Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy

Scott Aikin’s Evidentialism and the Will to Believe is the first book-length discussion of W.K. Clifford’s 1877 “The Ethics of Belief ” and William James’s 1896 “The Will to Believe.” Except for twenty pages, the book splits evenly between a detailed discussion of the two essays. A good book demands some good criticism, and I am hoping that the comments I make are read in that light. Evidentialism and the Will to Believe appears in the Bloomsbury Research in Analytic Philosophy series. Presumably because the book was written for this series, the discussion of historical context is kept to a minimum, and references to other writings of Clifford and James, and to the secondary literature, are scant. They pretty much only emerge where it directly serves the analysis and is all but unavoidable. Aikin’s own justification for ignoring the secondary literature is that both essays were written for the general public, so that one does not need the assistance of scholarly exegeses to make sense of them. As Aikin puts it, “I wish to read these essays on their own terms, as essays that were presented to educated, but not philosophically advanced audiences” (3). In a way this is commendable, but it also undermines the very rationale of Aikin’s own book, as on these grounds the educated reader would not need to read Aikin’s commentary either. As it turns out, however, Aikin’s true audience is the professional philosopher. Who else would want to distinguish between “evidentially productive doxastic efficacy” and “alethically productive doxastic efficacy”? Now it seems to me that for most professional philosophers it makes even less sense to wipe the scholarly slate clean. There still may be pockets of analytic philosophers who believe that philosophy only truly begins with them, but they are unlikely to be interested in what two people thought well over a century ago.

Before making some detailed comments on Aikin’s discussion of Clifford and James, a few general observations are in order. As said, the book is written to fit into the broader analytic tradition, and comes with some of its trappings. These include a penchant for abbreviations (Clifford’s ship owner becomes SO), a tendency to carve out philosophic [End Page 266] positions through hypostatic abstraction, and a focus on increasingly refined directives, such as “Clifford’s Evidentialist Norm” and the “Integrated Evidentialist Rule” (helpfully abbreviated as CEN and IER). Aikin lightens up a bit when he comes to James, and that part of the book is also stronger. Aikin moves through both essays section by section, aiming to stay close to the arguments as they actually unfold. The essays themselves, which are relatively short, can stand on their own, and are in public domain, are not included, which is regrettable. Alternating sections with commentary would have caused the reader to read the relevant section before reading what Aikin has to say about it, which would have enhanced the reader’s understanding, given a stronger voice to Clifford and James, forced Aikin to tighten his discussion, and made it more amiable to the general reader. This is particularly important for James who was not always careful when expressing himself.

Let’s next look at the debate itself. Especially within the American philosophical tradition, there is a tendency to side with James. Clifford’s famous maxim, that it is always, everywhere, and for anyone wrong to accept anything upon insufficient evidence, is considered too strong, which makes for a receptive ear when James argues that there are some exceptions to this. Aikin comes to the opposite conclusion, which he calls “a very unpopular view” (7). James, he argues, like so many others, misread Clifford. When Clifford is read correctly, Aikin continues, his view ends up being stronger than James’s.

One way of measuring the quality of a work that takes a contrarian position is to see whether it makes a convincing case to those who hold, or lean to, the rejected...