The Meaning of Truth

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THE MEANING OF TRUTH

A SEQUEL TO 'PRAGMATISM'

BY

WILLIAM JAMES

PREFACE

THE pivotal part of my book named Pragmatism is its account of the
relation called 'truth' which may obtain between an idea
(opinion, belief, statement, or what not) and its object. 'Truth,' I
there say, 'is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their
agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with
reality. Pragmatists and intellectualists both accept this
definition as a matter of course.

'Where our ideas [do] not copy definitely their object, what does
agreement with that object mean? ... Pragmatism asks its
usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what
concrete difference will its being true make in any one's actual
life? What experiences [may] be different from those which would
obtain if the belief were false? How will the truth be realized?
What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential
terms?" The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the
answer: TRUE IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CAN ASSIMILATE, VALIDATE,
CORROBORATE, AND VERIFY. FALSE IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CANNOT. That
is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that
therefore is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known
as.

'The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it.
Truth HAPPENS to an idea. It BECOMES true, is MADE true by events.
Its verity IS in fact an event, a process, the process namely of its
verifying itself, its veriFICATION. Its validity is the process of
its validATION. [Footnote: But 'VERIFIABILITY,' I add, 'is as good
as verification. For one truth-process completed, there are a
million in our lives that function in [the] state of nascency. They
lead us towards direct verification; lead us into the surroundings
of the object they envisage; and then, if everything, runs on
harmoniously, we are so sure that verification is possible that we
omit it, and are usually justified by all that happens.']

'To agree in the widest sense with a reality can only mean to be
guided either straight up to it or into its surroundings, or to be
put into such working touch with it as to handle either it or
something connected with it better than if we disagreed. Better
either intellectually or practically .... Any idea that helps us
to deal, whether practically or intellectually, with either the
reality or its belongings, that doesn't entangle our progress in
frustrations, that FITS, in fact, and adapts our life to the
reality's whole setting, will agree sufficiently to meet
the requirement. It will be true of that reality.

'THE TRUE, to put it very briefly, IS ONLY THE EXPEDIENT IN THE WAY
OF OUR THINKING, JUST AS THE RIGHT IS ONLY THE EXPEDIENT IN THE WAY
OF OUR BEHAVING. Expedient in almost any fashion, and expedient in
the long run and on the whole, of course; for what meets expediently
all the experience in sight won't necessarily meet all farther
experiences equally satisfactorily. Experience, as we know, has ways
of BOILING OVER, and making us correct our present formulas.'

This account of truth, following upon the similar ones given by
Messrs. Dewey and Schiller, has occasioned the liveliest
discussion. Few critics have defended it, most of them have scouted
it. It seems evident that the subject is a hard one to understand,
under its apparent simplicity; and evident also, I think, that
the definitive settlement of it will mark a turning-point in the
history of epistemology, and consequently in that of general
philosophy. In order to make my own thought more accessible to those
who hereafter may have to study the question, I have collected in
the volume that follows all the work of my pen that bears directly
on the truth-question. My first statement was in 1884, in the
article that begins the present volume. The other papers follow in
the order of their publication. Two or three appear now for the
first time.

One of the accusations which I oftenest have had to meet is that of
making the truth of our religious beliefs consist in their 'feeling
good' to us, and in nothing else. I regret to have given some excuse
for this charge, by the unguarded language in which, in the book
Pragmatism, I spoke of the truth of the belief of certain
philosophers in the absolute. Explaining why I do not believe in the
absolute myself (p. 78), yet finding that it may secure 'moral
holidays' to those who need them, and is true in so far forth (if to
gain moral holidays be a good), [Footnote: Op. cit., p. 75.] I
offered this as a conciliatory olive-branch to my enemies. But they,
as is only too common with such offerings, trampled the gift under
foot and turned and rent the giver. I had counted too much on their
good will--oh for the rarity of Christian charity under the sun! Oh
for the rarity of ordinary secular intelligence also! I had supposed
it to be matter of common observation that, of two competing views
of the universe which in all other respects are equal, but of which
the first denies some vital human need while the second satisfies
it, the second will be favored by sane men for the simple reason
that it makes the world seem more rational. To choose the first view
under such circumstances would be an ascetic act, an act of
philosophic self-denial of which no normal human being would be
guilty. Using the pragmatic test of the meaning of concepts, I had
shown the concept of the absolute to MEAN nothing but the
holiday giver, the banisher of cosmic fear. One's objective
deliverance, when one says 'the absolute exists,' amounted, on my
showing, just to this, that 'some justification of a feeling
of security in presence of the universe,' exists, and that
systematically to refuse to cultivate a feeling of security would be
to do violence to a tendency in one's emotional life which
might well be respected as prophetic.

