...James also thinks inquiry needs to be conducted in a scientific fashion, but especially in philosophical inquiry, he doesn't think this should be done using jargon, in a technical fashion. James's outlook here is evolutionary—he suggests that if natural selection operates on physical traits in populations of organisms, then a kind of selection may operate on ideas in an ecology of discourse. In the short-run, the ideas that proliferate may well be inferior in a host of ways to the ideas technical science produces. But on James's view, what counts in the long run (again, thinking especially of philosophy here) is the ideas that are adopted and passed along by *everyone,* not just by trained professionals. What makes those ideas true, for James, is that the ideas are in some sense adopted and carried forward by the entire community. And the entire community can't engage with ideas that can only be expressed in jargon.
So the case for James's account being the more promising pragmatist option when it comes to objectivity (at least in philosophy) rests on the relative size of the community of inquiry. On James's model, what's true is what sticks in the long run, from generation to generation, among all humans, not just the cognoscenti. It's obviously debatable whether biases and distortions are more likely to be canceled out in larger communities, but that's the (in my view not implausible) assumption on which Jamesean objectivity hinges...
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