# Passional Logic: The Meaningful Meaninglessness
Published: 2026-02-07
Canonical: https://journal.xiaotianfanx.com/journal/passional-logic-the-meaningful-meaninglessness

On Will to Believe by Williams James, Clifford's moralism, Logical Positivism, and the "other minds" problem.

 

	I'm actually in a bit of a rush to write this post at 10 p.m., and I should really be focusing on my transfer application. But I'm indeed much inspired by one of the class readings from this week. Although I've already made another discussion post on a different reading that satisfies the course requirement, I still feel this particular passage is worth discussing. It links back to my previous posts—as all my posts tend to be interconnected—but it also links back to my takeaways and realizations from last semester after taking Logic.

 

	Let's start with the readings still. (BTW, I'm experimenting with a voice-to-text transcription tool to write some of my journals and posts in a more effective and fluid way. Let's see how it goes.)

 

	Essentially, William James used the passage to make the point that there are certain choices—especially those that are "live, forced, and momentous" in his words—and that often cannot be resolved by reasoning. (If you're interested in how James defined the three words in his essay, you may like to refer back to the original piece. I shall not ramble on so much on those, as it's not exactly what this post is about.) For those questions, James argues it is not only permissible but necessary to allow our 'passional' nature to play a role in making a decision. Indeed, in such specific circumstances, allowing our passional nature to influence belief is, for James, a justified act. This obviously contradicts the view that we must rely exclusively on evidence or logic to form any belief—the case in point William James was responding to, or rebutting, is Clifford's moralism, which posits a strict ethics of belief:





It is always, everywhere, and for anyone wrong to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.



Such irresponsible belief has serious moral and societal consequences.



Consequently, where evidence is lacking, one should suspend judgment rather than risk unwarranted belief.



	I have no intention of taking sides here or rebutting either one of them, as there are many arguments that could be made against each stance. I believe that both of their views could be applicable in different contexts, especially considering that what James is preaching is, by definition, applicable to a very specific context that he defined with the three words. Anyhow, James rebuts Clifford by saying that Clifford's position is, in fact, contradictory to what the claim itself claims. According to James, Clifford's own imperative—the demand to believe only upon sufficient evidence—is itself a passional judgment, not one derivable from pure evidence or logic. It's a choice to prioritize avoiding error over potentially gaining truth, carrying its own inherent risk, and reflecting a particular 'will' just as much as any other momentous decision.

 

	This particular logic, amusingly, which James used to point out the flaw in Clifford's claim, is quite similar to what I had when considering logic and reasoning, and that leads us back to the class logic I took last semester. The story basically goes like this: Before taking the class Logic, although I hadn't formally studied any formal logic, I did have some degree of knowledge about the history of logic, let's say, particularly focusing on the period around which logic positivism was the thing, and about the Vienna Circle, and how their attempt eventually dissolves primarily due to internal inconsistencies. Its central tenet, the verification principle—that a statement is meaningful only if it is empirically verifiable or a tautological truth—could not itself be empirically verified nor was it a tautology, thus failing its own test for meaningfulness. (Not to mention how it excluded or dismissed many of the historically considered deep and fundamental philosophical questions from being meaningful.) Therefore, when I entered the class, although I knew that logic is pragmatically very useful—to some extent, modern technology is at large fundamentally built on digital logic—and I found myself relatively good at doing such kind of things, I was quite pessimistic back then in terms of how it would enlighten more of the epistemological pursuit—in that sense, it was even "meaningless." (Not to say I am an optimist now.) However, surprisingly, fortunately, or luckily, I did come across some realization in the class other than learning formal logic.

 

	The first realization happened in one of our review sessions before one of the midterm exams. What it was reminding me of is actually quite simple: it is just the existence of the problem, or the concept, of the other mind (in a broader, daily sense, of course, that addresses the difficulty of knowing how others' minds operate or why they hold certain beliefs beyond its original concern with the epistemological challenge of knowing if other conscious minds exist). For sure, the other mind is something that (at least from my perspective) I should have noticed, or I thought I had noticed, accepted, and realized a long, long while ago. Some of the examples I may use regarding the concept of "other minds" involve people who are so strongly against AI that they claim they will never use it or even consider trying it. To some extent, that stance is undecipherable to me. Although I have tried to understand different perspectives on this matter—and even developed my own theory, which you can check out in my other posts [1, 2]—one particular case still stands out. A friend of mine shared a post about a certain group of PhD candidates who refuse to use AI at all. This was initially quite a shock to me, as I perceive academia as one of the fields that is, or at least should be, actively adapting to new technologies, particularly AI and LLMs. To me, this represents an 'other mind' phenomenon—a deep divergence in perspective or reasoning that feels completely incomprehensible without further context or insight into their underlying framework. Fortunately, there was some context behind that group of PhD candidates—their particular field of study is child psychology. Of course, this single piece of information itself does not completely explain or justify the phenomenon or their choice, but at least it provides a starting point for me to reason upon and try to understand their stance. In this case, it seems at least understandable due to many concerns, I presume.

 

	Now, coming back to how it triggered my further realization of the other mind. The context of logic for this story is that, at least the kind of logic we were studying, first-order predicate logic itself, is positively or factually quite limited and/or, in other words, quite defined. So that everything should be rather clear when it's laid out. From my perspective, given the 'other mind' phenomenon (or more formally, the often-vast epistemic and conceptual gaps between individuals), one might expect logic—with its formalized rules—to be a domain where we should converge on consensus and identical conclusions, at least formally. Well, indeed, back then, at that particular moment, we finally arrived at the same conclusion formally. But what actually scintillated me was how fundamentally different it could be when different people approach the same argument or the same deduction within a well-defined logic framework, and even aiming at the same conclusion, to an extent that I myself may never have thought of that approach alone.

