Here's an excerpt from an article on William James, on intentional
philosophical "stance":
"
James chose to believe in free will not because he thought it was true
but because it was necessary to his well-being. Like the mountain
climber facing a life-or-death jump, he simply screwed up his courage
and told himself that he was free. "In such a case," James wrote about
the mountain climber, "(and it belongs to an enormous class) the part of
wisdom as well as of courage is to believe what is in the line of your
needs, for only by such belief is the need fulfilled.
James's career involved a progressive generalization of this thought.
What began as a simple, almost physical necessity--a personal need to
believe in free will in order to escape crushing moral
paralysis--blossomed into a full-fledged philosophical doctrine.
Beliefs, James eventually decided, were adaptations, like the giraffe's
long neck or the tiger's claws: they were justifiable only insofar as
they helped people to get around in the world. To believe what one
needed to believe was no mere sign of weakness, as some of James's
contemporaries contended. Rather, it showed a healthy understanding of
what the process of believing was all about. In particular James argued
that we are not obligated to be determinists, atheists, or materialists
just because science might say that those are the correct and true
doctrines. Ultimately science itself should be evaluated in terms of a
higher moral question: To what extent are scientific beliefs conducive
to human happiness?
"
"
There has to be a relation here.
Choosing to believe <<--->> stances.
Ed Stutsman <ed.stutsman@the-spa.com>