Russill - The Road Not Taken

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The Road Not Taken: William Jamess Radical Empiricism and Communication Theory
Chris Russill
a a
Department of Communication Studies, University of Otago Available online: 18 Aug 2006
To cite this article: Chris Russill (2005): The Road Not Taken: William Jamess Radical Empiricism and Communication Theory, The Communication Review, 8:3, 277-305 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714420500240474
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The Communication Review, 8: 277305, 2005 Copyright Taylor & Francis, Inc. ISSN 1071-4421 print / 1547-7487 online DOI: 10.1080/10714420500240474
The Communication Review Vol. 08, No. 03, August 2005: pp. 00 1547-7487 1071-4421 GCRV Review,
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN: WILLIAM JAMESS RADICAL EMPIRICISM AND COMMUNICATION THEORY
C. Russill The Road Not Taken
Chris Russill
Department of Communication Studies, University of Otago This essay examines how William Jamess radical empiricism deals with indeterminism and formulates a central issue in contemporary communication theory; incommensurability. A close textual reading of Jamess initial approach of indeterminacy as chaos is provided and I argue James subsequently reformulates this as the problem of incommensurability in his radical empiricism. In this way, James overcomes a chaos/order dualism that continues to orient much communication theory. I examine three post-positivist theories of communication Pearce & Cronens Coordinated Management of Meaning, Habermass Theory of Communicative Action, and Moscos Political Economy of Communication in light of this finding and consider its implications for pragmatist projects in communication. It is suggested that although John Durham Peterss Speaking into the Air anticipates many of these findings, recovering Jamess radical empiricism can facilitate the reconstruction of a pragmatist tradition of thougt subsequently developed through George Herbert Mead and John Dewey.
It has been about one hundred years since William James set to work on the most systematic statement of his views known as radical empiricism. Although his radical empiricism has not enjoyed the acclaim and continued readership his writings on pragmatism and religion have been accorded, it turns out James has a lot to say in these writings on problems of central importance to communication scholars and the social sciences more generally. If these views often appear dated in ways his other work does not, it is largely the result of Jamess attempts to employ a more formal style of academic discourse and to address the now unfamiliar vocabularies and arguments of thinkers that were his contemporaries. However, the problems James set out to escape and reformulate in his radical empiricism
Address correspondence to Chris Russill, Department of Communication Studies, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin, Aotearoa, New Zealand. E-mail: chris.russill@stonebow.otago.ac.nz
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are still with us today. In fact, I will argue that a number of post-positivist communication theories are still inhibited by basic categories of metaphysical thinking that Jamess radical empiricism points us beyond. What is radical empiricism? What are the broader scientific and philosophical projects of which it is a part? What problems does it set out to resolve, through which intellectual debates, and with what kinds of theoretical and practical implications for its time and our present? James was sensitive both to demands of his immediate critics and the long-term cultural implications of his way of thinking should it win out. Unfortunately, the demands of his contemporaries and immediate critics often distracted him from the task of finishing his radical empiricism, such that piecing together a fuller expression in its many implications requires studying Jamess private notebooks in conjunction with published articles. This is no easy task. Furthermore, the most recognizable and accessible expression of this view is the posthumous publication put together by Ralph Barton Perry in 1912, under the title Essays in Radical Empiricism. This introduces its own special set of problems for interpreting Jamess already difficult views. Therefore, not only is Jamess radical empiricism unfinished, it has been widely circulated in a format not of Jamess choosing or approval (although the publication does seem relatively faithful to Jamess design).1 Although no single essay can take on the entire task of reconstructing Jamess radical empiricism, I hope to demonstrate both the plausibility and benefits of doing so by focusing on Jamess central theoretical innovations: his dissolution of the problem of how two minds can know the same thing, his reformulation of the deterministic assumptions underpinning such a problem, and his characterization of the problem of incommensurability.2 My goals are to develop Jamess responses to the issue of indeterminacy, to demonstrate the relevance of this for contemporary communication scholars, and to suggest the consequences this might have for pragmatist approaches to communication and cultural studies. There is great potential in returning to Jamess radical empiricism since, despite the currency of pragmatist approaches among many noted scholars, Jamess influence has been slight or, at best, indirect.3 Occasionally the impetus to interesting essays (Peters, 1999; Shepherd, 2001a), only Leonhirth (2001) and Slater (2003) argue that the resources for a new approach to communication are recoverable from Jamess workand neither proceeds beyond offering initial suggestions.4 Ironically, perhaps the most systemic examination of what a Jamesian approach might look like is Stuart Halls (1980) at times dismissive characterization of a culturalist paradigm in cultural studies. The stakes in formulating a more positive characterization are considerable since Halls identification of the core problem of cultural studies as the search for a non-reductive
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determinacy which will supercede the endless oscillations between idealism and reductionism is the core problem driving Jamess radical empiricism (Hall, 1980, p. 72). James attempts, as Hall insists, on trying to think both the specificity of different practices and the forms of the articulated unity they constitute (p. 72, emphasis in original). Whereas the vast and varied bodies of work addressing this problem in communication and cultural studies have tended toward some version of Gramscis notion of hegemony, James opens up another pathway. The study of communication and culture is no stranger to attempts to rewrite its history on the basis of forgotten or excluded traditions of study. This is likely a result of the fact, well documented by Peters (1986, 1988, 1989, 1996) over a series of essays, that there is a mismatch between fragmentary institutionalization and vast intellectual inheritance (1996, p. 85). Peterss (1999) own subsequent book-length study goes some distance in recovering a spiritualist tradition of thinking on communication drawn from a Hegelian lineage. A reconstruction of Jamess radical empiricism can establish continuity with other resources in this intellectual heritage and advance our thinking on a central problem only inconsistently addressed at present: the problem of incommensurability. In this essay, I focus on Jamess shifting positions with respect to indeterminacy, a central issue in radical empiricism, and one with several implications for advancing pragmatist approaches to communication. The obstacles potentially impeding such an advance are clearly formulated in several essays by Gregory Shepherd (1993, 1999, 2001b), an important contemporary writer on pragmatism, pluralism, and communication. Shepherd provides us with a clear account of the well-ingrained assumptions that habitually guide many formulations of communication: scientism (truth unchangingly exists and can be procedurally found), psychologism (the individual is the source of meaning and ontologically primary), and mechanism (reality is known and explicable on mechanistic principles). Not only do such assumptions guide John Lockes still influential model of communication as the transmission of ideas from mind to mind (Peters, 1989, 1999; Shepherd, 1999, 2001b), they continue to persist despite an unraveling of their seamless interrelation in the late nineteenth century. Shepherd (2001b) links this unraveling to vocal criticism concerning the nature of truth and the rise of constructivist approaches, a tendency that initially emerges through the work of William James and Friedrich Nietzsche (p. 27). That tendency seems to have established some currency, as scientism and capital T Truth have been largely overrun by constructivist approaches, yet the assumptions of psychologism and mechanism remain well entrenched, particularly in prevailing conceptions of communication.
