I've been reading William James this week. A very long time ago, when I was a teenager discovering philosophy and libraries had Real Books in them, I tried to read James' Psychology, but I don't think I got very far. I'm reading the Pragmatism and Other Essays Penguin Classic and I have The Varieties of Religious Experience in the stock-cupboard.
Pragmatism is the book A J Ayer modelled Language, Truth and Logic on - the use of a single simple principle to cut swathes through metaphysics, morals and pointless disputes. I'm not too sure they don't cover much the same ground. James's bluff, breezy, conversational writing style influenced the authors of the "Big Book" of Alcoholics Anonymous (a work with which I am very familiar). The idea that we weave new information and experience into an existing web of belief and knowledge, possibly rejecting it if it doesn't fit, is one of Quine's Big Ideas - though Quine's formulation is usefully more detailed. It's also been travestied as "the coherence theory of truth".
Anyway, I found the quote rather apt in the light of my interest in mistakes. I'd slowly come to the realisation that one reason I didn't see wrong numbers is that I had no expectations as to what the numbers should look like - I wasn't looking for a particular result, and I wasn't looking because I didn't care about the result - I was more interested in the method of getting there and how to get there more quickly next time. So mistakes just sailed on straight past me.
Being "the warranted incapable" is not such a good position for an analyst to be in.
A couple of photographs of London, snatched during an inter-office trip...
Seven Dials, Covent Garden in the afternoon
St Paul's Courtyard, lunchtime
By the Tate Modern...
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