Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of ThinkingJames, William
Philosophy
Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking
James, William
Pragmatism
The 'absolutely' true, meaning what no farther experience will ever
alter, is that ideal vanishing-point towards which we imagine that all
our temporary truths will some day converge. It runs on all fours with
the perfectly wise man, and with the absolutely complete experience;
and, if these ideals are ever realized, they will all be realized
together. Meanwhile we have to live to-day by what truth we can
get to-day, and be ready to-morrow to call it falsehood. Ptolemaic
astronomy, euclidean space, aristotelian logic, scholastic metaphysics,
were expedient for centuries, but human experience has boiled over
those limits, and we now call these things only relatively true, or true
within those borders of experience. 'Absolutely' they are false; for we
know that those limits were casual, and might have been transcended by
past theorists just as they are by present thinkers.
When new experiences lead to retrospective judgments, using the past
tense, what these judgments utter WAS true, even tho no past thinker
had been led there. We live forwards, a Danish thinker has said, but we
understand backwards. The present sheds a backward light on the world's
previous processes. They may have been truth-processes for the actors
in them. They are not so for one who knows the later revelations of the
story.
This regulative notion of a potential better truth to be established
later, possibly to be established some day absolutely, and having powers
of retroactive legislation, turns its face, like all pragmatist
notions, towards concreteness of fact, and towards the future. Like the
half-truths, the absolute truth will have to be MADE, made as a relation
incidental to the growth of a mass of verification-experience, to which
the half-true ideas are all along contributing their quota.
I have already insisted on the fact that truth is made largely out
of previous truths. Men's beliefs at any time are so much experience
funded. But the beliefs are themselves parts of the sum total of the
world's experience, and become matter, therefore, for the next day's
funding operations. So far as reality means experienceable reality,
both it and the truths men gain about it are everlastingly in process
of mutation-mutation towards a definite goal, it may be--but still
mutation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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