William James

William James (January 11, 1842, New York–August 26, 1910, Chocorua, New Hampshire) was a pioneering psychologist and philosopher. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and the philosophy of pragmatism.

Epistemology

James defined truth as that which works in the way of belief. "True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse" but "all true processes must lead to the face of directly verifying sensible experiences somewhere," he wrote.

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Pragmatism as a view of the meaning of truth is considered obsolete by many in contemporary philosophy, because the predominant trend of thinking in the years since James' death (1910) has been toward non-epistemic definitions of truth, i.e. definitions that don't make truth dependent upon the warrant of a belief. A contemporary philosopher or logician will often be found explaining that the statement "the book is on the table" is true if and only if the book is on the table.

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In What Pragmatism Means, James writes that the central point of his own doctrine of truth is, in brief, that "truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and coordinate with it. Truth is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons." Richard Rorty claims that James did not mean to give a theory of truth with this statement, and that we should not regard it as such. James seems to say incompatible things about truth. In addition to truth being what is good in the way of belief, he also says truth is correspondence with reality, or 'the facts'. But this may be interpreted as viewing the property of truth as correspondence with reality while maintaining that the concept of truth is whatever is good in the way of belief. True to pragmatist spirit, he never purported to be providing the necessary and sufficient conditions for truth.

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