post 4

Rob Hoffman

(a) “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 anyone'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?” (James, Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth)

This selection highlights one of James’ largest critiques of prior philosophical and, to some extent, scientific thinking. When we are debating between two alternatives, we are to consider the effects that each would have upon us. If there is no change at all between the effects of one alternative and the effects of the other alternative, then we ought to consider these two to be equally true (and we ought not to worry ourselves any more over which is “right”). If the two alternatives do in fact produce different effects, then we should view the one that produces the better, more useful effects as the one that is true.

(b) My major question and criticism deals with the pragmatist conception of truth. Although I will expound upon this in greater detail below, one of the core issues is: if there is no difference in concrete life between one idea and another, then are we to assume that it does not matter which is true (and on some level, that neither is actually true)? This seems to be far too much like the Vatican response to Galileo’s observation of moons around Jupiter. Those moons, the Vatican’s astronomers claimed, were too small to be observed by the naked eye and therefore could have no concrete effect on humans and therefore did not exist, for God would not create anything that did not affect us (things that did not affect us would be, of course, useless). Trying to understand the peculiar nature of quantum physics might appear to the pragmatists as a useless argument, for the end result in life is still the same; yet, it seems odd to tell scientists that they ought not focus their attentions on this issue.

(c) Given that my focus was on the pragmatist conception of truth, which I will be presenting, I had quite a bit to say about this. Of all that we have studied thus far, it is this concept that most separates the pragmatists for the modern philosophers, especially the rationalists. While Peirce made claims about what philosophy ought to accomplish, he was never as specific as James when it came to laying down the foundation for metaphysically new, distinct principles. Pragmatism could claim to look at the world and philosophy differently, but it needed a metaphysical issue like truth to distinguish it from all that had gone before.

I am still holding out hope that there is some aspect of the pragmatist view of truth that I do not fully understand, because as it stands now I do not view it as a philosophically adequate concept. It is at best an incomplete, hasty, and limited view, and at worst it is contradictory and logically impossible.

At the heart of the rationalist issues with it is the concept that truth is merely whatever is useful at the time and that it is subject to change whenever it is no longer useful. This capricious truth loses much of what made it valuable in philosophy in the first place. From a pragmatist stand point, this conclusion might seem like a plausible extension of the idea that all our knowledge is fallible and our conclusions are the result of a process which often discards one idea after the next. However, the pragmatists falsely conflate the instrumentalist conclusions of these processes with the truth. Under a rationalist model, one could say that although truth is aimed for in these attempts, it is not always (or perhaps ever) achieved.

There are a few more issues with the mere usage of the term truth that I would like to point out before moving on. James acknowledges the pragmatists to be instrumentalists (“What Pragmatism Means”), and yet he still insists upon using the word truth. Instrumentalists will agree that we must operate as if the most useful, predictive theory in science is true, but they would not claim that it actually is true. In part, one could claim that James does not directly disagree with this, but rather merely redefines truth so as to be in line with it. This might be the case, but if so then truth has been rendered an epiphenomenal, unnecessary component of utility. We would pursue what is most useful and abandon it when it is no longer so; why make any mention of truth or nontruth?

I would like to return briefly to the topic of section (b). This seems problematic to me. If we have two explanations of the outcome of an experiment, then we ought to select for the most useful. Naturally, the most useful is going to be the one that agrees with the current, predictive models already established in science (as opposed to the one that can do nothing but tear down that which exists). If we truly did accept the pragmatists view, then, there would have been remarkably little scientific progress over the years, as those revolutionary concepts which could not yet make large predictions but could only point out major flaws would have been discarded as not as useful and therefore not true. Likewise, the pragmatists focus on verificationism flies in the face of the more modern, Popperian style of falsification.

“You can say of it then either that ‘it is useful because it is true’ or that ‘it is true because it is useful!’ Both these phrases mean exactly the same thing.” Logically speaking, this small statement is a nightmare. The circular reasoning should become immediately apparent: we know something is true because it is useful, and we know that it is useful because it is true. Likewise, if we take this and apply it to the context of the changing nature of truth discussed above, we run into serious issues. If truth can simply change from time to time when it is no longer useful, then once something is less useful than something else, it becomes untrue, and therefore not useful at all. This seems to be extremely myopic, to the point of intentionally and willfully forgetting that which was “true” or “useful” yesterday.

Finally, there are some serious problems with making blanket comments about truth when dealing with epistemic and metaphysical issues. For obvious reasons, any such comments will necessarily be self-referential. It is impossible to comment on truth in general without also commenting on the truth of the theory that you are expounding. In this way, it seems as though the pragmatist definition of truth might be self-defeating (the same way a relativist who issues a blanket statement that everything is always relative is self-defeating). The pragmatist definition of truth itself becomes accountable to only what is useful, and if at some point we find it more useful to believe that there is an absolute truth, then suddenly the rationalists are correct. This seems to be an eventuality for which the pragmatists were totally unprepared.