Apparently my absolutist critics fail to see the workings of their
own minds in any such picture, so all that I can do is to apologize,
and take my offering back. The absolute is true in NO way then, and
least of all, by the verdict of the critics, in the way which I
assigned!

My treatment of 'God,' 'freedom,' and 'design' was similar.
Reducing, by the pragmatic test, the meaning of each of these
concepts to its positive experienceable operation, I showed them all
to mean the same thing, viz., the presence of 'promise' in the
world. 'God or no God?' means 'promise or no promise?' It seems to
me that the alternative is objective enough, being a question as to
whether the cosmos has one character or another, even though our own
provisional answer be made on subjective grounds. Nevertheless
christian and non-christian critics alike accuse me of summoning
people to say 'God exists,' EVEN WHEN HE DOESN'T EXIST, because
forsooth in my philosophy the 'truth' of the saying doesn't
really mean that he exists in any shape whatever, but only that to
say so feels good.

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. The difference is that when the pragmatists speak of
truth, they mean exclusively some thing about the ideas, namely
their workableness; whereas when anti-pragmatists speak of truth
they seem most often to mean something about the objects. 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.

I understand the question and I will give my answer. I am interested
in another doctrine in philosophy to which I give the name of
radical empiricism, and it seems to me that the establishment of the
pragmatist theory of truth is a step of first-rate importance in
making radical empiricism prevail. Radical empiricism consists first
of a postulate, next of a statement of fact, and finally of a
generalized conclusion.

The postulate is that the only things that shall be debatable among
philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from
experience. [Things of an unexperienceable nature may exist ad
libitum, but they form no part of the material for philosophic
debate.]

The statement of fact is that the relations between things,
conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of
direct particular experience, neither more so nor less so, than the
things themselves.

The generalized conclusion is that therefore the parts of experience
hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves
parts of experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in
short, no extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but
possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure.

The great obstacle to radical empiricism in the contemporary mind is
the rooted rationalist belief that experience as immediately given
is all disjunction and no conjunction, and that to make one world
out of this separateness, a higher unifying agency must be there.
In the prevalent idealism this agency is represented as the absolute
all-witness which 'relates' things together by throwing
'categories' over them like a net. The most peculiar and unique,
perhaps, of all these categories is supposed to be the truth-
relation, which connects parts of reality in pairs, making of one of
them a knower, and of the other a thing known, yet which is itself
contentless experientially, neither describable, explicable, nor
reduceable to lower terms, and denotable only by uttering the name
'truth.'

The pragmatist view, on the contrary, of the truth-relation is that
it has a definite content, and that everything in it is
experienceable. Its whole nature can be told in positive terms. The
'workableness' which ideas must have, in order to be true, means
particular workings, physical or intellectual, actual or
possible, which they may set up from next to next inside of concrete
experience. Were this pragmatic contention admitted, one great point
in the victory of radical empiricism would also be scored, for the
relation between an object and the idea that truly knows it, is held
by rationalists to be nothing of this describable sort, but to stand
outside of all possible temporal experience; and on the relation,
so interpreted, rationalism is wonted to make its last most obdurate
rally.

