ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by outlining Willard V. O. Quine’s “web of belief” model of theory confirmation, an aspect of his work that is often supposed to place him in community with pragmatists like William James in particular. Quine and James agree that we must manage our beliefs as a corporate body. They agree that pragmatic considerations like simplicity and elegance must enter the picture when a choice between beliefs or theories is underdetermined by available evidence. Quine famously concluded his attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction by claiming that the considerations we use to fit our scientific commitments with observation are “where rational, pragmatic”. James often credits Darwin with distinguishing the causes that produce a novel trait from the causes of that trait’s being preserved or eliminated in a population. James, scientific inquiry is a process that gets carried out in real, human time; epistemology aims at understanding how that entire process unfolds.
