Truth, Half-Truth, and Post-Truth: Lessons from William James

Abstract

According to many authors, we live in a post-truth era, to the extent that truth has become subordinated to politics. This has implications not only to political debates, but also to science, technology, and common sense thinking. In this paper, I claim that William James’s conception of truth may shed new light on the contemporary post-truth debate. First, I will present the essential elements of James’s initial position. Then, I will discuss some of his amendments to clarify and improve his theory to avoid misunderstandings. Finally, I will address his potential contributions to the contemporary post-truth debate, and consider whether there are special implications for psychology.

Notes

1 See the original announcement here: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016.

2 For a discussion of this topic, see Perry, (1935).

3 In fact, this is a unsystematic retrospective account of his pragmatism, and as such, James selected two essays that seemed to him closer to his mature theory. However, upon a closer look, it is not hard to find other texts that equally discuss topics that are important to his theory of truth, such as “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence” (James, 1878), “The Sentiment of Rationality” (James, 1879), and “The Will to Believe” (James, 1896). Moreover, as Paul Croce, (2018) has recently showed, one can find, in James’s notebook reflections, traces of his later pragmatism as early as 1862.

4 For the historical context and development of James’s conception of truth, see Perry, (1935), Kuklick, (1977), Myers, (1986), and Bordogna, (2008). A comparison between the positions of James, Dewey, and Schiller can be found in Campbell, (2011), Perry, (1935), and Shook and Margolis, (2006).

5 It should be noted that the correspondence theory of truth is not a single entity, though. It appears throughout the history of philosophy in different contexts with distinct formulations (e.g., Blackburn, 2018; David, 2016; Enders & Szaif, 2006; Kirkham, 2001; Rasmussen, 2014). It is better to speak of correspondence theories of truth, instead. In this sense, James seems to have based his account on a popular or common sense view, rather than on a version elaborated by a specific philosopher. Be that as it may, what matters here is how he constructed his theory, not the accuracy of his description.

6 James does not mention the authors who would take these assumptions, nor does he provide textual evidence to support his description. So, it is not easy to identify whom exactly he is talking about.

7 For Francesca Bordogna, James went still farther. He “offered not only a psychology of truth … but also a physiology of truth” (Bordogna, 2008, p. 139), to the extent that truth is embodied.

8 It is never too much to emphasize that James’s theory of truth, at least in a broader sense, still “is one version of the correspondence theory of truth” (Eames, 1976, p. 157).

9 James often treats images and ideas as identical.

10 The difference between directly verifiable and indirectly verifiable ideas should be understood in the light of James’s earlier distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge about, which he took from the English philosopher John Grote (1813–1866), as he himself admitted (James, 1885, p. 31). In his Presidential Address to the American Psychological Association, in 1894, he added: “There are two ways of knowing things, knowing them immediately or intuitively, and knowing them conceptually or representatively. Although such things as the white paper before our eyes can be known intuitively, most of the things we know, the tigers now in India, for example, or the scholastic system of philosophy, are known only representatively or symbolically” (James, 1895, p. 107). According to him, perception involves direct acquaintance with reality, whereas concepts and theories substitute for, or represent reality, although they also point or refer to facts and empirical relations. In both cases, however, one can say that true ideas agree with reality in the Jamesean sense.

11 James’s pluralism is above all an alternative to what he calls absolutism or idealistic monism, according to which there is an all-encompassing reality that we are able to grasp in its totality. Although in Pragmatism James only indicated it in general lines, he gave it its fullest expression in A Pluralistic Universe (James, 1909/1977). “The pluralistic view I prefer to adopt,” James says, “is willing to believe that there may ultimately never be an all-form at all, that the substance of reality may never get totally collected, that some of it may remain outside of the largest combination of it ever made, and that a distributive form of reality, the each-form, is logically as acceptable and empirically as probable as the all-form commonly acquiesced in as so obviously the self-evident thing” (James, 1909/1977, p. 20, italics in original). It should be emphasized that James’s pluralism has both an epistemic and an ontological dimension, which brings it close to radical empiricism.

12 The first assumption, as stated at the beginning, is the belief that true ideas must copy reality.

13 Half-truth here is not to be understood in the sense of someone deliberately hiding or lying about something. It emphasizes the finite, temporally-circumscribed character of our cogitive capacity.

14 Throughout his career, James mantained a keen interest in human experiences that go beyond ordinary life. This can be seen in The Varieties of Religious Experience (James, 1902/1985) as well as in his life-long involvement with psychical research (James, 1986).

15 Here, it is important to distinguish between the finite and the infinite dimensions of reality in James’s work. His account of truth is essentially an explanation of finite truth, for he was highly skeptical that we human beings might come at any time to know reality in its infinite power. As he saw it, “things true of the world in its finite aspects, then, are not true of it in its infinite capacity” (James, 1909/1977, p. 22).

16 As seen in the previous section, James used the phrases ‘satisfactory leading’ and ‘agreeable leading’ to define the process of truth-verification.

17 James established his radical empiricism in a series of papers, published between 1904 and 1905, which were posthumously put together in book form as Essays in Radical Empiricism (James, 1912/1976).

18 In The Meaning of Truth, James uses the terms ‘saltatory’ and ‘ambulatory’ to classify these relations, borrowing from the American philosopher Charles Strong (1862–1940). Referring to his view of kowledge as a type of relation, he says: “My own account of this relation is ambulatory through and through” (James, 1909/1975b, p. 80).

19 Although it may be true that “the idea of satisfaction pervaded James’s account of truth” (Bordogna, 2008, p. 142), it is certainly not the whole thing.

20 It should be noted, however, that mental reality cannot be reduced to ideas alone: “both sense-percepts and percepts of ideal relations (comparisons, etc.) should be classed among the realities. The bulk of our mental ‘stock’ consists of truths concerning these terms” (James, 1909/1975b, p. 106).

21 This view is not new in James’s scholarship. According to David Lamberth, for instance, “most of the details of pragmatism’s theory of meaning and truth can be seen as rather closely related to, if not also actually dependent on, James’s radically empiricist way of thinking” (Lamberth, 1999, p. 54).

22 ‘Pragma’ (singular) and ‘Pragmata’ (plural) are Greek terms that appear several times in Aristotle’s work (De Rijk, 1987). Traditionally, ‘pragmata’ has been translated into English as ‘actual things’ (e.g., Aristotle, 1995, 16b5-10). James seems to be using here the Greek term in the same sense to denote things that exist both abstractly and concretely.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico.