James’s Pragmatic Theory of Truth

1. The Agreement Problem

What Does “Agreement with Reality” Mean?

• Traditional definition: Truth means ideas “agree” with reality, falsity means “disagreement”

• Both pragmatists and intellectualists accept this starting point

• But what “reality” is? And what exactly agrees with it?

• Is truth referring to some sort of exact copy of reality in our mind?

“Intelectualists” do not map to a clear thinking current, it refers to any approach which claims truth can be obtain exclusively by theoretical means.

Agreement with Reality: the copying model fails

• Works for simple sensible things: “Shut your eyes and think of yonder clock on the wall, and you get just such a true picture or copy of its dial”
• Breaks down for abstract concepts: “Your idea of its ‘works’… is much less of a copy, yet it passes muster”

Here is the old problem of the “concept”, what is a concept? What exactly is the ‘corespondent’ of objects in our mind?

Agreement with Reality: abstract realities resist copying

• “Past time,” “power,” “spontaneity” - “how can our mind copy such realities?”
• Even “time-keeping function” or “spring’s elasticity” - “hard to see exactly what your ideas can copy”
• The core question: “Where our ideas cannot copy definitely their object, what does agreement with that object mean?”

Somewhat unclear if we’re talking about “agreement with objects” or predicates; I cannot agree with “the clock”, as this is not a proposition

2: Truth as Dynamic Process: truth happens to an idea

• Against static conception:
• Intellectualists: “truth means essentially an inert static relation”
• “When you’ve got your true idea of anything, there’s an end of the matter”

We can trace back to this conception the pervasive idea that truth is “some sort of object” like in “ultimate truth”

Truth as Dynamic Process: James’s alternative

• Truth is dynamic and active

• “The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it”

• “Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events”

• Process terminology:

• “Its verity is in fact an event, a process […] of its verifying itself”

• “Its validity is the process of its valid-ation”

A sentence in itself has no truth value. Its truth value is always built by interaction, not only with the external world, but also with our own system of beliefs. It’s important, we tend to use ‘truth’ more often than we think in our language like some sort of object. James makes a valuable point here, truth is a process. Keep in mind, when we say that a proposition is true in logic, we actually mean there is a proof for that and proof in istself is process.

Truth as Dynamic Process: James’s alternative: Pragmatic question

• “What concrete difference will its being true make in anyone’s actual life?”

Up to now we’re mostly talking verificationsim and the argument was hard to discern from an empiricist one. (empiricism and pragmatism have all the “verification” part common). But here is pure pragmatism.

3: Direct vs Indirect Verification

• Direct verification:
• Lost in woods example: “If I am lost in the woods and starved, and find what looks like a cow-path”
• Success criterion: “if I do so and follow it, I save myself”

Or maybe it’s a wolf trail to their den?

Direct vs Indirect Verification: indirect verification

• Indirect verification dominates:
• Clock example: “no one of us has seen the hidden works that make it one”
• “We let our notion pass for true without attempting to verify”

Most of what we take as true we never verify. This is another profound insight

Direct vs Indirect Verification: the credit system of truth

• “Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system”
• “Our thoughts and beliefs ‘pass’ so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank notes pass”
• “You accept my verification of one thing, I yours of another”
• Foundation needed: “All this points to direct face-to-face verifications somewhere, without which the fabric of truth collapses”

This money analogy is very powerfull. As money, truth relies on credibility and trust. In fact much more than we currently think to rely on ‘hard rules’ in our civilization is in fact built on credibility and trust. Fake news is, to a point, similar to fake money, they disrupt the credibility and trust. But, it must be said, fake money, as fake news, always existed. And it also must be said, while for fake money there is an objective criteria, anybody can call fake news anything. This is not annecdotal, it is a vicious cycle by which the very notion of truth colapses in our times.

4: Truth’s Practical Value: Cash Value?

• Instrumental nature: “The possession of truth… is only a preliminary means towards other vital satisfactions”
• Practical importance:
  • “We live in a world of realities that can be infinitely useful or infinitely harmful”
  • True ideas correctly predict whether we’ll encounter helpful or harmful aspects of reality.

