Cambridge Journal of Economics 2006, 30, 321345 doi:10.

1093/cje/bei062 Advance Access publication 22 August, 2005

William Jamess psychological pragmatism: habit, belief and purposive human behaviour
Michael S. Lawlor*
Modern institutional economists look to pragmatism for: (1) an evolutionary philosophy of knowledge; and (2) a foundation of a theory of human nature. These two elements are combined in William James, who was both a philosopher of pragmatism and a pioneering experimental psychologist. The author shows rst how William James added psychological depth to the pragmatic tradition as it was left by C. S. Peirce, and offers a reconciliation of their respective theories of truth. The second part of the essay explores Jamess views on psychology, concentrating on the relation to pragmatic philosophy and the question of habit. The last section compares this to human nature as seen in modern evolutionary biology, in brain science and in the philosophy of rationality in the social sciences. Key words: William James, Psychology, Institutional economics, Pragmatism, Neuroscience JEL classications: A12, B25, B52, B4 A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once and for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufciency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from xed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant, and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, articiality and the pretence of nality in truth. (William James, Pragmatism, 1907)

1. Introduction
Pragmatism is back. After lying dormant for at least 50 years, during which formal analytical philosophers spurned it, it is once again making a splash in the philosophical world.1 Likewise, the original giants of pragmatism, Charles S. Peirce (Brent, 1998), William James (Meyers, 1986; Simon, 1998) and John Dewey (Westbrook, 1991; Rockefeller, 1991; Ryan, 1995) are
Manuscript received 30 July 2001; nal version received 8 December 2004. Address for correspondence: Department of Economics, Wake Forest University, Box 7505, Winston-Salem, NC, 27109 USA; email: lawlor@wfu.edu * Wake Forest University. This paper beneted from the suggestions of Allin Cottrell, John Duca, Greg Lilly, John Wood and two anonymous reviewers. 1 See Dickstein (1998) for an entry into what has now become an enormous literature. By most accounts, the origin of the new interest in pragmatism as philosophy is traced to Rorty (1979). Greg Lilly and Martin Hollis (1994, pp. 7783) remind me, though, that W. v. O. Quine (1953) had earlier argued that a general pragmatic web of belief philosophically characterised the social endeavour of science, in what Hollis rightly calls his electrifying and prescient (1953) essay, Two Dogmas of Empiricism.
The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved.

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receiving renewed biographical treatments. Even the hitherto mysterious origin of pragmatism in the discussions of a post-Civil War debating society in Cambridge, Massachusetts, recently received a book-length treatment (Menand, 2001). More broadly, a new generation of social theorists and political commentators is raising the banner of pragmatism to discuss everything from democracy (West, 1989), the law (Brint and Weaver, 1991; Posner, 1995), and feminism (Seigfried, 1996) to education (Orrill, 1995), postmodernism (Khalil, 2004) and poetry (Poirier, 1992). Interestingly for James scholars, there has also simultaneously but separately appeared an outpouring of intellectual activity aimed at a deeper, non-reductionist understanding of the functioning of the human mind. This literature is variously described as the philosophy of the mind, cognitive science, brain science or articial intelligence, depending on an enormous variety of aims and methods.1 One aspect that holds it together is a growing demand for an explicitly cross- or multi-disciplinary focus. Behavioural psychologists, anatomical neurologists, computer scientists, articial intelligence experts and philosophers are all coming to understand they have valuable lessons to share with one another. Recently, it has been suggested that this effort should include economics (Twomey, 1998). Twomey makes a persuasive case that Jamess outlook on psychology was both highly inuential on Veblens economics and was ahead of its time in preguring the new brain science view of human nature. Given the current interest in institutional varieties of economics (Hodgson, 2001, 2004), the time is ripe for a more detailed historical analysis of how Jamess philosophy of rational inquiry and his psychology of human nature mesh. This is particularly so in that William James is the one gure who can be shown to have precociouslyspanned both pragmatism and brain science at the turn of the twentieth century. James made an early and enduring attempt to systematise the ndings of the then new eld of psychology (James, 1890) and was really the rst public pragmatist (James, 1907).2 The present essay offers such an account. Its goal is to show what the distinctive contribution of William James was to the pragmatism that he rightly credits as starting with C. S. Peirces seminal statement of what became known as the Pragmatic Maxim for determining the meaning of a conception:
It appears, then, that the rule for attaining the third grade of clearness of apprehension is as follows: consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object. (Peirce, 1878, p. 124)

How James, starting from this hint, wove his own pragmatic theory of inquiry and truth, how this theory intertwines with his psychology, and what the import may be for social sciences like economics, will be the questions we address below.

2. Peirce and James

It was William James, late in a distinguished career as an academic and public intellectual, who put pragmatism on the map, so to speak. His 1907 book, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, rescued Peirces pragmatic maxim from the obscurity of his 1878 paper, and announced it to the world as the basis of a new and better philosophical method. It is clear from Jamess publications and private correspondence that he saw
1 2

Good starting places to enter this literature are Dennet (1991), Gazzaniga (2000) and Searle (2000). Following Peirces (1877, 1878) earlier, mostly ignored, efforts.

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himself as the leader of a conceptual movement in philosophy of great importance. For example, writing to his brother, Henry, in 1907:
I have just nished the proofs of a little book called Pragmatism which even you may enjoy reading . . . I shouldnt be surprised if ten years hence it should be rated as epoch-making, for of the denitive triumph of that general way of thinking [Pragmatism] I can entertain no doubt whateverI believe it to be something like the protestant reformation.

His Luther in this reformation must surely be Peirce. Publicly, Peirces inuence on James can be traced to Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results, a lecture given by James in 1898, which started a period of intense public debate over this new phase of thought. In it, James gives Peirce credit for showing him the most likely direction in which to start up the trail of truth. This direction turns out to be Jamess restatement of Peirces pragmatic maxim:
[T]he effective meaning of any philosophical proposition can always be brought down to some particular consequence, in our future practical experience, whether active or passive; the point lying rather in the fact that the experience must be particular, than in the fact that it must be active. (James, 1898(1920), p. 412)

But even before this, Jamess work and that of Peirce had been intertwined, both personally and intellectually. As young men, both were members of a philosophical discussion society in Cambridge (Massachusetts),1 which explored the meaning of the Darwinian revolution for philosophy. It was in discussions with this group that Peirce apparently struck upon his ideas for his path-breaking papers of the 1870s (Peirce, 1877, 1878). Later, they went in different directions professionally, but always remained friends and read each others work. It was James who tried repeatedly to get a hearing for Peirces ideas when he was labouring away at his philosophy in isolation and poverty. And it was James who personally organised a fund for contributions from sympathetic supporters to ease Peirces deprivations in his last years. There were also sharp differences between the two. Where Peirce was a solitary and difcult eccentric, unable to get along in almost any group, James was the epitome of reasonableness and by all accounts a generous and warm person, with a rare capacity for sympathetic dialogue with people of different temperaments and ways of life (Schefer, 1974, p. 97). This must have been true on the evidence from the fascinating correspondence between James and Peirce. Nothing could so starkly contrast the two in manner or thought. It is at once a record of true friendship and intellectual exchange, and one of what must have been a mutually exasperating inability to see each others exact meaning. James is seen labouring mightily to do his all to ease Peirces personal situation and to encourage him in his work. Peirce responds with sincere thanks, and sometimes appreciation for James as a philosopher. But this aspect is almost always accompaniedat voluminous lengthwith Peirces complaints, corrections, lectures and outright attacks upon Jamess work, especially concerning Jamess lack of mathematical precision. James, when he responds at all to these outbursts, does so with a gentle humour. The interested reader can get the full avour of this odd pairing from the chapter Friendly Disputes with Charles Peirce, in the excellent biography of James by Ralph Barton Perry (Perry, 1948). Just one irresistible example (quoted in Perry, pp. 2912) is the following characteristic exchange
1 Another member was Oliver Wendell Holmes. See Menand (2001) for a complete account. On Peirces life and his lifelong reliance on James, see Brent (1998).

