A pre-cut book has its advantages, but there's something to be said for the old days when a book buyer had to cut the pages of the book to read it. That "something" to be said is that readers, many, many years down the line, might learn about the book's history.

Two weeks ago, I got a copy of William James's Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (buy it here) from Georgetown University's library. It is a beat-up, 1925 edition that belonged to a Mr. Weeks of Alexandria, Virginia as of December 1, 1943. It seems to have come into Georgetown's possession in 1984. In the book's 81 years of existence, I don't think it has ever been read. I'm sure some people skimmed through a few pages. I'm sure some other people read passages. But that's not reading a book.

My evidence for writing this is that several of the pages haven't been cut. In the home-stretch of the book, I had to cut, sloppily so, pages 285-288, and then, 297-300. Pragmatism is one of the most talked about philosophy books of the last hundred years. But books talked about are not always books read.

Pragmatism is best when first read and then talked about. All books are. But it's perhaps true that it is one of those rare books, because of its simplicity of message, that doesn't lose too much if talked about without a read. Perhaps the uncut pages of this particular volume add credence to this view.

James's philosophy urges judgment on ideas based on practical consequences. This wisdom yields to sophistry. Pragmatism shows flashes of anti-dogmatism, but, in the final analysis, shows itself to be yet another dogma. What works, in pragmatism, becomes what's true. James defines the philosophy's methodology as an "attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts." Its definition of truth is "whatever proves itself to be good."

It might prove "good" to tell a reincarnated version of Mr. James that students have been reading this particular version of Pragmatism non-stop since it came into Georgetown's possession. But that wouldn't be true, would it? What proved "good" for the past owners of this heretofore uncut copy of Pragmatism perhaps has been to prominently display the book, but to never have read it--itself a type of dishonesty (at least it can be). What proves "good" for me is to read the book, and then quickly return it to its current owner, Georgetown University (to display for decades longer without marrying it to an actual reader) before fines accrue in excess of the volume's actual cost.

The unkindest cut of all for an old book is no cut at all. To boast the famous name "William James" and the title "Pragmatism" on the spine, to drop mention of "Harvard University" on the inside, to list the dates of nineteen previous printings, to impress with all this and not interest a single reader to finish the book in more than eight decades seems a magnificent failure. It's the curtain being lifted on the wizard. Alas, all talk and no action is the destiny of so many famous books.

After 81 years of serving as a conversation piece, this copy of Pragmatism, finally, at about 10:15 p.m. last Wednesday night, realized the ambition of all books: to be read.

Dan, Good post. I like your reflection. It's why I like your site. I have thought about the "unkindest broadcast" where some real words of wisdom fall on deaf ears, if there is no feedback.

P.S. Any chance of getting a little history on your interest in the music business?

The pressing question for pragmatists, as far as I can tell, is "WHY does it work." Surprisingly, pragmatists I've read (e.g., Rorty) blow this question off. It seems to me, however, that serious attention to this question must lead the pragmatist back to the real and the true.

Kudos, Dan, for your devotion to truth. Though I don't think James would agree with your implication that pragmatism means it is "good" to believe and hence "true" that GU students have been dutifully studying *Pragmatism*. Rather, he is of the mind that we are better equipped to deal with reality if our ideas in fact match up with it. It is never "good" to suffer delusions, for these will frustrate us in the long-run, if not the short-run.

You note that the ambition of all books is to be read, and I might add that the ambition of all thinkers who take the time carefully to write down (and rewrite, and revise) their thoughts is to be understood fully and properly. As such, anyone interested might consider spending a little time with James's *The Meaning of Truth*. This collection of essays is subtitled *A Sequel to Pragmatism*, and it is an attempt by James to provide rebuttal and clarification for his critics.

James wishes to disabuse us of the notion that his is a subjectivist or capricious theory of truth. It is NOT the case, for James, that (1) my finding some idea or belief good or pleasing CAUSES (2) the truth of that idea or belief.

Rather, we need to back up, and first understand that James wants to be clear about the fact that truth is a relation between (a) thought and (b) thing, (a) idea and (b) reality. Moreover, the truth-relation is one that we are able concretely to experience, identify, and describe. Now, how do we experience/identify/describe this truth-relation? Answer: purely in terms of the idea's "working"--i.e., we say the idea is true only if (n.b. *not* IF AND only if) it successfully "leads" us to the reality that it is supposed to be about, only if it serves us by enabling us better to function in the experiential environment of which the reality is a part. Further, those ideas are false which do not equip us well to operate in the experiential environment.

