Pragmatism turned out to be a slippery enough concept that James, a writer with a well-deserved reputation for clarity, had to write a second book about it to a

Pragmatism turned out to be a slippery enough concept that James, a writer with a well-deserved reputation for clarity, had to write a second book about it to address all the misconceptions. His version is all about making explicit the process that we all go through in weighing each new incoming experience or evidence for something against our mountain of collected experiences, which is how we individually decide whether or not something is true. It’s not as simple as “does this agree with what I have experienced before,” since some kinds of new information can radically change our perspective on past events. The article mentioned that he coined the term “stream of consciousness,” which is so familiar now to us that we can gloss over the depth with which he treated it. For James, the idea of “a thought” was itself an abstraction: if consciousness is a stream then there is no hard separation from a thought that comes before or after the one raises up for examination. He makes mention of a “fringe” surrounding whichever thought has most of our attention, and these fringes are constantly expanding to become the center of our focus, only to be replaced by the next. This came to mind when I was reading about attention models in neural networks, and how accounting for attention improved their functioning for some classes of problems. If you’re interested in William James, one of the best introductions to his work is not by James himself but by Jacques Barzun, entitled “A Stroll with William James.” Barzun quotes James extensively in it, and ties together the overarching themes of his various works with a deft hand. I may be slightly biased here because my jumping-off point for reading James was Barzun’s “From Dawn to Decadence,” a sprawling work that led me to investigate a number of references, but none turned out to be as rewarding as reading William James, who has become a personal hero.