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This condition speaks to relevance of Jamess work under examination here. For although debates on the nature of truth and epistemology concerned James a great deal (perhaps at the expense of more fully completing his radical empiricism) it is clearly the assumption of mechanistic determinism James tackles in his radical empiricism and the path subsequently pursued by Dewey (1919/1969, 1925/1988) in carrying forward Jamess work (Stuhr, 1997; Westbrook, 1991). Put simply, Jamess approach is to dissolve or move beyond such issues by abandoning the assumptions underpinning scientism, psychologism, and mechanism and by forwarding alternatives in his pragmatist theory of truth, his relational view of experience, and his practical approach to indeterminism. However, not all assumptions are easily abandoned or reformulated. Whereas his views on scientism and truth came rather easily to James, such that he was often perplexed by the unremitting and vociferous nature of the criticism challenging his work, Jamess notebooks illustrate the lengthy struggle he underwent to abandon mechanistic determination and avoid idealism.5 My sense is the theoretical gain won by James has not yet been adequately recognized by communication scholars, particularly those most quick to affirm the priority of indeterminacy.6 This raises the question of what may become of our theories of communication if we prove adequate to the challenge of reconstructing Jamess radical empiricism. I take up this question in reconstructing Jamess formulation of indeterminism within the context of communication and cultural theory. As stated, my goals are to present Jamess reformulation of indeterminacy in its relevance to contemporary communication scholars and to suggest its consequences for pragmatist approaches to communication and culture. To this end, I proceed as follows: (1) I review Jamess initial critique and revision of John Lockes assumptions, an important step if scholars as varied as Peters and Hall are correct about how thoroughly liberal conceptions guide our thinking on communication, and sketch out Jamess progression toward a radical empiricist handling of indeterminacy; (2) I pursue a close and innovative textual reading of Jamess approach to indeterminacy as chaos and trace the transformation of this view into the problem of incommensurability in his radical empiricism; (3) I explore the initial relevance of this for three post-positivist communication theories of communication well acquainted with Dewey, Mead, and James, respectivelynamely, Pearce and Cronens coordinated management of meaning, Habermass theory of communicative action, and Moscos political economy of communicationto see how their philosophies of social science handle indeterminacy and to evaluate whether James presents a theoretical gain; and (4) I consider the implications of this finding for communication studies.
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JAMESS RADICAL EMPIRICISM Locke as the Entering Wedge Situating Jamess views with respect to John Locke is useful for two purposes: it allows us to see why James considers his empiricism radical, while distinguishing Jamess view from the predominant way of thinking about communication. In questioning the cultural assumptions underpinning this view, our way of thinking about communication might change. It is difficult to judge the extent of Lockes impact on communication but strong arguments for significant influence are found among reputable theorists of language and communication. In fact, according to Harris (1987), Taylor (1992), Peters (1989, 1999), and Shepherd (1999, 2001b), Lockes view is the foundation for much of modern linguistics and communication. Peters (1999) sums up this view of Locke as a communication theorist in even more pronounced terms: Whenever we set out to think or discourse seriously about communication, we almost always find ourselves enacting a philosophical and political drama first written by John Locke (p. 89). This body of literature raises a number of interesting questions. Does Locke invent the modern notion of communication to deal with the problem of how two minds can know the same thing, a key problem for Jamess radical empiricism? Have we retained this notion even as Lockes psychology itself is no longer seriously entertained? Does this view remain, as Peters (1989) and Shepherd (2001b) suggest, the linchpin to classical liberal social theory? The near obsessive focus on consciousness or mind in modern philosophy and psychology has drawn attention away from such questions. Locke (1690/1975) clearly emphasizes mind to the extent of admitting that when I first began this Discourse of the Understanding, and a good while after, I had not the least Thought, that any Consideration of Words was at all necessary to it (p. 21). Yet this is precisely the most enduring contribution of Lockes work. Peterss (1989) early view on the matter seems convincing if not decisive:
Locke arguably invents the concept of communication as the sharing of thoughts by individuals. Though there are similar usages in English before Locke, both Samuel Johnsons Dictionary of the English Language (1755) and the Oxford English Dictionary make Locke the fountainhead of this sense. It is important to recognize that using communication to describe human discourse was something of an innovation. In most seventeenth-century English, communication mainly referred to physical processes of transmission and metaphysical processes of consubstantiation: tangibles such as robes, fortunes, plants, commodities, as well as
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intangibles such as light, heat, blessings, praise, secrets, vices, thoughts, and ideas could all be communicated. In Lockes own prose, old senses of the term mingle with his innovative usages. He speaks not only of people communicating ideas to each other, but of God communicating perfections to angels and of the spirit communicating with the body. Communication is not something invented by the earliest hominids: it is an invention that our discourse retroactively projects on history. Communication, in short, is a child of modernity, not antiquity. It gives a specific, not eternal, way of thinking about (and doing) social life that arises in classical liberalism. (pp. 391392)
At minimum, Jamess rejection of Lockes view of consciousness starkly halts his launching of the long drift of communication from physical to mental sharing (Peters, 1999, p. 81). Yet Locke is less rejected here than radicalized.7 In fact, in the first essay of radical empiricism, James (1912/1996) finds both the entering wedge and the first use of the pragmatic method in Lockes associational psychology (pp. 1011). Locke is a promising starting point since the failings of his psychology illustrate what James means to accomplish in radicalizing British empiricism. What he appreciates is Lockes attempt to move away from inconsequential metaphysical matters by grounding philosophical dialogue in the workings of the human mind and life. In giving his Essay Concerning Human Understanding such a purpose, Locke gains Jamess praise as an early practitioner of the pragmatic method. This method, for James, is not used to render all metaphysical discourse inconsequential or senseless. Rather it is a tool for deciding whether a dispute is consequential or trivialwhether affirming different positions results in different courses of action.8 As Dewey (1925b/1988) puts it in his useful history of the method, James wished to force the general public to realize that certain problems, certain philosophical debates have a real importance for mankind, because the beliefs they bring into play lead to very different modes of conduct (p. 8). Locke goes wrong, however, in abandoning his empiricism for what Dennett (1995) calls one of his uncharacteristic forays into proof (p. 26). This proof of the primacy of mind, or cogitative Being, introduces a fundamental dualism between matter and thought. The proof is simple enough: mind or consciousness could not emerge from matter because incogitative Matter and Motion, whatever changes it might produce of Figure and Bulk, could never produce Thought (Locke, 1690, IV, X, 10, p. 623, emphasis in original). For Locke this is unthinkable, impossible to conceive, and Locke understands himself as merely rehearsing what everyone already knows. Jamess massive influence in the history of modern thought is a result of attempting to think precisely what Locke
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found impossible, an attempt which made his Principles of Psychology an instant and enduring classic. However, it took him some time to work out the implications of such a thought. Although James does not elaborate on how Lockes views serve as an entering wedge for radical empiricism, it is simple enough to take his meaning. On Lockes view, we derive our ideas from experiencethere is nothing inborn or innate to them. This is the substance of book 1, Of Innate Notions. In Jamess estimation, where Locke goes wrong (or abandons his empiricism) is in linking this experiential view of ideas to a rationalist view of knowledge. This makes empirical ideas, based in lived experience, the materials of Reason and Knowledge (p. 2). Reason works out the relations between such ideas resulting in what we call knowledge. In moving from belief to knowledge through the rational association of ideas, Locke concludes that reason must be our last Judge and Guide in every Thing (p. 14). James (1912/1996) takes this entering wedge and radicalizes it with a rather simple claim: it is not only ideas which are derived from experience, as Locke claims, but so too the associations or relations (pp. 25, 42). Elsewhere, James (1909/1975) formulates this as the statement of fact from which radical empiricism takes its bearings:
The statement of fact is that the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more so nor less so, than the things themselves. (p. 7).
