JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL RESEARCH

VOLUME 36, 2011

A FAIRLY SHORT RESPONSE

TO A REALLY SHORT REFUTATION

HARVEY CORMIER
STONY BROOK UNIVERSITY

ABSTRACT: Brian Ribeiro argues that the pragmatic theory of

truth massively misrepresents the actual use of the terms true
and truth. Truths, he observes, can be distinguished from
illusions. The latter misrepresent reality and the former do
not. Psychologists, as they report on the way mentally healthy
people commonly overestimate themselves, draw just this dis-
tinction. They tell us of many beliefs that are adaptive but
illusory. Pragmatists cannot draw this distinction because their
theory explains truth as adaptiveness. Therefore no sensible
person will be a pragmatist. In fact, however, Ribeiro paints
a flawed picture of what both psychologists and pragmatists
do. Psychologists provide us not with reality-based accurate
beliefs but instead with beliefs that work, and pragmatists do
not identify all beliefs that are adaptive or useful for individu-
als as true. Pragmatism turns out to be quite sensible, though
often misunderstood.

B
rian Ribeiro argues that the pragmatic theory of truth massively misrepre-
sents the actual use of the terms true and truth. Truths, he observes, can be
distinguished from illusions. The former represent reality accurately and the
latter do not. Psychologists commonly draw just this distinction as they report
on illusory beliefs that are adaptive but false. But pragmatists cannot draw
that distinction since their somewhat kooky theory explains truth as adaptiveness
or usefulness.
This clever argument involves a regrettably common misapprehension regarding
what a pragmatist, especially one like William James, is actually trying to do with
his theory of truth. I try to show this in what follows.
36 HARVEY CORMIER

I.
Ribeiro begins by giving odd examples of ways in which false beliefs might be
adaptive: a homely guy whose belief in his attractiveness leads him to score at the
singles bar; a doomed cancer sufferer whose belief in her likely survival enables
her to survive longer; and a stranded mountaineer whose mistaken belief about her
ability to jump distances makes it possible for her to leap a crevasse. Ribeiro then
brushes aside these easy disproofs of pragmatism and tries to show that truth and
adaptiveness diverge in many more ordinary cases. But it is striking that these odd
outliers are just the kinds of cases that William James himself offers to support his
position. Ribeiro even credits Jamess book The Will to Believe (James 1979, 80) for
the mountaineer example. In the well-known essay that gives that book its title, James
gives examples including: a man who wins a woman over because he has faith in his
ability to do so; passengers on a train who defeat a solitary highwayman because of
their shared belief that they can count on each others help; and a religious believer
who may well come to know God because of his belief that he can do it. James
does not offer these as examples involving adaptive but untrue beliefsbecause the
beliefs at issue are true, or turn out to be true in the end. Well, actually, the jury is
still out on the religious believer, but his belief that he can come to know God may
turn out to be true, and, what is more important, his holding that belief may end up
being a necessary factor in that beliefs turning out to be true (ibid., 2832). James
says of Little-Engine-that-Could cases like these, faith in a fact can help create
the fact (ibid., 29, emphasis in original). And Ribeiros own first examples could
all, with only a little readjustment (redescription?) of what his characters believe,
help to illustrate this fundamental point. I can make the women in this bar find me
attractive, I can hang in there against this tumor until after Jennys birthday, and
I can make this jump are all just as true as they are adaptive, and moreover their
adaptiveness consists partly in their helping to make themselves true.
James uses examples like these to argue that even though moral and religious
beliefs cannot be confirmed scientifically, it may be rationalit may exemplify
the kind of procedure that will lead us to the truthto hold those beliefs before
we have conclusive evidence. Whats more, James thinks that even science relies
fundamentally on just this kind of faith. There is no conclusive scientific proof that
final scientific truth can ever be found, for example, but scientists display faith in
just that possibility as they investigate (ibid., 2324). James even appeals to the
arguments of the pyrhonnistic sceptic to indicate that nobody has yet got entirely
conclusive proof of anything at all: Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless
very fine ideals to play with, he says, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited
planet are they found? (ibid., 22). James himself is not a skeptic only because he is
willing to do what the skeptic will notnamely, believe1 (ibid., 19). And he has this
will to believe because he thinks that hanging back skeptically from commitments
to belief may be just the thing that makes finding truth impossible. Nevertheless, he
fallibilistically recognizes that any of the beliefs he adopts might well turn out in the
end to be illusory, and so he does not use non-illusoriness as his criterion for belief.
A FAIRLY SHORT RESPONSE TO A REALLY SHORT REFUTATION 37