 

	The other realization that struck me back then was the ambiguity of natural language. Again, this is another thing that seems quite understandable and acceptable; at least in my mind, it had been accepted and realized a long, long while ago. In fact, my motivation for using poetry to express myself a couple of years ago was exactly rooted in the ambiguity of natural language that I perceived as conducive to my encoded manner of self-expression. There are two examples I think worth mentioning: One is a very common logic transcription problem or convention to differentiate between "if" and "only if," and how their transcriptions differ from each other based on how we define the connective "horseshoe."

 

	The second real "aha moment" came to me when I was trying to apply our first-order predicate logic to a real-life philosophical meme argument. The argument goes like this:





The car has windows and can move.



The house has windows, but it cannot move.



Therefore, it is not the windows that allow the car to move, but something else.



	I'll skip the details of how I tried to transcribe it and have the argument proved using PL (Predicate Logic). It turned out that my direct transcription of the assumptions present in the argument was not enough to lead to the conclusion—and that's the first level of my realization: sometimes, or in fact, most of the time, in real life, the premises are just hidden in the chaos. We actually never know what precisely the premises of a problem are, especially when it comes to the ones in others' minds.

 

	This particular case, however, resonated even more profoundly with late Wittgenstein's concept of the language-game. For the particular kind of problems the meme argument belongs to, as my professor suggested, Predicate Logic (PL) may not be enough to transcribe them at all, so we may need causal logic. But what about other problems that causal logic cannot transcribe? Maybe we need temporal logic. Maybe we need spatial logic. Maybe we need X, Y, Z, and so on. The logic systems may eventually be a finite set of rules crafted with a specific purpose to accommodate a specific kind of question. But at least to my worldview, our reality in the universe is infinite. When we try to apply our finite logic systems to this infinite and chaotic reality, there is always some part of it that cannot be transcribed and formulated into logic. In that sense, I felt that I was experiencing an analogous thought and, thus, a dissolution process as the logical positivists, as my finite logical tools encountered the infinite ambiguity of reality. I found myself inadvertently caught in the very language game and the ambiguity of natural language I thought I had already understood and prepared for. The game still got me.

 

	All told, the "cruel" realizations I encountered in logic turned out to echo with what James suggested: eventually, beyond logic and reasoning, lie problems, questions, and choices that must be met by our passional nature.

 

	If to use James's framework, my takeaway is this:  it is precisely because logic—and reasoning itself—is internally incomplete and inconsistent, or, at least, the belief system that considers logic as the ultimate solution is inconsistent, we must acknowledge that placing logic and reasoning onto the pedestal is, paradoxically, a passional choice born out of our passional nature. And that passional choice is as justifiable as any other passional choice. This decision to place logic on a pedestal, born from our own will, is ultimately as justifiable (or unjustifiable) as any other passional commitment. It is precisely within this acknowledged incompleteness and inconsistency, our persistent choice not only to rely on these systems but to communicate through them—even via ambiguous natural language, giving our best effort—that I find beauty and the grounds for respectful discourse.

 

	Where logic and reasoning falter, the will to believe may not just be an option, but the only path to carry on. Change my mind.

 



 

P.S.

 

	Nevertheless,  it's crucial to distinguish my current perspective from a strict Jamesian pragmatism. If we zoom out a bit from this particular passage of "The Will to Believe"—and take a look at his pragmatist standpoint, we realize that truth or belief for him is what has "value" in experience. For James, the will to believe is only sound if the decision made creates great value in our lives; it is also a matter of justifying the passion of belief in terms of ultimately building towards a more functional worldview. That said, although I don't wanna spend time talking about how pragmatism falls short in many cases, I am obviously engaging in and establishing another language game by somewhat adapting James's theory or criteria but actually applying it in a peculiar and purposefully altered way, accustomed to my conclusion.

 

	Coming back to the case of that group of PhD candidates and the meme argument, my initial failure—or where I fell short—was in applying logic and reasoning to try to capture ostensibly simple yet categorically beyond-the-medium scenarios. Logic itself could be public, the axioms and premises residing in other minds are, I've realized, fundamentally private. My inability to understand that group of PhD candidates stemmed from the attempt to map their consciousness and conclusions onto my own logical frameworks; consequently, I am inevitably doomed to find the premises missing and the axioms misaligned. In other words, it's not a bug in communication, but a feature of our understanding. Therefore, to my understanding now, if we do want to truly understand an argument—or a person, in this case—there's no way to merely rely on the syntax of their words. Instead, we must account for their passional logic with the unstated axioms and premises in their mind. To do so, we must shift the focus from within logical frameworks to mapping what is around and outside the frameworks themselves—or, in another analogy, delve deeper below the surface to see the massive iceberg under the tip of reasoning. 

 

	To conclude with another "game," Gödel demonstrated that any sufficiently complex system contains truths that it cannot prove, and more importantly, that no system can demonstrate its own consistency from within—if even arithmetic cannot prove its own foundations, how can a human life? Early Wittgenstein would say that's why we must leave the rest to revelation. And that revelation seems to me, in my current language game, a sober, purposeful, passional choice. The will to believe, in that case, should not be a pragmatist rule of thumb or conflated into carte blanche to grant "everything goes," but rooted in our humility, responsibility, and, paradoxically, rationality.