Passage (William James, *The Will to Believe*, 1896, Section I): "Let us give the name of *hypothesis* to anything that may be proposed to our belief; and just as the electricians speak of live and dead wires, let us speak of any hypothesis as either *live* or *dead*. A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature — it refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is completely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the Mahdi's followers), the hypothesis is among the mind's possibilities: it is alive. This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual thinker. They are measured by his willingness to act. Next, let us call the decision between two hypotheses an *option*. Options may be of several kinds. They may be — 1, *living* or *dead*; 2, *forced* or *avoidable*; 3, *momentous* or *trivial*; and for our purposes we may call an option a *genuine* option when it is of the forced, living, and momentous kind. " Which statement best captures the author's central claim about the liveness or deadness of a hypothesis?
ALiveness and deadness are inherent properties of a hypothesis itself, independent of who considers it.
BA hypothesis is live or dead depending on whether it appeals as a real possibility to the particular thinker, not by any intrinsic feature.
CA hypothesis is dead only when no one anywhere in the world finds it credible.
DThe liveness of a hypothesis is determined by the strength of the logical arguments in its favor.
Answer & Solution
Correct answer: B. A hypothesis is live or dead depending on whether it appeals as a real possibility to the particular thinker, not by any intrinsic feature.
James is explicit: "This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual thinker." The whole Mahdi example is constructed to show this relativity — the same hypothesis is dead for an American audience but alive for an Arab.
- **A** is the position James explicitly denies ("not intrinsic properties").
- **C** sets the bar too high; James's account works at the level of the individual thinker, not the world.
- **D** introduces a criterion (logical argument) that James never invokes. The criterion he names is "willingness to act."
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