James's Philosophy of Science and Science of Philosophy

In this paper, I argue that James’s pragmatic method is not only informed by his scientific work, as an emerging trend in James scholarship suggests, but is in fact an attempt to reshape philosophy in the image of a science. I demonstrate this point through an analysis of two of the core tenets of James’s philosophy of science; namely, James’s answer to the problem of demarcation and his account of scientific progress. This analysis leads to an account of science based on common practices and accepted standards rather than anything intrinsic to science itself. Science progresses by re-evaluating and refining these assumptions through hypothesis-testing. After showing how this model holds for James’s attempts at sciences of religion and the paranormal, I argue that James’s pragmatic method is an explicit attempt to reshape philosophy in the image of a science so that philosophy can renovate positivistic science—and vice versa.