Clifford vs. James: Evidentialism and Pragmatism Compared

Clifford's Evidentialism and James's Pragmatism

William Clifford's epistemological position is evidentialism. Evidentialism holds that a person must have evidence to support whatever he or she believes to be true. Evidence must underpin all beliefs, whether they concern matters of everyday life or matters of morality and religion. Clifford argues that practical standards are not sufficient to support beliefs. For instance, it is not enough to believe that an alarm clock will go off in the morning simply because it has done so every other morning. Instead, one must have proof — evidence — that the alarm will sound. The moral component of Clifford's position concerns the assignment of blame. If a person can only justifiably believe something when evidence supports that belief, then the person is culpable when an unsupported belief proves faulty. In other words, if a person believes his house will not catch fire but has no evidence to support that assumption, and the house does catch fire and kills its occupants, the person who held that unsupported belief is to blame. Moreover, Clifford goes so far as to suggest that even if the house does not burn down, the owner is still guilty of having put the lives of its inhabitants at risk.

William James's epistemological position, by contrast, is called pragmatism. This position is based on the "pragmatic theory of truth," which holds that a proposition can only be true if the belief in that proposition actually works. This epistemological position is somewhat more difficult to grasp because people often have different ideas of what it means for something to "work." James suggested that a belief works if it is useful, verifiable, and grounded in reality. He employed a range of other terms to define this criterion, but these are the primary ones. Furthermore, James held that propositions can only be true if they are consistent with what a person already believes. For instance, a person cannot simultaneously believe that she is both twenty-seven and thirty-two years old — these beliefs do not mesh. In order for a person to believe that she is twenty-seven, she must not hold any belief that she is a different age.