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from 1909, in which Peirce responds to a draft of a forthcoming publication James had sent him, the faults of which had caused Peirce to write a 40 sheet comment:
I thought your Will to Believe [James, 1897, formally dedicated to Peirce(!)] was a very exaggerated utterance, such as injures a serious man very much, but to say what you now do is far more suicidal. I have lain awake several nights in succession in grief that you should be so careless of what you say.

In his reply, James charitably blames the confusion on the lack of the whole argument for context, and ends with the gracious closing:
But wait till you see the book, of which I enclose a circular! I hope to send it to you in four weeks, and repent now of having stirred you to such troublesome premature reaction. Forty sheets! Lord help us . . . Affectionately yours . . . Wm. James

Good-hearted he was, but more importantly James is also a fascinating intellectual gure in his own right. He had a unique childhood. His father, Henry James, was an independent private man of letters who wrote on spiritual and religious topics and was a (peripheral) member of the circle that included Emerson and Thoreau. When not writing, Henry James seems to have devoted unusual amounts of time cultivating the education of his children. They moved constantlyBoston, New York, London, Paris, Geneva, Newport, R.I., Bonn and back to Bostonsearching for just the right tutors and schools. If nothing else, amidst all this confusion, the children acquired a cosmopolitan outlook and a facility with languages. The one educational principle of the father was freedomfrom organised curricula or rote learning. He thought colleges a waste of time, detrimental to a true education. Perhaps he was correct, as James and his brother Henry both became distinctive voices in world culture, and each, but especially William, evinced strong personal independence in his work. James moved easily between disciplines and subjects, and refused to respect traditional academic boundaries. This independence and pluralism of outlook on personal matters, we shall see, also marked his pragmatism. Besides intellectual independence, the James family was marked by a rare combination of passions for ideas about both moral and philosophical topics, and scientic training. This combination of scientic rigour and humanistic learning, and particularly the issue of how to reconcile them, is what occupied James throughout his life. He became a gifted writer as well, in a house that also produced the novelist Henry James. Beginning as a painter, he early settled on medicine for his training, much of it in Europe and at the new Harvard Lawrence Scientic School (not the College!). In the latter, he learned the routine of the laboratory and fell especially under the spell of the famous geologist Louis Aggasiz. It was from Aggasiz, whom he assisted on an expedition to Brazil in 1865, that he acquired the passion for natural history as it was then calledthe detailed knowledge of particular natural phenomena. Jamess own personal fascination was with anatomy, especially human anatomy, which is what led him to medicine. But he never practised medicine, instead becoming a pioneering expert and the rst Harvard Professor of the then newly founded discipline of Psychology. Yet, though James admired the rigour and discipline of the laboratory (he founded the rst Psychology Lab in the country), he spent most of his time writing about psychology, rather than actually conducting experiments (again in contrast to Peirce, who had real claim to laboratory successes in at least three disciplines). Eventually, his musing about how the mind works led James to consider the wider question of how rational behaviour in general might be described. It is this question which led him to pragmatism.

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Unlike Peirce, Jamess main interest in rationality was not science and its progress. He was motivated by a desire to reconcile, in a reasonable way, the claims of metaphysics with what he (like Peirce also) saw as the wondrous advances of nineteenth-century science. Moreover, he wanted to offer answers to philosophical questions that would be intelligible and convincing to the average educated middle-class reader. It was his eloquent pen that was responsible for much of his success in this philosophy, and also perhaps for the misunderstandings that he encountered. This is a far cry from Peirce, who saw himself in direct line of decent from Aristotle and Kant and wrote accordinglyoften as if he were speaking directly to them. The result with James was a pragmatism that was less precise and more accessible, less tightly argued but more relevant to everyday concerns. In the process of this popularisation, he has been thought to have altered the very meaning of Truth from where Peirce had left it. So far, in fact, that Peirce himself later felt it necessary to distinguish his brand of pragmatism, renamed pragmaticism, from Jamess. We shall comment on the relation between Jamess and Peirces theories below, arguing that they are more complementary than opposed. Although historically speaking, James came to psychology rst and philosophy later, the elements of both are intertwined from the beginning, and his arguments in one mirror those in the other. It will serve our purposes best rst to explore briey his psychological-cultural analysis in Pragmatism. In particular, we shall focus on his discussion of truth from the 1907 book. This will offer us a way to back into his psychology, which underpins his philosophical views. The practical result for the reader will be a more general and personal view of rational conduct as a process of actively participating and interacting with the physical and social environment. On the larger question of new ways forward for modern economics, we get an added bonus from James. His psychological pragmatism embodies a view of behaviour that is in sharp contrast to the then (and now) dominant psychology of neoclassical economics, in which behaviour is often reduced to a simplistic economic man represented by an unchanging utility function optimising against its environment.

3. James on truth
Peirce is distinctive among the founding pragmatists for his more positivistic stance on the inuence of realitythe facts of the worldon human inquiry and rational beliefs.1 Peirces view was that there exists a xed and ultimate point toward which a community of inquirers could and would, if pursued long enough, push the collective activity of science to the one true conclusion. Just to emphasise this important point as it contrasts with James, consider the following from Peirce:
Different minds may set out with the most antagonistic of views, but the progress of investigation carries them by a force outside of themselves to one and the same conclusion. This activity of thought by which we are carried, not where we wish, but to a foreordained goal, is like the operation of destiny. (Peirce, 1958, vol. V, p. 133)2

For a direct contrast with James on this point, consider the following:
The absolutely true, meaning what no farther experience will ever alter, is that ideal vanishingpoint towards which we imagine that all our temporary truths will some day converge. It runs on
1 But see his 1877 essay The Fixation of Belief for a taxonomy and anthropology of pre-scientic, nonrational methods of inquiry. 2 For an exhaustive account of the philosophical literature the stems from this aspect of Peirces thought, see Almeder (1980, pp. 4480).

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all fours with the perfectly wise man, and with the absolutely complete experience; and, if these ideals are ever realized, they will all be realized together. Meanwhile we have to live today by what truth we can get today, and be ready tomorrow to call it a falsehood. (James, 1907, p. 107)

This is the aspect of the pragmatic argument about which it is useful to bring Jamess contribution into our discussion. In his Pragmatism (1907), he fully takes on board the pragmatic maxim, clearly attributing this basic insight to Peirce. His development of this insight, though, ends in a position that has traditionally been seen by scholars as differing from Peirce over the nature of the ultimate contingency of truth. Our task in this section is to see why and how far this difference extends.1 We wish to concentrate on Jamess discussion of belief formation and truth, which is where the split with Peirce is most evident, and where most of the philosophical controversy over Pragmatism that broke out at the time James was writing, and that continues to this day, occurs. What the reader should watch for is the manner in which James redened the terms upon which we might look for those crucial effects, which might conceivably have practical bearing, which Peirce had identied as holding the key to the meaning and truth of concepts. Not surprisingly, for a man who spent the previous 30 years of his life investigating the fundamental principles of the functioning of the mind, James, much more than Peirce, situated his pragmatic consequences rmly within the realm of the individual and his psychological relationship to belief. James, like Peirce, considers doubt and action as the crucial wellsprings of learning and belief formation. James, though, starts from a more general conception of doubt than just those that arise in the laboratory when new data contradict old theory (though his view can handle this situation as well). In particular, James was fascinated with the question of how to account for what he saw as the commonplace and obvious circumstance of people simultaneously holding theories, ideas, etc., which may conict or contradict one another. James suggests that what may seem entirely illogical and irrational, in the context of a narrow view of philosophy deduced from rst principles, may be shown to be perfectly sensible from the standpoint of his new pragmaticism.
Riding now on the front of this [Pragmatic] wave of scientic logic, Messrs. Shiller and Dewey appear with their pragmatistic account of what truth everywhere signies. Everywhere, these teachers say, truth in our ideas and beliefs means the same thing that it means in science. It means they say, nothing but this, that ideas (which themselves are but parts our experience) become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience, to summarise and get about among them by conceptual short-cuts instead of following the interminable succession of particular phenomena. Any ideas upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to another part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labour; is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true instrumentally. (James, 1907, p. 34; italics in original)2

One could say that James is here emphasising a type of conservation principle, whereby new ideas are adopted as true in an evolutionary way (as had Peirce). James, though, does not immediately appeal to Peirces community of thinkers working with the same facts as the ultimate arbiter to which the idea is submitted. Rather, James turns the question inward. He
1 In the interest of space and to focus on our main theme of the import of pragmatism for social science, we shall pass over Jamess novel and fascinating discussions of religion and morality. The interested reader is referred to James (1907), The Will to Believe, and James (1902), The Varieties of the Religious Experience. 2 This part of the book, essay II What Pragmatism Means, shows the degree to which Pragmatism had become a phenomenon by 1907. For James, the important gures in the movement, besides himself, were Peirce and F. C. S. Schiller, a British philosopher, and, increasingly over the last years of Jamess life, John Dewey. On Schillers relations with James, see the discussion in Perry (1948, ch. 32). On Deweys and Jamess relationship, see Perry (1948, ch. 33).