The action, then, takes place in lived experience and not simply in our heads. This statement of fact simply repeats Jamess earlier abandonment of psychologism or any internalistic conception of mental processes. Instead he postulates the existence of something called pure experience. I return to the problems introduced by Jamess characterization of this primal stuff below. However, James (1909/1975) will also introduce a postulate of radical empiricism to preclude reference to extra-experiential entities, such that our accounts of the world will only use terms that can be returned to experience (no references to things-in-themselves or transcendental agents are allowed) (p. xvi). The import of all this is to claim (a) that relations are experienced the same as things are and (b) relations are not only real but our relational world of experience is both conjunctive (associative) and disjunctive (dissociative). The world is not made up of fragmented elements that are then synthesized by a hidden entity, either in our heads or behind the clouds. The effect of radical empiricism is to literally transform our sense of the world, our relationship to it, and our place within it. The mind does not imprint order onto a primeval chaos; it copes with problematic situations among myriad,
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complex interrelations. How might this view, in turn, transform our view of communication and its core problems? Accounting for Sameness
Roughly speaking, to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing it is identical with itself is to say nothing at all. Wittgenstein, (1963), 5.5303.
Given Jamess reputation as the philosopher of novelty, indeterminacy, and a pluralistic universe, it no doubt seems odd to suggest Jamess enduring relevance to communication lies in an account of sameness. Yet this is precisely the importance of Jamess radical empiricism: it provides a nonskepticist approach to Lockes problem of how two minds can know the same thing. In fact, Jamess revising of sameness out from under the prevailing notion of absolute identity is analogous to Einsteins revision of received notions of absolute simultaneityresulting, in the later case, in the special theory of relativity.9 More to the point, it is necessary to examine how James rejects a mechanistic worldview in providing a temporal notion of sameness, for not all rejections of determinism result in Jamess view of indeterminacy. There is no systematic exposition of Jamess thought, an observation many have translated into a statement on the nature of Jamess philosophy. One of Jamess closest and most sympathetic readers suggests those seeking contradictions need spend no more than five minutes with his texts (Seigfreid, 1990, p. 8). In proceeding programmatically, my goal is to argue for the importance of Jamess account of sameness to communication rather than advocate for systematization of his thought. This account only really shines through in moving from The Many and The One notebooks (19031904), to Essays on Radical Empiricism (19041905), to the Miller-Bode Objections notebooks (19051908), through to his lecture series, A Pluralistic Universe (19081909). These works follow almost immediately The Varieties of Religious Experience, what might be called a study of incommunicable experience, and I suggest Jamess radical empiricism is fruitfully taken as the study of incommensurable experience. A crucial task in reconstructing this viewin explicating the process by which sameness is known or communicatedinvolves avoiding assumptions of all the fearful consequences a fully temporal and perspectival viewpoint seems to entail. But first it is worthwhile to ask, as James does in good pragmatic fashion, what does it mean to call something the same in human activity? Here is Jamess fully liberated 1909/1996 conclusion on the matter after he has broken free of deterministic assumptions:
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However indefinitely sames might still be substituted for sames in the logical world of nothing but pure sameness, in the world of real operations every line of sameness actually started and followed up would eventually give out, and cease to be traceable any farther. Sames of the same, in such a world, will not always (or rather, in a strict sense never) be the same as one another, for in such a world there is no literal or ideal sameness among numerical differents. (p. 397)
This view essentially restates the view of Wittgenstein referenced above. Both suggest it makes little sense to strictly maintain a static logic of identity and, more importantly, it would be still worse practice to evaluate Jamess account of sameness by such a standard. James himself claims to have only freely formulated this conclusion once alternatives to a mechanistic worldview were made available by Henri Bergson. It is worth emphasizing that James is not so much concerned with giving us a practical account of the processes through which samenesses are made. In fact, his account is only satisfactorily taken up in George Herbert Meads subsequent theory of communication, developed between 1909 and 1912. Instead, he is attempting to resituate the assumptions and context of demands for such an account and to cut off fears that his views lead necessarily to an unintelligible world of capricious chance and chaotic indeterminacy. In following Jamess own shifting formulations of indeterminacy, from chaos to incommensurability, I hope to provide an entry point for the reconstruction of his radical empiricism in a theory of communication. The examples of Cronen and Pearce, Habermas, and Mosco offered below are reflective instances of trying to account for indeterminacy in communication theory. They are not the only ones. Other theorists handling indeterminacy through a chaos/order distinction, as differentiated from the problem of incommensurability, include Careys cultural studies (Pauly, 1997) and Changs (1996) deconstruction (p. 37). However, despite this diversity, one can distinguish four typical responses to the issue: in its weakest form, one says pluralism is in and leaves it at that; in its pathetic form, one continues to wait for the grand unified theory; in its skeptical form, one is led to deconstruction; and in its pragmatic form, the situation is articulated as the problem of incommensurability. I turn to this last response directly. JAMESS FORMULATIONS OF INDETERMINACY: FROM CHAOS TO INCOMMENSURABILITY Pragmatists believe the distinction between the subjective and objective, between the mental and physical, is a difference in function introduced by reflection in the service of particular interests. A question almost immediately