Instead he commits himself to hypotheses, scientific, moral, religious, or other-

wise, that seem to him likely to make his life of action in the world turn out better in
the future. That is, though he does not use the name yet in The Will to Believe, he
becomes a pragmatist, someone who adopts beliefs or calls them true because of
the good he expects from them in life.2 James thinks that this pragmatic procedure,
to the extent we can call it one single procedure, is how belief really works or how
we really attribute truth to ideas. And James will go on to show in Pragmatism
and The Meaning of Truth that this story of a contingent process, rather than any
logical definition, gives the real meaningthe significance, the valueof truth. It
explains truth in terms of its function, or where it comes from and why we bother
trying to get it, share it, and hold on to it.3

II.
However, even if pragmatists are trying to give the typical function or role of truth
in our lives rather than a classic definition, Ribeiro argues that they get that wrong,
too. Psychologists tell us that many of our most adaptive or beneficial beliefs are
not true. We could not get through the day with a really accurate self-conception.
And of course the psychologists can report this bad news to us because they have
been able to determine that many adaptive beliefs are illusory, or are not reality-
based accurate beliefs.4
Come to think of it, though, how did they determine this? Or, at least, how did
they do it without being subject to Jamess kind of acknowledged fallibility? Did
they step out of all of their own and their subjects merely useful beliefs for a mo-
ment to compare them with a reality independent of those beliefs, making sure that
the relation of accurate representation was present in the case of their own beliefs
and absent in the case of the subjects illusions? Is that a realistic picture of their
research? This is certainly not how a pragmatist would describe the process by
which even scientists decide what to call illusory and what to call true. And
especially considering the distinct possibility that the subjects will manage to make
some of their illusions true by believing them, perhaps we should try to describe
the psychologists procedure another way.
Maybe instead these researchers interact with their subjects and have experi-
ences, then come up with beliefs like This hound will never get a date, That
cancers metastasizing. Shell be dead in a month, This fattie will never leap
nine feet, or This academic bozo cant really do above average research. The
psychologists then call their own beliefs true and their subjects contrary beliefs
illusions because their own beliefs work, fitting in consistently with their other
experiential judgments. (Coherence with preexisting belief is one way of working
or being adaptive.)5 The psychologists take into account not only their subjects
life experiences but their own experiences of those subjects from a different per-
spective, and they also call on all the experiences and statistics gathered up and
banked in the background scientific theories of the mind and the body that they
take for granted in their observations. Only then do they draw true conclusions
38 HARVEY CORMIER