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focuses on the feedback loop between experience and belief as it appears in the mind of the individual. This feedback loop involves desired ends, actions to achieve them and the relevant conceptual beliefs under questionall as in Peircebut now with the crucial addition of the individuals entire current belief system.
The process here is always the same. The individual has a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that puts them to strain. Somebody contradicts them; or in a reective moment he discovers that they contradict each other; or he hears of facts with which they are incompatible; or desires arise in him which they cease to satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives. So he tries to change rst this opinion, and then that (for they resist change very variously), until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter, some idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience and runs them into one another most felicitously and expediently. (James, 1907, p. 35)

It is the criteria that James advances by which the new, mediated, idea system becomes acceptable to the individual that caused such controversy over his Pragmatism. For James a true belief is one which allows its holder to act successfully to attain ends which are the practical consequences of those beliefs, while simultaneously causing as little adjustment to the rest of ones beliefs as possible. In Pragmatism, he variously described this balancing relation as one that is satisfactory, instrumental, protable and good, for the individual believer. It was characteristic of Jamess personality, and his writing in particular, that he was orid and lively, always feeling hemmed in by systemisation and logic. He wrote impressionistically to get his ideas across. In addition, recall that he aimed for a wider audience than professional philosophers. Perhaps, as it turned out, it was this very facility to tell a story in even the most abstract reaches of thought that got James into trouble. The trouble came in the form of an enormous furore amongst philosophers over his denition of truth in Pragmatism, so much so that he felt obliged to write another book (James, 1909) to defend himself from these attacks. The central focus of the attacks was on the degree to which this seemed to take Peirces rather tough-minded empiricism out of the picture and replace it with a vague psychological feeling. Added to this, and perhaps even more offensive to James, was a common reaction that this feeling seemed so self-serving and open to the self-rationalisation of unprincipled behaviour.

4. On Jamess contribution to pragmatism: psychological insight

How does Jamess theory of truth look today? Most importantly, can his arguments be synthesised into a larger, more useful, pragmatic theory of evolutionary knowledge? In what follows, I shall suggest an interpretation of Jamess own arguments (1907, 1909) with those of Peirce, driven by what I see as the complementarities of Jamess and Peirces visions of truth. This account concerns two issues, which will end, I hope, by bringing the importance of psychology into the open: the large variety of outward social settings for belief, and the accompanying large variety of possible inward psychological adjustments between belief, experience and action that different individuals make in different settings.1 The rst aspect is an argument that the variety of contexts of action be kept in mind in the description of belief formation. For James, Peirces idealised experimental scientist working
1 For an acute philosophical investigation of Jamess theory of truth see Hilary Putnam (1997). Putnams account sees Pierce and James as offering complimentary insights, based on a thorough account of their respective theories of what constitutes reality, perceptions and thoughts.

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in a laboratory is only one, rather rare, example of pragmatic thinking. James considered himself rst and foremost an empiricist. An element of the empirical world that particularly struck James, originating with his training under Aggasiz, was its sheer complexity. He is best thought of as an inheritor of what we might call the Natural History school of science, with due emphasis on collecting and particularity. As much as anything, this seems to be what James meant by empirical. He constantly complained that then current positivism represented principally for him by the works of the British interpreters of Darwin like T. H. Huxley, John Tyndall and W. K. Cliffordhad lost sight of the bewildering variety of facts found in life and science. Hence he came to attack both these Darwinian Positivists and, what would otherwise be considered philosophically divergent, Hegelians, under the general charge that they are two ends of an unsatisfying rationalist spectrum of philosophy. They are either too abstract or too sentimental and soft-headed, according to the rst essay of Pragmatism, The Present Dilemma in Philosophy. Notice, for instance, how he draws the contrast between stagnant philosophical debates and the hard-headed empiricism of progressive science:
[Rationalist systems of philosophy are] far less an account of this actual world than a clear addition built upon it, a classic sanctuary in which the rationalist fancy may take refuge from the intolerably confused and gothic character which mere facts present. It is no explanation of our concrete universe; it is another thing altogether, a substitute for it, a remedy, a way of escape. (p. 18)

As opposed to this refuge in a rationalist sanctuary, where truth appears as a timeless property of things, James saw pragmatic belief as an ever-changing process of temporary makeshift accommodationsa constant interplay between belief, experience and action. Consequently, what is good and instrumental about a true belief, for James, is that it heightens our ability to navigate successfully in an empirically rich, gothic, environment. As for Peirce, but in broader conception, Jamess true theories are the result of what Peirce called rubbing up against reality. Taking him together with Peirce, it is fair to say that James does not contradict, but rather expands the range of, Peirces reliance on the aspects of reality that beliefs can rub up against. In particular, he focused on psychological reality. Yet this does not mean that James did not appreciate the importance of an appeal to the facts of the world for truth conrmation. But he was, as a result of his individualistic psychological viewpoint, less insistent on unique, nal grounds for truth, and more insistent on the variety of true beliefs and the ways in which they would be held by individuals. From this follows, for instance, Jamess insistence on a dynamic evolving theory of truth:
The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-cation. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation. (James, 1907, p. 97)

The second point in our overall account concerns the charge that Jamess pragmatic account of truth leads to self-serving ideological ignorance, moral chaos and/or unprincipled self-rationalisation of whatever one may comfortably choose to believe. Of course people can, and do, so arrange their beliefsat various times and in various settingsin entirely dogmatic fashions. James seems to understand this phenomenon, but not explore it. Here, an aspect of Peirces insight1 is a useful corrective. Peirce particularly
1 Peirce introduces the topic of the methods by which belief is formed and changed in his classic early papers. In Peirce (1877) this takes the form of an abstract anthropological account of the methods of tenacity, authority and science, and explores the benets gained by widening the number of enquirers. In Peirce (1878) the particular practices of belief in a scientic community is investigated.

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valued the social contexts of science and its openness to group discussions of theory, concepts and evidence. He emphasised that beliefs are inextricable from the structure of the environment that humans act in. Since he was primarily interested in science, Peirce meant by environment the social setting and the logical framework of professional sciencethe context of belief particularly relevant to the mindset of what Veblen (1906, p. 30) called the nikin skeptic of the laboratory.1 James, though, was interested as well in the psychology, emotions and habits of belief, and of more than just laboratory scientists. Taking both writers together, the point worth emphasising is that the various setting in which such variables are found in different groups and individuals will determine the strength, exibility, endurance and conviction of belief. Environments, like individuals, vary as to the degree to which they will tolerate just any comfortable belief. In the professional environment of mechanical engineering there is little tolerance for beliefs that are out of touch with the evidence on the weight-bearing qualities of construction materials. Certain personalities may be more attracted to this environment, and it may foster certain habits of thought. In other environments, though, say for example politics or university administration, there is a much larger scope to create a world and comfortably live within it. C. S. Pierce was a master of and evangelist for the very successful method of pursuing truth revealed by a community of laboratory scientists. He thus stressed the communal standards by which evidence would be persuasive to such a group, and by which its concepts and conceptual reality would be constantly evolving. William James was an enthusiastic collector and systematiser of facts discovered in the laboratory, particularly the rst psychological laboratories. But he was not completely comfortable there, yearning for greater meaning than the laboratory alone suggested to him. James, consequently, turns the pragmatic viewpoint inward. He asks how, in all contexts of belief formation, the internal psychology of the believer will adjust, or not, to changing evidence. In this way, Jamess view of the conservative adjustment process of belief in the face of new information is a psychologically acute comment on pragmatism. It can be read as offering a description of what, scientic group evaluation notwithstanding, is common to personal mental activity in all such realms. This is a different, if related issue, from the more clearly made prescriptive thrust that he did sometimes confuse it with: that philosophical arguments are best pursued by pragmatic thinking. That argument is made of two parts. The rst aspect that gives force to the prescriptive argument is, as Pierce often said, a purely logical matter. Hence his reference to the advantage of stating propositions in terms of practical effects, the pragmatic maxim we dened above, in his last attempt to dene pragmatism:
Sufce it to say once more that pragmatism is, in itself, no doctrine of metaphysics, no attempt to determine the truth of things. It is merely a method of ascertaining the meanings of hard words and of abstract concepts. All pragmatists of whatsoever stripe will cordially assent to that statement. (Peirce, 1906, p. 271)