Now the anti-pragmatist contentions which I try to meet in this
volume can be so easily used by rationalists as weapons of
resistance, not only to pragmatism but to radical empiricism also
(for if the truth-relation were transcendent, others might be so
too), that I feel strongly the strategical importance of having
them definitely met and got out of the way. What our critics most
persistently keep saying is that though workings go with truth, yet
they do not constitute it. It is numerically additional to them,
prior to them, explanatory OF them, and in no wise to be explained
BY them, we are incessantly told. The first point for our enemies to
establish, therefore, is that SOMETHING numerically additional and
prior to the workings is involved in the truth of an idea. Since the
OBJECT is additional, and usually prior, most rationalists plead IT,
and boldly accuse us of denying it. This leaves on the bystanders
the impression--since we cannot reasonably deny the existence of the
object--that our account of truth breaks down, and that our critics
have driven us from the field. Altho in various places in this
volume I try to refute the slanderous charge that we deny real
existence, I will say here again, for the sake of emphasis, that
the existence of the object, whenever the idea asserts it 'truly,'
is the only reason, in innumerable cases, why the idea does work
successfully, if it work at all; and that it seems an abuse
of language, to say the least, to transfer the word 'truth' from the
idea to the object's existence, when the falsehood of ideas that
won't work is explained by that existence as well as the truth of
those that will.

I find this abuse prevailing among my most accomplished adversaries.
But once establish the proper verbal custom, let the word
'truth' represent a property of the idea, cease to make it something
mysteriously connected with the object known, and the path opens
fair and wide, as I believe, to the discussion of radical empiricism
on its merits. The truth of an idea will then mean only its
workings, or that in it which by ordinary psychological laws sets up
those workings; it will mean neither the idea's object, nor anything
'saltatory' inside the idea, that terms drawn from experience cannot
describe.

One word more, ere I end this preface. A distinction is sometimes
made between Dewey, Schiller and myself, as if I, in supposing
the object's existence, made a concession to popular prejudice which
they, as more radical pragmatists, refuse to make. As I myself
understand these authors, we all three absolutely agree in admitting
the transcendency of the object (provided it be an experienceable
object) to the subject, in the truth-relation. Dewey in
particular has insisted almost ad nauseam that the whole meaning of
our cognitive states and processes lies in the way they intervene in
the control and revaluation of independent existences or facts. His
account of knowledge is not only absurd, but meaningless, unless
independent existences be there of which our ideas take account, and
for the transformation of which they work. But because he and
Schiller refuse to discuss objects and relations 'transcendent' in
the sense of being ALTOGETHER TRANS-EXPERIENTIAL, their critics
pounce on sentences in their writings to that effect to show that
they deny the existence WITHIN THE REALM OF EXPERIENCE of objects
external to the ideas that declare their presence there. [Footnote:
It gives me pleasure to welcome Professor Carveth Read into the
pragmatistic church, so far as his epistemology goes. See his
vigorous book, The Metaphysics of Nature, 2d Edition, Appendix A.
(London, Black, 1908.) The work What is Reality? by Francis Howe
Johnson (Boston, 1891), of which I make the acquaintance only while
correcting these proofs, contains some striking anticipations of the
later pragmatist view. The Psychology of Thinking, by Irving
E. Miller (New York, Macmillan Co., 1909), which has just
appeared, is one of the most convincing pragmatist document yet
published, tho it does not use the word 'pragmatism' at all. While I
am making references, I cannot refrain from inserting one to the
extraordinarily acute article by H. V. Knox. in the Quarterly Review
for April, 1909.]

It seems incredible that educated and apparently sincere
critics should so fail to catch their adversary's point of view.

What misleads so many of them is possibly also the fact that the
universes of discourse of Schiller, Dewey, and myself are panoramas
of different extent, and that what the one postulates explicitly the
other provisionally leaves only in a state of implication, while the
reader thereupon considers it to be denied. Schiller's universe is
the smallest, being essentially a psychological one. He starts with
but one sort of thing, truth-claims, but is led ultimately to the
independent objective facts which they assert, inasmuch as the most
successfully validated of all claims is that such facts are
there. My universe is more essentially epistemological. I start with
two things, the objective facts and the claims, and indicate which
claims, the facts being there, will work successfully as
the latter's substitutes and which will not. I call the former
claims true. Dewey's panorama, if I understand this colleague, is
the widest of the three, but I refrain from giving my own account of
its complexity. Suffice it that he holds as firmly as I do to
objects independent of our judgments. If I am wrong in saying this,
he must correct me. I decline in this matter to be corrected at
second hand.