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inserts itself: What is the stuff preexisting this intellectual distinction making? Obviously this is a matter of some difficulty, if only because our object-directed language embodies habits of thought not well suited to the expression of such processes.10 James would give a number of characterizations to this stuff: pure experience, virtual existence, the field of the present, simply field more generally, and other timesin seeming to give up on even these vague formulationshe suggested an initial sort of chaos. In what follows, I have restricted myself to Jamess approach to chaos.11 In the 1904 Does Consciousness Exist?, James (1912/1996) says the world comes first as a chaos of experiences (p. 16) and then, in the 1904 A World of Pure Experience, he says that the universe is to a large extent chaotic (p. 46), or that the whole system of experiences as they are immediately given presents itself as a quasi-chaos (p. 63). Other instances refer to a chaotic pure experience out of which the mind becomes composed and organized. What is meant by this initial chaos, a formulation dropping out of his writing as James works directly on radical empiricism? The Principles of Psychology By far the most extensive usage of chaos is found in Jamess 1890 The Principles of Psychology. On my count, James uses the term fourteen times in the main text with each instance fairly consistent.12 Chaos is the initial condition out of which mental states organize themselves. The descriptions of chaos James uses are: original (chapter 6), infinite (chapter 9), primordial (chapter 9), monotonous and inexpressive (chapter 9), utter (chapter 11), primeval (chapter 17), primitive (chapter 20), and, in a quotation from Josiah Royce, perfect (chapter 21). The world presents itself in a primordial chaos of sensations, a claim James finds supported by physics and experience alike, out from which the mind functions and organizes in a selective manner. However, it seems James is more trusting of his physics than an experiential philosophy at this point, for as the final chapter of the work puts it:
The reality exists as a plenum. All its parts are contemporaneous, each is as real as any other, and each as essential for making the whole just what it is and nothing else. But we can neither experience nor think this plenum. What we experience, what comes before us, is a chaos of fragmentary impressions interrupting each other; what we think is an abstract system of hypothetical data and laws. (1890/1981, p. 1231)
Clearly, James is going to have to give up this extra-experiential plenum view of reality to hold his radical empiricism. Yet it is one thing to reduce
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consciousness as an entity to consciousness as passing thought, the infamous stream of consciousness proposal. But how is James to effect the same reworking for the objective or physical world, as a world of pure passing or pure experience, without conceiving it ideally (as constituted by passing thought) and without slipping into sheer indeterminacy or chaos? The first view James found plainly ridiculous, yet the second view was banned by the classical mechanics of natural science. Deweys (1940/1988) suggestion this was a persistent metaphysical dualism escaping notice (p. 160) is perhaps accurate of Jamess state of mind in 1890. But it is misleading if compared with his later private notebooks, where James is aware that his views result in an indeterminist and pluralistic universe and force him to challenge the reigning conceptions of identity and physical causality. To illustrate the problem more clearly, take Deweys (1940/1988) support for Jamess empirical account of the self, where he blends his words with Jamess Psychology (Dewey italicizes Jamess words): the belief in sameness of self arises on empirical grounds in the same way as belief in the sameness of any object whatever, the sense of our own personal identity being exactly like any one of our other perceptions of sameness among phenomenon (p. 166). Yet it was precisely a matter of how such sameness could occur in an original, infinite, primeval, primordial, and utter chaos for which James would henceforth have to give an account. The Varieties of Religious Experience In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James uses the terminology of chaos on three occasions (it also appears in three other instances in cited reports used by James). However, the formulation is not quite the same as that appearing in his Principles. The first instance is similar to the Principles in terms of fundamental processesinitial chaos undergoing some manner of ordering to functional organizationyet here chaos is not only of feelings and impulses but comparative:
The higher and the lower feelings, the useful and the erring impulses, begin by being a comparative chaos within usthey must end by forming a stable system of functions in right subordination. Unhappiness is apt to characterize the period of order-making and struggle. (1903/1997, p. 146)
This is a different designation than the infinite and primordial chaos originally postulated. The second and third usages occur in the lecture on philosophy:
When one views the world with no definite theological bias one way or the other, one sees that order and disorder, as we now recognize them,
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are purely human inventions. We are interested in certain types of arrangement, useful, aesthetic, or moralso interested that whenever we find them realized, the fact emphatically rivets our attention. The result is that we work over the contents of the world selectively. It is overflowing with disorderly arrangements from our point of view, but order is the only thing we care for and look at, and by choosing, one can always find some sort of orderly arrangement in the midst of any chaos. If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might then say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that the other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our dealings with Nature are just lines in innumerable directions. We count and name whatever lies upon the special lines we trace, whilst the other things and the untraced lines are neither named nor counted. There are in reality infinitely more things unadapted to each other in this world than there are things adapted, infinitely more things with irregular relations than with regular relations between them. But we look for the regular kind of thing exclusively, and ingeniously discover and preserve it in our memory. It accumulates with other regular kinds, until the collection of them fills our encyclopedias. Yet all the while between and around them lies an infinite anonymous chaos of objects that no one ever thought of together, of relations that never yet attracted our attention. (pp. 342343)
There are a number of interesting things about these usages, not the least of which is that neither order nor disorder is fundamental to the world. Does James not contradict himself, however, in claiming to find order in chaos? No doubt such usages perplexed his critics who became vicious when James refused to accept such logical refutations of his views. Today it is tempting to read these charitably, as reflective elaborations of the chaos/ order dualism Katherine Hayles (1990) would date only to the latter half of the twentieth century. In her study, Hayles turns up two predominate tendencies within chaos theory itself. The first line focuses on the spontaneous emergence of self-organization from chaos, whereas the second line emphasizes the hidden order that exists within chaotic systems (p. 9). The comparison of Jamess views here are suggestive. Jamess second usage quoted above, read cursorily, might seem to revert back to prior characterizations, yet here we see that James is now talking of a chaos of objects and relations. Previously it was assumed that objects took form only as chaotic conditions achieved some measure of organization out of the bloomin, buzzing confusion. Finally, it is worth elaborating the stakes by way of reference to Brenda Dervins review of Hayless book.
