Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Volume 8) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III.?PBOFESSOB JAMES' " PRAGMATISM." By G. E. Moore. My object in this paper is to discuss some of the things which Professor James says about truth in the recent book, to which he has given the above name. In Lecture VI he professes to give an account of a theory, which he calls " the pragmatist theory of truth "; and he professes to give a briefer preliminary account of the same theory in Lecture II. Moreover, in Lecture VII, he goes on to make some further remarks about truth. In all these Lectures he seems to me to make statements to which there are very obvious objections; and my main object is to point out, as clearly and simply as I can, what seem to me to be the principal objections to some of these statements. We may, I think, distinguish three different things, which he seems particularly anxious to assert about truth. (I) In the first place, he is plainly anxious to assert some connection between truth and " verification " or " utility." Our true ideas, he seems to say, are those that " work," in the sense that they are or can be " verified," or are " useful." (II) In the second place, he seems to object to the view that truth is something " static " or " immutable." He is anxious to assert that truths are in some sense " mutable." (III) In the third place, he asserts that " to an unascertain- able extent our truths are man-made products " (p. 242). To what he asserts under each of these three heads there are, I think, serious objections; and I now propose to point out what seem to me to be the principal ones, under each head separately. (I) Professor James is plainly anxious to assert some Pragmatism: A New Name for some Old Ways of Thinking: Popular Lectures on Philosophy. By William James. Longmans, Green,and Co., 1907. connection between...