two pur-poses: it allows us to see why James considers his empiricism “radical,”while distinguishing James’s view from the predominant way of thinkingabout communication. In questioning the cultural assumptions underpin-ning this view, our way of thinking about communication might change.It is difficult to judge the extent of Locke’s impact on communication butstrong arguments for significant influence are found among reputable the-orists of language and communication. In fact, according to Harris(1987), Taylor (1992), Peters (1989, 1999), and Shepherd (1999, 2001b),Locke’s view is the foundation for much of modern linguistics and com-munication. Peters (1999) sums up this view of Locke as a communica-tion theorist in even more pronounced terms: “Whenever we set out tothink or discourse seriously about communication, we almost always findourselves enacting a philosophical and political drama first written byJohn Locke” (p. 89).
This body of literature raises a number of interesting questions. DoesLocke invent the modern notion of communication to deal with the prob-lem of how two minds can know the same thing, a key problem forJames’s radical empiricism? Have we retained this notion even asLocke’s psychology itself is no longer seriously entertained? Does thisview remain, as Peters (1989) and Shepherd (2001b) suggest, the linchpinto classical liberal social theory? The near obsessive focus on conscious-ness or mind in modern philosophy and psychology has drawn attentionaway from such questions. Locke (1690/1975) clearly emphasizes mindto the extent of admitting “that when I first began this Discourse of theUnderstanding, and a good while after, I had not the least Thought, thatany Consideration of Words was at all necessary to it (p. 21). Yet this isprecisely the most enduring contribution of Locke’s work. Peters’s (1989)early view on the matter seems convincing if not decisive:
Locke arguably invents the concept of communication as the sharing ofthoughts by individuals. Though there are similar usages in Englishbefore Locke, both Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language(1755) and the Oxford English Dictionary make Locke the fountainheadof this sense. It is important to recognize that using communication todescribe human discourse was something of an innovation. In mostseventeenth-century English, communication mainly referred to physicalprocesses of transmission and metaphysical processes of consubstantia-tion: tangibles such as robes, fortunes, plants, commodities, as well as
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intangibles such as light, heat, blessings, praise, secrets, vices, thoughts,and ideas could all be “communicated.” In Locke’s own prose, oldsenses of the term mingle with his innovative usages. He speaks not onlyof people communicating ideas to each other, but of God communicat-ing perfections to angels and of the spirit communicating with the body.Communication is not something invented by the earliest hominids: it isan invention that our discourse retroactively projects on history. Com-munication, in short, is a child of modernity, not antiquity. It gives aspecific, not eternal, way of thinking about (and doing) social life thatarises in classical liberalism. (pp. 391–392)
At minimum, James’s rejection of Locke’s view of consciousnessstarkly halts his launching of “the long drift” of communication “fromphysical to mental sharing” (Peters, 1999, p. 81). Yet Locke is lessrejected here than radicalized.7 In fact, in the first essay of radical empiricism,James (1912/1996) finds both the “entering wedge” and the first use of“the pragmatic method” in Locke’s associational psychology (pp. 10–11).Locke is a promising starting point since the failings of his psychologyillustrate what James means to accomplish in radicalizing British empiri-cism. What he appreciates is Locke’s attempt to move away from incon-sequential metaphysical matters by grounding philosophical dialogue inthe workings of the human mind and life. In giving his Essay ConcerningHuman Understanding such a purpose, Locke gains James’s praise as anearly practitioner of the pragmatic method. This method, for James, is notused to render all metaphysical discourse inconsequential or senseless.Rather it is a tool for deciding whether a dispute is consequential ortrivial—whether affirming different positions results in different coursesof action.8 As Dewey (1925b/1988) puts it in his useful history of themethod, James “wished to force the general public to realize that certainproblems, certain philosophical debates have a real importance for man-kind, because the beliefs they bring into play lead to very different modesof conduct” (p. 8).
Locke goes wrong, however, in abandoning his empiricism for whatDennett (1995) calls “one of his uncharacteristic forays into ‘proof’” (p. 26).This “proof” of the primacy of mind, or “cogitative Being,” introduces afundamental dualism between matter and thought. The proof is simpleenough: mind or consciousness could not emerge from matter because“incogitative Matter and Motion, whatever changes it might produce ofFigure and Bulk, could never produce Thought” (Locke, 1690, IV, X, 10,p. 623, emphasis in original). For Locke this is unthinkable, “impossibleto conceive,” and Locke understands himself as merely rehearsing whateveryone already knows. James’s massive influence in the history ofmodern thought is a result of attempting to think precisely what Locke
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found impossible, an attempt which made his Principles of Psychology aninstant and enduring classic. However, it took him some time to work outthe implications of such a thought.
Although James does not elaborate on how Locke’s views serve as anentering wedge for radical empiricism, it is simple enough to take hismeaning. On Locke’s view, we derive our ideas from experience—thereis nothing inborn or innate to them. This is the substance of book 1, “OfInnate Notions.” In James’s estimation, where Locke goes wrong (orabandons his empiricism) is in linking this experiential view of ideas to arationalist view of knowledge. This makes empirical ideas, based in livedexperience, “the materials of Reason and Knowledge” (p. 2). Reasonworks out the relations between such ideas resulting in what we callknowledge. In moving from belief to knowledge through the rationalassociation of ideas, Locke concludes that “reason must be our last Judgeand Guide in every Thing” (p. 14). James (1912/1996) takes this enteringwedge and radicalizes it with a rather simple claim: it is not only ideaswhich are derived from experience, as Locke claims, but so too the asso-ciations or relations (pp. 25, 42). Elsewhere, James (1909/1975) formu-lates this as the “statement of fact” from which radical empiricism takesits bearings:
The statement of fact is that the relations between things, conjunctive aswell as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experi-ence, neither more so nor less so, than the things themselves. (p. 7).