about their subjects, and they will continue to call their new beliefs true only so
long as those beliefs keep working in the face of future experiences.
If this is how things actually go, then while it may be that usually the psycholo-
gists beliefs are the better candidates for the designation true, this will not be
because those beliefs have a relation of accurate representation to the world. And
this is especially clear, once more, because we know that those scientific beliefs
will sometimes turn out to be false. If we outside observers are more inclined at the
outset to call the psychologists beliefs trueand we are, and we should beit
will be because the researchers beliefs cover so much more experiential ground
that we properly take them to be better tools for management of future experi-
ence than the beliefs of the subjects being observed. That is, we expect scientific
beliefs, and we typically find them, to have a broader adaptiveness or usefulness.
Of course, there is no guarantee that the researchers beliefs, which sum up past
experiences, will keep on working into the future as new experiences come along
and new experiential judgments have to be made; but, hey, thats life. Sometimes
even scientists get surprises.
In any case, to the extent that scientists are interested in accuracy and connec-
tion to reality, how can they possibly test for these things if not by seeing, fallibly,
what works best in our experience? The search for accuracy is, as a practical
matter, indistinguishable from the search for expediency, whether or not true
can be defined as expedient. And although, ex hypothesi, the psychologists
self-overestimating subjects have adaptive, working beliefs about themselves that
help them live by cushioning their contacts with the world, it is not necessarily the
case that the subjects beliefs work better or are more adaptive or expedient than
any other possible competing beliefs, including especially the beliefs of observant
and knowledgeable researchers.
In fact, in a way, we might say that despite working well for the subjects, the
subjects beliefs might still not work. In the book Pragmatism, James draws a
somewhat Peircean distinction between a belief that is true or useful or adaptive for
me or for you, on the one hand, and a belief that is, on the other hand, absolutely
true or just plain useful. Jamess truth is what works, not what works for me or for
you. James makes a point of distinguishing explicitly between what is only half-
true, or relatively true, or true within [certain limited] borders of experience, and
what is just true, period. (James 1975, 106107) As I go through life, some of my
beliefs will get some confirmation in experience but later get falsified by my later
experiences or the experiences of others. I will properly call those beliefs true for
a while, but when I find they let me or someone else down, I will start calling new
beliefs true, and I will look back on the preceding ones and say that while they
were true or useful for a person, a time, or a place, they were not absolutely true and
thus could not be counted on to guide me and others satisfactorily into the future.
Absolutely or genuinely useful belief can spare us nasty surprises at crucial
moments, and so all of us believers do want lots of it, and nobody is content to have
or to share beliefs that are only relatively true. Still, to be properly called genu-
A FAIRLY SHORT RESPONSE TO A REALLY SHORT REFUTATION 39

inely useful, tools need not work every single time we use them or help everyone
at every moment now and forever. Useful toolsbrooms, hammers, handguns, or
beliefs about what people can doare allowed an occasional misfire, and they can
even fade into obsolescence as the conditions of their usefulness die away. But
they are nevertheless really useful, not merely relatively useful, as long as they
are typically helpful to people at large, or if they tend to be helpful in the right
contingent circumstances.
And we truth-seekers look for belief-tools with just that broad general tendency
to help, or what James would have called the habit of helping or satisfying.6 I
do not want all of my beliefs to be adaptive or helpful (or necessary) for me alone,
even though I can live with the prospect that some of my beliefs fit this descrip-
tion. I want my beliefs about lots of thingsmy own physical condition, economic
justice, dark energy, table manners, Jesus Christ, prenex normal form, how to take
tight corners fast on a motorbike, and so on and onto be typically of benefit not
only to me but to just about anyone I talk to and share my beliefs with.
And evidently, while all my healthy self-overestimations or illusions are ben-
eficial for me or true for me, they have only a narrow usefulness. Therefore they
are not simplyor are simply nottrue. Still, as a pragmatist, I can cope both
psychologically and philosophically with this revelation. Maybe I had better be
careful to avoid scrutinizing my particular beliefs about myself too carefully, lest
I find out which ones are false and get depressed; but pragmatism lets me visit
the meta-level sometimes and acknowledge that some unspecified number of the
beliefs that are necessary for my life are not in fact true. That acknowledgement
is, of course, not itself maladaptive or self-destructive, or even maladaptive for
me. Accepting things like this is a feature of maturity, which is, at least typically,
a very useful quality.

III.
Thus pragmatism is less of an outrage to common sense and science than Ribeiro
and the many critics like him think that it is. And is this really so hard to see?
Maybe it is worth asking in closing: Why do so many people have such a hard
time with the pragmatic theory of truth? An idea this simple hardly deserves the
name theory, really. Why have readers insisted on making the same interpretative
mistakes over and over, from Jamess time to the present? My surmise: If we ask
what truth is, then we find it hard to accept an answer that tells us only what truth
typically does and therefore why we value it. Explanations of value and function
may be what we are ultimately seeking when we ask philosophically what truth,
or anything else, is; but we also want to understand how that ideality comes from
a reality, or what there is in the real thing that gives it its value or makes it work.
Thus we are inclined to demand some kind of account of the essential quality in
truth, the thing inside the truth that produces all those good consequences. And
as empty and unavailing as the idea of reality-based accurate belief actually is,
it sounds, eternally, like the promising beginning of the solution to this problem.
40 HARVEY CORMIER

