American Pragmatism

Nobody around here seems to have started a thread regarding our homegrown philosophers, the big three being Peirce, James, Dewey.

What do you all think about two things ?

  1. the concept of truth as workability ie something is true (for that individual) if it works

  2. the value of a belief is only measured by the extent to which one is willing to act on it. For example I hermes the thrice great am marginally a theist and am marginally catholic. By pragmatic Jamesian standards, I am neither for the simple reason that I am unwilling to act on either of them.

post away

I’d sort of like for you to expand on being “marginally theist.” What does that mean?

JT

Really how can anyone be a dancer, if they never dance?

If you don’t get into the music, let the music move you, jump-jive and wail, get jiggy with it, boogie, freak-out, rock-n-roll, Charleston, boo-galoo, shake-your-grove-thing, break-it-down, and just dance, then you aren’t a dancer.

Likewise any other activity. If you don’t do the deed, then you ain’t the deed doer.

Without the leap of faith, then you don’t have faith at all.

i like this guy. my favorite new poster as of late, possibly ever.

anyway, about pragmatism, i can’t say it really strikes much of a chord in me… being the french existentialist type myself. i don’t think that the fact that something “works” or “produces results” has much to do with “truth”, at least as i think of the term. the idea certainly does have some merit though. i just wouldn’t even attempt to bring the term “truth” into the mix because something that may produce results in some specific situation at some specific time, but not in other differing situations/times. hell, i don’t know.

i’m going to a bar to get drunk.

Saying that truth is only what’s true for you seems absurd. At least James and Dewey should admit that there might be ultimate conditions “out there” and then say that as far as I’m concerned, the truth as it appears to me and the truth that yields results is the only one that matters to me, existentially. but don’t equate truth with use. That’s just pointless. Well, not pointless actually…useful. But just wrong sounding. We should focus on use…but not equate it with truth. Did I already say that? Maybe I should get drunk too.

Also, the value of belief is only inasmuch as you’re willing to act on it…another wrongheaded sentiment. The belief IS the action. To believe is an integrated activity…and action. To perpetuate the same belief for several seconds is an action. I think Dewey and James were getting at the idea that they wanted people to build a perpetual motion machine, or a better hurdy gurdy device. These were strange times, and these were philosophies to make people produce, produce, produce…

If I believe in Jesus, but never go to church and never read the bible what good is it? If you’re gay, but you never have homosexual relations ever are you really gay? I think your statement, Gamer, that belief is action is an anachronism in the sense that it is made possible by James and not against him. I think, unless I misunderstand, that to say belief is an integrated activity (with action) is exactly what James is saying.

If I’m wrong please clarify.

No pragmatist thinker has ever said (as far as I understand) that what’s true is what’s true for you. Nobody’s that solipsistic or relativistic in the movement. Tomorrow morning, I wil write out for you pages 117-118 of Classic American Philosopher ed by Max H Fisch, to further explain James’ ideas on truth and “working”

But yet James and Dewey were progressives who were troubled by capitalism in the 1890s - 1940s.

You are totally right. I was careless to suggest such a gross simplification of James and Dewey. But in my defense, I can think of several phish teeshirt wearing people who maintain precisely what I claimed, and I KNOW James and Dewey had something to do with it.

To say knowledge = use is wrong because how do you KNOW if something is useful? You can’t simply say it’s useful because it’s useful. There must be an epistemology that overrides pragmatism, as I understand it, in the limited sense.

And as far as doing versus believing? Believing in something makes you A Believer In Something. Doing something makes you a Doer Of Something. Believing and doing are verbs. Where’s the confusion?

But you’re right. I know next to nothing about pragmatism.

Here’s something that gave my mind a little bit of a boggle: Idealism is the greatest tool of a pragmatic leader. Nothing gets people producing/destroying like having an abstract, non-pragmatic cause at heart. Take a look at every religious zealot that ever lived.

Something is true to an idividual as long as it works for them. That’s totally wrong. If something doesn’t work for that individual then does that make that non-working thing false. No. Those things would have to be true too because they don’t work.

I’ll try to explain from a pragmatic point of view:
Christians believe in god and christ (but they use capital letters), and that works for them because it makes them feel good, gives them reason to live, etc… thus God and Christ are true. But Buddha to these people is true(pragmatically) because he is false(perspectively).

So, the only things that are false, as far as pragmatism is conserned are those things that aren’t workable and aren’t non-workable.

I have never read anything from William James before. I decided to remedy that. I went down to the local Barnes & Nobel and picked up a slim edition that they publish under the simple title of Pragmatism. I love this book! I must say thank you for drawing my attention to this. There is the slightest hint of archaic speech but William James is highly accessible. There is a wonderful clarity to his “author’s voice.” He also poses a very simple and powerful question as a test of pragmatism. “What difference does it make?” It is excellent.