ABSTRACT
The three tenets of James’s radical empiricism outline a framework for a more extended epistemology. They indicate the corrections he wished to make to traditional empiricism’s atomism and its consequent failure to appreciate conjunctive relations, and they prepare the way for the major illustrations of those conjunctive relations. The most obvious of these is provided by James’s account of the self and its transitive stream of consciousness. But in the Essays in Radical Empiricism and The Meaning of Truth James offers other illustrations in his treatment of the central problems of knowledge. That treatment conforms very plainly to his three tenets of empiricism and to his pragmatism. It stresses the holistic way in which each part of experience rests on other parts and insists that relations between the parts of our experience may themselves also be parts of that experience. It emphasises too the function which ideas have in our experience. As in his account of truth that function is described mainly in terms of those ideas ‘leading’ our beliefs or enquiries in certain directions via ‘intervening’ experiences towards a ‘terminus’, which may verify them or fail to do so.1