The action, then, takes place in lived experience and not simply in ourheads. This “statement of fact” simply repeats James’s earlier abandon-ment of psychologism or any internalistic conception of mental processes.Instead he postulates the existence of something called “pure experience.”I return to the problems introduced by James’s characterization of this“primal stuff” below. However, James (1909/1975) will also introduce a“postulate” of radical empiricism to preclude reference to extra-experien-tial entities, such that our accounts of the world will only use terms thatcan be returned to experience (no references to things-in-themselves ortranscendental agents are allowed) (p. xvi). The import of all this is toclaim (a) that relations are experienced the same as things are and (b) rela-tions are not only real but our relational world of experience is both con-junctive (associative) and disjunctive (dissociative). The world is notmade up of fragmented elements that are then synthesized by a hiddenentity, either in our heads or behind the clouds. The effect of radicalempiricism is to literally transform our sense of the world, our relation-ship to it, and our place within it. The mind does not imprint order onto aprimeval chaos; it copes with problematic situations among myriad,
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complex interrelations. How might this view, in turn, transform our viewof communication and its core problems?
Accounting for Sameness
Roughly speaking, to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense,and to say of one thing it is identical with itself is to say nothing at all. —Wittgenstein, (1963), 5.5303.
Given James’s reputation as the philosopher of novelty, indeterminacy,and a pluralistic universe, it no doubt seems odd to suggest James’senduring relevance to communication lies in an account of sameness. Yetthis is precisely the importance of James’s radical empiricism: it providesa nonskepticist approach to Locke’s problem of how two minds can knowthe same thing. In fact, James’s revising of sameness out from under theprevailing notion of absolute identity is analogous to Einstein’s revisionof received notions of absolute simultaneity—resulting, in the later case,in the special theory of relativity.9 More to the point, it is necessary toexamine how James rejects a mechanistic worldview in providing a tem-poral notion of sameness, for not all rejections of determinism result inJames’s view of indeterminacy.
There is no systematic exposition of James’s thought, an observationmany have translated into a statement on the nature of James’s philoso-phy. One of James’s closest and most sympathetic readers suggests thoseseeking contradictions need spend no more than five minutes with histexts (Seigfreid, 1990, p. 8). In proceeding programmatically, my goal isto argue for the importance of James’s account of sameness to communi-cation rather than advocate for systematization of his thought. Thisaccount only really shines through in moving from “The Many and TheOne” notebooks (1903–1904), to Essays on Radical Empiricism (1904–1905),to the “Miller-Bode Objections” notebooks (1905–1908), through to hislecture series, A Pluralistic Universe (1908–1909). These works followalmost immediately The Varieties of Religious Experience, what might becalled a study of incommunicable experience, and I suggest James’sradical empiricism is fruitfully taken as the study of incommensurableexperience. A crucial task in reconstructing this view—in explicating theprocess by which sameness is known or communicated—involves avoid-ing assumptions of all the fearful consequences a fully temporaland perspectival viewpoint seems to entail. But first it is worthwhile toask, as James does in good pragmatic fashion, what does it mean to callsomething “the same” in human activity? Here is James’s fully liberated1909/1996 conclusion on the matter after he has broken free of determin-istic assumptions:
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However indefinitely sames might still be substituted for sames in thelogical world of nothing but pure sameness, in the world of real opera-tions every line of sameness actually started and followed up wouldeventually give out, and cease to be traceable any farther. Sames of thesame, in such a world, will not always (or rather, in a strict sensenever) be the same as one another, for in such a world there is no lit-eral or ideal sameness among numerical differents. (p. 397)
This view essentially restates the view of Wittgenstein referencedabove. Both suggest it makes little sense to strictly maintain a static logic ofidentity and, more importantly, it would be still worse practice to evaluateJames’s account of sameness by such a standard. James himself claims to haveonly freely formulated this conclusion once alternatives to a mechanisticworldview were made available by Henri Bergson. It is worth emphasiz-ing that James is not so much concerned with giving us a practicalaccount of the processes through which samenesses are made. In fact, hisaccount is only satisfactorily taken up in George Herbert Mead’s subse-quent theory of communication, developed between 1909 and 1912.Instead, he is attempting to resituate the assumptions and context ofdemands for such an account and to cut off fears that his views lead nec-essarily to an unintelligible world of capricious chance and chaotic inde-terminacy. In following James’s own shifting formulations ofindeterminacy, from chaos to incommensurability, I hope to provide anentry point for the reconstruction of his radical empiricism in a theory ofcommunication. The examples of Cronen and Pearce, Habermas, andMosco offered below are reflective instances of trying to account forindeterminacy in communication theory. They are not the only ones.Other theorists handling indeterminacy through a chaos/order distinction,as differentiated from the problem of incommensurability, includeCarey’s cultural studies (Pauly, 1997) and Chang’s (1996) deconstruction(p. 37). However, despite this diversity, one can distinguish four typicalresponses to the issue: in its weakest form, one says “pluralism is in” andleaves it at that; in its pathetic form, one continues to wait for the grandunified theory; in its skeptical form, one is led to deconstruction; and inits pragmatic form, the situation is articulated as the problem of incom-mensurability. I turn to this last response directly.
JAMES’S FORMULATIONS OF INDETERMINACY: FROM CHAOS TO INCOMMENSURABILITY
Pragmatists believe the distinction between the subjective and objective,between the mental and physical, is a difference in function introduced byreflection in the service of particular interests. A question almost immediately
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inserts itself: What is the “stuff” preexisting this intellectual distinctionmaking? Obviously this is a matter of some difficulty, if only because ourobject-directed language embodies habits of thought not well suited to theexpression of such processes.10 James would give a number of character-izations to this “stuff”: “pure experience,” “virtual existence,” the “fieldof the present,” simply “field” more generally, and other times—in seem-ing to give up on even these vague formulations—he suggested an initialsort of chaos. In what follows, I have restricted myself to James’sapproach to chaos.11 In the 1904 “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?,” James(1912/1996) says the world comes first as a chaos of experiences (p. 16)and then, in the 1904 “A World of Pure Experience,” he says that the uni-verse is to a large extent chaotic (p. 46), or that “the whole system of experi-ences as they are immediately given presents itself as a quasi-chaos …” (p. 63).Other instances refer to a chaotic pure experience out of which the mindbecomes composed and organized. What is meant by this initial chaos, aformulation dropping out of his writing as James works directly on radicalempiricism?
