Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking

Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, lectures by William James delivered at the Lowell Institute and at Columbia (1906–7),and published in 1907. The Meaning of Truthis a sequel.

Asserting the inadequacy of both rationalism and empiricism in “the present dilemma in philosophy,” James proposes pragmatism as “a mediating system.”
A pragmatist … turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power.Pragmatism is not new; it is a more radical empiricism, which regards theories not as answers, but as instruments. The laws of science are useful only “to summarize old facts and to lead to new ones,” and, more generally, “ideas (which themselves are but parts of our experiences) become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience.” A truth is anything that “proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.” Having established this distinction, James applies it to such metaphysical problems as those of substance, personal identity, materialism, design, and “free‐will.” He opposes the dogmatism of absolute monism and states his own pluralistic belief. Common sense is on the side of pragmatism, and is indeed its origin, for truth is “expedient thinking,” having its text and context in human experience, which is its center and justification. Finally he discusses pragmatism in relation to religious questions, and contends that here too it mediates between extreme views, being conducive to useful possibilities, and, in the aptest sense, moral, for it is grounded in the present world of acts and facts.