''The true', to put it briefly, is only the expedient in our way of thinking, just as 'the right' is only the expedient in the way of our behaving. Expedient in almost any fashion; ... for what meets expediently all the experience in sight won't necessarily meet all farther experiences equally satisfactorily'.

- William James, (1842 – 1910).

So wrote James in a work entitled 'Pragmatism: A New Way for Some Old Ways of Thinking'. Pragmatism is a philosophical and methodological stance that seeks to evaluate theories or beliefs in terms of the success or otherwise of their practical application. What is true is what works, to sum it up in a nutshell. From which principle stems the most questionable history of American pragmatism over the nature of truth. American pragmatism had two important founders in William James and Charles Sanders Peirce, (1839 – 1914); and as a philosophical approach it did engender an English version of pragmatism initiated by Lady Victoria Welby, (1837 – 1912), and Frank Plumpton Ramsey, (1903 – 1930), who, together with Charles Kay Ogden, (1889 – 1957), recognised that Peirce (rather than James) had certainly tapped into something significant, thereby in the process succeeding in convincing Bertrand Russell, (1872 – 1970), and George Edward Moore, (1873 – 1958). That is to say, when Peirce was free of the influence of Hegelian loopiness, as they saw it, once the idealism in the philosophical sense of the word was stripped away from his thinking and its naturalism retained, there then emerged what proved to be an influential philosophical outlook on the nature of truth; an outlook that won over two important analytic successors to Russell and Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, (1889 – 1951), and Alfred Jules Ayer, (1910 – 1989).

So, to deal first with some positive consequences (in the sense of something that can be taken seriously enough to warrant refutation) of this particular brand of pragmatism:

1. Ordinary language philosophy.

Eastman Johnson, 'The Nantucket School of Philosophy', ca. 1887

A philosophical methodology and analysis that considers traditional philosophical problems to be based upon confusion and misconceptions that philosophers themselves advance through perverting or misremembering what words actually mean in ordinary commonplace usage. Such philosophical usage of language, the ordinary language philosopher maintains, generates rather than resolves the very philosophical problems upon which it was brought to bear.

There is, of course, a problem over what exactly 'ordinary' means in this context. Stanley Cavell, (1926 – 2018), 'elucidates':

'This is all that 'ordinary' in the phrase 'ordinary language philosophy' means, or ought to mean. It does not refer to particular words of wide use, nor to particular sorts of men. It reminds us that whatever words are said and meant are said and meant by particular men, and that to understand what they (the words) mean you must understand what they (whoever is using them) means, and that sometimes men, do not see what they mean, that usually they cannot say what they mean, that for various reasons they may not know what they mean, and that when they are forced to recognize this they feel they do not, and perhaps cannot, mean anything, and they are struck dumb'.

2. Game theory.

Thomas Eakins, 'The Chess Players', 1876

A theoretical framework for hypothetical political, economic or social situations, (as well as logical or mathematical conundrums), among rational competing players; it is a science of strategy in other words; once independent and competing rational players have been situated within a strategic setting the goal is then to optimise decision making. Decisions …. how shall we make the correct one? … always presupposing the other game players to be rational.

3. Evolutionary psychology.

Rene Magritte, 'The Face of Genius', 1926

Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical and methodological approach that forwards the view that the human brain is constituted of several functional mechanisms, referred to as psychological adaptations or evolved cognitive mechanisms, that have been designed (for want of a better word) by the process of natural selection. According to evolutionary psychologists, just as physical traits have evolved through the process of natural selection, so too have behavioural traits; and it is owing to natural selection that adaptive behaviours, or behaviours that increase reproductive success, are maintained and passed on from one generation to the next.

4. Post-positivist epistemology.

Rembrandt, 'The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Joan Deyman', 1656

Post-positivism is a meta-theoretical stance in philosophy and in scientific modes of enquiry that appraises and revises positivism (in which only that which can be scientifically verified or which is capable of logical or mathematical proof is to be recognized, and so metaphysics and theism are thereby abandoned). While positivism stressed an independence between the person conducting the research and the object of the research, post-positivism acknowledges that the cultural upbringing, the education and learning, and indeed the values, of the researcher has its effect upon that which is observed. Post-positivism pursues objectivity by recognizing the possible effects of biases. While positivism emphasizes quantitative methods, post-positivism considers both quantitative and qualitative methods to be valid approaches. Post-positivism supposes human knowledge to be grounded not upon the priori assessments of an individual assuming an objective stance, but on the contrary upon human conjectures. Human knowledge is inescapably conjectural, and the assertion of such conjectures is warranted, or to put it more precisely, is justified by a set of warrants, and these latter may be refined or rejected in the light of further inquiry. Post-positivism is not relativistic on the nature of truth; the notion of objective truth is retained.

