2 - Is Pragmatist Truth Irrelevant to Inquiry?

Summary

Such would be the scope of pragmatism – first, a method; and second, a genetic theory of what is meant be truth.

William James, Pragmatism (1907)

INTRODUCTION

In 1909 William James published a sequel, The Meaning of Truth, to his famous lectures on pragmatism of 1907. This new book opens with the sentence:

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.

(p. v)

Judging by the fact that he continued to focus on the concept of truth, James can have felt no remorse at having made the theory of truth the pivot of his presentation of pragmatism.

Apparently in strong disagreement with James, Isaac Levi writes that “pragmatism is seriously misrepresented as a philosophical outlook when attention is focused on the pragmatic theory of truth (whatever it may be)” (2002). Yet Levi agrees with the classical pragmatists, including James, that pragmatism is first a method and second, perhaps, a theory of truth. But Levi adds: If the second cannot be had without sacrificing the first, then we should let go of the idea of a distinctively pragmatist theory of truth. And he further adds: The second cannot be had without sacrificing the first. More specifically, Levi argues that the notion of truth that Peirce and James tried to describe as the ideal limit of converging inquiries does not square with the role that truth plays in pragmatically conceived inquiry.