The Meaning of TruthWilliam James
About The Meaning of Truth
appeared in 1909 as the sequel to James's of 1907. The volume gathers essays that defend and clarify the pragmatic theory of truth against critics who charged James with reducing truth to whatever is useful or pleasing to believe. James insists that truth is a relation between ideas and reality, but that the relation is made in the course of experience. An idea becomes true as it is verified: as it leads us into satisfactory workings with objects, coheres with other accepted truths, and survives the tests of practice and further inquiry.
The book revisits the claim that "the true" is only the expedient in our way of thinking, and explains expediency as long-run, public, and answerable to fact, not as private convenience. James answers absolute idealists and rationalists who treat truth as a static correspondence already complete apart from human knowing. He also answers fellow pragmatists when their formulations seem to invite misunderstanding. The essays keep the Conversation's question about truth open between correspondence, coherence, and use. They show James fighting for a middle position: realism about a world that resists us, and a theory of knowing in which human action and verification help constitute what counts as true.