William James · Philosophy
Can one deflating question dissolve philosophy’s oldest quarrels - and remake truth itself?
The camp had split into two angry parties over a squirrel. The animal clung to one side of a tree trunk. A man circled the tree to see it, and the squirrel scooted round the trunk just as fast, keeping the bark between them. Does the man go round the squirrel?
William James refused to take a side. ‘Which party is right,’ he said, ‘depends on what you practically mean by going round.’ Passing north of the squirrel, then east, then south, then west, the man goes round it. Passing in front of the animal, then beside it, then behind, he never does: the belly stays turned toward him. Make the distinction and the dispute dies.
Much of philosophy, James thought, is that quarrel in better clothes. Is the world one, or many? Is the will free or determined? To each he put the same deflating question: what practical difference would it make if one side were true rather than the other? Stating the rule is easy; tracing the difference is the work.
James turned the same test on the word true. A true idea, he said, is one that works: it leads you through experience without bringing you up short, and it pays its way. Everyone had agreed that a true idea agrees with reality. The old picture explained that agreement as copying - the idea mirrors a reality already finished. James asked what the copying actually does for you.
Truth is not a property an idea owns; it is a name for what the idea does. In his most provocative formula, the true is only the expedient in the way of our thinking. James had named the method pragmatism in 1898 - trace an idea to its consequences - and credited his friend Charles Sanders Peirce. Twenty years earlier Peirce had argued that our whole conception of a thing is nothing but our conception of its practical effects.
Peirce meant a rule about meaning, and no more. Bertrand Russell answered that James had reversed cause and effect: beliefs are useful because they are true, not true because they are useful. If Russell is right, James has mistaken a symptom of truth for its meaning. But one question comes first. If truth is not something an idea already has, where does it get it?
Picture a corridor in a hotel. The devout believer’s room opens off it, and the scientist’s. Inside them people do wholly incompatible things, and every one of them must pass along the corridor to get in or out. James took the image from Giovanni Papini, and it answers anyone who demands to know what pragmatism believes. It believes nothing in particular, owns no rooms, and is only a way of moving among ideas.
What the corridor charges for passage is a belief’s cash-value in experiential terms - what it is worth in lived difference. That is a demand, not a permission. If an idea has to be made true, something has to do the making, and that something is how experience answers. James pressed the point himself: the expedient is expedient in the long run and on the whole. It is never a licence to believe what feels comfortable this morning.
Which leaves one thing unexplained. If the test is this plain, and the rule this public, why do the same disputes keep splitting people into the same two camps?
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
Two moves carry this lesson: the test pragmatism runs on any dispute, and what James put in place of truth as copying. State both from memory, and show how the second follows from the first.
Leads to Charles Sanders Peirce.
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