Sick Souls, Health Minds Chapter 3 : Truth and Consequences
When William James began his philosophical and writing career, he didn't yet have the idea of Pragmatism, the philosophy that would earn him the title “The American Philosopher.” Instead, James’s ideas about Pragmatism would be molded by a lifetime of him persistently moving through different struggles and opportunities, slowing “groping” his way through different means of intellectual thought in order to produce Pragmatism.
But what really is James’s American philosophy? What makes up Pragmatism at its core and how did James intend it to be used? Well, that's what John Kaags “Sick Souls and Health Minds” intends to explain.
To start, Pragmatism is explained in its more modern definition and how it relates to epistemology, which can be defined as the theory of knowledge, especially with regards to its method, validity and scope. Modern thoughts of Pragmatism focus on it as a piece of epistemology and how they both work as a part of the scientific method; hypothesis, testing, reflection. But what's more important to our discussion is pragmatism as it was defined and taught by James. I personally had a hard time when I first started learning about how pragmatism relates to epistemology and found this video, Epistemology of Pragmatism which I found very useful in understanding how pragmatism worked in relation to the scientific method, but also how it sounded like other philosophies, primarily relativism, but was different. James developed Pragmatism as a philosophical tool that could find a middle ground between two areas of thought which he believed most people possessed. That being the tough and tender minded.
Willaim James actually created a similar chart to this to explain the different types of minds and their associated traits when he was teaching his philosophy as a professor.
James believed that people tended to view the world between two lenses of thought. The first being the “Tough” minded who looked at the world and believed any absolute certainty was impossible and you were foolish to think otherwise. While the “Tender” minded though that there could be some certainty; with this certainty being backed up a supernatural force, usually God. In other word “Tough” minded believe there is no truth only fact, which you can never fully know while the “Tender” minded believe that there is a truth, made fact by a higher power. Kaag summarized pragmatism, as the pragmatic meeting of both “Tough” and “Tender” minded thinking, a tool for humans to use as beings that existed “Somewhere between amoebas and angels” (SSHM, p. 137). He suggests that James believed that these mindsets were what determined how people approached ideas, truth and facts, and finding a balance between them to provide a tool, Pragmatism, that could allow people to more effectively move through life.
Truth and facts play a critical role in James’s theory of Pragmatism. For James the world is filled with facts, but truth is the means to those facts being discovered and understood.
But if we talk about truth we also need to talk about ideas. Ideas are where, according to James, all truths begin as the ideas of individuals, but through a series of processes, like the empirical method, these ideas verify themselves and become truth. James says “Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its own verifying itself, its verification."(SSHM, p. 134).
However, because pragmatism is tricky, where it’s meant to answer the trickiness of life, so is truth which has more than one type. The first being complete truths, or capitals Ts, and the second being little truths, or lowercase Ts. I believe that understanding the difference between these two truths highlights James's difference between truth and fact and what defined Pragmatism as a means for a person to better navigate their life. Complete truths are truths that have been achieved over an extended period, but hardly anyone ever actually sees them. Instead, most people go through life using little truths, small ideas that can be quiky verified and allow a person to move through daily life with some level of success. James said, “We have to live through today by the truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it false hood.” (SSHM, p. 137). While researching I found an article, Pragmatism: How American Define Truth
When discussing moving through life and using big truths and little truths, Kaag actually uses his own experiences, and struggles, as a father to explain the value of ideas and little truths and how they are able to feed into a greater complete truth. Kaag discusses how, in preparation for fatherhood, he consumed amount of media regarding child rearing, which you can see as a responsible and competent thing for any person who is preparing for parenthood to do. However, Kaag also explains how this created such a complicated picture in his mind for how he would raise his child because he was consuming these IDEAS of parenting in order to create a complete truth, his child's successful life. Kaag explained “in my careful study of childbearing, I’d formed a stable picture of what it was supposed to be like. This stable picture was what the Romans might call... a stereotype.” (SSHM, p. 140). However, this stereotype that Kaag had built wasn’t able to stand up to confrontation with life as his child's birth became more complicated than what any book had prepared him for. But when confronted with this change Kaag followed the pragmatic method, he looked less at the big truth and focused on the little truth that ensure his wife and child were as health and happy as he could help them to be in the moment, “Sometimes its best to let experience have its say and reform one’s theories on the basis on the basis of what is actually said.” (SSHM, p141).
This isn’t to say that stereotypes are necessarily wrong, they're just the product of someone gathering information without using that information practically yet. This article, The Pragmatic Function of Stereotypes by Adam Schaff actually discusses how people use stereotypes as a means to gather information and act as a motivator, and how this can be beneficial when applied pragmatically.
Kaag also discusses an issue that would appear to be recurring with regards to pragmatism, an issue that James would also spend a significant piece of his later years trying to defend his ideology against. Sophism. Sophism is an ancient Greek philosophy that was and is looked down on by many academics for what is seen by many as inherently selfish and misleading purpose that doesn't actually strive for the actual "truth." When academics think of Sophistry, they think of people who use fallacious arguments with the intention of deceiving others, basically saying something that seems like the truth but isn't. And some think of sophistry and pragmatism as one and the same. This article, Sophism and Pragmatism, explains how, while pragmatism is often more concerned with finding practical solutions to real-world problems, sophism is more focused on the rhetorical and subjective nature of truth. Pragmatists seek to engage in constructive problem-solving, while sophists were often seen as more interested in demonstrating the malleability of truth for rhetorical or strategic purposes. I also found this article, The Sophist, which goes through much of the history and core beliefs of Sophism and really highlights how different the two ideologies are.
Discussion questions
1. Since scientific truths often claim to be objective and independent of human preferences or needs, how does pragmatism reconcile with the idea of scientific objectivity?- 2. Given that pragmatism holds that truths are contingent on practical consequences, is it fair to say that pragmatism leads to a relativistic view of truth?
3. Is it fair to compare Sophism and Pragmatism considering that they were developed, and used taught, as two very different philosophy with very different purposes?
"pragmatism, as the intermediate of the “Tough” and “Tender” minded"- Yes, but this is not the same as Aristotle's preference for the mean between extremes. James is prepared to believe that some Toughs are pragmatically warranted in their view, AND that some Tenders are too. But most of us, he thinks, are composites of tough and tender... and that can "work" in the pragmatic sense, too, depending on the results of acting on those hybrid beliefs. The pure Tough and Tenders, too, tend to be stereotypes as yet untested by actual life experience.
ReplyDeleteRe: the ancient sophists, they probably got a bad rap. They called Socrates a sophist, implying that he didn't care about truth. He did, by all accounts. But our modern word sophistry, often applied to the legal profession, advertising, and some business culture, does imply a disregard for truth in favor of those appearances that will generate a profit for the sophist, does indeed connote a negative motivation and character.
1. The most thoughtful scientists are more circumspect, preferring not to claim ultimate and final or absolute truth. Objectivity and truth are aspirational ideals for them, not faits accompli. Pragmatists are fallibilists in this sense, expecting that today's truths will be improved over time... so long as we keep our eyes on the prize of inquiry as a long-term collaborative process.
2. Relational, but not relativistic in the sense of rejecting truth, facts, and reality. The real facts are what they are, truth is what we think we can plausibly say about them. But we're still learning.
3. I'm not sure they were so different. Protagoras, the most famous ancient sophist, was probably a pragmatist (except in name). As WJ said, pragmatism is a new name for an old way of thinking.