Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Thanks to friend Henry for forwarding me a review of Cheryl Misak's recent book on pragmatism in England. I may never obtain the book, but I'll summarize here what the review says it says, and end with a quotation (from the book via review). The book recounts how, in 1908-09, Bertrand Russell, at Cambridge, developing his own logical atomistic views, took pragmatism to be an American re-working of a familiar foe, the coherence theory of truth distinctive to the Anglo-Hegelians. Russell was quite hostile to the coherence theory, and his view of this new variant of it from across the Atlantic was no more sunny. But, beginning with 1914, Russell was adopting pragmatic theses himself. By 1921 he had come around to the quite American understanding of belief itself as a "disposition to act."  It was Ramsey, though, not Russell, who made the Cambridge warming to pragmatic winds more official or explicit. For Ramsey, Peirce was THE pragmatist, and a central influence...

I have written before in this blog about the 'Bayesian' interpretation of probability. I have even discussed a construction of quantum mechanics that draws on Bayesianism. What I'd like to add today is a little bit of history. Bayesianism doesn't come from the Reverend Thomas Bayes. No more than Christianity comes from Jesus. No one seems to have thought Bayes' 18th century contributions to probability theory (real though they were) had a lot of philosophical weight until the early 20th century. It was Frank Ramsey who made that leap, who served as the Apostle Paul of our analogy. In the mid 1920s and through the early 1930s, Ramsey worked to axiomize a Bayesian/subjectivist approach to probability. [Ramsey is a relevant figure in the history of epistemology as well: he pioneered the minimalist account of truth.] H wrote, "[w]e have the authority both of ordinary language and of many great thinkers for discussing under the heading of probability what ap...