This logical requirement to be clear about our ideas is thus one aspect of the prescriptive argument. But Peirce immediately added the following sentence in the above quotation. As to the ulterior and indirect effects of practicing the pragmatistic method, that is quite
1 Veblens (1906) essay, The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation, is an interesting and sceptical study of the historical development and cultural impact of the rising social dominance of the pragmatic-scientic point of view. It includes references to Jamess Psychology.

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another affair. One ulterior and indirect effect for Peirce was to prize laboratory empiricism as the most successful method of approaching truth. This was based, for him and James, on the evidence of the triumph of science as a way to discover new truth about the natural world. This then forms the second element of the pragmatic prescription that philosophy ought to follow this experimental method. Thus follows both writers oft stated opinion that pragmatism offers a way out of sterile philosophical debate and a way to settle age-old philosophical conundrums. Taking James and Peirce together, the descriptive point emphasises our theme of their complementarities. The group context of belief does vary greatly and importantly. Among these dimensions of variation will be group size, the strength of inuence a group exercises over its individual members, and the habits of thought that it inculcates. In addition, groups offer greater or lesser scope for the expression of individual interpretations of belief. A hallmark of organised natural sciences, a trait that Peirce so admired about the laboratory, is its impersonal reliance on evidence and peer review. Appeal to evidence and the social processes of a community of scholars is, of course, no guarantee of the validity or fruitfulness of a research programme, but it does seem to be a prerequisite for its normal activity. This may not be so for the paradigm shifts of a science, usually brought about by an individual creative idea. As we can see in the broad historical arc of economics, among other organised systems of thought, even a community of scholars can often lead themselves into scientic sclerosis. This is especially so when presuppositions become scholasticism and groups get isolated enough to be able to reproduce themselves and their work for too long, too sheltered from outside criticism. Even more so can this be true of an individual. But every form of rational belief is vulnerable to social isolation. The hallmark of psychosis is an unusual sense of what is real about the world. Most of us operate somewhere between these poles. I take all of this as having been assumed by James, the psychologist-philosopher. Such an assumption makes sense of his outrage at seeing his pragmatism pilloried as the philosophy of a charlatan. It also sits well with the view that James added to pragmatism by eshing out from Peirces logical insight the mental processes that govern belief formation and change. When realities do kick back at ones beliefswith more or less insistence as the environment dictatesones total belief system will have to be adjusted. How this happens, what the inuence of evidence will be, what principles will be preserved and what given up in the process are the variables at stake in Jamess analysis. Thus further assessment of Jamess theory of truth must recognise the complexity of his vision. James was trying to explain human behaviour in a wide variety of settingsnot just, but including, the scientic laboratory. From his more selective view of the wonders of nineteenth-century science, Peirce was condent that only experimental empirical thinking, constantly appealing to empirical evidence and conducted by a like-minded community of scholars, could ever scientically uncover truth. He was, of course, correct that physical and empirical sciences can, and at their best, do operate in this way. But James, while perhaps not completely successful in his attempt to offer a prescription for rational thought in his pragmatism, did provide a more complete description of human behaviour than Peirce hadone that encompasses more of the variety and contradictions of human thinking. He was also much more interested than Peirce in the internal mental machinery of belief formation and change. Interestingly, and much less well-documented in the literature on Jamess philosophical writings, this view grew from what he saw as the best evidence on this mental machinery. Decades before he tackled pragmatic philosophic questions, James had carefully considered the mind, based on then consensus laboratory

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empirical evidence, in his masterpiece, Psychology. Thus it is back to Jamess psychology that we are led for further exploration of his pragmatism.

5. Jamess psychology and the importance of habit

William Jamess Principles of Psychology is one of the great classics of modern western thought. Like Adam Smiths Wealth of Nations, it encapsulates in a pregnant form most of the questions, and many of the answers, that modern psychology has pondered since its publication in 1890. Also like Smith, Jamess description of the basic outline of a scientic psychology is written in such a lucid and engaging style, so little like the antiseptic clinical language of more recent writers on the topic, that it stands even now among the best introductions to the subject. Also like Smiths economics, Jamess Psychology continuously reverts to philosophical issues. The most important of these for James were those surrounding the nature of thought, perception, belief and truth. Thus, by 1900 he said of his treatise, I confess that during the years that have elapsed since the publication of the book, I have become more and more convinced of the difculty of treating psychology without introducing some true and suitable philosophical doctrine (Perry, 1948, p. 194). That philosophy of course turned out to be Pragmatism, and we wish to show in what follows how closely allied it was to his Psychology from the very start. The nal synthesis, a Psychological Pragmatism, will then provide us with a contrast to the psychological view of economic man found in contemporary neoclassical economics. It will also lead us into the last sections comparisons between James and views of human nature found in more contemporary work outside economics proper, but vital to its subject. Jamess training and fascination with physiology and experimental science is the rst aspect of his Psychology to emphasise. It is over-full with a wide range of experimental ndings and observations, used to ground his more interpretive and metaphysical arguments in physical descriptions of brain function. The most important physiological facts he stresses are the hierarchical organisation of the brain and the role of the nervous system as a complex network of electrical stimulus and response activity. Hierarchically, the brain displays the evolutionary development of vertebrates. First, there are the lowest forms of nervous activity found in the spinal cord alone, with their almost purely reexive response to stimuli, such as heat and pain. Next, there are the instincts and sense organs controlled and interpreted by the lower brain in a hard-wired fashion. Sight and the reproductive drive are examples. In these cases, James stresses that the mental functioning they consist of should be seen as an active process of selectively organising environmental stimuli in the form of a system of signs to which the brain attaches meaning. Thus the drive to reproduce seeks realisation of its goal by a complex system of behaviours that aim to manipulate the interpersonal and social environment to ensure the transmission of genes to the next generation. In sight, not all colours, shades and frequencies of light are visible, just those that the evolution of the organism found it useful for survival to focus its attention upon. Overseeing and utilising these lower-brain functions are the cerebral hemispheres, with their abilities to remember, categorise, analyse and plan. These highest, most developed brain functions, including at the highest stage consciousness, are designed not only to express instincts and take sense and nervous data from the lower functions and act upon them, but also to conceptualise the purpose and goals of this acting. Thus for James, the crucial aspect of higher-order behaviour is the fact that it constructs and then pursues, by a variety of means, what it considers to be its own self-interest. This is the importance of the subjective self for James. Me, I, mine become the focus of all action and the subjective

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perspective through which cognitive interpretation of the world takes place. He dubbed the intensely personal view of the world that conscious thought represents as the stream of consciousness, and described it as follows:
the mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention. The highest and most elaborated mental products are ltered from the data chosen by the faculty beneath, out the mass offered by the faculty below that, which mass in turn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet simpler material, and so on. The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest. Just so the world of each of us, howsoever different our several views of it may be, all lay embedded in the primordial chaos of sensations, which gave the mere matter to the thought of all of us indifferently. (James, 1890, p. 288)