The Principles of Psychology
By far the most extensive usage of chaos is found in James’s 1890 ThePrinciples of Psychology. On my count, James uses the term fourteentimes in the main text with each instance fairly consistent.12 Chaos is theinitial condition out of which mental states organize themselves. Thedescriptions of chaos James uses are: original (chapter 6), infinite (chapter 9),primordial (chapter 9), monotonous and inexpressive (chapter 9), utter(chapter 11), primeval (chapter 17), primitive (chapter 20), and, in a quo-tation from Josiah Royce, perfect (chapter 21). The world presents itselfin a primordial chaos of sensations, a claim James finds supported byphysics and experience alike, out from which the mind functions andorganizes in a selective manner. However, it seems James is more trustingof his physics than an experiential philosophy at this point, for as the finalchapter of the work puts it:
The reality exists as a plenum. All its parts are contemporaneous, eachis as real as any other, and each as essential for making the whole justwhat it is and nothing else. But we can neither experience nor thinkthis plenum. What we experience, what comes before us, is a chaos offragmentary impressions interrupting each other; what we think is anabstract system of hypothetical data and laws. (1890/1981, p. 1231)
Clearly, James is going to have to give up this extra-experiential plenumview of reality to hold his radical empiricism. Yet it is one thing to reduce
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consciousness as an “entity” to consciousness as “passing thought,” theinfamous stream of consciousness proposal. But how is James to effectthe same reworking for the objective or physical world, as a world of purepassing or “pure experience,” without conceiving it ideally (as constitutedby passing thought) and without slipping into sheer indeterminacy orchaos? The first view James found plainly ridiculous, yet the second viewwas banned by the classical mechanics of natural science. Dewey’s(1940/1988) suggestion this was a persistent metaphysical dualism escap-ing notice (p. 160) is perhaps accurate of James’s state of mind in 1890.But it is misleading if compared with his later private notebooks, whereJames is aware that his views result in an indeterminist and pluralistic uni-verse and force him to challenge the reigning conceptions of identity andphysical causality. To illustrate the problem more clearly, take Dewey’s(1940/1988) support for James’s empirical account of the self, where heblends his words with James’s Psychology (Dewey italicizes James’s words):“the belief in sameness of self arises on empirical grounds in the same way asbelief in the sameness of any object whatever, “the sense of our own personalidentity” being “exactly like any one of our other perceptions of samenessamong phenomenon” (p. 166). Yet it was precisely a matter of how suchsameness could occur in an original, infinite, primeval, primordial, and utterchaos for which James would henceforth have to give an account.
The Varieties of Religious Experience
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James uses the terminology ofchaos on three occasions (it also appears in three other instances in citedreports used by James). However, the formulation is not quite the same asthat appearing in his Principles. The first instance is similar to the Princi-ples in terms of fundamental processes—“initial chaos” undergoing“some manner of ordering” to “functional organization”—yet here chaosis not only of feelings and impulses but “comparative”:
The higher and the lower feelings, the useful and the erring impulses,begin by being a comparative chaos within us—they must end byforming a stable system of functions in right subordination. Unhappi-ness is apt to characterize the period of order-making and struggle.(1903/1997, p. 146)
This is a different designation than the infinite and primordial chaos originallypostulated. The second and third usages occur in the lecture on philosophy:
When one views the world with no definite theological bias one way orthe other, one sees that order and disorder, as we now recognize them,
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are purely human inventions. We are interested in certain types ofarrangement, useful, aesthetic, or moral—so interested that wheneverwe find them realized, the fact emphatically rivets our attention. Theresult is that we work over the contents of the world selectively. It isoverflowing with disorderly arrangements from our point of view, butorder is the only thing we care for and look at, and by choosing, onecan always find some sort of orderly arrangement in the midst of anychaos. If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon atable, I could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them,leave the rest in almost any geometrical pattern you might propose tome, and you might then say that that pattern was the thing prefiguredbeforehand, and that the other beans were mere irrelevance and pack-ing material. Our dealings with Nature are just lines in innumerabledirections. We count and name whatever lies upon the special lines wetrace, whilst the other things and the untraced lines are neither namednor counted. There are in reality infinitely more things “unadapted” toeach other in this world than there are things “adapted”, infinitelymore things with irregular relations than with regular relationsbetween them. But we look for the regular kind of thing exclusively,and ingeniously discover and preserve it in our memory. It accumu-lates with other regular kinds, until the collection of them fills ourencyclopedias. Yet all the while between and around them lies an infi-nite anonymous chaos of objects that no one ever thought of together,of relations that never yet attracted our attention. (pp. 342–343)
There are a number of interesting things about these usages, not the leastof which is that neither order nor disorder is fundamental to the world. DoesJames not contradict himself, however, in claiming to find order in chaos?No doubt such usages perplexed his critics who became vicious whenJames refused to accept such logical refutations of his views. Today it istempting to read these charitably, as reflective elaborations of the chaos/order dualism Katherine Hayles (1990) would date only to the latter halfof the twentieth century. In her study, Hayles turns up two predominatetendencies within chaos theory itself. The first line focuses on “the spon-taneous emergence of self-organization from chaos,” whereas the secondline “emphasizes the hidden order that exists within chaotic systems” (p.9). The comparison of James’s views here are suggestive. James’s secondusage quoted above, read cursorily, might seem to revert back to priorcharacterizations, yet here we see that James is now talking of a chaos ofobjects and relations. Previously it was assumed that objects took formonly as chaotic conditions achieved some measure of organization out ofthe “bloomin, buzzing confusion.” Finally, it is worth elaborating thestakes by way of reference to Brenda Dervin’s review of Hayles’s book.
