"Riding now on the front of this wave of scientific logic Messrs. Schiller and
Dewey appear with their pragmatistic account of what truth everywhere
signifies. Everywhere, these teachers say, 'truth' in our ideas and beliefs
means the same thing that it means in science. It means, they say, nothing but
this, that ideas (which themselves are but parts of our experience) become true
just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other
parts of our experience, to summarize them and get about among them by
conceptual short-cuts instead of following the interminable succession of
particular phenomena. Any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea
that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any
other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying,
saving labor; is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true
instrumentally. This is the 'instrumental' view of truth taught so successfully
at Chicago, the view that truth in our ideas means their power to 'work,'
promulgated so brilliantly at Oxford. ...
Now Dewey and Schiller proceed to generalize this observation and to apply it
to the most ancient parts of truth. They also once were plastic. They also were
called true for human reasons. They also mediated between still earlier truths
and what in those days were novel observations. Purely objective truth, truth
in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying
previous parts of experience with newer parts played no rôle whatever, is
nowhere to be found. The reasons why we call things true is the reason why they
are true, for 'to be true' means only to perform this marriage-function.
The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything. Truth independent;
truth that we find merely; truth no longer malleable to human need; truth
incorrigible, in a word; such truth exists indeed superabundantly- or is
supposed to exist by rationalistically minded thinkers; but then it means only
the dead heart of the living tree, and its being there means only that truth
also has its paleontology and its prescription,' and may grow stiff with years
of veteran service and petrified in men's regard by sheer antiquity. But how
plastic even the oldest truths nevertheless really are has been vividly shown
in our day by the transformation of logical and mathematical ideas, a
transformation which seems even to be invading physics. The ancient formulas
are reinterpreted as special expressions of much wider principles, principles
that our ancestors never got a glimpse of in their present shape and
formulation.
Mr. Schiller still gives to all this view of truth the name of 'Humanism,' but,
for this doctrine too, the name of pragmatism seems fairly to be in the
ascendant, so I will treat it under the name of pragmatism in these lectures."
William James
dmb says:
My point? Humanism and pragmatism so compatible and so similar that humanism is
another name for pragmatism.
Naturally, the term can mean more than one thing and it has meant different
things throughout history. In this case, pragmatism is a humanistic
epistemology. It says that human truth is the only kind we can ever have. It is
epistemologically humble.
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