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Referring to the distinction of chaos/order as perhaps the most important meta-dualism in our field, Dervins (1993) assessment points toward the relevance of Jamess thinking on this score:
We may concludebased on a reading of Hayles exploration of treatments of chaos as they are emerging both in the sciences and the humanities in the last half of this centurythat our field is very much in tune with and constitutive of the times. Hayles explores in detail the proposition that current theoretic developments in both the sciences and humanities are characterized by the destabilization of the orderchaos dichotomy and the emergence of chaos theories (albeit under a variety of names) that envision a third territory beyond and/or between. She describes this destabilization of a central dichotomy in Western thought as a major fault line in the episteme, one that has a magnet-like attraction. (p. 439)
Radical Empiricism What can James mean in speaking of an initial chaos? The clearest example occurs in Jamess (1912/1996) 1905 essay, Can Two Minds Know One Thing. Were it necessary to pinpoint a definitive breakthrough realization in which James moves from chaos as a description of the universe to his perspectival formulation, this would be it. In this brief article, James once again notes the chaotic nature of the experience among which objects take shape, only this time he takes a moment to explicate his meaning:
Experiences come on an enormous scale, and if we take them all together, they come in a chaos of incommensurable relations that we cannot straighten out. We have to abstract different groups of them, and handle these separately if we are to talk of them at all. (p. 133)
I want to suggest the contemporary relevance of this view. Not only is this usage of incommensurability important, but so too is the sense of temporality implied by James. In this sense, the observations of Craig (1989, 1993), Robinson (1989), and Demers (2000) that communication scholars have been slow to incorporate work in the philosophy of science may function less as a criticism than an opportunity. For not only have those following Kuhn and Feyerabend missed or ignored this usage but they have emphasized the logical implications of incommensurability rather than how we often confront and communicatively deal with the problem.13 If we follow James, then this becomes a key problem of and for communication. How can two minds know one thing? For James, to say that any two thoughts or things are strictly identical is nonsense (in the sense
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of silly) and to say that any one thought or thing is identical to itself is nonsensical (in the sense of saying nothing at all). The question only arises as a significant philosophical concern if the functional distinction between subject-object is mistaken for an ontological dualism that must be definitively bridged. But such concerns, when they arise, are practical problems of coordinating our activities in the world rather than apprehending a rational foundation upon which our activities take place. The gamble here is that characterizing such difficulties as a problem of incommensurability rather than how two minds know one thing will provide a better means of resolving such situations. In fact, we are only led to the latter formulation if we confuse the products of intellectual inquiry for the way the world actually is. Yes, we discriminate between subjects and objects for certain purposes, we distinguish the mental and the physical in many contexts, but this is the outcome of cognitive processes and not simply a reflection of an unchanging preexistent reality. The world is not wholly reducible to impermeable subjects and objects that precede all knowing and inquiry, rather we make such distinctions in the process of coming to know and resolve a problematic situation. James does not give us a technique or proof for accounts of sameness in his radical empiricism, but his nonskeptical ruling out of an objective procedure for doing so is immensely important: the problem of knowledge (or epistemology), of how two minds can know one thing, is reconstructed on the basis of a problem of incommensurability. Once indeterminacy as chaos is reconstructed as a problem of incommensurability, James moves away from the term.14 I dont believe he uses chaos in either Pragmatism (1907/ 1975) or A Pluralistic Universe (1909/1996)preferring the much more satisfactory term, to my mind, of fieldsand although it does appear in several instances in The Meaning of Truth (1909/1975), these instances support rather than detract from this claim.15 Seigfrieds (1978) book-length study of radical empiricism puts it best: It should be noted that with this shift in meaning, chaos as a description of a field of consciousness has been de-emphasized and instead is used to explain why no single rational explanation of the world is possible (p. 32). One might fairly note, however, that a great deal is being made of a single usage of the term, in a brief article, and it was a usage to which James did not return or emphasize. Part of the value in emphasizing it is that both Dewey (1925b/1988) and Mead (1926) would later utilize the term and both present examples of how communication might be reconstructed in accord with radical empiricism, particularly Deweys Experience and Nature (1925a/1981). The problem of communication then begins to approximate Peterss (1999) understanding, where it is not so much contact between individuals as it is to establish a vibrant set of social relations in which common worlds can be made (p. 118). Dewey and Mead will advance our thinking on those social
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relations, but Jamess work stands as a good reminder not to reduce lived experience to the symbolic interactions through which we often apprehend such relations.16 Its immediate value, however, is in overcoming the chaos/ order dualism that persists in our field. THE RELEVANCE OF JAMES FOR CONTEMPORARY COMMUNICATION THEORY The renaissance of pragmatism in the 1980s is a result, in no small part, of two internationally renowned theorists dissatisfaction with their studies of analytical philosophy.17 Richard Rorty (from within the analytic tradition) and Jurgen Habermas (from within the tradition of German Idealism) both launch post-positivist reconstructions of pragmatist thought, from Dewey and Mead respectively. Although Rortys antifoundationalist contingency and Habermass enlightenment universalism take them in very different directions, both give pragmatist thought a radical linguistic turn. Neither of these projects has anything to do with Jamess radical empiricism or its subsequent elaboration in John Deweys theory of inquiry.18 I want instead to maintain focus and explore the consequences indeterminacy introduces into communication theory, particularly in the form of chaos, and illustrate how pragmatism can reformulate this as the problem of incommensurability. It might improve understanding to note that, contra Rorty, there is no absolute or necessary incommensurability implied by Jamess position, nor, contra Habermas, can the problem be overcome once and for all. Demonstrating incommensurability is not the theoretical goal or end of Jamess position; it is a practical beginning. Positivism as a plausible and defensible philosophy of science dies as a number of smash-hit critiques erupt into mainstream intellectual discourse in the 1960s: Kuhns The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Feyerabends Against Method, Habermass Knowledge and Human Interests, Gadamers Truth and Method, and Foucaults The Order of Things to name only the most prominent. Craig (1993) gives an excellent overview of the disruption this introduces into received notions of communication theory. Providing a more specific account of how the indeterminacy or antifoundationalism of these critiques impacts communication is no easy task. Although Careys (1983, 1989a) cultural studies perspective borrows freely from Kuhn and strenuously attacks positivism, the most explicit and concerted rejection occurs in the 1985 Beyond Polemics: Paradigm Dialogues, an International Communication Association panel of papers finding agreement only in a common enemy. Since then, Demerss (2000) triumphant assessment gets it right: Pluralism is in (p. 2). More interestingly, Demerss links this condition to the philosophical
