Pragmatism and ordinary thought

For me, the most potent intersection of pragmatism and ordinariness lies in the fact that James unites philosophical thinking with ordinary thinking; that is, he says that what differentiates philosophy from other kinds of thought is aura and vocabulary; the same rules apply. My own particular phobia about philosophy has always had to do with an idea of myself as incapable of "thinking philosophically" -- that is, sufficiently rigorously, objectively, abstractly. James' writings, when I first encountered them, seemed to allow the kind of personal, subjective, interested (in both senses) thinking that I was doing into what I had perceived as the cordoned-off realm of philosophy. Feeling that way made me want to read more philosophy, which in turn positively affected my ability to read philosophy...and so runs the pragmatist circuit. Our ideas and desires and feelings affect the way things "really" are.

I'll quote here what has become a very important passage for me. James' description of the process of thought has been useful for me both in understanding my own thinking (both "ordinary" and "philosophical") and in understanding how my students navigate the texts and ideas I present them with.

The process here is always the same. The individual has a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that puts them to a strain. Somebody contradicts them; or in a reflective moment he discovers that they contradict each other; or he hears of facts with which they are incompatible; or desires arise in him which they cease to satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives. So he tries to change first this opinion, and then that (for they resist change very variously), until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter, some idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience and runs them into one another most felicitously and expediently.