green numbers give full details | back to texts | unexpand these ideas
| 18986 | Truth is just a name for verification-processes |
| Full Idea: Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification-processes, just as 'health' is a name for other processes in life. | |||
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 6) | |||
| A reaction: So the slogan is 'truth is success in belief'? Suicide and racist genocide can be 'successful'. I would have thought that truth was the end of a process, rather than the process itself. |
| 18983 | In many cases there is no obvious way in which ideas can agree with their object |
| Full Idea: When you speak of the 'time-keeping function' of a clock, it is hard to see exactly what your ideas can copy. ...Where our ideas cannot copy definitely their object, what does agreement with that object mean? | |||
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 6) | |||
| A reaction: This is a very good criticism of the correspondence theory of truth. It looks a lovely theory when you can map components of a sentence (like 'the pen is in the drawer') onto components of reality - but it has to cover the hard cases. |
| 18972 | Ideas are true in so far as they co-ordinate our experiences |
| Full Idea: Pragmatists say 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. | |||
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 2) | |||
| A reaction: I'm struck by the close similarity (at least in James) of the pragmatic view of truth and the coherence theory of truth (associated later with Blanshard). Perhaps the coherence theory is one version of the pragmatic account |
| 18973 | New opinions count as 'true' if they are assimilated to an individual's current beliefs |
| Full Idea: 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. | |||
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 2) | |||
| A reaction: Note the tell-tale locution 'counts as' true, rather than 'is' true. The obvious problem is that someone with a big stock of foolish beliefs will 'count as' true some bad interpretation which is gratifyingly assimilated to their current confusions. |
| 18984 | True ideas are those we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify (and false otherwise) |
| Full Idea: True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. | |||
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 6) | |||
| A reaction: The immediate question is why you should label something as 'false' simply on the grounds that you can't corroborate it. Proving the falsity is a stronger position than the ignorance James seems happy with. 'Assimilate' implies coherence. |
| 18987 | A 'thing' is simply carved out of reality for human purposes |
| Full Idea: What shall we call a 'thing' anyhow? It seems quite arbitrary, for we carve out everything, just as we carve out constellations, to suit our human purposes. | |||
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 7) | |||
| A reaction: James wrote just before the discovery of galaxies, which are much more obviously 'things' than constellations like the Plough are! This idea suggests a connection between pragmatism and the nihilist view of objects of Van Inwagen and co. |
| 18981 | 'Substance' is just a word for groupings and structures in experience |
| Full Idea: 'Substance' appears now only as another name for the fact that phenomena as they come are actually grouped and given in coherent forms. | |||
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 4) | |||
| A reaction: This is the strongly empirical strain in James's empiricism. This sounds like a David Lewis comment on the Humean mosaic of experience. We Aristotelians at least believe that the groups run much deeper than the surface of experience. |
| 18974 | Truth is a species of good, being whatever proves itself good in the way of belief |
| Full Idea: Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it. The true is whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons. | |||
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 2) | |||
| A reaction: The trouble is that false optimism can often often be what is 'good in the way of belief'. That said, I think quite a good way to specify 'truth' is 'success in belief', but I mean intrinsically successful, not pragmatically successful. |
| 18989 | Pragmatism accepts any hypothesis which has useful consequences |
| Full Idea: On pragmatic principles we cannot reject any hypothesis if consequences useful to life flow from it. | |||
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 8) | |||
| A reaction: Most governments seem to find lies more useful than the truth. Maybe most children are better off not knowing the truth about their parents. It might be disastrous to know the truth about what other people are thinking. Is 'useful but false' meaningful? |
| 18971 | Theories are practical tools for progress, not answers to enigmas |
| Full Idea: Theories are instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest. We don't lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make nature over again by their aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one to work. | |||
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 2) | |||
| A reaction: This follows his criticism of the quest for 'solving names' - big words that give bogus solutions to problems. James's view is not the same as 'instrumentalism', though he would probably sympathise with that view. The defines theories badly. |
