ABSTRACT
William James held that the 'difference between monism and pluralism is perhaps the most pregnant of all the differences in philosophy', and he himself came down firmly on the side of a thoroughgoing philosophical pluralism. James regards both percepts and concepts as indispensable throughout all human experience. The stream of experience during any given passing moment is an indefinitely complex presentation of aspects and characters potentially available for conceptual isolation and generalisation. Vicious abstractionism generates paradoxes through a use of abstract terms as 'positively excluding all that their definition fails to include'. Instrumentalism in the philosophy of science generally rests upon the notion that there is a basis of theoretically neutral observations. Both the scheme-relativity and the truth-convergence strategies focus upon the role of conceptual schemes in constituting various points of view on the world. In general, to the extent that the plenitude response goes beyond the scheme-relativity strategy it seems to me to be highly problematic.
