Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth

Lecture 1: The Present Dilemma in Philosophy

• The two philosophical temperaments:

• The Tender-Minded: Rationalistic (going by ‘principles’), Intellectualistic, Idealistic, Optimistic, Religious, Free-willist, Monistic, Dogmatical

• The Tough-Minded: Empiricist (going by ‘facts’), Sensationalistic, Materialistic, Pessimistic, Irreligious, Fatalistic, Pluralistic, Sceptical

• “Each type believes the other to be inferior to itself; but disdain in the one case is mingled with amusement, in the other it has a dash of fear.”
• “Facts are good, of course— give us lots of facts. Principles are good— give us plenty of principles. The world is indubitably one if you look at it in one way, but as indubitably is it many, if you look at it in another. It is both one and many—let us adopt a sort of pluralistic monism. Everything of course is necessarily de-termined, and yet of course our wills are free: a sort of free-will determinism is the true philosophy. The evil of the parts is undeniable; but the whole can’t be evil: so practical pessimism may be combined with metaphysical optimism.”
• “Refinement is what characterizes our intellectualistic philosophies. They exquisitely satisfy that craving for a refined object of contemplation which is so powerful an appetite of the mind.”
• “Now, what does thinking about the experience of [people who suffer] come to compared with directly, personally feeling it, as they feel it? The philosophers are dealing in shades, while those who live and feel know truth.”

Lecture 2: What Pragmatism Means

• When faced with a new experience that contradicts our prior beliefs, we first try to modify the contradictory opinion, if not spawning a new idea that we can “graft upon the ancient stock [of opinions] with a minimum disturbance of the latter.” That mediates the new experience and the stock felicitously.
• Success in solving problems is always a matter of approximation. “We say this theory solves it on the whole more satisfactorily than that theory; but that means more satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will emphasize their point of satisfaction differently.”
• “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.”
• Lady Pragmatism has no prejudices, no obstructive dogmas, no rigid canons. She is completely genial, entertaining any hypothesis, any evidence. “She widens the field of search for God.”

Lecture 3: Some metaphysical problems pragmatically considered

• If only past were considered, it would make no difference whether there is just matter or a God, the same present would be brought to fruition by either. If, however, future is also considered, materialism offers but a bleak outlook, whereas spiritualism affirms an eternal moral order and a reason to hope.

Lecture 5: Pragmatism and Common Sense

• Novelty soaks into our minds and stains the ancient preexisting mass. New facts are seldom added raw, but are embedded cooked, stewed in the sauce of the old.
• “You may alter your house ad libitum, but the ground plan of the first architect persists—you can make great changes, but you cannot change a Gothic church into a Doric temple. You may rinse and rinse the bottle, but you can’t get the taste of the medicine or whisky that first filled it wholly out.”
• “Our fundamental ways of thinking about things are discoveries of exceedingly remote ancestors, which have been able to preserve themselves throughout the experience of all subsequent time.”

Lecture 6: Pragmatism’s conception of truth

• Typical definition of truth as that which agrees with reality.
• Pragmatism’s definition: “true ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot.”
• Truth becomes a process that depends on participation. Truth is thus not a stagnant property that lies in something.
• “The term ‘energy’ doesn’t even pretend to stand for something ‘objective’. It is only a way of measuring the surface of phenomena so as to string their changes on a simple formula.”

• Facts we gather are not true, they simply are. “Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.”

• If our beliefs about the facts cohere to some agreeable end, lead to consistency, stability, flowing intercourse, and away from isolation and barren thinking, then that flowing process embodies what we call truth.

• “As that intrinsic excellence, [the rationalist’s] truth has nothing to do with our experiences. It adds nothing to the content of experi-ence. It makes no difference to reality itself; it is supervenient, inert, static, a reflexion merely. It doesn’t EXIST, it HOLDS or OBTAINS, it belongs to another dimension from that of either facts or fact-relations, belongs, in short, to the epistemological dimension—and with that big word rationalism closes the discussion. Thus, just as pragmatism faces forward to the future, so does rationalism here again face backward to a past eternity. True to her inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to ‘principles,’ and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution.”

Lecture 7: Pragmatism and Humanism

• “What we say about reality thus depends on the perspective into which we throw it. The that of it is its own; but the what depends on the which, and the which depends on us.”