For James, an idea's being personally satisfying or "good for me" to believe does not alone constitute its truth:

"The pragmatist calls satisfactions indispensible for truth-building, but I have everywhere called them insufficient unless reality be also incidentally led to. If the reality assumed were cancelled from the pragmatist's universe of discourse, he would straightaway give the name of falsehoods to the beliefs remaining, in spite of all their satisfactoriness.... [T]here can be no truth if there is nothing to be true about." (MT, p. 195)

The existence of objective reality and the successful and verifiable relation of my ideas (practical AND theoretic) to it are twin requirements for James's epistemology, which he thus maintains is solidly in the "realist" camp.

James admits that his critics have trouble with his emphasizing the role of the subject, the knower, when characterizing the truth-relation. But this tact is wholly defensible, inasmuch as we realize that we cannot exceed our human ken. What is truth? Unaided human reason can say no more than what truth is "known-as." (And this is the essence of James's pragmatism, for what truth is known-as is its "workings.") If there be Absolute Truth, it is absolutely known only by an Absolute Knower. For us, the best we can do is describe how we know it.

Buzz- you know a lot more about James and about Pragmatism than I do, but I don't see how there is a pragmatist theory of _truth_ (rather than of justification) at all if he's just saying that "we are better equipped to deal with reality if our ideas in fact match up with it." Notice that you are defining truth independent of its working, and then predicationg something (usefulness) of this independently defined phenomenon. No?

Skeptic: I think your comment is quite apt. It seems that, for James, the question "What is truth?" necessarily leads to and is perhaps even reducible to the question "Why do we say something is true?" And he is fine with that...

It might be helpful to do a little parsing and carefully distinguish (a) the idea, (b) the object/reality, and (c) the truth-relation between (a) and (b). For James, (a) is said to be "true," and (c) is "truth."

James does not see his own view as incompatible with a traditional correspondence theory, i.e., truth as a relation of "agreement" between idea and reality. But he finds this description too abstract and not very helpful or revealing. His own view pushes forward and asks: What does it *mean* to say that an idea "agrees" with reality? In answering this question, all we can say, the only way we can expand, is to describe how this "agreement" appears to us in our experience, which is, I think, just describing justification. Indeed: "Why do we say something is true?"

We say an idea is true becuase we recognize it as one side of a truth-relation. These truth-relations are accessible to us only within our concrete experience, James maintains, not through a priori archetypes or categories. Our experience of truth-relations IS PRECISELY our experience of their beneficial effects, i.e., the workings of our ideas, their helping to adapt us to the experiential environment. It is our experience of the confluence of the subjective and the objective, of our ideas and our relation with and through them to the concrete world. (In like fashion, we experience and regognize falsity through the frustrations and failures of our ideas.)

James addresses this issue in *The Meaning of Truth*, chapter 7, under the heading "Sixth misunderstanding [of pragmatism]." The objection is stated, "Pragmatism explains not what truth is, but only how it is arrived at." The first sentence of his reply is: "In point of fact it tells us both, tells us what it is incidentally to telling us how it is arrived at,--for what *is* arrived at except just what the truth is?" He continues later, "It is quite true that the abstract *word* 'how' hasn't the same meaning as the abstract *word* 'what,' but in this universe of concrete facts you cannot keep hows and whats asunder." And later, "...the links of experience sequent upon the idea, which mediate between it and a reality, form and for the pragmatist indeed *are*, the *concrete* relation of truth that may obtain between the idea and that reality." And finally, "...what intellectualism calls *the* truth, the *inherent* truth, of any one such series [of workings or satisfactions] is only the abstract name for its truthfulness in act, for the fact that the ideas there do lead to the supposed reality in a way that we consider satisfactory."

Buzz,

That's some very interesting information about James' approach to 'truth'. I wonder whether he is alone among the pragmatists in this regard.

Rorty writes, "For the pragmatist, true sentences are not true because they correspond to reality, and so there is no need to worry what sort of reality, if any, a given sentence corresponds to -- no need to worry about what 'makes' it true. ... [The Pragmatist] drops the notion of truth as correspondence with reality altogether, and says that modern science does not enable us to cope because it corresponds, it just plain enables us to cope." ("Pragmatism and Philosophy")

These claims about the pragmatist approach to truth a part and parcel of a larger set of claims about language, viz., that language is not moored to reality. In that regard, Rorty sees pragmatism as allied to various stripes of anti-realism concerning language (e.g., Derrida, Sellers, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Foucault).

James, according to Rorty, is included among these. "On my view, James and Dewey were not only waiting at the end of the dialectical road that ana-lytic philosophy traveled, but are waiting at the end of the road that, for example, Foucault and Deleuze are currently traveling."

I have not read James, so what I "know" is second hand. It seems to me that it would be difficult to reconcile Rorty's James with the one you have presented (by giving quotations). I would appreciate your thoughts, both on James' approach to truth and that of pragmatism generally.

Postulate One: Unless truth is constant, it is not useful.

Postulate Two: James' "truth" is not constant. ("How we know things" varies).

Therefore: James' "truth" is not useful.

