The Web and the Tree: Quine and James on the Growth of Knowledge

Abstract

Quine’s metaphor — the web of belief that touches on experience at its periphery, but gets exceedingly removed from experience as one approaches its center — is widely known to philosophers. ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, the classic paper in which the metaphor first appeared, and the various theses that Quine sought to illustrate by means of his metaphor have all received a great deal of attention. Far less attention has been paid to the strikingly similar features of James’s epistemology; indeed, the similarity between the two is mostly overlooked. One reason for this oblivion to the similarity between Quine and James might be related to a prevalent misreading of James, on which his pragmatic theory of truth identifies truth with utility and sanctions wishful thinking. Such abuse of rationality (this misreading suggests) can hardly count as epistemology, let alone be compared with that of Quine. Another reason may have to do with philosophical context: Quine interacted more directly with the logical positivists than with the pragmatists. He engaged in continuous dialogue with Carnap and often mentioned Neurath, but did not devote comparable efforts to critical dialogue with the pragmatist tradition. James, in particular, is almost completely absent from his writings.