I have not pretended in the following pages to consider all the
critics of my account of truth, such as Messrs. Taylor, Lovejoy,
Gardiner, Bakewell, Creighton, Hibben, Parodi, Salter, Carus,
Lalande, Mentre, McTaggart, G. E. Moore, Ladd and others,
especially not Professor Schinz, who has published under the title
of Anti-pragmatisme an amusing sociological romance. Some of these
critics seem to me to labor under an inability almost pathetic, to
understand the thesis which they seek to refute. I imagine that most
of their difficulties have been answered by anticipation elsewhere
in this volume, and I am sure that my readers will thank me for not
adding more repetition to the fearful amount that is already there.

95 IRVING ST., CAMBRIDGE (MASS.), August, 1909.

CONTENTS

I THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION

II THE TIGERS IN INDIA

III HUMANISM AND TRUTH

IV THE RELATION BETWEEN KNOWER AND KNOWN

V THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM

VI A WORD MORE ABOUT TRUTH

VII PROFESSOR PRATT ON TRUTH

VIII THE PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OF TRUTH AND ITS MIS-UNDERSTANDERS

X THE EXISTENCE OF JULIUS CAESAR

XI THE ABSOLUTE AND THE STRENUOUS LIFE

XII PROFESSOR HEBERT ON PRAGMATISM

XIII ABSTRACTIONISM AND 'RELATIVISMUS'

XIV TWO ENGLISH CRITICS

XV A DIALOGUE

THE MEANING OF TRUTH

I

THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION
[Footnote: Read before the Aristotelian Society, December 1,
1884, and first published in Mind, vol. x (1885).--This, and
the following articles have received a very slight verbal
revision, consisting mostly in the omission of redundancy.]

The following inquiry is (to use a distinction familiar
to readers of Mr. Shadworth Hodgson) not an inquiry into
the 'how it comes,' but into the 'what it is' of
cognition. What we call acts of cognition are evidently
realized through what we call brains and their events,
whether there be 'souls' dynamically connected with the
brains or not. But with neither brains nor souls has this
essay any business to transact. In it we shall simply
assume that cognition IS produced, somehow, and limit
ourselves to asking what elements it contains, what
factors it implies.

Cognition is a function of consciousness. The first factor it
implies is therefore a state of consciousness wherein the cognition
shall take place. Having elsewhere used the word 'feeling' to
designate generically all states of consciousness considered
subjectively, or without respect to their possible function, I shall
then say that, whatever elements an act of cognition may imply
besides, it at least implies the existence of a FEELING. [If the
reader share the current antipathy to the word 'feeling,' he may
substitute for it, wherever I use it, the word 'idea,' taken in the
old broad Lockian sense, or he may use the clumsy phrase 'state of
consciousness,' or finally he may say 'thought' instead.]

Now it is to be observed that the common consent of mankind has
agreed that some feelings are cognitive and some are simple
facts having a subjective, or, what one might almost call a
physical, existence, but no such self-transcendent function as
would be implied in their being pieces of knowledge. Our task
is again limited here. We are not to ask, 'How is self-transcendence
possible?' We are only to ask, 'How comes it that common sense
has assigned a number of cases in which it is assumed not only to be
possible but actual? And what are the marks used by common sense
to distinguish those cases from the rest?' In short, our inquiry is
a chapter in descriptive psychology,--hardly anything more.

Condillac embarked on a quest similar to this by his famous
hypothesis of a statue to which various feelings were successively
imparted. Its first feeling was supposed to be one of fragrance. But
to avoid all possible complication with the question of genesis, let
us not attribute even to a statue the possession of our imaginary
feeling. Let us rather suppose it attached to no matter, nor
localized at any point in space, but left swinging IN VACUO, as
it were, by the direct creative FIAT of a god. And let us also, to
escape entanglement with difficulties about the physical or
psychical nature of its 'object' not call it a feeling of
fragrance or of any other determinate sort, but limit ourselves to
assuming that it is a feeling of Q. What is true of it under this
abstract name will be no less true of it in any more particular
shape (such as fragrance, pain, hardness) which the reader may
suppose.

