PragmatismWilliam James
About Pragmatism
collects eight lectures William James delivered in 1906-1907, presenting pragmatism as both a method for settling philosophical disputes and a theory of truth. The method is simple: when two positions seem irreconcilable, ask what practical difference it would make if one were true rather than the other. If no practical difference can be identified, the dispute is idle.
James divides philosophers into two temperaments: the tough-minded (empiricist, materialist, skeptical) and the tender-minded (rationalist, idealist, religious). Pragmatism claims to satisfy both. It takes experience seriously without closing off the questions that matter to the tender-minded. Truth, on James's account, is not a static relation of correspondence between thought and reality. It is what works, what leads us successfully through experience, what can be verified in practice. Ideas become true insofar as they help us get into satisfactory relations with other parts of our experience.
This redefinition of truth generated fierce opposition. Critics charged James with reducing truth to utility or wish-fulfillment. James insisted the charge missed the point: verification is a real process, not a subjective preference, and truths must cohere with the entire body of already-verified beliefs. did not end the debate, but it established a distinctively American philosophical tradition and posed a challenge to correspondence theories of truth that analytic philosophy has never fully absorbed.