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Referring to the distinction of chaos/order as perhaps the most importantmeta-dualism in our field, Dervin’s (1993) assessment points toward therelevance of James’s thinking on this score:
We may conclude—based on a reading of Hayles’ exploration of treat-ments of chaos as they are emerging both in the sciences and thehumanities in the last half of this century—that our field is very muchin tune with and constitutive of the times. Hayles explores in detail theproposition that current theoretic developments in both the sciencesand humanities are characterized by the destabilization of the order-chaos dichotomy and the emergence of chaos theories (albeit under avariety of names) that envision a third territory beyond and/orbetween. She describes this destabilization of a central dichotomy inWestern thought as a “major fault line … in the episteme,” one thathas a magnet-like attraction. (p. 439)
Radical Empiricism
What can James mean in speaking of an initial chaos? The clearest exampleoccurs in James’s (1912/1996) 1905 essay, “Can Two Minds Know OneThing.” Were it necessary to pinpoint a definitive breakthrough realizationin which James moves from chaos as a description of the universe to hisperspectival formulation, this would be it. In this brief article, James onceagain notes the chaotic nature of the experience among which objects takeshape, only this time he takes a moment to explicate his meaning:
Experiences come on an enormous scale, and if we take them alltogether, they come in a chaos of incommensurable relations that wecannot straighten out. We have to abstract different groups of them,and handle these separately if we are to talk of them at all. (p. 133)
I want to suggest the contemporary relevance of this view. Not only is thisusage of incommensurability important, but so too is the sense of temporal-ity implied by James. In this sense, the observations of Craig (1989, 1993),Robinson (1989), and Demers (2000) that communication scholars havebeen slow to incorporate work in the philosophy of science may functionless as a criticism than an opportunity. For not only have those followingKuhn and Feyerabend missed or ignored this usage but they have empha-sized the logical implications of incommensurability rather than how weoften confront and communicatively deal with the problem.13
If we follow James, then this becomes a key problem of and for com-munication. How can two minds know one thing? For James, to say thatany two thoughts or things are strictly identical is nonsense (in the sense
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of silly) and to say that any one thought or thing is identical to itself isnonsensical (in the sense of saying nothing at all). The question onlyarises as a significant philosophical concern if the functional distinctionbetween subject-object is mistaken for an ontological dualism that mustbe definitively bridged. But such concerns, when they arise, are practicalproblems of coordinating our activities in the world rather than appre-hending a rational foundation upon which our activities take place. Thegamble here is that characterizing such difficulties as a problem of incom-mensurability rather than how two minds know one thing will provide abetter means of resolving such situations. In fact, we are only led to thelatter formulation if we confuse the products of intellectual inquiry for theway the world actually is. Yes, we discriminate between subjects andobjects for certain purposes, we distinguish the mental and the physical inmany contexts, but this is the outcome of cognitive processes and not sim-ply a reflection of an unchanging preexistent reality. The world is notwholly reducible to impermeable subjects and objects that precede allknowing and inquiry, rather we make such distinctions in the process ofcoming to know and resolve a problematic situation.
James does not give us a technique or proof for accounts of sameness inhis radical empiricism, but his nonskeptical ruling out of an objective pro-cedure for doing so is immensely important: the problem of knowledge (orepistemology), of how two minds can know one thing, is reconstructed onthe basis of a problem of incommensurability. Once indeterminacy as chaosis reconstructed as a problem of incommensurability, James moves awayfrom the term.14 I don’t believe he uses chaos in either Pragmatism (1907/1975) or A Pluralistic Universe (1909/1996)—preferring the much moresatisfactory term, to my mind, of fields—and although it does appear inseveral instances in The Meaning of Truth (1909/1975), these instances sup-port rather than detract from this claim.15 Seigfried’s (1978) book-lengthstudy of radical empiricism puts it best: “It should be noted that with thisshift in meaning, chaos as a description of a field of consciousness has beende-emphasized and instead is used to explain why no single rational expla-nation of the world is possible” (p. 32).
One might fairly note, however, that a great deal is being made of a singleusage of the term, in a brief article, and it was a usage to which James did notreturn or emphasize. Part of the value in emphasizing it is that both Dewey(1925b/1988) and Mead (1926) would later utilize the term and both presentexamples of how communication might be reconstructed in accord with radi-cal empiricism, particularly Dewey’s Experience and Nature (1925a/1981).The problem of communication then begins to approximate Peters’s (1999)understanding, where it “is not so much contact between individuals as it is toestablish a vibrant set of social relations in which common worlds can bemade” (p. 118). Dewey and Mead will advance our thinking on those social
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relations, but James’s work stands as a good reminder not to reduce livedexperience to the symbolic interactions through which we often apprehendsuch relations.16 Its immediate value, however, is in overcoming the chaos/order dualism that persists in our field.
THE RELEVANCE OF JAMES FOR CONTEMPORARY COMMUNICATION THEORY
The renaissance of pragmatism in the 1980s is a result, in no small part,of two internationally renowned theorists’ dissatisfaction with their studiesof analytical philosophy.17 Richard Rorty (from within the analytic tradition)and Jurgen Habermas (from within the tradition of German Idealism)both launch post-positivist reconstructions of pragmatist thought, fromDewey and Mead respectively. Although Rorty’s antifoundationalistcontingency and Habermas’s enlightenment universalism take them invery different directions, both give pragmatist thought a radical linguisticturn. Neither of these projects has anything to do with James’s radicalempiricism or its subsequent elaboration in John Dewey’s theory ofinquiry.18 I want instead to maintain focus and explore the consequencesindeterminacy introduces into communication theory, particularly in theform of chaos, and illustrate how pragmatism can reformulate this as theproblem of incommensurability. It might improve understanding to notethat, contra Rorty, there is no absolute or necessary incommensurabil-ity implied by James’s position, nor, contra Habermas, can the prob-lem be overcome once and for all. Demonstrating incommensurabilityis not the theoretical goal or end of James’s position; it is a practicalbeginning.
