 There's two demands upon us with rationality. The first is to know the truth. Second is to avoid error. The idea by knowing the truth is to believe what's true or know what's true as opposed to believing something that's false. Also to actually know some truth, not just to completely withhold belief, to actually claim knowledge on some things. Now in this pursuit of knowledge and this pursuit of knowing the truth James is asking the question whether we must always know that we know. So that might get a little confusing. Well he makes a distinction between knowing that you know and then just simply knowing. Now what's perhaps surprising is James says sometimes you know but you don't know that you know and that's all right. To understand what James is doing here we have to put it in context. He's trying to make his way between Clifford and Pascal. Pascal offers what's been called Pascal's wager and it's not exactly an argument for the existence of God. Rather it's an argument that you should believe in God. It's not quite the same thing. So Pascal in this argument is not really offering any evidence for or against existence or the truth just merely the choice. So to illustrate what Pascal means there I mean there are two possibilities. Either God exists or God doesn't exist. And Pascal, according to Pascal you have two choices. Either you believe in God or you don't believe in God. Now suppose you believe in God and God exists. Pascal says well this is the best possible outcome because if you believe in God and God actually exists well then you get an eternity in heaven. But if you believe in God and God doesn't exist there's no real consequence. He simply lived a life of piety and holiness, morality and so what? There's no real big consequence either way. Let's take the other one. Suppose you don't believe in God and God doesn't exist. There's still no real consequence. Death is kind of the great equalizer for Pascal. Whether you believe in God exists or not the consequence is the same if God doesn't exist. Namely you know nothing. Suppose you don't believe in God and God does exist. That's the bad consequence according to Pascal. If you don't believe in God and God actually exists well you get you know an eternity in perhaps the warmest of locations. Now and we looked at Clifford in another video. So you know reference that video if you want to get the full explanation on Clifford's view. But it's important to remember that for James he understands Clifford to be saying that you have to know that you know before you can ascend to belief and for according to James so that means is that you have this evidence that's objective all right that's publicly available and you have something like an unwavering confidence in the belief before you can even act. Now James is going to reject this notion. He thinks that there's going to be at least some times not always but at least some times where you're not going to have this objective evidence and yet you still are allowed to ascend. You're still allowed to believe. James thinks he's going to get out of this dilemma between Clifford and Pascal and to start on his way he's going to make a distinction between a life hypothesis and a dead hypothesis. Hypothesis is just merely a belief that's proposed to somebody here so here believe this right that's a hypothesis. Now a life hypothesis is one that the person is already kind of willing to accept doesn't have any problem with even considering the possibility of that belief. A dead hypothesis is one that according to James it's just not even going to be considered by the individual. Now it's important to remember that for James whether a hypothesis is live or dead it's going to depend upon the individual not upon evidence. For James whether or not you believe something or can't believe something at first and somebody just depends upon what you're initially willing to believe just to begin with. So suppose I told you something like the following. Did you see that? There was a mermaid. You wouldn't believe me. There's no evidence that I could provide that there that there are a mermaid. Short of I don't know actually putting one right in front of you. It's not that it's not going to happen. I could promise you all that I want. I can swear up and down that I saw a mermaid. You still wouldn't believe that there's a mermaid and the reason why is you're not willing to accept that there's a mermaid pretty much from the beginning. This is a dead hypothesis. A hypothesis that you're just not willing to accept at least not without you know overwhelming evidence of the contrary. But suppose I told you something like this. Ooh a dolphin. You wouldn't necessarily believe me right away but the idea that there's a dolphin out there is at least possible. It's a live option. It's something that fits with what you already know about the water about the kind of life that exists out there. You don't necessarily have really great evidence for it. You know I'm sitting there trying to spot it a far distance away but it's at least a possibility. It's not a dead option like a mermaid. So one reply we might have to James from the beginning regarding this live versus dead hypothesis business is that you know you're believing something. So if you say something's a dead hypothesis or a live hypothesis regardless of what evidence provided you're believing something without any evidence. I mean Clifford would freak at this point like Clifford would have a fit about this live versus dead hypothesis business. James provides an argument or at least can't provide an argument saying look you know if we demand sufficient evidence for all of our beliefs as Clifford would have us do we're going to run into a huge problem. So you know just suppose it's true that all knowledge or all belief must be justified by some sufficient evidence. Well there's kind of a problem that pops up. I mean if all belief must be justified by some evidence well then we've got either one of two situations either there's some belief that is justified by itself and this is something you know some kind of foundation of belief or we have an infinite regress of belief. Now what James is getting at here is you know even if we're presented with some evidence we still have to consider you know if we give some evidence to believe the evidence right so then we need some sufficient evidence to believe that it's evidence so on and so forth. So that can get kind of sticky. Well the way out of this then is to say look we got one or two possibilities either we have some belief that justifies itself and then that belief is going to found everything else right it's going to justify everything else or we have an infinite regress of belief because if it's not a foundational belief we you know if we'd have no foundational belief then there's always going to be some kind of a regress of belief. Well it's just simply impossible that we can have an infinite regress of belief when we first of all our minds are finite right our minds can't hold that much evidence we can keep going and going and going and going and keep looking and looking and looking like you would never find any kind of evidence for any knowledge whatsoever including you know the initial claims. All right well then let's try the other way. Supposedly we have some kind of self-justified belief but the only thing that works and we talk about the whole history philosophy and James has talked about this as well but the only thing that really works is this evidence that you in fact exist. You know Russell's talked about this, Descartes talked about this even if everything around you is some kind of deception you're at least having experiences and if you're having