5. Functionalism.

Fernand Léger, 'Élément mécanique', 1924

Functionalism is a view in the theory of mind that contends that mental states (beliefs, desires, being conscious of pain, and so on) are constituted simply by their functional role, which is to say, they have causal relations to other mental states, various sensory inputs, and behavioural outputs. Functionalism developed largely as an alternative to the identity theory of mind (states and processes of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain), and behaviourism (human as well as animal behaviour generally can be accounted for in terms of conditioning, without any appeal to thoughts or feelings; the concern is primarily with observable behaviour, as opposed to internal events such as thinking).

6. The Canberra Plan.

Albert Tucker, 'The possessed', 1942

During the 1990s there arose at the Australian National University, Canberra, a particular philosophical methodology and analysis as a consequence of many contemporary philosophers having arrived at the view that philosophy primarily rests upon the analysis of concepts; what precisely this commits them to is a matter of dispute; but an influential train of thought that explicitly promoted the central priority of analytic claims for philosophy, led by David Lewis, (1941 – 2001), and Frank Cameron Jackson, (1943 - ), and which became known as the Canberra Plan, contended that philosophy begins with an initial analysis of concepts employed in commonplace thinking, (of the kind we indulge in), for example, consciousness, knowledge, free will, moral or aesthetic value, truth perhaps, upon which basis philosophy can then turn to the business of what may be considered to be serious metaphysics. That is to say, to demonstrate how a limited number of ingredients, physical ingredients for example, may satisfy such commonplace concepts; this is a secondary stage in the analysis that would appeal to synthetic a posteriori (reasoning proceeding from observation and experience) scientific knowledge concerning the fundamental nature of reality. According to Jackson, however, the purely analytic first stage performs a crucial role in the matter of setting an agenda for the consequent metaphysical inquiry.

Pragmatism English style can thus be seen to have provided the necessary apparatus by which to discard the continental predilection for playing fast and loose with the nature of truth, and to undermine progressivist theory in the process; logical truths such as the law of non-contradiction are preserved and by no means are truths that are false ever admitted. That is to say, Peircean pragmatism is assumed; ('Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception', said Peirce. 'Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object'. For Peirce truth was immutable); as opposed to Jamesian instrumentalism; (instrumentalism: the view that an activity such as science or education or law etc. is primarily a tool, an instrument, for a particular practical purpose, rather than something to be viewed in more absolute or ideal terms; any successful scientific theory, for instance, discloses nothing that can be known to be either true or false about unobservable objects, properties or natural processes).

So much for the positive influences of pragmatism, now for the negative.

Biologist and evolutionary theorist Bret Weinstein, (1969 - ), under the sway of Jamesian instrumentalism, is apparently of the opinion that not only factual falsehood need not necessarily entail falsehood, it can also entail truth; that at least is the implication behind his notion of metaphorical truth.

'For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord'.

- Luke 2:11

William Blake, 'The Nativity', 1799 or 1800

The idea of metaphorical truth is that the proposition 'Jesus is our saviour' is a religious assertion that may be quite literally false, yet nonetheless it is metaphorically true. 'Jesus is our saviour' thereby may indeed express a false proposition; assuming that 'Jesus' is a grammatical subject and that it denotes an actual person, Jesus, who did exist, nonetheless this subject does not conform to the predicate, 'is our saviour'; not in the way that would satisfy a Biblical literalist, for whom 'Jesus is our saviour' expresses a profound truth on the nature of a supernatural being denoted by the term 'God' and on its divine and ultimate plan for our species. However, the belief 'Jesus is our saviour' expresses a truth that perhaps led our ancestors to behave in ways that assisted them in the capacity of being our ancestors, thus facilitating a shared identity of faith that enabled them to survive, kept them healthy, promoted sociability, going forth and multiplying and thus making it so that Jesus was the saviour of the seed, and the proposition 'Jesus is our saviour' thus expresses a truth, albeit of a metaphorical nature.