Positivism as a plausible and defensible philosophy of science dies as anumber of smash-hit critiques erupt into mainstream intellectual discoursein the 1960s: Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Feyerabend’sAgainst Method, Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interests, Gadamer’sTruth and Method, and Foucault’s The Order of Things to name only themost prominent. Craig (1993) gives an excellent overview of the disrup-tion this introduces into received notions of communication theory.Providing a more specific account of how the indeterminacy or antifoun-dationalism of these critiques impacts communication is no easy task.Although Carey’s (1983, 1989a) cultural studies perspective borrowsfreely from Kuhn and strenuously attacks positivism, the most explicitand concerted rejection occurs in the 1985 “Beyond Polemics: ParadigmDialogues,” an International Communication Association panel ofpapers finding agreement only in a common enemy. Since then, Demers’s(2000) triumphant assessment gets it right: “Pluralism is in” (p. 2). Moreinterestingly, Demers’s links this condition to “the philosophical
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problem of theory-neutral observation,” a problem handed down tocommunication by philosophers of science (p. 1).
That problem, of course, is what philosophers of science call incom-mensurability. In fact, this incommensurability problem shows up repeat-edly when issues of theoretical pluralism or competing perspectives arise,even if it is not always named as such (Cappella, 1989; Craig, 1999;Gandy, 1995; Jacobson, 1991; Krippendorff, 1989, 1993; Pavitt, 1994,1999; Pearce, 1989, 1991; Penman, 1992; Rosengren, 1989 ). The impos-sibility of a theory-neutral language into which competing positions couldbe translated and evaluated sparked Kuhn’s (1970) initial interest inincommensurability, although contemporary work has both broadened itsapplicability (to cultural belief systems) and narrowed it (to issues ofsemantic variance). In recovering James’s earlier and undifferentiatedusage of the term, I hope to move beyond postulations of either an under-lying, deterministic order (often associated with positivism) or those ofdisorder and chaos (often associated with breaking from positivism). Tothis end, I briefly examine three theories developed from pragmatistsources—Pearce and Cronen’s coordinated management of meaning,Habermas’s theory of communicative action, and Mosco’s political econ-omy of communication—to highlight their specific handling of indetermi-nacy before turning to a broader consideration of the implications ofradical empiricism.
Pearce and Cronen
In a wide-ranging introduction to their coordinated management ofmeaning theory, Pearce and Cronen (1980) distinguish between theirview of theory and positivistic approaches: “The new idea is that com-munication is a form of social action that can best be studied as a processof creating and managing social reality rather than a technique fordescribing objective reality” (p. 61). Cronen (2001) and Cronen andChetro-Szivos (2001), in particular, give these early formulations a nat-uralistic turn through Dewey’s philosophy of science. In the earlierwork, Pearce and Cronen are more programmatic about how the “revo-lutionary” consequences to result from reconceptualizing “communica-tion as action” are to come about (p. 75). Reviewing the historicalemergence of this perspective, they suggest any pragmatist or action-based theory requires the acceptance of four ideas. The first threeideas—actions as the object of study, an emphasis on the meaning ofaction from an actor’s perspective, and the importance of action andmeaning in constructions of reality—are of a piece with most method-ological proposals to study action rather than describe behavior. Yet
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Pearce and Cronen attach a further condition to the emergence of action-oriented theories of communication:
The fourth and most difficult idea necessary for the development of aconcept of communication as actional was the acceptance of disorder.Throughout Western history, the major thinkers assumed that some-where in or behind the flux of experience was an order which, if itcould be discovered, would provide a suitable object for rapt contem-plation or the ability to describe, predict, and control events. … Thethree ideas described above preclude—or at least make improbable—the notion of an underlying, inexorable order, and from the perspec-tive of action theory, the assumption that order exists is dysfunctional.(pp. 82–83)
Habermas
Compare this conclusion with those drawn by Habermas in formulatinghis theory of communicative action. Habermas’s theory building beginswith the argument that scientism cannot eliminate or definitively repressthe active character of human reflection. Knowledge and Human Inter-ests, the first of three books proposing to reconstruct analytic philosophyas a result of this conclusion, resituates epistemological issues in the con-text of social theory. By the 1970s, positivism or scientism is finished as adefensible philosophy of science. Irrationalism, antifoundationalism, andFeyerabend’s (1975) infamous “anything goes” rose to prominence andthreatened the universalistic aspect of truth claims—along with cumula-tive knowledge, progress, and the enlightenment project—and Habermasbroke off his study of analytic philosophy to begin the theory of commu-nicative action. Similar to Pearce and Cronen, Habermas (1971/2001)foregrounds the priority of meaning, the focus on action versus behavior,and proposes to study how communication generates a symbolic order ofreality (pp. 8–18).
First of all, Habermas recognizes the need to address the questionof how one can know the same thing or communicate identicalmeanings. The pivotal chapter 5 in The Theory of CommunicativeAction derives this account from Mead’s theory of communication.Yet Habermas (1973) explicitly rejects the pragmatist connection oftruth and action (p. 179) to defend a discourse theory retaining theuniversalistic aspect of truth claims. This, in turn, forms one aspectof an ineradicable and culturally invariant communicative rational-ity. Habermas (1987) clearly rejects both scientism and psycholo-gism, or what he calls the philosophy of consciousness, but waverson indeterminacy (Kaufman-Osborn, 1991; Shalin, 1992). Instead,
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Habermas also gives the assumptions of an action-based approach anaturalistic turn—through a proposed theory of social evolution—and comes out in favor of universalism, not disorder. This move islargely driven by the necessity, in Habermas’s view, of holding ontoan adequate account of sameness (Habermas, 1970/2001, 1973,1987). Since Habermas feels communication cannot take place with-out sameness, and that a thoroughgoing indeterminism renders thatimpossible, Habermas turns away from indeterminism and chaos tostudy how communicative action establishes order (Habermas, 1984,p. 100). In the one case, indeterminacy results in a postulate of dis-order, and in the other, an attempt to renew the universalistic foun-dations of social science. As we will see, however, it is notuncommon for such opposing conclusions to be drawn from reflec-tions on indeterminacy.
