The Truth According to James

Abstract

Pragmatist truth – as advocated e.g. by Peirce and James – is usually taken to integrate four key elements: (1) the value of truth is likened to some kind of utility; (2) truth is naturally taken to consist in correspondence; (3) truth is essentially linked to the possibility of knowledge; (4) truth is not relative but absolute. Critics have never tired to question the individual and collective consistency of these four constraints. The principal challenge issued to pragmatists (and many other essentially epistemic theories of truth) always consisted in developing viable interpretations of the key notions utility, correspondence, knowability and absoluteness that would render the pragmatist proposal at least consistent. I shall take up that challenge developing some ideas of James in a contemporary garb.