Meaning and Pragmatism James on the Pragmatic Consequences of Belief

In the third lecture of his 1907 Pragmatism, William James famously presented his pragmatic theory of meaning by posing the simple question “what difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true?” James’s pragmatic method of clarifying the meaning of conceptions was simply to trace what he called their respective “practical consequences.” However, already in 1908, Arthur O. Lovejoy proposed that James confounds two incongruent criteria of the meaningfulness of propositions. According to the first criterion, a proposition is meaningful if it refers to or predicts future experiences regardless of whether the proposition is believed or not; according to the second, a proposition is meaningful if belief in that proposition results in some experiences on the part of the believer, despite the fact no predications by way of future experiences can be deduced from its truth. Many sympathetic commentators have since held that there is a duality inherent to James's pragmatism about meaning. Consequently, James has often been regarded as allowing for merely subjective emotions and interests to play a role in the pragmatist determination of not only the meaning but the truth of the proposition. I argue that Lovejoy’s objection is mistaken in its main claim. The two criteria Lovejoy separates are not inconsistent; rather, by pragmatist lights, they are inseparably related. If a proposition has meaning in the light of the first criterion, it is meaningful by the second, and vice versa.