Mosco
Mosco (1996) would seem to side with Pearce and Cronen in outlining theassumptions of his political economy of communication as realist, inclu-sive, and critical (p. 2). Although fleeting mention of Kuhn and James ismade, Mosco prefers to elaborate his assumptions through prominentpolitical economists and examples from contemporary physics. Nonethe-less, his views sound far more like James’s views that those of a politicaleconomist. Mosco blends these together in a discussion of (1) theory/practice, (2) nonreductionist approaches revising notions of physical cau-sality, (3) pluralistic approaches abandoning dualistic thinking (4) mutu-ally constitutive approaches focusing on relations, and (5) an assumptionof chaos. Where Mosco loses his affinity with James is in the ambiguousdiscussion of how the first four tendencies, widely shared in social theory,result in the assumption of chaos. Similar to Pearce and Cronen (1980),Mosco finds this assumption necessary:
Although dichotomies are typically presented to suggest a formalequality based on difference, or on the relationship between objects,the reality suggests a preference that borders on the distinctionbetween presence and absence or between “A and non-A.” Moreover,dualisms are not only conducive to such thinking, they disincline thereflection on third possibilities or alternatives that would take one out-side the boundary formed by the dualism. As a result, the only alterna-tive to the dual, in practice close to the singular, is chaos. (pp. 4–5)
No doubt, many political economists will be happy to hear Mosco is notreducible to James. But there is a good reason for them to look to James in
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addition to the contemporary political economy and feminism referencesMosco prefers to cite. For if Mosco is not simply to stipulate these views,but to provide some defense of their employment, where is he to turn inrejecting mechanistic formalization? Where he does turn is to contempo-rary physics, particularly theories speculating on quantum mechanics andchaos theory. Yet the reference to quantum theory is entirely unsupportedand the much more elaborate speculation on chaos theory references onlya single work—Gleick’s (1987) journalistic account of its emergence.This is potentially problematic in several ways of which I will mentiononly the most pressing. The question of indeterminacy in quantum phys-ics and chaos theory is no better settled than in philosophy or communica-tion theory. To be sure, it is not difficult to find great weight placed ontwentieth century physics by pragmatists. Indeterminist physical theorieswere important to James, an enduring concern for Mead, and Dewey(1929/1984) accorded a significant place to quantum mechanics early on.Still, there are varying interpretations of this work and its implications areby no means well settled. To choose the most instructive example, AlbertEinstein and Niels Bohr famously fail to reach agreement concerningHeisenberg’s uncertainty principle on a particularly interesting and, onemight say, Jamesian point.19 Their dispute centers on the meaning of con-cepts, or rather, the fashion in which concepts correspond to reality: inBohr’s view, ambiguity is allowable and concepts may not attach to real-ity in well-defined ways, whereas Einstein insists fundamental conceptsmust have an unambiguous relationship to reality (Bohm & Peat, 2000,p. 84). The point of this example is that agreement on the mathematicalformulation of quantum theory did not produce agreed-upon assumptionsor interpretations of that work, which on closer inspection, Bohm andPeat (2000) link to “their incompatible notions of order” (p. 104).20
Therefore, we are left with a situation in which the interpretationsaccorded chaos theory produce similar difficulties to the order/chaoticdisorder divide we find in both the communication theory and quantummechanics examples. Does James point the way forward? Does radicalempiricism settle the question of how to think about determinacy?
A fuller understanding of James’s radical empiricism in its contempo-rary consequences requires the sort of background understanding offeredin Ian Hacking’s (1990) The Taming of Chance, where not only is James’simmersion in central debates about mechanistic determinism evident butso too is the unlikelihood of definitively settling the matter anytime soon(in fact, even James, Dewey, and Peirce vary significantly on indetermin-ism and what is entailed by their respective formulations). But suchdebates are hardly our primary concern. Although developing James’sviews in such debates would be quite valuable, my goals have been morenarrow and specific: to rehearse how James handles the indeterminacy of
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everyday experience, to examine how this releases us from prevailingconceptualizations or problems in communication, and to elaborate howfollowing James can resituate questions of communication within a prob-lem of incommensurability. In turning to this latter goal more directly,Hacking’s conclusion strikes the right tone and seems relevant here, evenif James has been preferred in this essay:
Somebody had to make a first leap to indeterminism. Maybe it wasPeirce, perhaps a predecessor. It does not matter. He “rejoiced tofind” himself in the company of others, including Renouvier. He didargue against the doctrine of necessity but it was not an argument thatconvinced him that chance is an irreducible element of reality. Heopened his eyes, and chance poured in. … I do not use him herebecause he is the happy upshot of preceding chapters, the point atwhich groping events finally lead to the truth as we now see it. Not atall: some of what he wrote strikes me as false and much of it isobscure. I use him instead to exemplify a new field of possibilities, theone that we still inhabit. (p. 201)
SOME IMPLICATIONS OF JAMES’S RADICAL EMPIRICISM FOR PRAGMATIST APPROACHES TO COMMUNICATION STUDIES
One person did feel James had definitively settled the matter, took leaveof what he considered philosophical infighting, and went forward with thetask of building on radical empiricism or what he called James’s “meta-physics of the incommensurable.” It will surprise no one to hear this isJohn Dewey. Why have we not more fully reconstructed pragmatism as atradition of thinking about communication? Robert Craig (1999), forinstance, would seem to point this way in advocating for seven traditionsof communication, especially given his facility with pragmatism and hischaracterization of contemporary theoretical relations as incommensurate.Yet only cursory and uninspiring mention of a genuinely pragmatist tradi-tion is made in this article.21 James Carey’s work has incorporated impor-tant aspects of Dewey’s vision but abandoned the work on inquiry thatextended most directly from James’s radical empiricism (on Dewey’sview of inquiry as an extension of James’s radical empiricism, see Stuhr,1997; Westbrook, 1991). This sort of reading comes at a high cost andreducing James’s or Dewey’s work, and the manifold human relations ithandles, to dialogue is especially troublesome, even if Carey’s goals ofavoiding scientism are understandable. Dialogic presumptions can distortexperience just as positivistic ones can, a point made repeatedly by Peters(1999) and an error James should help us avoid. Peters, for his part, has
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contributed a sympathetic and sensitive understanding of James to com-munication studies and sets a task for communication quite suggestive ofJames.22 Yet Peters (1999) has been busy forwarding his own one-manparadigm shift in communication, a Herculean effort to recover not only a“spiritualist” tradition drawn from the Hegelian wellspring but also anuanced historical understanding of communication technologies as well.
