Philosophy in the modern world a new history of western philosophy, volume 4 (new history of western philosophy) ( PDFDrive ) (1) 145

LANGUAGE Pragmatism, he claimed, was not at all inconsistent with realism Truth and reality are not the same as each other; truth is something known, thought, or said about the reality Indeed, the notion of a reality independent of any believer, James said, was at the base of the pragmatist definition of truth Any statement, to be counted true, must agree with some such reality Pragmatism defines ‘agreeing’ to mean certain ways of ‘working’, be they actual or potential Thus, for my statement ‘the desk exists’ to be true of a desk recognized as real by you, it must be able to lead me to shake your desk, to explain myself by words that suggest that desk to your mind, to make a drawing that is like the desk you see, etc Only in such ways as this is there sense in saying it agrees with that reality, only thus does it gain for me the satisfaction of hearing you corroborate me (T 218) Passages like this suggest that pragmatism adds to, rather than subtracts from, the common-sense notion of truth For ‘p’ to be true, it appears, not only must it be the case that p, but it must actually have been verified, or at least verifiable, that p is the case To an objector who protested that when a belief is true, its object does exist, James retorted, ‘it is bound to exist, on sound pragmatic principles’ How is the world made different for me, he asked, by my conceiving an opinion of mine as true? ‘First, an object must be findable there (or sure signs of such an object must be found) which shall agree with the opinion Second, such an opinion must not be contradicted by anything else I am aware of ’ (T 275) But in spite of his bluff, sleeves-rolled-up, manner of speech, James was rather a slippery writer, and it is quite difficult to pin him down on the question whether a proposition can be true without any fact to correspond to it He tries to avoid the question by making the notion of truth a relative one In human life, he tells us, the word ‘truth’ can only be used ‘relatively to some particular trower’ Critics objected that there were some truths (say, about the pre-human past) that nobody would ever know; to which James replied that these, though never actual objects of knowledge, were always possible objects of knowledge, and in defining truth we should surely give priority to the real over the merely virtual But there is another, more serious, objection to his claim that truth is relative to the truthclaimer Surely if I hold that p is true, and you hold that not-p is true, it is a genuine question which of us is in the right 128