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Making truth
Instead of truth being ready-made for us, James asserts we and reality jointly "make" truth.
This idea has two senses: (1) truth is mutable, (often attributed to William James and F.C.S.
Schiller); and (2) truth is relative to a conceptual scheme (more widely accepted in
Pragmatism).
(1) Mutability of truth
"Truth" is not readily defined in Pragmatism. Can beliefs pass from being true to being
untrue and back? For James, beliefs are not true until they have been made true by
verification. James believed propositions become true over the long term through proving
their utility in a person's specific situation. The opposite of this process is not falsification,
but rather the belief ceases to be a "live option." F.C.S. Schiller, on the other hand, clearly
asserted beliefs could pass into and out of truth on a situational basis. Schiller held that truth
was relative to specific problems. If I want to know how to return home safely, the true
answer will be whatever is useful to solving that problem. Later on, when faced with a
different problem, what I came to believe with the earlier problem may now be false. As my
problems change, and as the most useful way to solve a problem shifts, so does the property
of truth.
C.S. Peirce considered the idea that beliefs are true at one time but false at another (or true for
one person but false for another) to be one of the "seeds of death"[8] by which James allowed
his pragmatism to become "infected." For Peirce the pragmatic view implies theoretical
claims should be tied to verification processes (i.e. they should be subject to test). They
shouldn't be tied to our specific problems or life needs. Truth is defined, for Peirce, as what
would be the ultimate outcome (not any outcome in real time) of inquiry by a (usually
scientific) community of investigators. John Dewey, while agreeing with this definition, also
characterized truthfulness as a species of the good: if something is true it is trustworthy and
reliable and will remain so in every conceivable situation. Both Peirce and Dewey connect
the definitions of truth and warranted assertability. Hilary Putnam also developed his internal
realism around the idea a belief is true if it is ideally justified in epistemic terms. About
James' and Schiller's view, Putnam says:
Truth cannot simply be rational acceptability for one fundamental reason; truth is supposed to
be a property of a statement that cannot be lost, whereas justification can be lost. The
statement 'The earth is flat' was, very likely, rationally acceptable 3000 years ago; but it is not
rationally acceptable today. Yet it would be wrong to say that 'the earth is flat' was true 3,000
years ago; for that would mean that the earth has changed its shape. (Putnam 1981, p. 55)
Rorty has also weighed in against James and Schiller:
Truth is, to be sure, an absolute notion, in the following sense: "true for me but not for you"
and "true in my culture but not in yours" are weird, pointless locutions. So is "true then, but
not now." [...] James would, indeed, have done better to say that phrases like "the good in the
way of belief" and "what it is better for us to believe" are interchangeable with "justified"
rather than with "true." (Rorty 1998, p. 2)
(2) Conceptual relativity
With James and Schiller we make things true by verifying thema view rejected by most
pragmatists. However, nearly all pragmatists do accept the idea there can be no truths without
a conceptual scheme to express those truths. That is,
Unless we decide upon how we are going to use concepts like 'object', 'existence' etc., the
question 'how many objects exist' does not really make any sense. But once we decide the use
of these concepts, the answer to the above-mentioned question within that use or 'version', to
put in Nelson Goodman's phrase, is no more a matter of 'convention'. (Maitra 2003 p. 40)
F.C.S. Schiller used the analogy of a chair to make clear what he meant by the phrase that
truth is made: just as a carpenter makes a chair out of existing materials and doesn't create it
out of nothing, truth is a transformation of our experiencebut this doesn't imply reality is
something we're free to construct or imagine as we please.
Dewey
Main article: John Dewey
John Dewey, less broadly than William James but much more broadly than Charles Peirce,
held that inquiry, whether scientific, technical, sociological, philosophical or cultural, is selfcorrective over time if openly submitted for testing by a community of inquirers in order to
clarify, justify, refine and/or refute proposed truths.[9] In his Logic: The Theory of Inquiry
(1938), Dewey gave the following definition of inquiry:
Inquiry is the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that
is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the
original situation into a unified whole. (Dewey, p. 108).
The index of the same book has exactly one entry under the heading truth, and it refers to the
following footnote:
The best definition of truth from the logical standpoint which is known to me is that by
Peirce: "The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what
we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real [CP 5.407].
(Dewey, 343 n).
Dewey says more of what he understands by truth in terms of his preferred concept of
warranted assertibility as the end-in-view and conclusion of inquiry (Dewey, 1415).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatic_theory_of_truth