Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

In a Facebook philosophy group one participant asked the others: "What are your thoughts on being a truly rational person?" I liked my own answer so much I thought I'd reproduce it here. It is direct from the Jamesian playbook. Rationality consists of two very different pulls: one toward the general and one toward the particular. We always get a sense of rationality when we learn that two different-seeming things are in some respect the same. When the orbit of the moon is explained by a law that also covers the fall of an apple, or when electricity and magnetism turn out to be the same force. The rational impulse is toward the general. On the one hand, we have a natural fear of vagueness and so of generality. We want to know the particular workings of things. "Let's be specific." That too is a rational drive.  The encyclopedia is as rational a phenomenon, even as  much an ideal of rationality, as the concise governing law.    ...

In the February issue of Harper's , in the "Easy Chair" column near the front, John Crowley has a column about the Encyclopedia Britannica, and in general about the fun of old-fashioned alphabetized reference books, the sort of thing we used for reference before we had cyberspace and wikipedia. Given the alphabetized structure, Crowley writes, "any search for anything passes through things that have nothing in common with it but an initial letter. It's impossible not to abstract something from some of them. Look up 'Dog' ( Damascu to Educ ) to study the attractive plates ... and you may notice the nearby entry for 'Dogger Bank' ('an extensive shoal in the North Sea') and the sea battle fought there on January 24, 1915, which you had not previously heard of." Indeed. That was and still is the fun of browsing through such works. Soon Crumb is on to the sales tactics of the old-fashioned door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen. But t...