Perhaps the “why have we not done so” requires a better reply to “whymight we do so.” First of all, it would support a shift in thinking about com-munication practices along the lines of Peters’s (1999) suggestions and fillout the partaking model, or fifth vision of communication he draws fromDewey’s pragmatism. Second, it would highlight the differences between apragmatist tradition and contemporary philosophies of difference devel-oped out of various responses to Hegel. Consider how easily the views ofJames and Dewey are caught in the following critical crossfire. For propo-nents of a thoroughgoing philosophy of difference, Dewey’s extension ofthe Jamesian problematic in particular seems to support arguments that forDewey communication is a moral imperative of sorts, impelling us to com-mune in our commonness and join cause with others. Such imperatives areoften blind to the violence done in assimilating difference or too quicklyaccommodating otherness and deafen us to the suffering such practicesoften entail. Peters (1999) is careful not to reach too far with such warnings,but it is difficult not to hear this as a rebuke to Carey’s Dewey. For thosemissing it, others have struck much more directly and Ron Greene (2003)has lodged similar concerns on the use of Dewey in rhetoric programs.Greene’s (2003) view is particularly interesting in recognizing the centralityof the problem of incommensurability but disappointing in its failure to cor-rect the impoverished view of Dewey passing in rhetoric. If James’s radicalempiricism were substituted for such views, it would go some distance inaddressing the concern to maintain otherness and difference.
However, emphasizing the views of James as a philosopher of differ-ence brings with it the opposite problem. From the perspective of thoseimpatient with a philosophy of difference, the charge Hall (1980) levels atFoucault seems just as relevant to pragmatism, such that one might alsosay of James that he
so resolutely suspends judgment, and adopts so thoroughgoing a skep-ticism about any determinacy or relationship between practices, otherthan the largely contingent, that we are entitled to see him, not asagnostic on these questions, but as deeply committed to the necessarynon-correspondence of all practices to one another. (Hall, 1980, p. 71)
There are more than a couple tricks and traps contained in the language ofHall’s judgment and I have sought to give an account of James that
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surpasses such a concern. More importantly, however, I think a pragma-tist tradition is well disposed to take up the guiding challenge of Hall’sessay, which reduces to the demand for an account of determinacy in socialrelations. The course of cultural analysis has tended to follow Williams andHall in turning to a notion of hegemony in attempting to do so.
The pragmatist tradition is a different pathway. If one begins from theproblem of incommensurability in experience, the communication theoryof Mead and Dewey is a means for making a shared perspective available.Dewey, in particular, set this task for critical philosophy in the conclusionto his 1925 Experience and Nature, and his account of communication inthat book is both indebted to and thereafter affirmed by Mead. Dewey setsthe task at a still grander scale for political theory in his 1927 The Publicand its Problems. The overlooked key to that book, however, is Dewey’sstipulation that only an account of communication linked to an account ofsocial inquiry will carry the day (1927/1997, p. 184). We are familiar withand know where to find that account of communication, but not with itslimitations if shorn of an intimate relation to inquiry. For Dewey, his viewof communication is necessary and designed for addressing problems ofincommensurability elucidated by James, but hardly adequate in everycase. Rather, it needs to be wedded to an account of social inquiry and it isDewey’s (1938/1986) theory of inquiry, a body of work developed over aperiod of over half a century, which holds a pragmatist theory of determi-nation.23 It is this theory of knowledge, built upon the universe envisionedin James’s radical empiricism, that provides an account of our often-dailytrackings between determinate and indeterminate situations and backagain, the very practice Dewey characterized as inquiry. One wonders ifthat path remains open and whether, if taken, it will make all the difference.
NOTES
1. The essays in Essays in Radical Empiricism were collected and published in bookform by Ralph Barton Perry in 1912. With the exception of an essay added byPerry, they were originally published in 1904 and 1905 and I include these dateswhen relevant. Perry’s “Editor’s Preface” tells the story of how James collectedreprints of the essays in an envelope titled “Essays in Radical Empiricism,” andalso had copies bound for use in two Harvard libraries. James used a couple ofthese essays in two later works, The Meaning of Truth and A Pluralistic Universe,the former of which restated James’s (1909/1975) pragmatist theory of truth tothe end of clearing a path for radical empiricism.
2. Therefore I do not attempt to provide a detailed intellectual reconstruction of thedevelopment and institutional reception of radical empiricism here. For a briefoverview of radical empiricism in James’s work, see McDermott (1978). For a closestudy of James’s radical empiricism with attention to his critics, see Seigfried(1978). For an illuminating account of how James’s radical empiricism contrasts to
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Platonism, and the relation of these theories to ethics, see Stuhr (1997, chap. 8).The interesting question of how James’s pragmatism relates to his radical empiri-cism has no single answer and is too complex to be addressed here.