experiences then there's something having experiences namely you. So there's this one belief it's just simply virtue of having experience. There is one belief that's foundational one belief that you from which you can start that just can't be doubted that you have for which you have sufficient evidence namely that you exist and you have experiences right but that belief alone doesn't justify much of anything else it's a really minimal belief you exist and you have experiences when you get to infer from that that you just you have experiences. You don't get to infer anything about your experiences telling you something about the world you don't get to infer anything that's even caused by anything else other than maybe your own mind right. So we saw some of this when we looked at Descartes when we looked at Russell. So what James is getting at here is if you were if you had this claim that all knowledge must be justified by sufficient evidence right every belief must be justified by sufficient evidence you're not going to have any knowledge whatsoever and if you don't have any knowledge whatsoever you fail at these rules for rationality because you fail to have at least some knowledge you know beyond this foundational belief you fail to have any knowledge that there's an exterior world. But something that James points out right away these rules are not equivalent to each other it's just simply false that if you follow one you're going to necessarily fulfill the other so suppose you spent your whole life trying to avoid error you could have the strictest standards of belief ever and not reach a single conclusion or you could just simply not believe anything in order to avoid error but then that would mean that you don't know any truths because you don't know anything on the same way suppose you spent your whole life trying to know truth but you maybe not are too picky about your methods of evidence right you could know a lot of truths you could accidentally stumble upon them but you probably also believe a lot of false things too so these rules while they're important for rationality they're not equivalent if follow one to the to an extreme or exclusively you're going to reject the other. So in addition to hypotheses we also had these options and James looks at three kinds of options so the first is is live. So a live option is when you have two hypotheses and each of them is live. If one of them is if you only have two options if you only have two beliefs and one of them is dead it's not a live option right because you're not going to believe the dead option. So a live option is when you have two hypotheses and each of them is live. Next is forced. Forced is when you have two beliefs and they are contradictory that means that you have to believe one and reject the other. If each of them are say they're just contrary beliefs well that's not forced because you can reject both of them. You can only accept you can at most accept one but you can also reject both of them right so that's not forced. You don't have to believe any one of them and with sub-country supposedly it's a sub-country you don't have to reject any one of them right. You suppose you have two hypotheses in the sub-country you don't have to reject one you can believe both if you want to but you're not forced into accepting one or rejecting the other. It's only when you have two beliefs that are contradictory where if one is true the others false and vice versa. That's when you have a forced option you're forced to accept one and finally momentous. It's where the belief has deep consequences. It's when the belief matters when the hypothesis is important in your life. So you had the option to believe one or two hypotheses and the decision between the two is going to affect the rest of your life. So here you know here's something that's not momentous right whether or not it's going to rain that's not momentous. I mean I'm not forced to believe one of those it's either going to rain or it's not going to. Okay you know that's contradictory but it doesn't make a difference in my life because I'm going to run to the car no matter what or go to my car no matter what. I don't have an umbrella for this I'm just going back and forth to my car it's 20 feet to my car so what. So it's not momentous. Ah. So with these three options you have live forced and momentous. When you have all three of these you have what James calls a genuine option. A genuine option. Now he doesn't mean that you know it's actually an option versus another. It's genuine in the sense that this is going to affect this is a matter of what you are. It's live. It's forced and it's momentous. So here we have it. We have the question of what we should believe. Clifford says we should only believe that for which we have sufficient evidence. James has provided problems for that. So what are we so what does he say we should do? Well it depends on whether or not the option to believe or withhold belief is genuine. If it's remember we have two rules right we have our two rules to know the truth and to avoid error. Sometimes those rules can conflict. Sometimes those rules can conflict. Okay well if it's not a genuine option if it's not a genuine option uh James says avoid error. Just avoid error. Okay uh in the reason so in that case you give him a whole belief or you wait till you get some sufficient evidence right wait till you get something that just really demonstrates the truth of one hypothesis over another. So you know if it's not a genuine option then one of three things is going to be the case. It's either either it's not going to be live either it's not going to or it's not going to be uh forced or it's not going to be momentous. If it's not live uh well you kind of if it's not live then it's not going to go anywhere to begin with. You're not going to consider the other option to be begin with. So you don't need to uh subscribe to it. You can just hold on to what you already believe. If it's not forced you don't need to uh believe one or the other right then then there you can wait for the evidence right you can with whole belief from from one to the other. If it's not forced it's not contradictory. You can either with whole belief or subscribe it doesn't really matter at this point. Or it's not momentous. If it's not momentous who cares right just with whole belief until you have that sufficient evidence if you never have the sufficient evidence so what it's not going to affect your life. Okay so if it's not genuine void error that's the rule to follow a void error. If it is a genuine option James says you side with knowing the truth you follow that rule and you risk error you risk error. So if it's genuine one of two beliefs is going to be the case. One or two beliefs are live for you. But each holds a real possibility and you're forced to believe one or the other. You can't hold on to both. You're forced to have one or the other. Even trying to with whole belief is the same as saying it's false for James. Even with whole belief it's the same as saying it's false. So even if you try to say well I'll know with whole belief and in favor of you know this idea of waiting for sufficient evidence it's the same thing as believing it's false without sufficient evidence. So James says even if you do something like this you're still acting contrary to the rule. So for James some people at least some of the time are going to have genuine options in terms of belief. There's going to be some questions that are not going to be subject to these to this demand of certitude that Clifford has given us. For those people with these genuine options they have the right to believe and they have the right to believe as they see fit.