Winfried,
I very much appreciate your open-mindedness and honesty. Pragmatism is
not what most people believe it to be. As you say, whenever we think
about effectiveness, about achieving some mutually agreeable goal, we
become pragmatists.
Rather than responding directly, then, to your excellent points (I simply
commend them to others who read this), I thought it might be helpful to
pass along the words of one of the wisest people I ever met. Professor
Abraham Kaplan, with whom I had the privilege of studying, in his book,
The New World of Philosophy (Vintage Book, 1961), wrote this about the
pragmatist theory of truth:
"The truth of an idea lies in the fulfillment of purpose which the idea
makes possible. In [William] James' not always happy phrasing, the truth
is what works, what is expedient in our thinking. The attribute of truth
accrues to an idea when we put the idea to work. It becomes true as we
use it, for its truth is nothing other than its usefulness.
Now it is easy to misunderstand this doctrine, and Europeans especially
have widely misunderstood it. Obviously, a scoundrel's purpose may be
better fulfilled by falsehood than by truth, a lie may work some of the
time, a deception may prove expedient, and even self-deception has its
uses. But all this is entirely beside the point, for it places the idea
only in a personal and limited context, which is just what the pragmatist
wants to get away from. No proposition becomes true only because it
pleases us to believe it, or to have other believe it, any more than
something we eat becomes nourishing merely because we enjoy its taste or
because gourmets commend it. Whether or not an idea is useful is not a
matter of subjective feeling, nor even of an objectively warranted
judgment based on only a single context of application. What counts is
whether it works in the long run, and really works out -- that is,
achieves the ends to which it serves as a means, regardless of the
recognition withheld or bestowed on its achievement. James once
characterized as 'an impudent slander' the charge that pragmatists claim
that an idea is true if it makes us happy to think so. Whether the charge
is malicious I cannot say; but it seems to me beyond question that it is a
misrepresentation.
The pragmatist theory of truth amounts, I think, to this: that candidates
for truth are fundamentally not descriptions but predictions, and what
they predict is the outcome of possible action. ... [pragmatism] turns
here, not to the origins of the idea, but to its destination. What counts
is not its antecedents, but what we can do with the idea, what we can make
of it, what it promises for the enrichment of our lives. For knowledge is
not merely a record of the past -- not even the kind of knowledge we call
'history.' It is a reconstruction of the present directed toward
fulfillments in the emerging future."
--"John Gunkler" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>