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Opportunists propose to act now and win what they can today. Never mind about tomorrow with its sequences and consequences of today's action. Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. Pragmatists believe in serving their own interests, on the theory that whatever serves personal interests must have first priority. "What is good for me/us is good for the universe".
I do not say that for certain logical purposes it may not be useful to treat propositions as absolute entities, with truth or falsehood inside of them respectively, or to make of a complex like 'that Caesar is dead' a single term and call it a 'truth. But the 'that' here has the extremely convenient ambiguity for those who wish to make trouble for us pragmatists, that sometimes it means the FACT that, and sometimes the BELIEF that, Caesar is no longer living.
This is so true that unless we make the substitution into psychic terms instinctively, the whole pragmatic view of things will seem paradoxical, if not actually unthinkable. For instance, pragmatists might protest against the accusation that "they never think about the facts upon which scientific theories are based," for they lay a great emphasis on facts.
The very term 'useful' was chosen by pragmatists as a protest against the common philosophic licence of alleging 'truths' which could never be applied or tested, and were supposed to be none the worse for being 'useless. It is clear both that such 'truths' must be a monopoly of Intellectualism, and also that they do allow every man to believe whatever he wishes, provided only that he boldly claims 'self-evidence' for his idiosyncrasy.
Most of the pragmatist and anti-pragmatist warfare is over what the word 'truth' shall be held to signify, and not over any of the facts embodied in truth-situations; for both pragmatists and anti- pragmatists believe in existent objects, just as they believe in our ideas of them.
They are enamored of offices, typewriters, telegrams, long-distance messages, secretaries, programs, conferences and drives. Getting results is their goal; everything is judged by the criterion of effective action; they are instinctive and unconscious pragmatists. They make good cheer leaders at football games in their youth and impressive captains of industry in their old age.
No matter what religion we profess, whether it be Calvinism, or Catholicism, we are individualists, pragmatists, empiricists for ever. Our faces are set toward strange worlds presently to rise out of the sea and take on form and colour and substance worlds of new aspirations, of new ideas and new values.
He displayed a marvellous invention in ascribing to her plausible expressions of opinion entirely identical in import with those of the Oxford and Harvard Pragmatists, against whom he waged a fierce obscure war.... It was Codger's function to teach me philosophy, philosophy! the intimate wisdom of things.
Theology has long applied the name truth pre-eminently to fiction. When the conviction first dawned upon pragmatists that there was no absolute or eternal truth, what they evidently were thinking of was that it is folly, in this changing world, to pledge oneself to any final and inflexible creed.
'According to the pragmatists, Mr. Russell writes, 'to say "it is true that other people exist" means "it is useful to believe that other people exist." But may not real terms, I now ask, have accidents not expressed in their definitions? and when a real value is finally substituted for the result of an algebraic series of substituted definitions, do not all these accidents creep back?
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