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problem of theory-neutral observation, a problem handed down to communication by philosophers of science (p. 1). That problem, of course, is what philosophers of science call incommensurability. In fact, this incommensurability problem shows up repeatedly when issues of theoretical pluralism or competing perspectives arise, even if it is not always named as such (Cappella, 1989; Craig, 1999; Gandy, 1995; Jacobson, 1991; Krippendorff, 1989, 1993; Pavitt, 1994, 1999; Pearce, 1989, 1991; Penman, 1992; Rosengren, 1989 ). The impossibility of a theory-neutral language into which competing positions could be translated and evaluated sparked Kuhns (1970) initial interest in incommensurability, although contemporary work has both broadened its applicability (to cultural belief systems) and narrowed it (to issues of semantic variance). In recovering Jamess earlier and undifferentiated usage of the term, I hope to move beyond postulations of either an underlying, deterministic order (often associated with positivism) or those of disorder and chaos (often associated with breaking from positivism). To this end, I briefly examine three theories developed from pragmatist sourcesPearce and Cronens coordinated management of meaning, Habermass theory of communicative action, and Moscos political economy of communicationto highlight their specific handling of indeterminacy before turning to a broader consideration of the implications of radical empiricism. Pearce and Cronen In a wide-ranging introduction to their coordinated management of meaning theory, Pearce and Cronen (1980) distinguish between their view of theory and positivistic approaches: The new idea is that communication is a form of social action that can best be studied as a process of creating and managing social reality rather than a technique for describing objective reality (p. 61). Cronen (2001) and Cronen and Chetro-Szivos (2001), in particular, give these early formulations a naturalistic turn through Deweys philosophy of science. In the earlier work, Pearce and Cronen are more programmatic about how the revolutionary consequences to result from reconceptualizing communication as action are to come about (p. 75). Reviewing the historical emergence of this perspective, they suggest any pragmatist or actionbased theory requires the acceptance of four ideas. The first three ideasactions as the object of study, an emphasis on the meaning of action from an actors perspective, and the importance of action and meaning in constructions of realityare of a piece with most methodological proposals to study action rather than describe behavior. Yet
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Pearce and Cronen attach a further condition to the emergence of actionoriented theories of communication:
The fourth and most difficult idea necessary for the development of a concept of communication as actional was the acceptance of disorder. Throughout Western history, the major thinkers assumed that somewhere in or behind the flux of experience was an order which, if it could be discovered, would provide a suitable object for rapt contemplation or the ability to describe, predict, and control events. The three ideas described above precludeor at least make improbable the notion of an underlying, inexorable order, and from the perspective of action theory, the assumption that order exists is dysfunctional. (pp. 8283)
Habermas Compare this conclusion with those drawn by Habermas in formulating his theory of communicative action. Habermass theory building begins with the argument that scientism cannot eliminate or definitively repress the active character of human reflection. Knowledge and Human Interests, the first of three books proposing to reconstruct analytic philosophy as a result of this conclusion, resituates epistemological issues in the context of social theory. By the 1970s, positivism or scientism is finished as a defensible philosophy of science. Irrationalism, antifoundationalism, and Feyerabends (1975) infamous anything goes rose to prominence and threatened the universalistic aspect of truth claimsalong with cumulative knowledge, progress, and the enlightenment projectand Habermas broke off his study of analytic philosophy to begin the theory of communicative action. Similar to Pearce and Cronen, Habermas (1971/2001) foregrounds the priority of meaning, the focus on action versus behavior, and proposes to study how communication generates a symbolic order of reality (pp. 818). First of all, Habermas recognizes the need to address the question of how one can know the same thing or communicate identical meanings. The pivotal chapter 5 in The Theory of Communicative Action derives this account from Meads theory of communication. Yet Habermas (1973) explicitly rejects the pragmatist connection of truth and action (p. 179) to defend a discourse theory retaining the universalistic aspect of truth claims. This, in turn, forms one aspect of an ineradicable and culturally invariant communicative rationality. Habermas (1987) clearly rejects both scientism and psychologism, or what he calls the philosophy of consciousness, but wavers on indeterminacy (Kaufman-Osborn, 1991; Shalin, 1992). Instead,
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Habermas also gives the assumptions of an action-based approach a naturalistic turnthrough a proposed theory of social evolution and comes out in favor of universalism, not disorder. This move is largely driven by the necessity, in Habermass view, of holding onto an adequate account of sameness (Habermas, 1970/2001, 1973, 1987). Since Habermas feels communication cannot take place without sameness, and that a thoroughgoing indeterminism renders that impossible, Habermas turns away from indeterminism and chaos to study how communicative action establishes order (Habermas, 1984, p. 100). In the one case, indeterminacy results in a postulate of disorder, and in the other, an attempt to renew the universalistic foundations of social science. As we will see, however, it is not uncommon for such opposing conclusions to be drawn from reflections on indeterminacy. Mosco Mosco (1996) would seem to side with Pearce and Cronen in outlining the assumptions of his political economy of communication as realist, inclusive, and critical (p. 2). Although fleeting mention of Kuhn and James is made, Mosco prefers to elaborate his assumptions through prominent political economists and examples from contemporary physics. Nonetheless, his views sound far more like Jamess views that those of a political economist. Mosco blends these together in a discussion of (1) theory/ practice, (2) nonreductionist approaches revising notions of physical causality, (3) pluralistic approaches abandoning dualistic thinking (4) mutually constitutive approaches focusing on relations, and (5) an assumption of chaos. Where Mosco loses his affinity with James is in the ambiguous discussion of how the first four tendencies, widely shared in social theory, result in the assumption of chaos. Similar to Pearce and Cronen (1980), Mosco finds this assumption necessary:
Although dichotomies are typically presented to suggest a formal equality based on difference, or on the relationship between objects, the reality suggests a preference that borders on the distinction between presence and absence or between A and non-A. Moreover, dualisms are not only conducive to such thinking, they disincline the reflection on third possibilities or alternatives that would take one outside the boundary formed by the dualism. As a result, the only alternative to the dual, in practice close to the singular, is chaos. (pp. 45)
No doubt, many political economists will be happy to hear Mosco is not reducible to James. But there is a good reason for them to look to James in
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addition to the contemporary political economy and feminism references Mosco prefers to cite. For if Mosco is not simply to stipulate these views, but to provide some defense of their employment, where is he to turn in rejecting mechanistic formalization? Where he does turn is to contemporary physics, particularly theories speculating on quantum mechanics and chaos theory. Yet the reference to quantum theory is entirely unsupported and the much more elaborate speculation on chaos theory references only a single workGleicks (1987) journalistic account of its emergence. This is potentially problematic in several ways of which I will mention only the most pressing. The question of indeterminacy in quantum physics and chaos theory is no better settled than in philosophy or communication theory. To be sure, it is not difficult to find great weight placed on twentieth century physics by pragmatists. Indeterminist physical theories were important to James, an enduring concern for Mead, and Dewey (1929/1984) accorded a significant place to quantum mechanics early on. Still, there are varying interpretations of this work and its implications are by no means well settled. To choose the most instructive example, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr famously fail to reach agreement concerning Heisenbergs uncertainty principle on a particularly interesting and, one might say, Jamesian point.19 Their dispute centers on the meaning of concepts, or rather, the fashion in which concepts correspond to reality: in Bohrs view, ambiguity is allowable and concepts may not attach to reality in well-defined ways, whereas Einstein insists fundamental concepts must have an unambiguous relationship to reality (Bohm & Peat, 2000, p. 84). The point of this example is that agreement on the mathematical formulation of quantum theory did not produce agreed-upon assumptions or interpretations of that work, which on closer inspection, Bohm and Peat (2000) link to their incompatible notions of order (p. 104).20 Therefore, we are left with a situation in which the interpretations accorded chaos theory produce similar difficulties to the order/chaotic disorder divide we find in both the communication theory and quantum mechanics examples. Does James point the way forward? Does radical empiricism settle the question of how to think about determinacy? A fuller understanding of Jamess radical empiricism in its contemporary consequences requires the sort of background understanding offered in Ian Hackings (1990) The Taming of Chance, where not only is Jamess immersion in central debates about mechanistic determinism evident but so too is the unlikelihood of definitively settling the matter anytime soon (in fact, even James, Dewey, and Peirce vary significantly on indeterminism and what is entailed by their respective formulations). But such debates are hardly our primary concern. Although developing Jamess views in such debates would be quite valuable, my goals have been more narrow and specific: to rehearse how James handles the indeterminacy of
