James: What Pragmatism Means

a) An area that I believe that James states a key pragmatist concern is on page 195 when he says "Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude but it represents it, as it seems to me, both in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed." What James is saying that Pragmatists go a step further when they conclude something is truth. WHen pragmatists analyze truth, they take specific qualities from theories presented by other philosophers before, such as empircism, rationalism and positivism, but refining these ideas in such a way that things are clear, concrete and sufficiently justified to the reader. Essentially what James is saying that pragmatism is not an entirely new idea, it is something that has been remodified and have worked out all the errors that have been found in other theories in the past.

b) Why do we bother to lok away from "supposed necessities, categories and principles" (James 196), when these are the things that most truths are based on? How would you arrive at the truth without evaluating the categories and principles that they fit under?

c) I think that pragmatism has a philosophically adequate concetion of truth because it encompasses most of the strong points of rationalism and empiricism. It states truth as something that is practical and completely objective and unfettered by emotions and other factors that may obscure truth. I believe that this is one of the stronger arguments for pragmatism because your truth tends to be relative to your experiences. It would therefore make sense that truth should be something that is "objective and remote, refined and non-utilitarian" (James 199). When emotions are taken out of deduction, it becomes much clearer. However, strangely enough I also find this a weakness because for most humans it is impossible to remove emotion and one's experiences when making deductions about a certain object or occurrence. As truth is relative to a person because of his or her's experiences, I feel that this is a flaw in pragmatism, because I believe it's impossible to be completely objective when analyzing a situation or something as truth.