ABSTRACT
James's warning against weeding out the human contribution in philosophy is a fundamental criticism of the price to be paid for a developed empiricism. William James's protracted struggle to convince his critics soundness of much the same point, namely that a commitment to seems like 'subjectivism' is not a commitment to abandoning rationality. Kuhn's urbane assurance that nothing in this thesis implies that good and decisive reasons are no longer to be found has seemed astonishing to his critics. W. K. Clifford in a sense James's Hume affirmed that is always wrong to believe anything on insufficient evidence evidence less than that of experience or valid argument. Rorty is more faithful to James's instincts but his distillation of the pragmatist core owes less to Pragmatism than to a larger Jamesian picture of philosophy. The orthodox defence of objectivity relies two ideas, the maintenance of interpersonal commensurability of perceptions, meanings and beliefs and elimination of this commensurability.