Pragmatism, however, basically directs us to stop looking for the thing called
truth. The truth we know and care about is no more a single, real thing than is
usefulness. (How worthwhile would it be to try to develop a theory of useful-
ness, or to look for the essential quality that that makes everything from spark
plugs to knowledge of a foreign language useful?) Instead, truth is a role played by
a developing set of real things called beliefs. For a while, we honor with the label
true the beliefs that we generate and then count on to bring us various valuable
practical results when we act on them; but that honorific title reflects no pre-existing
necessary essence, and thus it is unlikely to be bestowed on any particular belief
forever, just as the title useful is unlikely to be bestowed forever on any role-
playing or purpose-serving toolthough The sky is blue, Love is better than
hate, and 1+1=2 just may turn out, along with opposable thumbs, inclined
planes, and levers, to be tools that never get old.
To find pragmatism satisfactory, we have to change our philosophical habits.
We have to keep more resolutely in mind what it is we are really looking for. In
the end, when we ask what truth is, we are not seeking a definition of an essence
or a thing any more than we are when we ask what, say, life or love is. Ultimately
what we want to understand in cases like these is how and why we should seek and
preserve these things that are not things (or unified things, anyway). Fortunately, a
variety of answers to all these questions can be found in the details of our practical
dealings with the things like these that we want to know about. These answers
are not always easy to find because they are often shifting, partial, and perspec-
tival, and we sometimes have to penetrate a lot of confusion, preconception, and
self-deception to get at them. But the observable world is ready to tell us what we
want to know. We just have to learn to take Yes for an answer.

ENDNOTES
1. In chapter 4 of Cormier 2001 I argue that since what James calls believing is pretty
much what the Pyrrhonists called living by appearances, James was mistaken to distance
himself from the real historical skepticism.
2. James says in Will that
The strength of [the scholastic absolutists] system lies in the principles, the origin, the
terminus a quo [beginning point] of his thought; for us [empiricists] the strength is in
the outcome, the upshot, the terminus ad quem [the end result]. Not where it comes
from but what it leads to is to decide. It matters not to an empiricist from what quarter
an hypothesis may come to him: he may have acquired it by fair means or by foul;
passion may have whispered or accident suggested it; but if the total drift of thinking
continues to confirm it, that is what he means by its being true. (James 1979: 24)
James will in a few years go on to identify this kind of empiricist as a pragmatist.
3. James says in his debate with Bertrand Russell that when he calls truths expedient, he
is offering the causa existendi of our truth-claims, not a logical account or a synonym of
the word truth. (James 1975, 313) He is offering a functional account of how truth works
A FAIRLY SHORT RESPONSE TO A REALLY SHORT REFUTATION 41

in our lives, not an essentialist theory of the relation that certain beliefs have to reality. He
wants us to stop defining truth as accurate, non-illusory representation, or copying, or cor-
respondencemainly because he wants us to stop logically defining truth altogether, at
least for philosophical purposes.
4. Ribeiro cites Taylor and Brown (1988, 194) for this distinction between truth and illusion.
5. Among the realities with which a pragmatic truth must agree is the whole body of
other truths already in our possession. (James 1975, 102) Agreement with a reality here
involves providing us believers with the ability to handle that reality better than we could
if we did not believe that truth.
6. James points out in Pragmatism that health, wealth, and strength sometimes actively
provide us with satisfactory experiences of various kinds but sink to the status of habits
between their times of exercise; and similarly truth becomes a habit of certain of our ideas
and beliefs in their intervals of rest from their verifying activities. (James 1975, 106) There
is no more to strength than the sometimes manifest habit, potential, or tendency of muscles
to move heavy things around, no more to wealth than the sometimes manifest tendency of
certified checks to provide beach houses and fine dining, and no more to truth than the some-
times manifest habit or tendency of beliefs to provide verifying satisfactory experiences.
Peirce mistakenly criticized James for overlooking the role of habit in truth; see chap. 3
of Cormier 2001 for a discussion.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cormier, H. 2001. The Truth is What Works: William James, Pragmatism, and the Seed of
Death. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
James, W. 1975. Pragmatism, A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking; The Meaning
of Truth, A Sequel to Pragmatism. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.
. 1979. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. Cambridge
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Taylor, S., and J. Brown. 1988. Illusion and Well-Being: A Social Psychological Perspective
on Mental Health. Psychological Bulletin 103: 193210.