The chickens had learned that if they pecked at the lever the door would open, leading to food, a reward. James went one step further. To all intents and purposes, he said, the chickens believed that if they pecked at the lever the door would open. As he put it, ‘Their beliefs were rules for action.’ And he thought that such rules applied more generally. ‘If behaving as though we have free will, or as if God exists, gets us the results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true…“The truth” is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the
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