William James's Pragmatic Notion of Reality

In this paper, it is shown that Lectures Five, Six, and Seven of William James's Pragmatism contain the following three interesting, but puzzling and often misunderstood, theses on reality: conceptual scheme pluralism, the thesis of the mutation of reality, and a humanist view of reality. Taken together, I consider these "James's pragmatic notion of reality." It is argued that James can be better interpreted as explaining and defending these three theses from an epistemological perspective, within a framework based on both his holistic model of belief revision and his notion of "three-fold realities." Finally, I investigate whether the objection that there are insufficient objective regulations on belief successfully challenges his model of belief revision and these three theses on reality.