William James begins The Will To Believe by introducing a slightly technical usage of some very ordinary words. On page 3, WJ introduces “genuine” options as “of the forced, living, and momentous kind”. Presumably, “genuine” options are a subset of options generally and the implication is that “genuine” options exemplify or are paradigmatic cases of options. Other non-”genuine” options qualify as options from their resemblance to these “genuine” options. Although WJ’s entire project is based around the categorization of religious faith as a “genuine” option, he rarely uses the term. Other than section I and section X, the only other place he uses the term is in his “thesis” on page 11. Consider these two statements from section I and his “thesis” in section IV:
G1: “genuine” options are “of the forced, living, and momentous kind” (3)
G2: “[we — you/me/everybody] not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds” (11, ital. WJ’s).
G1 adds three more terms to WJ’s terminological scheme and I don’t think it is a stretch to say that WJ sees the following equation in G1:
G = Living + Forced + Momentous (LFM)
LFM is jointly sufficient, but I think it is also safe to say that LFM is necessary — all three and only those three criteria must be met for them to be “genuine” options. G2 simply states: we may and must decide “genuine” options. In this section I will argue that G1 and G2 are roughly synonymous. “Living” options are the “may” portion of G2 and “forced” and “momentous” together add up to the “must” portion. Finally, the clause at the end of G2 about options that can’t be decided on “intellectual grounds” are included within WJ’s “living” options and it is not a subset of “genuine” options. Again, my intention is to present them as WJ has them in mind (in the next section I will argue that he sneaks a fourth criteria included in G1). In the rest of this section I will present and discuss these two statements.
G1: Living + Forced + Momentous
G1 contains three more terms in WJ’s terminological scheme. These three occur at one extreme of three spectrums of beliefs. In WJ’s terminological scheme, “living” is defined against “dead” options, “forced” is defined against “avoidable” options and “momentous” is defined against “trivial” options. Briefly,
Living-Dead distinguishes “real” possibilities from those that aren’t “real”. These “dead” hypotheses are either discarded on “intellectual grounds” or are mere theoretical possibilities that don’t impact our everyday lives. In short, living-dead describes the perceived possibilities each individual is immediately concerned with in their lived experience.
Forced-Avoidable describes options where there is or is not an option to defer judgement and WJ seems to have exclusive or binary options in mind — two possibilities, no more no less.
Momentous-Trivial options are pretty self-explanatory. Something is a “momentous” option if and only if the (at least anticipated) life impact of the current and immediate option is weighty — you could be missing out “even now”.
I will discuss “living” options next, but at time T, you can either do it or not. Perhaps you could do it later at some T2, but that is not the question. At time T you can either do it or not. This is a binary option. There is no waiting when doing it now. Consider boarding a steamer around the world in the 1800s. This choice will have an enormous and irreversible effect on your life. Consider spitting out your chewing gum out right now. You would have to struggle to conceive of a more trivial option. I will discuss these in even greater length below and will finally argue that his picture could be seen to be inconsistent and unclear and some criteria overlap, so I have slightly expanded and refined the criteria for “genuine” options.
On “Living” Options
In the second sentence of section I WJ gives us a definition of a “living” hypothesis: “A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed.” To my ears, this sounds like a loose and informal definition, but WJ is very familiar with philosophy and he is discussing philosophical matters so I think this must be considered a strict philosophers’ definition: a statement that picks out all the “genuine” hypotheses and only the “genuine” hypotheses. Although it sounds a bit informal, I think it is actually a simple and complete definition working within WJ’s terminological scheme. There are three important components to this statement that I will use to structure the discussion in this section. First, he uses the word “appeal”. Next, “living” hypotheses are “a real possibility” and last is “to him to whom it is proposed”. I will discuss each below, but here is the tl;dr version: “living” options are intellectually irresolvable and both possibilities occupy the imagination/mind as equal options. If you got this far, then you might like the much longer piece of writing that this is excerpted from when it is done which might not be for a couple months at least.