“cash value” are James’s words. primitive pragmatism - it may work for animals too! - whatever we call “value” it is in fact related to feeling and thinking judging functions. The whole idea of “truth as process” becomes much more clear if we look at how we decide truth, what is the process of deciding the truth. Pragmatism is using only feeling (is it good for me?) while Logic is using only thinking.

Truth’s Practical Value: value equation

• “You can say of it then either that ‘it is useful because it is true’ or that ‘it is true because it is useful’”
• Truth storage: “We store such extra truths away in our memories, and with the overflow we fill our books of reference”
• Ready for when they become “practically relevant to one of our emergencies”

• “Both these phrases mean exactly the same thing, ‘true iff useful’”
• Here James introduces, with our “extension” of memory, the ideea of social nature of truth.

5: Social Nature of Truth

All Human Thinking Gets ‘Discursified’

• Social construction: “We exchange ideas; we lend and borrow verifications, get them from one another by means of social intercourse”
• Verbal truth building: “All truth thus gets verbally built out, stored up, and made available for everyone”

There is o powerfull idea here. There is a more recent important text on that , “The Social Construction of Reality” of Berger and Luckmann: reality is a social construct

Social Nature of Truth: consequences

• Consistency requirements:
  • We must talk consistently just as we must think consistently
  • We mustn’t now call Abel ‘Cain’ or Cain ‘Abel’
• Systematic consequences:
  • “[Iff] we ungear ourselves from the book of Genesis, and from all its connections with the universe of speech and fact”
  • “[then] we throw ourselves out of whatever truth that whole system may embody”

The Bible example is telling: it is not about The Book truth status, but about the collective social truths that embeded into our beliefs, texts, culture etc, derived from The Bible. We’re prisoners to our conventions which go beyond language and definitions as they are cultural conventions.

6: Reality as Collective Construct

(a proposal)

• Direct vs indirect evidence:
  • Twin Towers example: “We all know they were real… but how do we know it?”
  • “We saw images, but the key point here is that we chose to trust”
• Verification delegation:
  • “Different sources send different images showing the same event from different angles”
  • “Strictly speaking, it’s a delegation of verification. I do not verify anything”

“Reality” often amounts to “Truth of the proposition describing a MoF”. We delegate most of the verification of truth to the credibility of our sources. Remember school, it’s built on this idea that the teachers cannot lie.

Reality as Collective Construct: The asymmetry

(a proposal)

• First: Reality is built by the sum of subjective truths

• Then: When some truth is validated we compare it with reality

• Circularity? No.

• The collective reality is not the personal reality.

• Reality as collective conscious archetype: I is everywhere, in everything, but you can’t really see it”

An archetype is by definition a sort of ‘matrix’ to describe something we don’t have direct access to but we know only by its effects. ‘Energy’ for instance is an archetypal concept. Collective Unconscious Archetypes of Jung function more like ‘fields of force’ guiding any individual psyche along its lines while allowing definite individual freedom. Its individual manifestation is personal (in dreams and behavior) but its nature is collective. To this effect, Reality as a Conscious Archetype is some sort of consciously accepted ‘field of force’ that we all align to. This also links well into Quine’s idea that our beliefs face the “tribunal of sense experience” not individually but as a “corporate body.” (“Two Dogmas”)

7: Pragmatist vs Rationalist: Rationalist position

• Truth “absolutely obtains, being a unique relation that does not wait upon any process”
  • “Shoots straight over the head of experience, and hits its reality every time”
  • Truth’s quality is “timeless, like all essences and natures”
  • “You pragmatists put the cart before the horse”

Back to James

Pragmatist vs Rationalist Debate: James’s response

• Rationalists treat verification as mere “signs of its being”
• “Merely our lame ways of ascertaining, after the fact”
• “Truth is made… in the course of experience”
• “Truths emerge from facts; but they dip forward into facts again”
• Fundamental difference: “Pragmatism faces forward to the future, while rationalism face backward to a past eternity”

8: Two Types of Truth: MoF vs. RAI

• Empirical truths: Require sense-verification, can change
  • “If I am lost in the woods… it is of utmost importance that I should think of a human habitation”
    • Objects: concrete things, dates, places, distances
• Logical/Mathematical truths: “Eternal character” - once true, always true
  • “1 and 1 make 2… white differs less from gray than from black”
  • Objects: mental concepts, abstract relations

This is pure David Hume and it is interesting to note that in the long run “Hume’s Fork”” proved untenable.