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everyday experience, to examine how this releases us from prevailing conceptualizations or problems in communication, and to elaborate how following James can resituate questions of communication within a problem of incommensurability. In turning to this latter goal more directly, Hackings conclusion strikes the right tone and seems relevant here, even if James has been preferred in this essay:
Somebody had to make a first leap to indeterminism. Maybe it was Peirce, perhaps a predecessor. It does not matter. He rejoiced to find himself in the company of others, including Renouvier. He did argue against the doctrine of necessity but it was not an argument that convinced him that chance is an irreducible element of reality. He opened his eyes, and chance poured in. I do not use him here because he is the happy upshot of preceding chapters, the point at which groping events finally lead to the truth as we now see it. Not at all: some of what he wrote strikes me as false and much of it is obscure. I use him instead to exemplify a new field of possibilities, the one that we still inhabit. (p. 201)
SOME IMPLICATIONS OF JAMESS RADICAL EMPIRICISM FOR PRAGMATIST APPROACHES TO COMMUNICATION STUDIES One person did feel James had definitively settled the matter, took leave of what he considered philosophical infighting, and went forward with the task of building on radical empiricism or what he called Jamess metaphysics of the incommensurable. It will surprise no one to hear this is John Dewey. Why have we not more fully reconstructed pragmatism as a tradition of thinking about communication? Robert Craig (1999), for instance, would seem to point this way in advocating for seven traditions of communication, especially given his facility with pragmatism and his characterization of contemporary theoretical relations as incommensurate. Yet only cursory and uninspiring mention of a genuinely pragmatist tradition is made in this article.21 James Careys work has incorporated important aspects of Deweys vision but abandoned the work on inquiry that extended most directly from Jamess radical empiricism (on Deweys view of inquiry as an extension of Jamess radical empiricism, see Stuhr, 1997; Westbrook, 1991). This sort of reading comes at a high cost and reducing Jamess or Deweys work, and the manifold human relations it handles, to dialogue is especially troublesome, even if Careys goals of avoiding scientism are understandable. Dialogic presumptions can distort experience just as positivistic ones can, a point made repeatedly by Peters (1999) and an error James should help us avoid. Peters, for his part, has
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contributed a sympathetic and sensitive understanding of James to communication studies and sets a task for communication quite suggestive of James.22 Yet Peters (1999) has been busy forwarding his own one-man paradigm shift in communication, a Herculean effort to recover not only a spiritualist tradition drawn from the Hegelian wellspring but also a nuanced historical understanding of communication technologies as well. Perhaps the why have we not done so requires a better reply to why might we do so. First of all, it would support a shift in thinking about communication practices along the lines of Peterss (1999) suggestions and fill out the partaking model, or fifth vision of communication he draws from Deweys pragmatism. Second, it would highlight the differences between a pragmatist tradition and contemporary philosophies of difference developed out of various responses to Hegel. Consider how easily the views of James and Dewey are caught in the following critical crossfire. For proponents of a thoroughgoing philosophy of difference, Deweys extension of the Jamesian problematic in particular seems to support arguments that for Dewey communication is a moral imperative of sorts, impelling us to commune in our commonness and join cause with others. Such imperatives are often blind to the violence done in assimilating difference or too quickly accommodating otherness and deafen us to the suffering such practices often entail. Peters (1999) is careful not to reach too far with such warnings, but it is difficult not to hear this as a rebuke to Careys Dewey. For those missing it, others have struck much more directly and Ron Greene (2003) has lodged similar concerns on the use of Dewey in rhetoric programs. Greenes (2003) view is particularly interesting in recognizing the centrality of the problem of incommensurability but disappointing in its failure to correct the impoverished view of Dewey passing in rhetoric. If Jamess radical empiricism were substituted for such views, it would go some distance in addressing the concern to maintain otherness and difference. However, emphasizing the views of James as a philosopher of difference brings with it the opposite problem. From the perspective of those impatient with a philosophy of difference, the charge Hall (1980) levels at Foucault seems just as relevant to pragmatism, such that one might also say of James that he
so resolutely suspends judgment, and adopts so thoroughgoing a skepticism about any determinacy or relationship between practices, other than the largely contingent, that we are entitled to see him, not as agnostic on these questions, but as deeply committed to the necessary non-correspondence of all practices to one another. (Hall, 1980, p. 71)
There are more than a couple tricks and traps contained in the language of Halls judgment and I have sought to give an account of James that
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surpasses such a concern. More importantly, however, I think a pragmatist tradition is well disposed to take up the guiding challenge of Halls essay, which reduces to the demand for an account of determinacy in social relations. The course of cultural analysis has tended to follow Williams and Hall in turning to a notion of hegemony in attempting to do so. The pragmatist tradition is a different pathway. If one begins from the problem of incommensurability in experience, the communication theory of Mead and Dewey is a means for making a shared perspective available. Dewey, in particular, set this task for critical philosophy in the conclusion to his 1925 Experience and Nature, and his account of communication in that book is both indebted to and thereafter affirmed by Mead. Dewey sets the task at a still grander scale for political theory in his 1927 The Public and its Problems. The overlooked key to that book, however, is Deweys stipulation that only an account of communication linked to an account of social inquiry will carry the day (1927/1997, p. 184). We are familiar with and know where to find that account of communication, but not with its limitations if shorn of an intimate relation to inquiry. For Dewey, his view of communication is necessary and designed for addressing problems of incommensurability elucidated by James, but hardly adequate in every case. Rather, it needs to be wedded to an account of social inquiry and it is Deweys (1938/1986) theory of inquiry, a body of work developed over a period of over half a century, which holds a pragmatist theory of determination.23 It is this theory of knowledge, built upon the universe envisioned in Jamess radical empiricism, that provides an account of our often-daily trackings between determinate and indeterminate situations and back again, the very practice Dewey characterized as inquiry. One wonders if that path remains open and whether, if taken, it will make all the difference. NOTES
1. The essays in Essays in Radical Empiricism were collected and published in book form by Ralph Barton Perry in 1912. With the exception of an essay added by Perry, they were originally published in 1904 and 1905 and I include these dates when relevant. Perrys Editors Preface tells the story of how James collected reprints of the essays in an envelope titled Essays in Radical Empiricism, and also had copies bound for use in two Harvard libraries. James used a couple of these essays in two later works, The Meaning of Truth and A Pluralistic Universe, the former of which restated Jamess (1909/1975) pragmatist theory of truth to the end of clearing a path for radical empiricism. 2. Therefore I do not attempt to provide a detailed intellectual reconstruction of the development and institutional reception of radical empiricism here. For a brief overview of radical empiricism in Jamess work, see McDermott (1978). For a close study of Jamess radical empiricism with attention to his critics, see Seigfried (1978). For an illuminating account of how Jamess radical empiricism contrasts to
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3.
