The pragmatic theory of truth as developed by Peirce, James, and DeweyGeyer, Denton Loring
Philosophy
The pragmatic theory of truth as developed by Peirce, James, and Dewey
Geyer, Denton Loring
Dewey, John, 1859-1952; James, William, 1842-1910; Peirce, Charles S. (Charles Sanders), 1839-1914; Pragmatism
No one, it seems, paid any especial attention to this theory at the
time. But twenty years later James brought the subject to the
forefront of discussion by explaining it anew in his exceptionally
lucid way and by making a particular application of it to religion.
But for James the method for clearness very soon grew into a new
theory of truth, and in this way, in spite of the fact that the method
had been proposed by a scientist as a description of the procedure of
science, he seems to have lost for it the support of science. The
reason for this outcome was his introduction of value as a criterion
for truth. This, James recognizes, was counter to all the scientific
ideals of many of the workers in science, for the essence of their
procedure, as they saw it, was to put all desire as to outcomes behind
them and to try to find out how things actually prove or test out to
be, quite apart from how we would like them to be. To introduce the
general value of an outcome, then, as a criterion for truth, seems to
destroy what the scientist had been thinking of as 'pure research',
and to involve control by an outside influence that would determine
which things are or are not valuable and worth investigating. It was
sufficiently well known to the scientist that most of the greatest
scientific discoveries were made by men who had no appreciation or
interest in the general utility of the outcome, and whose results were
applied only much later and, as it were, by accident. To say, then,
that the truth of an idea was influenced by its general value was to
run afoul of all the sorely sensitive ideals which the scientist had
acquired in his recent contest with the domination of the church. It
is hardly to be wondered at, therefore, that the interpretation of
pragmatism given by James was not popular with persons of a scientific
temperament.
Further, if the value or desirability of an idea has an influence upon
its truth, then truth will vary from person to person, for
desirability varies with the taste of the person concerned. Peirce had
warned against individual standards of truth in his discussion of the
Methods of Fixing Belief. The scientific conception, as it had
differentiated itself from other conceptions of truth, had attempted
to secure a kind of truth not determined by what we would like or by
what can be made to seem desirable by oratory or by what can be made
to win out over other opinions by skill in debate, but by some
criterion quite apart from desire and opinion. Peirce had attempted
such a criterion in his postulate of an unchanging eternal reality.
Instead, that is, of consulting with each other, of debating with each
other to find the truth, we ought to consult this reality. In other
words, to undertake scientific experiment. Such had been Peirce's
description of the scientific and modern method of attaining truth as
contrasted, as he says, with that of the medievalists.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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