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. " Based on the passage, which of the following is **most likely** to count as a *genuine* option in James's sense?
AChoosing between two flavors of ice cream at a shop you visit often.
BDeciding whether to bring an umbrella on a casual walk.
CAccepting or declining a one-time chance to join a high-stakes expedition to a place you may never reach again.
DChoosing whether to call a stranger's theory true or false when no consequences attach to the choice.
Answer & Solution
Correct answer: C. Accepting or declining a one-time chance to join a high-stakes expedition to a place you may never reach again.
A *genuine* option, James says, is "of the **forced, living, and momentous** kind." Check each candidate against the three criteria.
**A** (ice cream): not momentous (low stakes), not forced (you can buy nothing). Trivial.
**B** (umbrella): not forced — the passage uses this same example in the next paragraph to *exclude* it ("you can easily avoid it by not going out at all").
**C** (one-time expedition): all three criteria match. The chance is *unique* (momentous), it must be *accepted or refused* with no third option (forced), and the alternatives — going, not going — are both real (living). The North Pole example James gives later in the section is exactly this shape.
**D** (stranger's theory with no consequences): not momentous (trivial stakes), and arguably not forced (one can withhold judgment, as James says of such cases later).
Only **C** satisfies all three.
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