Pragmatism and the pragmatic theory of truth: relativism or careful epistemology?

William James, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Truth is what works in experiential terms — what leads us prosperously through experience, connects with the body of our other beliefs, and survives the test of fitting the observable consequences of action. The pragmatic method asks, of any conceptual dispute, what practical difference would follow from the truth of one side rather than the other; if no such difference can be traced, the dispute is empty.

The pragmatic theory of truth applies the method to truth itself: true beliefs are those whose having yields the experiential consequences of leading us rightly through what comes; false beliefs are those whose having leads us into trouble.12 "Cash value" is rhetorical compression — Russell read it as relativism, but the formulation is precise about what epistemological work truth-attribution does for the believing agent.

The theory is not the claim that truth is what we wish to be true, nor that truth is whatever the community accepts; it is the claim that truth is verified and verifiable through its consequences, that absent verification we operate with provisional truth-claims, and that the regulative ideal of truth is the convergence of inquiry across communities of inquirers.34

Sources

  1. What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?" The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: TRUE IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CAN ASSIMILATE, VALIDATE, CORROBORATE AND VERIFY. FALSE IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CANNOT.
    Pragmatism, p. 10
  2. They assign the only intelligible practical meaning to that difference in our beliefs which our habit of calling them true or false comports. No truth-claimer except the pragmatist himself need ever be aware of the part played in his own mind by consequences, and he himself is aware of it only abstractly and in general, and may at any moment be quite oblivious of it with respect to his own beliefs. Mr.
    The Meaning of Truth, p. 29
  3. This manner of their practical working was the first thing that made truths good in the eyes of primitive men; and buried among all the other good workings by which true beliefs are characterized, this kind of subsequential utility remains.
    The Meaning of Truth, p. 21
  4. Such an account is vague and it sounds at first quite trivial, but it has results which it will take the rest of my hour to explain.
    Pragmatism, p. 10

Where the argument is made

  • Pragmatism (Lowell Lectures 1906, book 1907), especially Lectures II ('What Pragmatism Means') and VI ('Pragmatism's Conception of Truth')
  • The Meaning of Truth (1909), the book of essays defending the doctrine against Russell and others
  • 'Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results' (1898 Berkeley address), the founding statement of the pragmatic method
  • Some Problems of Philosophy (1911 posthumous)

How the argument was received

Russell's 1908 attack ('William James's Conception of Truth') shaped the early-twentieth-century reading of pragmatism as relativist; the Pragmatism-Meaning of Truth-Pluralistic Universe sequence is James's response. The mid-twentieth- century revival of pragmatism (Putnam, Misak, Brandom) recovered the careful epistemological core; Rorty's postmodern reading kept the anti-correspondence move while cutting the regulative-truth ideal that Putnam-Misak preserved. The interpretive battle between the Putnam-Misak careful pragmatism and the Rortyan post-truth pragmatism continues.