Pragmatism's Conception of Truth

Excerpt from William James' Pragmatism's Conception of Truth (1907)

I fully expect to see the pragmatist view of truth run through the classic stages of a theory's career.  First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.  Our doctrine of truth is at present in the first of these three stages, with symptoms of the second stage having begun in certain quarters.  I wish that this lecture might help it beyond the first stage in the eyes of many of you.

 

Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas.  It means their 'agreement', as falsity means their disagreement, with 'reality'.  Pragmatists and intellectualists both accept this definition as a matter of course, They begin to quarrel only after the question is raised as to what may precisely be meant by the term 'agreement', and what by the term 'reality', when reality is taken as something for our ideas to agree with.

 

In answer these questions the pragmatists are more analytic and painstaking, the intellectualists more offhand and irreflective.  The popular notion is that a true ideas must copy its reality.  Like other popular views, this one follows the analogy of the most unusual experience.  Our true ideas of sensible things do indeed copy them.  Shut your eyes and think of yonder clock on the wall, and you get just such a true picture or copy of its dial.  But your idea of its 'works' (unless you are a clockmaker) is much less of a copy, yet it passes muster, for it in no way clashes with the reality.  Even though it should shrink to the mere word 'works', that word still serves you truly; and when you speak of the 'time-keeping function' of the clock, or of its spring's 'elasticity', it is hard to see exactly what your ideas call copy.

 

You perceive that there is a problem here.  Where our ideas cannot copy definitely their object, what does agreement with that object mean?  Some idealists seem to say that they are true whenever they are what God means that we ought to think about that object.  Others hold the copy-views all through, and speak as if our ideas possessed truth just in proportion as they approach to being copies of the Absolute's eternal way of thinking.

 

These views, you see, invite pragmatistic discussion.  But, the great assumption of the intellectualists is that truth means essentially an inert static relation.  When you've got your true idea of anything, there's an end of the matter.  You're in possession; you know; you have fulfilled your thinking destiny.  You are where you ought to be mentally, you have observed your categorical imperative; and nothing more need follow on that climax of your rational destiny.  Epistemologically you are in stable equilibrium.

 

Pragmatism, on the other hand, asks its usual question, 'Grant an idea or belief to be true,' it says, 'what concrete difference will its being true make in any one's actual life? How will the truth be realized?  What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false?  What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?'

 

The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify.  False ideas are those that we can not.  That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known-as.

 

This thesis is what I have to defend.  The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it.  Truth happens to an idea.  It becomes truth, is made true by events.  Its verity is in fact an event, a process; the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication, Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.

 

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