Lecture Supplement on James

According to James, the pragmatic method forces us to concentrate on the “cash value” of our conceptions:

131 ...if you follow the pragmatic method, you....must bring out of each word its practical cash value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed.

It generates an instrumental theory of truth which emphasizes that when we modify our opinions:

134 (a) we are conservative and try to retain as great a mass of our previous beliefs as we can, we modify and add “...until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter...”,

(b) of course, this idea must “...mediate[s] between the [ancient] stock and the new experience and runs them into one another most felicitously and expediently.”

This emphasis upon the practical does not entail a nominalism or rejection of universals, but it does require that they have a practical or experiential value (in concrete life). We have seen that Peirce promises that the “method of science” is superior, as a method of fixing belief, to the other methodologies (tenacity, authority, and a priori) because it is to yield truth and reality. Clearly James also believes that the pragmatic orientation is centrally concerned with truth. In this essay, however, James makes it clear that the connection with truth is one which is not concerned (or not simply concerned) with “independent reality.” It is also a concern with value, as he notes further on in the article than our editor continues:

...truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and coordinate with it. The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.”[2]

As we work through this essay and James’ views in general, we need to pay close attention to his emphasis upon value and how it is related to talk of truth. It is important to remember that one of the “failures” of modern philosophy which the pragmatists are reacting to is the failure of the underlying dualism to relate talk of truth, reality, and value (whether one is an empiricist, rationalist, realist, idealist, etc.).

128 The squirrel, the tree trunk, and the hunter. Does the man go round the squirrel or not? “Which party is right...depends on what you practically mean by `going round’ the squirrel.”

-129 The pragmatic method “...is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable....What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true?”

-"To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve—what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, whether immediate or remote, is then for us the whole of our conception of the object.”

-130 “...in what respects would the world be different if this alternative or that were true? If I can find nothing that would become different, then the alternative has no sense.”

-"There can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere—no difference in abstract truth that doesn’t express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere, somewhen. The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world formula or that world formula be the true one.”

131 Pragmatism is nothing new. It is most at home with empiricism however. “A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power.”

-"...if you follow the pragmatic method, you....must bring out of each word its practical cash value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed.”

-For pragmatists, “theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest.”

-132 Pragmatism is not a set of doctrines, it is a methodology—his “corridor” metaphor. It is “the attitude of looking away from first things; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.”

-132-133 At first science seemed to display the very mind of God, but now we recognize that our theories are approximations God, but now we recognize that our theories are approximations and useful predictive tools: [133] “their great use is to summarize old facts and to lead to new ones. They are only a man-made language, a conceptual shorthand...in which we write our reports of nature; and languages, as is well known, tolerate much choice of expression and many dialects.”

-According to the pragmatists (Dewey, Schiller, etc.), the meaning of truth is that “...ideas (which themselves are but parts of our experience) become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience....Any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor; is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true instrumentally.”

--Here we need to contrast the pragmatist’s view of truth with the traditional “copy” (or correspondence) and “coherence” theories of truth.

134 When we modify our opinions in the light of new or recalcitrant experience, we are conservative, we try to retain as great a mass of our previous beliefs as we can when we encounter a “conceptual strain.” The successful new belief “...preserves the older stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them just enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as familiar as the case leaves possible.” When we modify our opinions:

-we are conservative and try to retain as great a mass of our previous beliefs as we can. We modify and add “...until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter, some idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience and runs them into one another most felicitously and expediently.”

-The successful new idea “...preserves the older stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them just enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in way as familiar as the case leaves possible.”

-135 “A new opinion counts as “true” just in proportion as it gratifies the individual’s desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock. It must both lean on old truth and grasp new fact; and its success...in doing this, is a matter for the individual’s appreciation....That new idea is truest which performs most felicitously its function of satisfying our double urgency. It makes itself true, gets itself classed as true, by the way it works; grafting itself then upon the ancient body of truth, which thus grows much as a tree grows by the activity of the new layer of cambium.”

--135-136 The old truths were, of course, once plastic themselves. “They also were called true for human reasons. They also mediated between still earlier truths and what in those days were novel observations. Purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts played no role whatsoever, is nowhere to be found. The reason why we call things true is the reason why they are true, for “to be true” means only to perform this marriage function.”

--Note: the discussion here is directed toward theory-change rather than toward the [ultimate] final truth of theories. Other philosophical orientations seem to emphasize the latter. This is more than a change in emphasis.

James’ Chapter continues though Fisch stops at this point, and the following points are relevant to our discussions:

-"The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalizes. Truth, for him, becomes a class name for all sorts of definite working values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer.”

-The pragmatists’ ideal of truth “...converts the absolutely empty notion of a static relation of “correspondence” (what that may mean we must ask later) between our minds and reality, into that of a rich and active commerce (that any one may follow in detail and understand) between particular thoughts of ours, and the great universe of other experiences in which they play their parts and have their uses.”

-Idealism suffers from remoteness and abstractness. “You cannot redescend into the world of particulars by the Absolute’s aid, or deduce any necessary consequences of detail important for your life from your idea of his nature.”

-Idealism “...substitutes a pallid outline for the real world’s richness.”

-pragmatism “...has no such materialistic bias as ordinary empiricism labors under. Moreover, she has no objection whatever to the realizing of abstractions, so long as you get about among particulars with their aid and they actually carry you somewhere. Interested in no conclusions but those which our minds and our experiences work out together, she has no a priori prejudices against theology. If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. For how much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged.”

Pragmatism maintains that “...truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and coordinate with it. The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.”

-"Pragmatism is willing to take anything, to follow either logic or the senses and to count the humblest and most personal experiences. She will count mystical experiences if they have practical consequences. She will take a God who lives in the very dirt of private fact—if that should seem a likely place to find him.

Her only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience’s demands, nothing being omitted.”

Notes: [click on the note number to return to text for the note]

[1] The selection is excerpted from Chapter II of James’ Pragmatism (New York, 1934). The supplement is to the reprint in Classic American Philosophers, ed. Max Fisch (N.Y,: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1951), pp. 128-136. Emphasis has been added at several points.

[2] Cf., the reprint in Pragmatism: The Classic Writings, ed. H.S. Thayer (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982), p. 223.