3. I have in mind those drawing from John Dewey’s work (Carey, 1982, 1983, 1989a,1989b, 1995, 1997; Craig, 2001; Cronen, 2001; J. Jensen, 1995, 2001; Perry, 2001a,2001b), George Herbert Mead’s social theory (Blumer, 1969; Habermas, 1987;Joas, 1985), and Charles Peirce’s semiotics (Apel, 1980, 1995; K. B. Jensen, 1995).
4. One might fairly argue, however, that John Durham Peters didn’t bother to sug-gest such an approach and simply went about the business of doing so. Such aclaim is made more complex by the fact that James held little love or patiencefor Hegel, a thinker of some significance in Peters’s (1999) most important workto date. I return to this below.
5. In the case of psychologism, James begins in postulating its abandonment in thefirst salvo of his radical empiricism, “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?”
6. For an excellent study of indeterminacy and its shifting articulations, see IanHacking’s (1990)The Taming of Chance. Hacking takes the tale of its emergenceup to the point of Charles Sanders Peirce’s work, the man from whom Jamesfamously borrowed the term pragmatism, and provides an important contextwithin which to further appraise James’s views.
7. James’s famous 1904 “Does Consciousness Exist?” is actually more of a“depends” than an unequivocal “no.” As an entity, James advocates giving upon the notion; as a function, however, James clearly admits it.
8. See James (1907/1975) and especially chapter 2, “What Pragmatism Means,”for a fuller elaboration and demonstration.
9. Interestingly enough, Einstein refused to give up on a deterministic universe,whereas James refused to give in.
10. Such a concern, for example, would be the basis of Bertrand Russell’s objec-tions to Dewey’s theory of inquiry.
11. Ruf (1991) studies the role of chaos in James’s work from The Principles of Psychol-ogy through to The Varieties of Religious Experience. His study examines the religioususes and connotations of chaos and argues that James’s work makes for a chaoticview of mind and world. I want to avoid such a conclusion by suggesting this viewchanges once again as James’s radical empiricism comes into clearer focus.
12. It also appears in note 6 (p. 1231) and note 7 (pp. 1231–1232) of chapter 28, note 6of which is a quotation from Mill’s Logic. In the main text, on my count James usesit once in chapter 4, three times in chapter 9, once in chapter 11, once in chapter17, three times in chapter 20, twice in chapter 21, and three times in chapter 28. Inmy view, each usage is fairly consistent. See Ruf (1991) for a closer study.
13. This might be a result of Kuhn’s claim to have drawn the word from the lan-guage of mathematics.
14. See McDermott (1978) for a history of how James is drawn back into debate onthe nature of truth and never returns to more systematic formulations of his rad-ical empiricism.
15. In the first instance of chaos in The Meaning of Truth (1909/1975), James uses theword to voice a concern that a critic might forward to his view of cognition:“What can save us at all and prevent us from flying asunder into a chaos of mutuallyrepellent solipsisms?” (p. 30). The next two instances are the result of republishing
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essays from 1904. The final instance, as with the first, is interesting for James’sawareness that his critics will use it to attack his views and his willingness to putthe term itself in their mouths:
Heaven forbid that I should get entangled here in a controversy about therights and wrongs of the free-will question at large, for I am only trying to illus-trate vicious abstractionism by the conduct of some of the doctrine’s assail-ants. The moments of bifurcation, as the indeterminist seems to himself toexperience them, are moments both of re-direction and of continuation. Butbecause in the “either—or” of the re-direction we hesitate, the deterministabstracts this little element of discontinuity from the superabundant continu-ities of the experience, and cancels in its behalf all the connective characterswith which the latter is filled. Choice, for him, means henceforward disconnec-tion pure and simple, something undetermined in advance in any respect what-ever, and a life of choices must be a raving chaos, at no two moments of whichcould we be treated as one and the same man. (p. 138, emphasis in original)
16. We can favorably cite Peters once more in his gloss on Wittegenstein: “Hispoint … was that understanding comes as much from a lived or embodied worldof common practices as from symbol-manipulating capacities alone” (p. 244).
17. Richard J. Bernstein and Steven Toulmin, well known to scholars versed in thephilosophy of science, should not be underestimated due to the fact they do nottell stories of intellectual conversion. The case of Bernstein (1983) is particu-larly interesting since he advocates for reflection on the problem of incommen-surability as a means of moving “beyond objectivism and relativism,” but linksthis only to hermeneutics and analytic philosophy—not pragmatism!
18. In the case of Rorty, under criticism that Dewey rarely says the things Rortyclaims he says, the issue is clear in his proposal for “a hypothetical Dewey whowas a pragmatist without being a radical empiricist” (1998, p. 292). In the caseof Habermas, see Habermas (1973, 1985) and Russill (2003).
19. McDermott (1978) mentions James’s influence on Bohr. Also see Bohm andPeat (2000, p. 101).
20. Also see Krippendorff (1989) and Putnam (1995) for further reflection on quan-tum theory in regard to communication and pragmatism, respectively.
21. Perhaps this is because reconstruction of the tradition does not yet adequatelyfit Craig’s criteria or perhaps the proposal itself presumes a pragmatist orienta-tion. Such an assumption might gain support from Craig’s almost Jamesianreply to a critic of the proposal. On the other hand, if it presumed pragmatismCraig would likely have said as much. For a view of pragmatism as a tradition ofcommunication theory addressing Craig’s criteria, see Russill, (2004).
22. While exhibiting a stunning breadth, Peters’s (1999) introductory chapter,“The Problem of Communication,” is framed by concerns set by WilliamJames. For Peters, James’s Psychology sets the problem of how two mindsknow one thing in a definitive and irresolvable way (pp. 4–5) and points the wayforward in attending to difference and otherness as a context for considerationsof communication (p. 31).
23. For suggestive work on Dewey’s views of inquiry among communication scholars,see Craig (2001), Cronen (2001), and Cronen and Chetro-Szivos (2001).
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