Perhaps the reader can already see a degree of afnity between Jamess Psychology and Pragmatism. In Psychology, as in his pragmatic theory of truth, all thought is a combination of subjective interpretation and selective sensations of data from the vast chaos that is the total physical world (earlier, the gothic aspect of physical reality in all its complexity). What we think, feel, even see of this world is inuenced by the interaction of our inherited instinctual drives, our sense organs, set to frequencies important to the survival of more primitive mammals, and is also inuenced by the selective attention we give to aspects of this already selected data by higher-order mental activity. But this selection itself is guided by the mentality of our subjective selves and the ends that this personality chooses to pursue. In Pragmatism, the truth of a belief was an active process of attempts to pursue ends in a given context, and by the need for workable compatibility of new truths with the rest of ones belief system. Likewise in Psychology, mental activity in general is conditioned by a complex combination of active drives, inherited means of receiving signals from the world and our goals in interacting with that world. James characterised the essence of higher-order consciousness as the active purposiveness of mental behaviour, dened as the quality of deliberately serving or effecting a predetermined end. He did not conne this to humans, but offered many human observations and animalexperiment results to illustrate the claim. In each there was a common element of a given enda frog trying to pass a glass barrier in a tank, or Romeo trying to see Julietwhich was pursued with a succession of various means until one was successful. Mental activity involves the selection of the ends and the interaction with the environment to accomplish this end. For James, it was the process of repeatedly trying to express a drive or achieve a goal that was the fundamental thing, not the prior calculation of the best solution. Unlike lower-brain behaviour, which typically displays a unique predetermined response to any given stimulus, higher-order mentality is only loosely determinedits purposes arise from a combination of primitive drives with experience and context, its goal and function are the adaptation of this purpose to multiple circumstances. Thus a range of behaviour can be consistent with the pursuit of any given end in a given situation. Reecting again on Pragmatism, the True, protable, good, behaviour(s) will be the, possibly quite varied, one(s) that end up working. But where do the ends themselves come from? James, unlike modern economists, was not content to leave this question outside his theoryas if it were an unscientic matter of mere tastes. The ends of conscious activity are themselves a product of the conscious mind as it develops and learns. Here James stresses the role of Habit (Chapter IV), the doctrine for

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which his Psychology is perhaps most remembered today. Habits are learned ways of automatically dealing with certain combinations of environmental and emotional circumstances. Physiologically, habits are due to the plasticity of nervous tissue. Environmentally, they are due to repeated encounters with similar stimuli. They are in this way due to individual endowments of sensitivity to different stimuli, partly to chance, partly to the stage of development of the brain when the stimuli are rst encountered and partly due to deliberate control through education and training. James, in what reads now as a very modern account, consistent with the current developments in cognitive science,1 looks for the interaction of the repeated stimuli and the physiology of the brain at the level of the electric response of nerve cells and tissue. Here he applies the concept of the reex arc, then a novel concept, now the bedrock of neuroscience. As specic stimuli are repeated and excite similar parts of the brain and nerve system, they form grooves or pathways of associated nervous activity. Once well established, by either chance repetition, or voluntary or involuntary practice, these grooves are able to respond to similar stimuli without any conscious decision-making or even awareness. This is benecial to the brain, as it both channels its enormous and perhaps otherwise overwhelming capacity for receiving new stimuli into organised categories, and it frees up the decision-making function for more important and immediate needsperhaps even including decisions about alternative habits. Thus James allows for the learning and unlearning of habits as they continue or not to full psychic needs, but also for a high degree of stability and conservation of behaviour. This stability is particularly marked after the brain and a set of habits are fully developed. Thus he emphasises the degree to which early experience, early training and education, occurring when the nervous tissue is particularly plastic, are disproportionately responsible for setting life-long habits:
Could the young but realise how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. (James, 1890, p. 127)

Again one can sense a parallel with Jamess Pragmatism. New experience blends with old beliefs and alters them if need be. But as we stressed earlier, the old beliefs, perhaps habitually formed early in life, are difcult to give up. Here arises a strong contrast between Jamess view of human nature and that of modern economics, with its casual dismissal of taste formation and change in the analysis of social phenomena. James elaborates a theory of how habits become the seat of an individuals own set of personal ends in lifethe selective goals which we have seen are the motivating force of purposive behaviour for him. Habits form the constituent parts of consciousness, of the sense of person, the me of an individual. James describes a personality as a bundle of habits. Habits thus select activities to be actively pursued. Once set, this habitual way of looking at the world will also exclude large parts of possible behaviour or actions not consistent with or even within the personal universe of the relatively stable current set of habits. To some extent, there is a self-reinforcement mechanism at work here. If early formed habits determine what ends to seek, they also dene what behaviours will be consistent with subjectively satisfying a particular personality. As long as some such satisfaction can be found in the persons environment, it will tend to be purposively sought
1 On the general agreement between Jamess Psychology and some modern views in brain science, see Twomey (1998) and the nal section of the paper below.

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out to the exclusion of other ends, other satisfaction, other behaviour, and maybe even other environments. James quotes approvingly from Carpenters Mental Physiology (1874):
The universally admitted fact that any sequence of mental action which has been frequently repeated tends to perpetuate itself; so that we nd ourselves automatically prompted to think, feel, or do what we have been before accustomed to think, feel or do, under like circumstances, without any consciously formed purpose, or anticipation of results. (James, 1890, p. 112)

Compare this with the notion of an individual who is dened in most economic modelling as a calculating utility optimiser with set of given preferences over all possible choices, whose goal is without context or content save that it seeks to maximise its utility in the face of any situation. The psychology of economics, as a famous critic and follower of James (Veblen, 1898, p. 73.) wrote, conceptualises man as a lightning calculator of pleasures and pains, who oscillates like a homogeneous globule of desire of happiness under the impulse of stimuli that shift him about the area, but leave him intact. Over one hundred years ago, Veblen took exception to this view by claiming its passive portrayal of human behaviour was contradicted by then modern psychology, meaning Jamess, which found it characteristic of man to do something, not simply to suffer pleasures and pains. The critique still rings true of economics today. Jamess active, selective view of mind is at once both more complex and simpler than the view represented in standard economic theorya view which has in recent decades become fashionable across the social sciences. It is more complex because it proposes that one take seriously the social, cultural and personal inuences on habit formation, the non-optimal nature of their formation (by chance, circumstance and education), their resistance to change once set and the recognition that understanding social behaviour may involve how these habits vary across groups and interact. Jamess view is also simpler and more stable, in that there is not necessarily a continually changing automatic response systemas in marginal analysisby which mental activity constantly chooses and re-chooses optimal behaviour. Again, according to James, within a more or less large range of circumstances, much behaviour will not be amenable to constant changes in light of every new bit of evidence. Rather, it will be habitually determined by the conditioning of the surviving impressions on the brain of previous, formative experiences. Indeed, James remarks that without such habits the lives of individuals and the history of societies would be unintelligible chaos. A substantial quotation from James will illustrate much of the avour of his views on habit as a social force:
Habit is thus the enormous y-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It keeps the sherman and the deck-hand at sea through the winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his log-cabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow . . . It dooms us all to ght out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are tted, and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social strata from mixing. Already at the age of twenty-ve you see the professional mannerism settling down on the young commercial traveler, on the young doctor, on the young minister, on the young counselor-at-law. You see the little lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the shop, in a word, from which the man can by-and-by no more escape than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of folds. On the whole, it is best he should not escape. It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again. (James, 1890, p. 121)

