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Updated: May 19, 2025
The satisfaction of KNOWING TRULY is thus the only one which the pragmatist ought to have considered. As a PSYCHOLOGICAL SENTIMENT, the anti-pragmatist gladly concedes it to him, but then only as a concomitant of truth, not as a constituent.
Their direction constitutes the idea's reference to that reality, their satisfactoriness constitutes its adaptation thereto, and the two things together constitute the 'truth' of the idea for its possessor. Without such intermediating portions of concretely real experience the pragmatist sees no materials out of which the adaptive relation called truth can be built up.
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.
Since the pragmatist, if he agrees that an idea is 'really' true, also agrees to whatever it says about its object; and since most anti- pragmatists have already come round to agreeing that, if the object exists, the idea that it does so is workable; there would seem so little left to fight about that I might well be asked why instead of reprinting my share in so much verbal wrangling, I do not show my sense of 'values' by burning it all up.
As a good pragmatist, I myself ought to call the Absolute true 'in so far forth, then; and I unhesitatingly now do so. But what does TRUE IN SO FAR FORTH mean in this case? To answer, we need only apply the pragmatic method. What do believers in the Absolute mean by saying that their belief affords them comfort?
The only way to stop the process that occurred to logicians was an appeal to the 'self-evident' truth of 'intuitions'; but this has been shown to be argumentatively worthless. From this difficulty the pragmatist alone escapes, by assuming his premisses provisionally and arguing forwards, in order to test them by their consequences.
If the scientist scoffs at the poet's intuitive selection of ideal values, declaring that he might just as well take any other aspect of things their number, solidarity, edibleness instead of beauty, for his test of their reality, the poet has his answer ready. After all, this poet, this dreamer, is a pragmatist at heart.
The mere existence of the idea, all by itself, if only its results were satisfactory, would give full truth to it, it was charged, in our absurd pragmatist epistemology. The solemn attribution of this rubbish to us was also encouraged by two other circumstances.
But, at the outset, at least, it stands for no particular results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method. As the young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it.
As Kant's question about synthetic judgments had escaped previous philosophers, so the pragmatist question is not only so subtile as to have escaped attention hitherto, but even so subtile, it would seem, that when openly broached now, dogmatists and sceptics alike fail to apprehend it, and deem the pragmatist to be treating of something wholly different.
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