4.
5. 6.
7.
8. 9. 10. 11.
12.
13. 14.
15.
Platonism, and the relation of these theories to ethics, see Stuhr (1997, chap. 8). The interesting question of how Jamess pragmatism relates to his radical empiricism has no single answer and is too complex to be addressed here. I have in mind those drawing from John Deweys work (Carey, 1982, 1983, 1989a, 1989b, 1995, 1997; Craig, 2001; Cronen, 2001; J. Jensen, 1995, 2001; Perry, 2001a, 2001b), George Herbert Meads social theory (Blumer, 1969; Habermas, 1987; Joas, 1985), and Charles Peirces semiotics (Apel, 1980, 1995; K. B. Jensen, 1995). One might fairly argue, however, that John Durham Peters didnt bother to suggest such an approach and simply went about the business of doing so. Such a claim is made more complex by the fact that James held little love or patience for Hegel, a thinker of some significance in Peterss (1999) most important work to date. I return to this below. In the case of psychologism, James begins in postulating its abandonment in the first salvo of his radical empiricism, Does Consciousness Exist? For an excellent study of indeterminacy and its shifting articulations, see Ian Hackings (1990)The Taming of Chance. Hacking takes the tale of its emergence up to the point of Charles Sanders Peirces work, the man from whom James famously borrowed the term pragmatism, and provides an important context within which to further appraise Jamess views. Jamess famous 1904 Does Consciousness Exist? is actually more of a depends than an unequivocal no. As an entity, James advocates giving up on the notion; as a function, however, James clearly admits it. See James (1907/1975) and especially chapter 2, What Pragmatism Means, for a fuller elaboration and demonstration. Interestingly enough, Einstein refused to give up on a deterministic universe, whereas James refused to give in. Such a concern, for example, would be the basis of Bertrand Russells objections to Deweys theory of inquiry. Ruf (1991) studies the role of chaos in Jamess work from The Principles of Psychology through to The Varieties of Religious Experience. His study examines the religious uses and connotations of chaos and argues that Jamess work makes for a chaotic view of mind and world. I want to avoid such a conclusion by suggesting this view changes once again as Jamess radical empiricism comes into clearer focus. It also appears in note 6 (p. 1231) and note 7 (pp. 12311232) of chapter 28, note 6 of which is a quotation from Mills Logic. In the main text, on my count James uses it once in chapter 4, three times in chapter 9, once in chapter 11, once in chapter 17, three times in chapter 20, twice in chapter 21, and three times in chapter 28. In my view, each usage is fairly consistent. See Ruf (1991) for a closer study. This might be a result of Kuhns claim to have drawn the word from the language of mathematics. See McDermott (1978) for a history of how James is drawn back into debate on the nature of truth and never returns to more systematic formulations of his radical empiricism. In the first instance of chaos in The Meaning of Truth (1909/1975), James uses the word to voice a concern that a critic might forward to his view of cognition: What can save us at all and prevent us from flying asunder into a chaos of mutually repellent solipsisms? (p. 30). The next two instances are the result of republishing
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essays from 1904. The final instance, as with the first, is interesting for Jamess awareness that his critics will use it to attack his views and his willingness to put the term itself in their mouths: Heaven forbid that I should get entangled here in a controversy about the rights and wrongs of the free-will question at large, for I am only trying to illustrate vicious abstractionism by the conduct of some of the doctrines assailants. The moments of bifurcation, as the indeterminist seems to himself to experience them, are moments both of re-direction and of continuation. But because in the eitheror of the re-direction we hesitate, the determinist abstracts this little element of discontinuity from the superabundant continuities of the experience, and cancels in its behalf all the connective characters with which the latter is filled. Choice, for him, means henceforward disconnection pure and simple, something undetermined in advance in any respect whatever, and a life of choices must be a raving chaos, at no two moments of which could we be treated as one and the same man. (p. 138, emphasis in original)
16. We can favorably cite Peters once more in his gloss on Wittegenstein: His point was that understanding comes as much from a lived or embodied world of common practices as from symbol-manipulating capacities alone (p. 244). 17. Richard J. Bernstein and Steven Toulmin, well known to scholars versed in the philosophy of science, should not be underestimated due to the fact they do not tell stories of intellectual conversion. The case of Bernstein (1983) is particularly interesting since he advocates for reflection on the problem of incommensurability as a means of moving beyond objectivism and relativism, but links this only to hermeneutics and analytic philosophynot pragmatism! 18. In the case of Rorty, under criticism that Dewey rarely says the things Rorty claims he says, the issue is clear in his proposal for a hypothetical Dewey who was a pragmatist without being a radical empiricist (1998, p. 292). In the case of Habermas, see Habermas (1973, 1985) and Russill (2003). 19. McDermott (1978) mentions Jamess influence on Bohr. Also see Bohm and Peat (2000, p. 101). 20. Also see Krippendorff (1989) and Putnam (1995) for further reflection on quantum theory in regard to communication and pragmatism, respectively. 21. Perhaps this is because reconstruction of the tradition does not yet adequately fit Craigs criteria or perhaps the proposal itself presumes a pragmatist orientation. Such an assumption might gain support from Craigs almost Jamesian reply to a critic of the proposal. On the other hand, if it presumed pragmatism Craig would likely have said as much. For a view of pragmatism as a tradition of communication theory addressing Craigs criteria, see Russill, (2004). 22. While exhibiting a stunning breadth, Peterss (1999) introductory chapter, The Problem of Communication, is framed by concerns set by William James. For Peters, Jamess Psychology sets the problem of how two minds know one thing in a definitive and irresolvable way (pp. 45) and points the way forward in attending to difference and otherness as a context for considerations of communication (p. 31). 23. For suggestive work on Deweys views of inquiry among communication scholars, see Craig (2001), Cronen (2001), and Cronen and Chetro-Szivos (2001).
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This article was downloaded by: [University of South Florida] On: 01 August 2011, At: 07:21 Publisher: Routledge

The Communication Review

Department of Communication Studies, University of Otago Available online: 18 Aug 2006

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C. Russill The Road Not Taken

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The Road Not Taken

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