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A brief example will illustrate the contrast of Jamess view of behaviour with that of human nature assumed in traditional neoclassical economics.1 Economists have been notorious in the eld of criminology in the last 30 years for an application of the basic utility maximisation, costbenet approach to decisions to engage in criminal behaviour. In this view, crime is just another rational calculation problem and the pursuit of self-interest works itself out through the relative rewards and costs of criminal activity. At the most expansive, this literature admits that there may be a preference for or against breaking the law at work in such choices, but that is a strictly background issue, from which the calculus problem proceeds. Consider, for instance, the following classic statement from Becker (1968/1974, p. 9): The approach taken here follows the economists usual analysis of choice and assumes that a person commits an offense if the expected utility to him exceeds the utility he could get by using his time and other resources at other activities. He goes on to say that an implication of this theory, and a very anti-Jamesian one I am trying to argue, is that [s]ome persons become criminals, therefore, not because their basic motivation differs from that of other persons, but because their benets and costs differ. Leaving aside the question of how criminal activity translates into utility on an equal basis with other choices,2 James alternatively suggests we concentrate on the developments of the habits of the criminal and others, and stresses that this constitutes a real, scientically predictive, difference, not as Becker puts it, just a congerie of ad hoc concepts of differential association, anomie and the like. Stripped to its essence, Becker is essentially saying that, if the price is high enough, and/ or the costs are low enough, anyone is likely to commit a crime. Consequently, he suggests, we should consider criminal punishment not, as has been traditional in jurisprudence, as a matter of personal and property rights, moral standards or in terms of justice and public order, but purely as costbenet analysis. This makes some sense in civil law, and in fact has spawned the whole eld of law and economics. But its import for criminal law is much harder to see. There may be a peculiar psuedo-scientic fascination when such arguments are cast as mathematical formalisms. Nevertheless, this should not mask the fact that common observation suggests a very different picture of criminality, and the extreme implausibility of the so called rational choice model as more than an epiphenomenon in what used to be called the life of crime.
I have provided a more extensive application of the evolutionary theory of knowledge suggested by pragmatism, to a recent episode in monetary economics, in Lawlor (2004). As that work demonstrates, I do not intend to provide a broadside attack on neoclassical economic choice theory. That would be na ve and wrong in the light of how valuable such a view is in its proper spherethe ordinary business of life, as Marshall said. This is despite the fact that, even in that context, rational choice theory alone is neither an exhaustive account of human behaviour nor impervious to critique. That said, and notwithstanding the undeniable fact that Jamess work stands on its own as a contribution to behavioural science, today more than ever his work should suggest a degree of humility for economists, a realisation that the narrow model of choice theory can at best be only part of the inquiry into human social behaviour. After decades of growing inuence across the social sciences, we can now see that the insight to be gained from neoclassical choice theory itself exhibits diminishing returns. Many developments today suggest a corrective tack is needed for economics to continue to prosper scientically. Such a tack will have to look for a greater perspective on the complexity of human action and the multiple other planes on which humans behave and exercises choiceeven rational choice. The rush to consider everything a constrained utility decision, and to ignore other levels of analysis, are the main obstacles to contemporary economics tting in to a more fully functioning social science. James, as Veblen knew so long ago, forcefully demonstrates this. 2 This has been questioned even within the Chicago tradition by theorists less sanguine about using the economic approach as an overarching theory of human behaviour. See Nutter (1979), for example, for an early critique from this standpoint.
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For one thing, it is obvious that most criminality is restricted to a very small proportion of the population. Very few people pursue it all the time, while most could not be induced to participate for almost any reward. Second, the early experience, exposure to standards of right and wrong and the education of the two groups mostly explain this bimodality. Those who end in the criminal group are clearly marked by experiences and choices, and ultimately a canon of taste,1 that lead to something very much like one of Jamess selfreinforcing, personality-dening, sets of habits. Decisions to commit crime (as opposed to when or where to commit crimes) are habitual. Moreover, they are clearly not of the nature of the economists marginal decisions variety. This is so even though changes in costs, like law enforcement activity and the penal code, may shift the direction or location of criminal activity. Thus, it is not contradictory, though disparaging, to this economic analysis of the minutiae of optimal punishment to ask a different, Jamesian, question. Isnt the central problem of crime, considered as a social problem, the existence of groups of individuals habituated to breaking the law in the rst place?2 Changing their status, beyond just having them locked up or grown too old to participate in crime, is a much more difcult problem than is asked by the economics of crime literature. It involves for the most part guring out ways to alter those crucial formative experiences and setting young people off on the right rather than the wrong path. In other words, it involves the social development of a different sort of habit. If this were accomplished successfully, the costs and rewards of the criminal life would be beside the point. As James, who was not shy about elaborating moral lessons from his psychology, says in the context of a discussion of the selective quality of a purposive mind with an already formed personality, it is not the choice of what we shall do that is of utmost importance in determining conduct but the choice of who we shall be:
To sustain the arguments for the good course and keep them ever before us, to stie our longing for more owery ways, to keep the foot uninchingly on the arduous path, these are characteristic ethical energies. But more than these, for these but deal with the means of compassing interests already felt by the man to be supreme. The ethical energy par excellence has to go farther and choose which interest out of several, equally coercive, shall become supreme. The issue here is of the utmost pregnancy, for it decides a mans entire career. When he debates, Shall I commit this crime? choose that profession? accept that ofce, or marry this fortune?his choice really lies between one of several equally possible future Characters. What he shall become is xed by the conduct of this moment. (p. 288)

7. On the contemporary relevance of William James

The enduring signicance of William Jamess work can be seen in its relevance to a wide range of current debates in neuroscience, the philosophy of mind and in the philosophy of the social sciences. In an odd replay of a historical movement, just as Jamess pragmatism and psychology was inuential on the original institutional economics at the dawn of the
1 It is no surprise that this extreme economistic view of behaviour also severely discounts the role of the variety of tastes in explaining choice (Stigler and Becker, 1977). We shall have more to say on this below, when we argue for the Jamesian quality of modern brain science. For another interesting angle of critique, see Caplan (2003). He utilises the modern literature in personality testing by psychologists and the important predictive value of the observed variety of personalities, to suggest that the neglect of tastes may be an extreme oversight. 2 Alternatively, as the dismal spectacle of the decades-long failure of the war on drugs shows us, like American Prohibition before it, there is the complementary problem of the social judiciousness of a policy that criminalisesthrough legal prohibitiona widespread habitual behaviour.

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twentieth century, so might rethinking in neuroscience and philosophy play a part in changing the focus modern economics. As a way of briey illustrating this potentially multifaceted inuence, let us look at two common, broad and representative social science themes that have emerged in different ways in these disciplines: the importance of group identity in human behaviour and the related role of social trust to well-functioning social groups. Treatment of the brain and behaviour in evolutionary biology starts from the premise that primate and human brains evolved in competition between bearers of selsh genes (Dawkins, 1976, 1989) to further inclusive tness, maximising the frequency of ones genes in future generations (Campbell, 1986, p. S356). Biology has found that pursuit of this goal leads to strategies of kin selection (Hamilton, 1964) by which social behaviour furthers the tness of not only an individual, but also the individuals close genetic group. Robert Trivers (1971, 1985) develops this into a theory of reciprocal altruism by which behaviour of a seemingly altruistic nature within families, for instance, can be shown to be adaptations which further the inclusive tness of individuals and their kin group. Especially in primates, this innate social behaviour begins with families, but it extends through social evolution to wider and overlapping structures of groups. Many species, from ants and bees to wolves have pursued varied and complex social strategies of inclusive tness. A common theme is that they all represent mechanisms to curb, to some degree, natural individual self-interest in exchange for group interests (Campbell, 1983). Primates have followed a highly successful strategy in this direction based on the physical development of brain capacities. In tandem with this brain development, biologist now think, was the selection of specic brain structures which condition identication and cohesion of individuals within groups. A particular advantage of this tendency to group cohesion in many early human environments was the benetvia hunting and farming for exampleof increased food resources through cooperation. Campbell (1982, 1986) elaborates this insight into an analysis of the obvious rational evolutionary benets of yet more complex human social coordination, and explains how it exploits the special resources of increased brain capacity. His argument rests on the propensity of humans to develop moral norms to curb ruthless individual self-interest and the resulting (rationally adaptive) development in brain function of a preference for how others behave. In other words, biology suggests that, in addition to a naturally given narrow selfinterest, humans also possess an innate preference for allegiance to their own groups (especially kinship groups) accompanied by a naturally given sense of justice. Thus the cooperation that is widely observed in human societies is an outcome of natural selection. The argument is completed when it is shown that cooperation also furthers inclusive tness of kinship groups, and so the further survival of the genes of these groups. Often this will entail behaviour that is not strictly individually self-interested, but altruistic in the sense of the sacrice of individual interests for the sake of the group. Biologists have long situated the evolutionary value of altruism in the context of a social system whereby individuals can expect others to act similarly by group rules, in a reciprocal fashion. Successful widespread group reciprocity makes altruistic behaviour rationally in the interest of the individual. But evolutionary biology stresses that the stability of social strategies of reciprocity depend crucially upon a complex and fragile trust in groups: trust to deliver collectively a benet to those subscribing to group norms and a reciprocal trust that most members will behave according to group rules most of the time (Trivers, 1971; Axelrod, 1984, 1997). Note that this is not a na ve argument for cooperation for the sake of cooperation, but a rather hardheaded one which sees reciprocity as the minimum necessary condition for the inclusive tness and evolutionary survival of social cooperation. But it is also one which can explain

