On Facebook, Jim Adams had the question in the Epistemology group,
“Years ago I stumbled into an argument wherein I argued that pragmatism is not a viable mechanism for determining truth. I do believe this statement is actually true. Pragmatism is fraught with problems. American pragmatism is summed up as, “truth is what works”.
In this argument I, however, found my self stumbling and frustrated because the act of arguing against pragmatism, for any reason, seems ludicrous. The argument fell into petty squabbling and ended in rancor.
I would be interested in hearing your ideas on pragmatism as an epistemological argument, its problems as you see it, and its strengths.”
My answer was as follows:
Okay, my thoughts on pragmatism are that
First, it’s true, or at least strongly arguable, that all truth is fundamentally utility. I.e., just like how physics validates its models through their predictive power (and hence utility) and can’t possibly validate them any other way, our ideas of what’s true and real are validated by their ability to allow us to predict and successfully navigate our environment. This is the only way we can validate or generate them, because we only know via our indirect senses, and if we (perhaps illogically) imagine there’s such a thing as absolute, objective truth, all our own ideas that we call truth don’t necessarily have much correspondence to it, because they’re modulated by the arbitrary facts and structure of our biology, which wholly frame how we perceive reality, including how we perceive our own biology and sensory organs and their supposed relationships to reality.
Really, there are other ways of apprehending truth–transcendental ways–but for the purposes of this argument, truth is based in utility. E.g., for an empiricist, all truth would necessarily be based in utility according to the above argument. And even outside of empiricism, truths you divine through some kind of mystical practice would probably be considered extraneous to the pragmatic view of a pragmatist (because they’d likely be seen as absolute, or at least more than just useful, if a pragmatist ever believed in some sort of divination), so they’re not relevant to this argument.
Now, this argument may seem to validate pragmatism on the surface of it, but it doesn’t necessarily. The thing about pragmatism is that it tends to disregard the more theoretical or indirectly logically deducible, and maybe even some of the more directly empirical yet not directly useful, aspects of truth. That’s why they call themselves pragmatists and distinguish themselves from other types of thinkers. So, pragmatism only accepts a subset of all those truths that we infer that arguably fall under the umbrella of utility, and may even accept some things as truth that we would invalidate as truth under the larger umbrella of utility, i.e. in non-pragmatism, because they’re useful on a more … direct (or “pragmatic”) level.
For example, a pragmatist may reject the idea of electrons because you can never see them, feel them, etc. or directly use them, and they may accept the idea of flat Earth because it’s corroborated by everyday perception and useful for most everyday purposes. I don’t really know if pragmatism goes that far, I don’t know specifically what types of things they accept or reject, I’m not that well versed in it, but on a level of general principle, you get the idea. And, in this sense, pragmatism could be seen to embrace things that aren’t ultimately rational/reject things that are ultimately rational.
