and presents a stronger push to relativize truth. But this is not from continental philosophy. It goes instead by the name of pragmatism and its evils hide in plain sight, even hidden from those who think it to be benign and live out the philosophy daily. Peterson, incidentally, despite all his virtues which I duly acknowledge, is a pragmatist.
You see the story begins with Charles Sanders Peirce (from whom we get the term pragmatism, and later pragmaticism. When he thought the former term was being misused he invented yet another “ism”). Peirce, an American philosopher and chemist, once wrote in 1878 an article on epistemology titled “How to Make Ideas Clear”. Well I must confess his article was not always clear to me, and I dare guess many others who may read it. And I wish to make clear myself that Peirce held a belief in truth existing beyond the particular bearer of the truth. He held faith to a positivist eschatology that someday somehow science will irresistibly approach a point where belief (as a truth assertion) will be held without the possibility of an argument that would prevail against it.
That said, this eschatology was obviously an article of faith without empirical evidence. It also in no way could be interpreted as a correspondence theory of truth, where truth exists “out there” as something to be discovered and our beliefs must accord to it in order to be “true”. He saw belief (qua an assertion of truth) as having a psychological utility in discharging doubt, the resultant being a sense of peace for a time, a comfort with the thought held, this comfort being the affective side of belief. Doubtless this is all carrying a survival value and could be argued to be part of the Darwinian project, another pan explanatory “ism” extremely pervasive at the time and one that remains so to this day.
He (Peirce) also makes a number of other statements that point towards a concept of truth in the here and now that is our daily life, even the life of the scientist. And that is that belief or truth is a function of the utility of the belief. It is true if it works for the singular or collective “you”. The repeatability of science points towards a truth which is utilitarian, not a communing with an ontological truth “out there”. X is true because it works, not because it is true.
e.g. “Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object”
In other words, if it is practical to believe in x and ascribe to X the word “true”, then believe in x.
Someone who was greatly influenced by Peirce and had both the intellect and the clarity as a wordsmith to take pragmatism to the masses was William James. James meta-philosophical project was to save those who carried what he called the “tender minded” philosophic temperament from the “tough minded” ones. That is to say he wished to save the humanities and spiritually minded philosopher from the corrosive effects of materialism, scientism and the excessive austerities of pure logic, much as Kant and Wittgenstein tried to do the same in their own and far better ways. Pragmatism was James answer as a happy mediation towards both the tender and the tough. James pragmatism can also be encapsulated beautifully into his story of the squirrel in the published account of James second lecture.
“Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find everyone engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel — a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree’s opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: DOES THE MAN GO ROUND THE SQUIRREL OR NOT? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree; but does he go round the squirrel? In the unlimited leisure of the wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare. Everyone had taken sides, and was obstinate; and the numbers on both sides were even. Each side, when I appeared, therefore appealed to me to make it a majority. Mindful of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction you must make a distinction, I immediately sought and found one, as follows: “Which party is right,” I said, “depends on what you PRACTICALLY MEAN by ‘going round’ the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb ‘to go round’ in one practical fashion or the other.”“
In the above excerpt from James, his claim to truth and belief rest upon a clarity with which the problem is stated, and is a better illustration of what Peirce wished clearly to say. In what sense is the question asked, that the man goes around the squirrel? It hinges upon a definition of “going around”. There’s a third option also. After Einstein and without any aether or universal reference frame it might be as true to say that the man’s legs move yet he does not go anywhere, as the squirrel, tree and indeed the whole universe orbit around him. Perhaps in the 22nd century there can be additional formulations of man, squirrel and tree, bounded only by our imagination and the new scientific paradigms that may come…or may not as the case will be. But as is clear in the example and in further of James lectures, truth is not arrived at by a clear sense in which terms of the proposition are made. Neither does truth find it’s ground in clear grammar providing a correspondence between words about the world and the world as it is. No, for James truth is entirely instrumental. It is as true to say that man revolves around squirrel as squirrel revolves around man depending on the ends to which the question is asked and what one wants. James, in the land of the free marketeer capitalist and contra the Marxist temperament, even accords to truth the descriptor “cash value” and also additionally writes….
“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.”
And where the anti-communist conspiracy might have it (and probably has it correctly) that certain Marxist infiltrations entered into the universities, media and the like by Gramsci ‘s inspired “march through the institutions”, pragmatism also had its inroads into the same institutions in the United States by John Dewey and his disciples, even leading to the foundation of American public school education and social work.
Dewey, a democratic socialist with friends in high places and philosopher of many areas, was the last of the trio of classical pragmatists, classical pragmatism having taken root and flourishing as the first home grown American philosophy. Not surprising for an atheist, Dewey also rejected truth as an ontological, dare I say transcendent, state of affairs, that knowledge is or ought to be a correspondence between the reality out there and how it might be represented in the mind or the collective “sciences”. Instead truth was for Dewey, as it was for James and Peirce before him, that that is the case when we reliably get the outcome we are wanting. Truth is teleological where the architect of telos is mortal man.
Now I’m not stating that Pierce and James’ pragmatism was entirely as it could be cynically interpreted. On a deeper reading it was actually quite nuanced and I confess not to have read the entire corpus of their works. It’s entirely possible, though this is very much to be doubted, that somewhere they might have inserted a caveat not to be taken too seriously. That having been said, we are at least discussing the effects of their pragmatism, a reading of their pragmatism which by their own lights is the “cash value” of their