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a much wider degree of human behaviour than can strict individual self-interest alone (Fukuyama, 1999). Notice also that when this is combined with the added recognition of individual egoism, the traditional motivator of behaviour in economics, this is also an evolutionary explanation for attempts at rational cost minimising behaviour, as well as social cheating, crime and deception by individuals within groups. But the evolutionary view also posits a related natural tendency for human societies to erect punishments of such transgressions of socially given rules; in fact, it argues for the evolutionary superiority of social groups that do so effectively. Here the biology overlaps with more purely economic behaviour, such as comes under the heading of cost minimisation or utility maximisation or, more generally, optimising. What evolutionary biology adds, and what is often forgotten in modern economic theory, is the insight that normal economic behaviour occurs in a social context and is limited by that context. Rational behaviour is clearly not truly minimisation at all costs if there is a natural inclination to avoid incurring the wrath of the groupfor instance by breaking the law.1 Our short discussion of the motivation of criminality, above, is just such an example. More broadly, human nature, on this very abstract view, is thus capable of a range of behaviours because, as (Campbell, 1986, p. S361) suggests, the physical evolution of the brain and social evolution naturally create a tension in primate psychology and so in primate and human societies between pure self-interest and group self-interest, or between greed and cooperation. Many experimental results from the emerging eld of behavioural economics and from experimental game situations have witnessed the resulting anomalies this causes for traditional economic depictions of behaviour. To Campbells evolutionary biology view (1986, p. S355), now ever more widely evident in the social sciences generally, this suggests that a biologically based model of human preferences ought to be moved from being a description of an exogenous factor distorting market rationality and become instead an integral part of a theory of collective rationality. As we have detailed above, James (and Veblen) seem to have seen much of this over a century ago. Twomey (1998) details the extent to which modern neuroscience is also nding physical aspects of brain function that both support this evolutionary view and accord well with Jamess Psychology. Two very important lessons that link modern neuroscience with evolutionary biologys explanation of social behaviour are the degree to which the brain has been found to be modular and the evidence that social instinctseven in non-primate nature, but more importantly also, in manare innately hard-wired as preferences for cooperation (as well as for competition). The modularity of the brain means that a hierarchy of different, sometimes specialised, but still overlapping functions of different parts of the brain determines the complex range of human behaviour. Some drives seem quite hard-wired into the primitive brain, while the higher brain organises the fullment of these drivesfor everything from food and sex to social standing and justiceby adapting to and interacting with the environment. Campbell (1986, p. S357) further emphasises that this modularity of brain function often favours overall inclusive tness for kin groups by directing behaviour at subgoals. Subgoals
1 It is perhaps worth noting that this argument, like Martin Holliss notion of roles detailed below, is not one that is captured by including the costs of breaking the law in the utility function calculations by individual actors. What biology is increasingly discovering is that evolution conditions the brain to resist breaking socially given norms (at least those which an individual trusts) without marginally contemplating costs and benets.

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refer to the way that tasks are rationally ordered into a hierarchical nest of behaviours that are most important to an organisms survival and tness. To the extent that subgoals are satised, and given no critical change in environmental circumstances, they come to be acted on habitually, thus economising on the necessary information and effort needed to tackle more important goals. The goals themselves are thus not free-oating choices, but depend on instinctual drives seeking expression as the organism navigates its environment. Only when environments dangerously and radically change, and maybe not even then for maladaptable kin groups, do habitual behaviours have to be revised. The consequent neglect of already solved problems, even those that could be improved upon, in favour of higher ranked goals turns out to be an efcient strategy to navigate complex environments cumulatively.1 Moreover, it describes a practical rationality in which decisions are motivated by natural interests, not just any given preferences. Again, this is all exactly what James had in mind in his description of purposive behaviour and what Veblen referred to above as the tendency in men actively to do something, not just suffer pleasure and pain. In more modern discussions, Simon (1973, 1986) emphasises how this makes sense in terms of computational efciency, and will often result in habitual behaviour. The second point, that humans seem naturally endowed with preferences for cooperative social behaviour and rule-following, has long been known experimentally, and has recently led to the founding of a discipline at the very intersection of economics and neuroscience: neuroeconomics.2 James emphasised that we naturally learn, most enduringly at an early age, to act in ways consistent with socially given cues and rules. Through a natural urge to t into the context of groups, these rules can become habitual. As we have seen, habits satisfy some fairly xed subgoals of a complex modular mind. What we are now learning from neuroscience is that part of these goals come from genetically given, seemingly hard-wired senses of justice, morals and related preferences for cooperation and retribution against unfair play. Thus from the standpoint of current brain science, and the light it has shed on brain function, behaviour and evolution, humans are neither singlegoaled computers of free-oating utility nor completely egoistic in nature. We should be quick to add, as James did, that this still leaves plenty of room for freedom of action and alternative rational behaviours. As Francis Fukuyama (1999, p. 159) puts it, in constructing an explanation of modern social problems that is itself grounded in insights from what he calls the new biology about the human necessity for social trust, [t]hat children will learn certain things at certain times according to a certain structure is set by the biology, what they learn is the province of culture. To emphasise the philosophical side of the current relevance of James, it is well to end with a modern philosopher of the social sciences who echoes all of these more scientic themes in the context of a philosophic argument that ts well with (while not at all relying on) Jamess Pragmatism. It also amplies Jamess philosophical concerns, in ways that he did not, into the unique questions of the method of the social sciences. In the work of the late Martin Hollis, we see a philosopher of the social sciences grappling with the social scientic characterisation of human rationality, and, particularly, how the decision-theoretic view so inuential in economics needs to be reformulated to describe behaviour more accurately. Hollis attacks the basis of the standard economic view of man as an isolated egoist in his contention that true human self-interest should also
See the discussion and references in Campbell (1986, p. S357). The most convenient way to see what is happening in this emerging eld is by accessing Paul J. Zaks page at the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies, and the his link to the literature, at: http://fac.cgu.edu/,zakp/ CNS/index.htm
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include the reciprocal social interaction that is built into human societies. Starting from modern decision theory depictions of human rationality in game theory, Hollis ends up in a philosophical position close to Jamess account of pragmatic reason. Well-known results in game theory, captured most famously by the prisoners dilemma and the backward induction solution to the Centipede game, are often used to characterise rational choice as incompatible with cooperative behaviour. The paradox presented is that, though each player (prisoner) knows that mutual commitment to the best outcome would be better for everyone, lacking trust in the other player to commit to this strategy, leads each self-interested player to end up worse off than they could be by acting cooperatively.1 Hollis (1998, ch. 7) saw the complacency amongst game theorists and economists with this standard interpretation of such paradoxical results as a scandalone that he felt compelled to propose alternatives to (Sugden, 2000, p. 439). To Hollis, the scandal for modern decision theory was that its wide application in social science implied that human rationality was not able to nd ways to strive for better social results, even when the benets of so doing was clearly evident. Decision theory proclaims trust to be irrational. Hollis instinctively felt that this was not an accurate description of rational behaviour in real human interaction, and that a theory that implied that egoistic behaviour alone was as far as reason could take us was a deeply awed basis for social science, and for society. He was especially adamant that rationality should include the possibility of play by teams, not just individuals, and that the resulting characterisation of individuals should offer at least the option of superior outcomes through cooperation. Without rehearsing the whole of his extensive, elegant and nuanced arguments,2 Holliss philosophical move was to attack the view of human nature behind standard game theory. As an astute student of the history of philosophy, Hollis attributed the source of this view, as James did, to David Hume and his argument that only desiresnarrowly conceived, immediate (or immediately predictable) individualistic satisfactionscan motivate human action. More popularly, this is sometimes put as Humes conviction that reason could decide means, but only passions motivate ends. Hollis was adamant, also like James, that man be depicted in philosophy as a free, autonomous being rather than a slave to his passions.3 This was despite the fact that Hollis saw much appeal in self-interest as a basis for rationality. Hence his initially favourable, but ultimately frustrated, view of game theory becomes all the more understandable, especially as he lamented the wide social inuence of its logic. His suggestion as a way forward from this scandal was the inclusion
1 See a good philosophical discussion of the many forms of this problem from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/prisoner-dilemma/. For an interesting biological viewpoint, including a link to an extensive literature on the iterative prisoners dilemma as witnessed in nature, see Principia Cybernetica Web: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/PRISDIL.html 2 A good review of Holliss life work is contained in Sugden (2000). His most accessible mature argument is contained in Hollis (1998). Hollis (1987) provides a more closely argued philosophical treatment. Hollis (1996), a collection of his essays over 25 years, offers varied and entertaining examples of the breadth of his thinking in the area of rationality in philosophy and the social sciences. Finally, Hollis (1994), offered as a textbook on the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, is a nice way to sample his thinking on the broad development in that eld, and his particular contributions (very modestly downplayed but still present to the alert reader). Holliss visits to the Philosophy Department at Wake Forest, his sharing of his work in an exciting series of lectures and his generous response to requests for comment and discussion, allowed me valuable insights to his thought. Though he would not have known it, he continues to be a stimulus to my own work. 3 Hollis continually came back to Hume in his writings, and his treatment of him was both subtle and fascinating. One aspect of this was his concern with the question of free will and rationality, or, more narrowly, how it might be rational to promise, or accept a promise, while still believing that actions are motivated by passions alone. See, for instance, Hollis (1987), throughout, but especially chapters 1, 5 and 6. Hollis (1998), reargues this ground more compactly, especially in chapter 2.

