Will to believe doctrine

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Cover to a collection of James' essays.

"The Will to Believe" is the title of William James's classic lecture (published in 1897) defending the right to violate evidentialism in cases of hypothesis venturing (hypothetico-deductivism) and self-fulfilling prophecies. The work is controversial because James' attempts to use these allowed violations of evidentialism to justify beliefs generally only adopted on faith: freewill, God, immortality, and so on. James' doctrine is sometimes mocked as the "wish to believe doctrine." James himself changed the name of the doctrine several times. First appearing as "the duty to believe," then "the subjective method," then "the will to believe" and finally being recast by James as "the right to believe." The reason James' hypothetico-deductivism is able to justify positions often not believed to be verifiable under any method, is that James' pragmatism allows him to use the consequences of the hypothesis (emotional consequences in addition to empirical consequences) as evidence for that hypothesis' truth. Therefore, James allows us to adopt God as a hypothesis without evidence and then verify that hypothesis by what fruits the belief brings us in our life.

Throughout James’ career, he would offer descriptions of what sort of empirical evidence would verify this-or-that metaphysical claim. Ultimately, James had never been too concerned with proving the existence of God. His main concern was justifying beliefs in freewill, possibility, pluralism, and in particular, in the possibility of morality. In the following passage, James utilizes his will to believe doctrine to justify a belief that "this is a moral world":

It cannot then be said that the question, Is this a moral world? Is a meaningless and unverifiable question because it deals with something non-phenomenal. Any question is full of meaning to which, as here, contrary answers lead to contrary behavior. And it seems as if in answering such a question as this we might proceed exactly as does the physical philosopher in testing an hypothesis. [….] So here: the verification of the theory which you may hold as to the objectively moral character of the world can consist only in this,--that if you proceed to act upon your theory it will be reversed by nothing that later turns up as your action’s fruits; it will harmonize so well with the entire drift of experience that the latter will, as it were, adopt it. [….] If this be an objectively moral universe, all acts that I make on that assumption, all expectations that I ground on it, will tend more and more completely to interdigitate with the phenomena already existing. [….] While if it be not such a moral universe, and I mistakenly assume that it is, the course of experience will throw ever new impediments in the way of my belief, and become more and more difficult to express in its language. Epicycle upon epicycle of subsidiary hypothesis will have to be invoked to give to the discrepant terms a temporary appearance of squaring with each other; but at last even this resource will fail. (William James, "The Sentiment of Rationality")

The hypothetico-deductivism James developed in his "Will to Believe" lecture was later extended by his protégé F.C.S. Schiller in his lengthy essay "Axioms as Postulates." In this work, Schiller downplays the connection between James' doctrine and semi-religious positions like God and immortality. Instead, Schiller stresses the doctrine's ability to justfy our beliefs in the uniformity of nature, causality, space, time, and other philosophic doctrines that have generally been considered to be empirically unverifiable.

Today, James' "The Will to Believe" continues to be widely read and debated. It, and W.K. Clifford's essay "The Ethics of Belief" are touchstones for many contemporary debates over evidentialism, faith, and overbelief. James' doctine is today standardly referred to as either the will to believe doctrine or the right to believe doctrine.