James on changing an opinion

[From Bruce Abbott (960608.1145 EST)]

PCTers will find some familiar ideas expressed in the material presented
below from William James. You can find this and many other interesting
James quotes at:

http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~mpajare/james.html

(Try rephrasing the process described below by James in terms of
disturbances, error signals, conflict, and action.)

Bruce

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                How an individual settles into a new opinion

                               William James

The process is always the same.

The individual has a stock of old opinions already.

The individual meets a new experience that puts some of these old
opinions to a strain:

     Somebody contradicts them.
     In a reflective moment, the individual discovers that they
        contradict each other.
     The individual hears of facts with which they are incompatible.
     Desires arise in the individual which the old opinions fail to
        satisfy.

The result is inward trouble, to which the individual's mind till then
   had been a stranger.

The individual seeks to escape from this inward trouble by modifying
   the old opinions.

     The individual saves as many of the old opinions as is possible
        (for in this matter we are all extreme conservatives).
     Old opinions resist change very variously.
     The individual tries to change this and then that.

Finally, some new opinion comes up which the individual can graft upon
   the ancient stock of old opinions with a minimum of disturbance to
   the others.

     The new opinion mediates between the stock and the new experience.
     The new opinion runs the stock and the new experience into one
        another most felicitously and expediently.

The new opinion is then adapted as the true one.

     The new opinion preserves the older stock of truths with a
        minimum of modification, stretching them just enough to make
        them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as familiar
        as the case leaves possible.
     An outre� explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never
        pass for a true account of a novelty.

The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of
   his old order standing.

New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions.

The point I now urge you to observe particularly is the part played by
   the older truths . . . their influence is absolutely controlling.
   Loyalty to them is the first principle; for by far the most usual way
   of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious
   rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or
   to abuse those who bear witness for them.

                               from Pragmatism

[From Bill Powers (970608.1157 MDT)]

Bruce Abbott (960608.1145 EST)--

PCTers will find some familiar ideas expressed in the material >presented

below from William James.

Thanks much for that. The only thing missing from William James'
truthsaying is the observation that there is a spectrum of attitudes, which
range from the uncritical embracing of any new idea simply because it's new
to the total inability to admit novelty into any point of view once it has
achieved the status of belief.

Best,

Bill P.