| 18982 | Pragmatism says all theories are instrumental - that is, mental modes of adaptation to reality |
| Full Idea: The pragmatist view is that all our theories are instrumental, are mental modes of adaptation to reality, rather than revelations or gnostic answers to some divinely instituted world enigma. | |||
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 5) | |||
| A reaction: This treats instrumentalism as the pragmatic idea of theories as what works (and nothing more), with, presumably, no interest in grasping something called 'reality'. Presumably instrumentalism might have other motivations - such as fun. |
| 18985 | True thoughts are just valuable instruments of action |
| Full Idea: The possession of true thoughts means everywhere the possession of invaluable instruments of action. | |||
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 6) | |||
| A reaction: It looks to me like we should distinguish 'active' and 'passive' instrumentalism. The passive version says there is no more to theories and truth than what instruments record. James's active version says truth is an instrument for doing things well. |
| 18975 | We return to experience with concepts, where they show us differences |
| Full Idea: Concepts for the pragmatist are things to come back into experience with, things to make us look for differences. | |||
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 3) | |||
| A reaction: That's good. I like both halves of this. Experience gives us the concepts, but then we 'come back' into experience equipped with them. Presumably animals can look for differences, but concepts enhance that hugely. Know the names of the flowers. |
| 18980 | If there is a 'greatest knower', it doesn't follow that they know absolutely everything |
| Full Idea: The greatest knower of them all may yet not know the whole of everything, or even know what he does know at one single stroke: - he may be liable to forget. | |||
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 4) | |||
| A reaction: And that's before you get to the problem of how the greatest knower could possibly know whether or not they knew absolutely everything, or whether there might be some fact which was irremediably hidden from them. |
| 18978 | It is hard to grasp a cosmic mind which produces such a mixture of goods and evils |
| Full Idea: We can with difficulty comprehend the character of a cosmic mind whose purposes are fully revealed by the strange mixture of good and evils that we find in this actual world's particulars. | |||
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 3) | |||
| A reaction: And, of course, what counts as 'goods' or 'evils' seems to have a highly relative aspect to it. To claim that really it is all good is massive hope based on flimsy evidence. |
| 18991 | If the God hypothesis works well, then it is true |
| Full Idea: On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true. | |||
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 8) | |||
| A reaction: The truth of God's existence certainly is a challenging test case for the pragmatic theory of truth, and James really bites the bullet here. Pragmatism may ultimately founder on the impossibility of specifying what 'works satisfactorily' means. |
| 18977 | The wonderful design of a woodpecker looks diabolical to its victims |
| Full Idea: To the grub under the bark the exquisite fitness of the woodpecker's organism to extract him would certainly argue a diabolical designer. | |||
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 3) | |||
| A reaction: What an elegant sentence! The huge problem for religious people who accept (probably reluctantly) evolution by natural selection is the moral nature of the divine being who could use such a ruthless method of design. |
| 18979 | Things with parts always have some structure, so they always appear to be designed |
| Full Idea: The parts of things must always make some definite resultant, be it chaotic or harmonious. When we look at what has actually come, the conditions must always appear perfectly designed to ensure it. | |||
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 3) | |||
| A reaction: In so far as the design argument is an analogy with human affairs, we can't deny that high levels of order suggest an organising mind, and mere chaos suggests a coincidence of unco-ordinated forces. |
| 18976 | Private experience is the main evidence for God |
| Full Idea: I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experience. | |||
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 3) | |||
| A reaction: There is not much you can say to someone who claims incontrovertible evidence which is utterly private to themselves. Does total absence of private religious experience count as evidence on the subject? |
| 18990 | Nirvana means safety from sense experience, and hindus and buddhists are just afraid of life |
| Full Idea: Nirvana means safety from the everlasting round of adventures of which the world of sense consists. The hindoo and the buddhist for this is essentially their attitude, are simply afraid, afraid of more experience, afraid of life. | |||
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 8) | |||
| A reaction: Wonderfully American! From what I have seen of eastern thought, including Taoism, I agree with James, in general. There is a rejection of knowledge and of human life which I find shocking. I suspect it is a defence mechanism for downtrodden people. |