Works in Progress

Carrying Gold to California: "The Will to Believe" as a Work of Philosophy of Science

Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy (Indiana University Press) Volume 60, Number 2, Spring 2024; pp. 205-233

10.2979/csp.00027

William James argued that certain beliefs require a leap of faith before sufficient evidence becomes available—and his paradigm example of such beliefs is taken from science. Scientific knowledge often begins with a weakly supported and underdeveloped proposal, laden with contrary evidence, and plagued by internal inconsistencies. Consequently, the proposal often garners limited interest. Initially, a novel scientific proposal only appeals to a small group of scientists who instinctually find something in the proposal that strikes them as profoundly right. Motivated by faith, they are convinced that once the hypothesis has been further developed, revised, and its full promise made good on over the course of years or decades of hard work, that their early belief will ultimately be vindicated. The present paper contends that James' "The Will to Believe" justifies religious faith on precisely the same grounds. James' defense of faith is an attempt to apply his views about belief ahead of sufficient evidence in scientific knowledge formation to defend a religious believer's faith. The relationship between belief and evidence when it comes to the religious hypotheses is—as James puts it—analogous to California's gold. California is where one travels to bring gold back from, carrying gold to California is to get matters backwards; likewise, belief is the means of discovering scientific and religious truth, to demand evidence before belief is the wrong way around.

The Need for God and the Problem of Evil in William James’ Moral Philosophy

Sophia (Article Under Review)

How can we maintain the reality and significance of human moral concerns in a universe that science has revealed as utterly indifferent to us? This paper follows William James' philosophical struggle to answer this question—from his early embrace of his father's religious monism, through a middle period of atheistic scientism, to his mature position advocating for belief in a finite God. While James is often read as defending religious faith on purely pragmatic grounds, I argue that instead James' belief can only be understood as part of his lifelong project to recognize evil's reality and significance. James' intellectual development reveals a consistent concern with preserving the legitimacy of our moral responses to evil—regret, anger, and the strenuous effort that genuine moral struggle demands. His father Henry James Sr.'s Swedenborgian theology viewed evil as merely part of God's perfect unity, making genuine moral action blasphemous. Rejecting this, young William initially turned to atheistic empiricism, which seemed to acknowledge evil's reality. However, the deterministic implications of scientific materialism proved equally problematic, leaving no room for the free agency that moral responsibility requires. The solution James develops involves a voluntaristic embrace of free will, followed by his mature religious position that posits a finite God engaged alongside humanity in cosmic moral struggle. I demonstrate that James' turn to religion stems not from its practical benefits or the inspirational need for belief in God, but from his view that only within a larger spiritual order can the evils we encounter possess the genuine significance they appear to demand from us. In a purely naturalistic universe, human suffering remains cosmically insignificant—a problem James finds philosophically and existentially unacceptable given our pre-theoretical experience of evil's overwhelming importance.

From the Problem of Universals to Inquiry, Meaning, and Truth: The Medieval Genealogy of C.S. Peirce’s Pragmatism

Proceedings of the C.S. Peirce 2025 International Congress (Book Chapter Under Review)

It is often overlooked that C.S. Peirce not only expected his pragmatic maxim to cut away metaphysical rubbish, but also to correct the overzealous verificationism of positivists like Auguste Comte. Peirce saw this kind of verificationism as a form of nominalism in the tradition of William of Ockham—a view he had once accepted, but whose rejection set Peirce on the path to his mature philosophy. Hence why Peirce spoke of "the two offices of pragmatism": to combat both emptily loquacious metaphysics and excessive nominalism. But why was Peirce so anti-nominalist? Because it is only by treating universals as real that Peirce believed we can make sense of scientific prediction. On Peirce’s view, new ideas gain meaning through their role in enabling scientific prediction by way of abductive inference (that is, the introduction of a new idea to explain a surprising empirical pattern). But such prediction requires more than giving a mere name to an observed empirical pattern; it depends on the existence of real projectable generalities—laws, kinds, habits, or powers of a non-nominalist, non-Humean sort. At the same time, the introduction of a new idea by abduction allows for no surplus meaning beyond what is needed to support empirically explanatory and predictive power. Peirce is thus led directly to both his pragmatic criterion of meaning as well as his accounts of truth and reality, accounts which accommodate a realism about universals through the thought of Duns Scotus rather than Plato. This paper shows how Peirce’s development on abduction, truth, and meaning all find their start in his embrace of real abstractness or generality (what he called Thirdness). It offers a unified reading of Peirce’s intellectual development, grounded in his originating commitment to scholastic realism and culminating in his accounts of reality, truth, abduction, and, ultimately, the two offices of pragmatism.

How to Achieve Temporally Extended Agency in Artificial Agents Using Intra-Personal Collective Agency

Journal of Social Ontology, Special Issue: Social Ontology Faces the Future (Article Under Review)

What makes an artificial system a genuine agent? Most discussions focus on the synchronic features of agency—those features that belong to a system at a single point in time. This paper argues that diachronic agency—the capacity to act as a unified agent over time—is a necessary condition for artificial agents to qualify as genuine agents. Moreover, I contend that understanding diachronic agency will require importing ideas from the philosophy of collective agency. My central proposal is that temporally extended agency in an individual AI system is best modeled as a form of intra-personal group agency. The paper begins by distinguishing thin and thick conceptions of AI agency. Thin models, such as those that rely on mere Turing Test success, fall short given their failure to require of AI systems such things as embodiment or stable representational commitments. Thick models, by contrast, risk setting the bar too high. And while my sympathies lie more with thick than thin accounts, I acknowledge that genuine agency need not require every feature that such accounts sometimes demand. Still, even thick models often fail to require a feature that would address what I take to be a crucial question: what ensures that the agent today and the agent tomorrow are part of the same agent? That is, what is required to make the AI agent temporally extended? To answer this, I draw from theories of collective agency and team reasoning (to include the work of Margaret Gilbert, Raimo Tuomela, Pekka Mäkelä, Natile Gold, Robert Sugden, and others). I argue that the shared deliberative standpoint of diachronic agency is a special case of collective agency, where the group is spread out across time instead of space. That is, we should think of an agent extended over time as composed of multiple time-slices or sub-agents that must coordinate from a shared “we” perspective in order to act as one. This view reveals something important that current AI systems lack: they do not coordinate with their future selves. They lack the deliberative infrastructure required for temporally extended self-governance. Without this, they fall short of the rich kind of agency that we humans possess and that is often too quickly claimed on their behalf.