Two Types of Truth: Key insight

• Both involve “leading” but different verification processes
  • Empirical: lead to sensible experiences
  • Logical: lead through abstract idea systems

9: Truth as “Leading”: The Guidance Metaphor

• Core concept: “True ideas are those that we can validate, corroborate and verify”
• Leading that pays: Truth guides us toward valuable experiences
  • “Any idea that helps us deal with either the reality or its belongings… will agree sufficiently”
  • “Leading that is useful because it is into quarters that contain objects that are important”

Here the analogy with the “force field” of Reality works again. The pragmatic interpretation is relatively forced, as the truth we’re guided to may have ‘negative’ value. It is telling how often we encounter the term “alignment” or “re-alignment” in modern talk.

Truth as “Leading”: Multiple forms of leading

• Direct: toward sensible objects themselves
• Indirect: toward “useful verbal and conceptual quarters”
• Social: toward “consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse”
• Bottom line: “Agreement turns out to be essentially an affair of leading”

This is true, but agreement is on ething and truth another. There is a risk to reduce truth to agreement.

10: The “Ante Rem” Fallacy

Truth Exists in Processes, Not as Pre-existing Essence

• Rationalist error: Treating truth as existing “before the thing” (ante rem)
• Like saying rich people are rich because they possess “wealth essence”

The “Ante Rem” Fallacy: James’s analogies

• Wealth: “name for concrete processes that certain men’s lives play a part in”
• Health: “name for processes, as digestion, circulation, sleep”
• Truth: exists only in verification activities, not as separate quality

It seems to me there is a slight confusion here between “process” and “state”. Sleep is a state more than a process. There is also a forced analogy, truth can be attributed to elementary, non-complex statements about things; while evaluating the health of an individual is a complex process, evaluating the truth of “it is raining” it’s not. This may be the weakest point in James’s view for truth as process.

11: “Absolutely True” as Ideal

The Regulative Function of Perfect Truth

• Definition: “What no further experience will ever alter”
• Status: “Ideal vanishing-point towards which we imagine all our temporary truths will some day converge”
• Like “perfectly wise man” or “absolutely complete experience”
• “May never fully eventuate or materialize”

“Absolutely True” as Ideal: consequences

• Practical consequence: “We have to live today by what truth we can get today, and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood”
• Historical examples:
  • “Ptolemaic astronomy, Euclidean space, Aristotelian logic… were expedient for centuries”
  • Now “only relatively true, or true within those borders of experience”
• Retrospective judgment: “We live forwards… but we understand backwards”

12: Defense Against Subjectivism: The accusation

• Critics say pragmatists “put foolishness and wisdom on one level”
• “Think that by saying whatever you find it pleasant to say and calling it truth you fulfill every pragmatistic requirement”

They seem to think that pragmatism is defining truth to your own liking. But in fact this is the opposite of pragmatism, as it usually leds to great suffering or even death.

Defense Against Subjectivism: James’s response

Pragmatism is Not “Anything Goes”

• Past knowledge constrains us: Must work with existing verified truths, can’t ignore established facts
• Reality constrains us: The physical world forces compliance - “coercions of the world of sense”

Defense Against Subjectivism: Expedient ≠ Pleasant

• “Expedient in the long run and on the whole”
• Must “mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences”
• “Must lead to some sensible terminus or other that can be verified exactly”

Final point:

“In this field of truth it is the pragmatists… who are the more genuine defenders of the universe’s rationality”

Thank You