Conclusion: "Pragmatism" is not pragmatic.

Buzz,

Is James being consistent through his writings? Or is their development or change in his version of pragmatism? In *Pragmatism* he talks of truth "happening" to an idea by proving itself expedient. Now, expedience could mean that the idea corresponds to reality, but that isn't necessarily so for an idea to be expedient. You are describing him as fine w/ traditional correspondence theory and realism, and you seem to ably use his writings to justify that claim. I just don't yet see how the two books jive (having only read the one).

To illustrate further, you point to James's response to what he calls the "sixth misunderstanding" and that response of his is very interesting. I read those quotes of yours to be showing James to say that the method of attaining "truths" is exactly the same as the "truth" itself. Therefore, since utility determines our arriving at a "truth" (seeing it as "expedient" or that it "works" in thought), *utility* is what "truth" is. Is my formulation correct? If so, is James just trying to respond to a Humean skeptic, by collapsing what had traditionally been called the "true" into the "useful" which is the *method* of obtaining the "true")?

Ralph,

I'm confident in my reading and knowledge of James, as he speaks well and clearly for himself and goes to great lengths, in a variety of places, to estalish the position I highlight above, viz. that his pragmatism is grounded in objective reality, pace Rorty as you quote him. It is helpful to understand James in light of those he opposes, i.e., the "intellectualists" or "rationalists" who prefer to appeal to abstract, nonexperiential principles in their accounts of truth. James is ever seeking for a concrete, empirical account of truth, and consistently he takes it as axiomatic that truth is something known by a knower, and so is always truth FOR SOMEONE. (Just as the tree falling in the woods needs a hearer to hear it..., so any truth needs a knower (not his ana-logy, as far as I know, but anyway).) It is this axiom that gets him into trouble with critics who misread him as a relativist/positivist/subjectivist, etc. I suspect that the term "pragmatism" was hijacked early on by such critics--the rest being history. James found himself exerting tremendous amounts of energy--perhaps more than most similarly prominent thinkers of his day--combating misreadings, distortions, "vicious abstractions," and the like. Repeatedly he defends his confreres Dewey and Schiller, noting their thorough compatibility with his own thought and expaining their differences as perspectival. (Personally I don't know too much about either, but I suspect James may have unnecessarily stuck his neck out in this regard and earned himself and his pragmatism some unwarranted guilt-by-association.)

To be honest, for "pragmatism" in general, particularly "pragmatism" beyond the first decade of the 20th century, I can't say much. From your characterization of Rorty, it sounds like it's been rendered a meaningless equivocation.

Brian,

I'd argue that James is consistent. In his later writings he admits that the "expediency" language was provocative and perhaps gave wind to the sails of his critics. In fact, for James, it is proper to understand that mere expediency is a neccessary but not sufficient condition for truth (cf. one of the quotes above); importantly, for us, it is one of the distinguishing marks by which we recognize truth, but that is not the whole truth-story. I think the later and earlier James jibe if we understand that his concern throughout is to maintain that truth can be, for us, only an "intra-experiential" affair. There is no meaning, no sense, in any reference to an abstract truth that is not FOR SOMEONE. When he writes of truth "happening" to an idea (early James) he means to highlight the fact that truth is known BY SOMEONE, through some sort of "process" whereby someone "cashes it out" (practically or theoretically) in his or her life. Truth is thus always something verified, or at least verifiable. Truth is not an abstract, static relation. Rather, it is always, necessarily, something present in and appealed to through the course of someone's active LIFE; and, to the extent that our lives and environments are fluid (or stable), what is true for us will be fluid (or stable). The point is a relatively simple one, I think, and the later James states it more carefully.

I think your formulation is good. Truth for James is the really truth-relation, and when we unpack the relation, what we have is some set of experiential connections or workings between thought and thing. Personally, I'm a bit hesitant to employ the word "utility" as a substitute for these connections that constitute the truth-relation as we know it (largely because of the later James's comments on the "expediency" language), but I guess it's still fair. Now, James and a Humean skeptic? It's a good question. I'm not sure, to be honest. He's quite up-front about his concern to respond to "rationalists" and "intellectualists" who as a matter of temperament seem to prefer abstract truth-accounts (as opposed to his concrete, empirical one), and all those who go no further than parroting the simple adequatio formula, which he finds vacuous and unhelpful.

To whomever might find the time, I'd strongly recommend *The Meaning of Truth*. James's writing is a pleasure to read, and I think it's very important, especially given that the distortions of his pragmatism seem so prevalent.

Dear Meno's servant boy: Both of your premises are either false, or only partially true. Isn't it useful to know the Earth is, more or less, spherical, or whether one's child is sick? Those are certainly not "constant" truths; also, there may be (I think there are) necessarily structures or laws regarding "how" one knows, and they would be constant.