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of extra-individual social roles as a necessary part of characterising human identity, and so rationality. Each of these roles, he argued, could be seen as a set of rules that are representative guides to behaviour. The set of such rules that make up a role, becomes through habitual use an explicit or implicit social institution. The inclusion of social roles those of a tinker, tailor, soldier or spy, for instanceand the rules that come with them, became for Hollis a means of rounding out the overly individualistic sense of economic man that he saw in contemporary rational decision theory. Crucially, in his argument, rules that roles are invested with are of an ethical variety, captured by such terms as duty, honour, or professional. For an individual actor, various roles become a part of an identity, in a manner very reminiscent of Jamess description of a human as a collection of habits. Thus for a single actor, roles can be multiple, held with varying degrees of attachment, interpreted privately, and subject to both choice and abandonment.1 But at the same time, they must also be roles whose fullment is recognisable and durable.2 Once inhabited, these roles become what James would call habitual. Hollis, though, is careful to argue that roles do not dene an individuals actions. Instead, they give individuals an arena for what he called expressive rationality. By this is meant a way of pursuing ones interests while still operating within a code of rules. Thus, for example, the attention to such social roles as citizen and neighbour can help explain the social and cooperative behaviours we observe in people that rational decision theory cannot account for, such as voting or giving blood. An illustrative quotation from Hollis (1996, pp. 356) gives a avour of both his abstract argument and how it might be applied:
Is it rational to climb Mount Everest? Instrumentally it is, for someone who wants to get to the top and has no more efcient way up. But that answer sees the action as a way of achieving. An expressive view sees it as a way of being and becoming, of expressing and developing the self. Costeffectiveness is no longer crucial and people can act rationally from, for instance, honour, respect or gratitude without having to be found a goal rationally thus achieved. The idea is attractive enough to have invaded political sociology, where exponents of an economic theory of democracy sometimes invoke it to deal with the puzzle of the determined voter. This is the stubborn citizen, who turns out to vote regardless of discomfort or prospect of affecting the result. Since such persons make up most of the electorate, they are an embarrassment to a theory premised on the postulate that individuals are instrumentally rational. But that, it is often said, is solely because voting is not an instrumental act: hence all is resolved when we see that determined voters are acting rationally by acting expressively.

But role playing is not only an explanation of such seemingly (on the game theory denition) irrational behaviour as voting. Hollis argues that it is the norm for all behaviour in wellfunctioning social groups. Thus, nally, it is worth noting that Holliss theory of social rationality, as we may call it, requires for its existence and proper functioning a set of social conditions that he identies as the fragile, but necessary components of good societies.3 In
See Hollis (1994, ch. 8) for a subtle description of Self and Roles, and Hollis (1998, ch. 6) for a metaphorical treatment. 2 Notice that, as for James, this commits Hollis to a form of non-reductive, extra-individualistic realism, in which social facts are considered as real objects of social science. 3 Economists and other latent social science positivists (including sometimes myself) will no doubt cringe at the extreme normative element in Holliss argument, automatically equating his good society with extrascientic normative judgments. Yet Hollis is convincing on the difference between understanding and explaining. He openly considered that normative judgments are actually an unavoidableor at least unwisely avoidedelement in social science. This was because of the strange interplay of introspection and observation in the social science process used by humans to study themselves in groups. See Hollis (1987, ch. 11) for a very interesting discussion of this issue.
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fact, he may be interpreted as saying that good societies and trusting social rationality must occur together, each necessary for the existence of the other. (It is no surprise that Hollis was fascinated by hermeneutics.) This is another way of saying that for role playing to be rational, social trust must be possible, and vice versa. One has to believe that by choosing and fullling a social role, one will further ones real interest as Hollis puts itmeaning wider interests which may not always coincide with ones narrowly egotistical interests, but perhaps in the interests of the team in which one has chosen a role, and with which one identies. This will only be so, says Hollis, if each agent can expect some reciprocity of such role playing in a society that is thought to be playing by the rules. The maintenance of such trust may require social groups to be small in membership, or at least a collection of small groups (not anonymous), to enforce the rules effectively, and to be expected to endure.1 I have given only the barest outline here. Holliss philosophical reasoning is imaginative and grounded in a sure sense of practicality. Summarising does not do it complete justice, and I urge the interested reader to consult it in the original. What is important for our argument is how Holliss attempts to situate human behaviour in a reasonable degree of self-interest (Jamess me), but a self-interest that cannot be expressed in isolation from the environments in which it is pursued. This is not something that can be captured by including the choice of a habit in a utility function (Becker, 1992), in the sense that Holliss motivating real interests include duty. Duty indicates a call to do something that, despite its possible unpleasantness, is felt to be necessary. It may come with assuming a role, and with well-worn use, may become habitual. But, Hollis is saying, wider, real interests can make it rational to choose willingly to undertake a role that may call on one to curb individual goals, if we trust that doing so will be better for a wider group. This is a view that is inconsistent with the notion that all behaviour can be explained by recourse to unchanging utility functions in the context of changing circumstances (Stigler and Becker, 1977). Individual lives, in Jamess and Holliss world, are complex mixes of self-interest, different habits and roles, all the while dened and constrained by the rules of the institutions they represent, but not completely determined by them. So long as roles are motivators of behaviour in their arena, they will resist changes in costs and rewards in ways that go beyond inelastic. Also, as James emphasises, the cumulative effect of the adoption of habits, especially those learned in early life, is fundamentally transformingthe acquired habits change tastes. Actual behaviour, as James and Hollis show, is a complex resultant of the habits one is brought up with, or later chooses (or are chosen by), and also of how habits are adjusted to environments and to each other, and how the fullment of them is purposefully pursued in a rule-bound, but self-interested way. Thus, they are telling us, rational man is not constantly computing his advantage; he is purposive about some goals, and will try different routes to fullling them as long as they achieve the end he naturally desires or has become socially habituated to. His roles, though, may put certain behaviours out of bounds, even those with very high net benets. Computing and rationality does sometimes mean pragmatically adjusting given drives and ideas to the environment, but only with the least change in the given total mental outlook. Importantly, when rational man does compute, it may not only concern his own self-interest, narrowly conceived. Hollis shows us that to assume a narrow view of rationality leads to social sillinessno one would want a pure economic man for a neighbour. Hollis wants further to

1 See Hollis (1996, ch. 10) for an allegorical treatment of the tension between rights and duties and the differences between consumers and citizens.

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teach us that, just as bad for social science, such an outlook is not in accordance with actual rational behaviour. In this he links hands with William James.

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