Friendship and Over-Belief in Nehamas and James

In “The Will to Believe,” William James argues that there are cases in which we must place more belief in a hypothesis than our evidence warrants: when such “over-belief” is necessary to access the evidence that could confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis. One of James's examples is meeting a potential new friend: in order to find out whether the possibility of friendship exists, you must believe in it more than your current evidence warrants. This chapter interprets Nehamas's account of friendship, which understands it as an ongoing bet that the relationship will reveal things about both friends that they will continue to affirm, as a deeper, more expansive version of James's picture, also involving over-belief in a hypothesis as a necessary condition of determining its truth, which strengthens James's argument by making vivid an irreplaceable good that we can only access by believing beyond our evidence prompted by emotion and desire.