Skip to content
- Author: John J Stuhr
- Full Title: 100 Years of Pragmatism
- Category: #books
- James set forth his pragmatism as a theory of truth. In his view, truth is an instrument for getting us into satisfactory relations with experiences, an expedient in our way of thinking, a marrying function between old beliefs and new experiences, and something made rather than found.
- He opens by asserting that the semantic difficulty has waned: “I think it can be safely assumed that the readers of this journal by this time know sufficiently well what the pragmatist means by truth, by a true idea.”38 The problem lies in pragmatism’s identification of an idea’s truth with its usefulness, instead of recognizing the idea’s truth as an independent quality that enables it to yield useful effects.