The Meaning of Truth | Page 3

burning it all up.
I understand the question and I will give my answer. I am interested in
another doctrine in philosophy to which I give the name of radical
empiricism, and it seems to me that the establishment of the pragmatist
theory of truth is a step of first-rate importance in making radical
empiricism prevail. Radical empiricism consists first of a postulate,
next of a statement of fact, and finally of a generalized conclusion.
The postulate is that the only things that shall be debatable among
philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience.
[Things of an unexperienceable nature may exist ad libitum, but they
form no part of the material for philosophic debate.]
The statement of fact is that the relations between things, conjunctive
as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular
experience, neither more so nor less so, than the things themselves.
The generalized conclusion is that therefore the parts of experience
hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of
experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no
extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own
right a concatenated or continuous structure.
The great obstacle to radical empiricism in the contemporary mind is
the rooted rationalist belief that experience as immediately given is all
disjunction and no conjunction, and that to make one world out of this
separateness, a higher unifying agency must be there. In the prevalent
idealism this agency is represented as the absolute all-witness which
'relates' things together by throwing 'categories' over them like a net.
The most peculiar and unique, perhaps, of all these categories is
supposed to be the truth- relation, which connects parts of reality in
pairs, making of one of them a knower, and of the other a thing known,

yet which is itself contentless experientially, neither describable,
explicable, nor reduceable to lower terms, and denotable only by
uttering the name 'truth.'
The pragmatist view, on the contrary, of the truth-relation is that it has
a definite content, and that everything in it is experienceable. Its whole
nature can be told in positive terms. The 'workableness' which ideas
must have, in order to be true, means particular workings, physical or
intellectual, actual or possible, which they may set up from next to next
inside of concrete experience. Were this pragmatic contention admitted,
one great point in the victory of radical empiricism would also be
scored, for the relation between an object and the idea that truly knows
it, is held by rationalists to be nothing of this describable sort, but to
stand outside of all possible temporal experience; and on the relation,
so interpreted, rationalism is wonted to make its last most obdurate
rally.
Now the anti-pragmatist contentions which I try to meet in this volume
can be so easily used by rationalists as weapons of resistance, not only
to pragmatism but to radical empiricism also (for if the truth-relation
were transcendent, others might be so too), that I feel strongly the
strategical importance of having them definitely met and got out of the
way. What our critics most persistently keep saying is that though
workings go with truth, yet they do not constitute it. It is numerically
additional to them, prior to them, explanatory OF them, and in no wise
to be explained BY them, we are incessantly told. The first point for
our enemies to establish, therefore, is that SOMETHING numerically
additional and prior to the workings is involved in the truth of an idea.
Since the OBJECT is additional, and usually prior, most rationalists
plead IT, and boldly accuse us of denying it. This leaves on the
bystanders the impression--since we cannot reasonably deny the
existence of the object--that our account of truth breaks down, and that
our critics have driven us from the field. Altho in various places in this
volume I try to refute the slanderous charge that we deny real existence,
I will say here again, for the sake of emphasis, that the existence of the
object, whenever the idea asserts it 'truly,' is the only reason, in
innumerable cases, why the idea does work successfully, if it work at

all; and that it seems an abuse of language, to say the least, to transfer
the word 'truth' from the idea to the object's existence, when the
falsehood of ideas that won't work is explained by that existence as
well as the truth of those that will.
I find this abuse prevailing among my most accomplished adversaries.
But once establish the proper verbal custom, let the word 'truth'
represent a property of the idea, cease to make it something
mysteriously connected with the object known, and the path opens fair
and wide, as I believe, to the discussion of radical empiricism on its