Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

128 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
begins with the universal and then moves to the parts of the whole, and empiricism, which he
says starts in an explanation of the parts. He continues,
To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly
experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the
relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation
experienced must be accounted as “real” as any thing else in the system. [James’s emphasis] (p. 533)
James’s major explanation of his theory was published in Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912). In
the editor’s preface of this posthumous collection, Ralph Barton Perry says James valued radical
empiricism more than pragmatism (pp. xvi–xvii). Perry adds that the term itself first appeared
in print in The Will to Believe (1896/1967), and James defined it as a philosophic attitude
(p. xix). James goes even further in The Meaning of Truth (1911), specifying that “Radical
empiricism consists (1) first of a postulate, (2) next of a statement of fact, (3) and finally of a
generalized conclusion” (p. xvi). Radical empiricism may also be defined as pure experience, or
the inseparability of the knower and the known. He ends Essays in Radical Empiricism saying,
“all philosophies are hypotheses, to which all our faculties, emotional as well as logical, help
us ...” (p. 279).
JAMES THE POSTFORMALIST
William James foreshadows twenty-first-century postformalism in three ways: in his conceptualization
of truth, in his acknowledgement of complexity, and in his phenomenological, or as
it may more properly be called, his proto-phenomenological writing, which in interpretations by
theorists such as Husserl has been reduced to a positivist version bearing only partial similarity
to the original. James alludes to the uneasy reception given to pragmatism when he writes in The
Meaning of Truth (1911) about “warfare” (p. xv) between the pragmatists and the nonpragmatists.
But he is firm in his notion that truth is ever-changing, saying,
“Truth” is thus in process of formation like all other things. It consists not in conformity or correspondence
with an externally fixed archetype or model. Such a thing would be irrelevant even if we knew it to exist.
(p. xv)
He is even less prosaic in The Will to Believe (1896/1967) when he writes, “Objective evidence and
certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited
planet are they found?” (p. 725). James recognizes human beings for their complexity, writing
in Talks to Teachers (1899/1958), “Man is too complex a being for light to be thrown on his real
efficiency by measuring any one mental faculty taken apart from its consensus in the working
whole” (p. 96). He continues by arguing that any attempt to quantify human understanding is
reductive and suspect, saying, “There are as many types of apperception as there are possible
ways in which an incoming experience may be reacted on by an individual mind” (p. 112).
James is describing a truly human science. His intellectual descendent, Husserl, in contrast, takes
the notion of lived world and attempts to make of it a phenomenology that is positivistic in its
conceptualization. Philosopher G.B. Madison, in The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity (1988),
describes Husserl’s obsession with the idea of a unified science, and his construction of science
as a hierarchy with phenomenology at the top (p. 43). Ironically, James’s conceptualization is
closer to the postformal model than is Husserl’s, although James does not invoke issues of power
and social justice. As Madison puts it in reference to James, “Pioneers, like Moses, do not always
make it to the Promised Land” (p. 192, n27).