Phenomenology of certainty and belief. Reading William James

Abstract

This essay studies the analysis that the psychologist and philosopher William
James applies to the function of belief in relation to his concepts of the stream of
thought and process of knowledge. Furthermore, it pays attention to James’s phenomenology
of certainty within experience and to the explanation of the foundational
place of feelings in experience. In James’s thought we may call certainty only
what can provide a knowledge which stands in immediate relation to the inner
state: the images provided by individual depths are both the locus of perplexity
and the spring of certainty. The truth of beliefs is in this sense provisional upon
the outcome of the continuing experience of understanding and of the continuing
process of critical scrutiny.