Now, if this feeling of Q be the only creation of the god, it will
of course form the entire universe. And if, to escape the cavils of
that large class of persons who believe that SEMPER IDEM SENTIRE AC
NON SENTIRE are the same, [Footnote:1 'The Relativity of Knowledge,'
held in this sense, is, it may be observed in passing, one of the
oddest of philosophic superstitions. Whatever facts may be cited in
its favor are due to the properties of nerve-tissue, which may be
exhausted by too prolonged an excitement. Patients with neuralgias
that last unremittingly for days can, however, assure us that
the limits of this nerve-law are pretty widely drawn. But if
we physically could get a feeling that should last
eternally unchanged, what atom of logical or psychological argument
is there to prove that it would not be felt as long as it
lasted, and felt for just what it is, all that time? The reason for
the opposite prejudice seems to be our reluctance to think that
so stupid a thing as such a feeling would necessarily be, should be
allowed to fill eternity with its presence. An
interminable acquaintance, leading to no knowledge-about,--such
would be its condition.] we allow the feeling to be of as short a
duration as they like, that universe will only need to last an
infinitesimal part of a second. The feeling in question will thus be
reduced to its fighting weight, and all that befalls it in the way
of a cognitive function must be held to befall in the brief
instant of its quickly snuffed-out life,--a life, it will also be
noticed, that has no other moment of consciousness either preceding
or following it.

Well now, can our little feeling, thus left alone in the universe,--
for the god and we psychological critics may be supposed left out of
the account,--can the feeling, I say, be said to have any sort of a
cognitive function? For it to KNOW, there must be something to be
known. What is there, on the present supposition? One may reply,
'the feeling's content q.' But does it not seem more proper to call
this the feeling's QUALITY than its content? Does not the
word 'content' suggest that the feeling has already dirempted itself
as an act from its content as an object? And would it be quite safe
to assume so promptly that the quality q of a feeling is one and the
same thing with a feeling of the quality q? The quality q, so far,
is an entirely subjective fact which the feeling carries so to speak
endogenously, or in its pocket. If any one pleases to dignify so
simple a fact as this by the name of knowledge, of course
nothing can prevent him. But let us keep closer to the path of
common usage, and reserve the name knowledge for the cognition of
'realities,' meaning by realities things that exist independently of
the feeling through which their cognition occurs. If the content of
the feeling occur nowhere in the universe outside of the feeling
itself, and perish with the feeling, common usage refuses to call it
a reality, and brands it as a subjective feature of the
feeling's constitution, or at the most as the feeling's DREAM.

For the feeling to be cognitive in the specific sense, then, it must
be self-transcendent; and we must prevail upon the god to CREATE A
REALITY OUTSIDE OF IT to correspond to its intrinsic quality Q. Thus
only can it be redeemed from the condition of being a solipsism. If
now the new created reality RESEMBLE the feeling's quality Q I say
that the feeling may be held by us TO BE COGNIZANT OF THAT REALITY.

This first instalment of my thesis is sure to be attacked. But one
word before defending it 'Reality' has become our warrant for
calling a feeling cognitive; but what becomes our warrant for
calling anything reality? The only reply is--the faith of the
present critic or inquirer. At every moment of his life he
finds himself subject to a belief in SOME realities, even though his
realities of this year should prove to be his illusions of the next.
Whenever he finds that the feeling he is studying contemplates what
he himself regards as a reality, he must of course admit the feeling
itself to be truly cognitive. We are ourselves the critics here; and
we shall find our burden much lightened by being allowed to take
reality in this relative and provisional way. Every science must
make some assumptions. Erkenntnisstheoretiker are but fallible
mortals. When they study the function of cognition, they do it by
means of the same function in themselves. And knowing that the
fountain cannot go higher than its source, we should promptly
confess that our results in this field are affected by our own
liability to err. THE MOST WE CAN CLAIM IS, THAT WHAT WE SAY ABOUT
COGNITION MAY BE COUNTED AS TRUE AS WHAT WE SAY ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE.
If our hearers agree with us about what are to be held 'realities,'
they will perhaps also agree to the reality of our doctrine of the
way in which they are known. We cannot ask for more.

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