The attentive among you will have noticed something here that I pointed out in Part One, namely, the issue here is not as it seems, it is not about the nature of truth; rather, the presupposition remains that truth is whatever corresponds with, well, something, either with the facts, in which case the issue is rather to do with what counts as a fact, or, in the case of metaphorical truth, truth is whatever corresponds with a useful fact or a useful non-fact. Religion may not be factually true, but it is metaphorically true in that it was, and perhaps remains, advantageous for many of those that believe it; which is why it has flourished and survived over the centuries, and the justification for such a view on the nature of truth is that we inhabit a world of such complexity that it is impossible to penetrate to the truth of it, to comprehend or to discover the literal truth about everything; and therefore, in practice, almost everything we believe is an abstraction, and thereby a metaphorical truth, in some sense. But I would prefer to put it that if that is so then the most we can say about truth claims is that they are only ever approximations to the truth. 'There are no whole truths', said Alfred North Whitehead, (1861 – 1947), 'all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil'.

I accept that ideas that are factually incorrect may be beneficial for people to believe in them, but if the literal truth should prove to be unsuitable for purposes of adaption then so be it. I will stick by the truth regardless. And I accept that belief in falsehoods may be useful, but I do not accept that a falsehood, no matter what may be its utility, can ever be true, metaphorically or otherwise. And I am prepared to entertain the notion that what Weinstein calls metaphorical truth is in itself a significant phenomenon necessary for an understanding of human evolutionary history; if the hypothesis is correct metaphorical truth is itself factual much like the competitive mating rituals observable among animals as the male seeks to entice the female for purposes of copulation; but I would designate such phenomena that Weinstein calls metaphorical truth something else other than any kind of truth.

We can detect Jamesian instrumentalism in operation here. An example Weinstein likes to give to support his contention on metaphorical truth is that of malaria; the root of the word 'malaria' is bad air, malaria is not transmitted by bad air but by mosquitoes that live in places of unwholesome atmosphere, marshes the exhalations of which were thought to be the cause of the disease; those who thought so were thus in possession of a useful half-truth (actually a falsehood). But the notion of metaphorical truth is certainly seductive for those concerned with scientific truth and but who are so much under the sway of religious sensibilities they wish to continue to think in terms of religious claims being true, in some sense. It gives succour to the notion of Darwinian truth favoured by clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson, (1962 - ), who is not so interested in it for what it suggests about our thoughts concerning mosquitoes and the true cause of malaria. 'Metaphorical truth' chimes more pleasingly in the ear of the religious rather than 'useful falsehood'; for the latter would be an admission of religious claims just not being true, and further, all talk of a useful falsehood prompts the question, useful for whom? Useful for theocratic authoritarians most certainly.

Again under the influence of Jamesian instrumentalism Peterson argues that there is the truth of a description and the truth of a tool, and for him our fundamental truths are tool-like; we employ them so that we may function effectively in the world. Peterson 'reasons' for Darwinian truth thus (spot the equivocating): The idea of truth precedes that of objective truth by a considerable amount of time; the original notion of truth was not about what was objectively true but can be better understood if we think of an arrow flying reliably straight and true towards its target. And religious texts, he asserts, encode profound and evolutionary determined universal (tool-like?) truths:

'Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me'.

- John 14:6

When Christ talks about the truth and the way of the truth he is not talking about objective truth, according to Peterson.

Matthias Stomer, 'Christ Before the High Priest', ca. 1633

There are two kinds of truth that at times are commensurate and at other times they dissociate; the truth that manifests itself in the manner in which we act, and the truth that manifests itself as an objective representation of the objective world (the correspondence theory of truth again, underpinning both kinds of truth, even were we to accept the distinction though there is little reason why we should given the nature of truth is presupposed to be the same in both cases). According to Peterson both kinds of truth can interlock, and sometimes they cannot; one could deliver a pearl of wisdom that would work well for those that took heed of it and enacted it out, even though it carries within it an inaccurate representation of part of the objective world.

Similarly, Biblical stories may incorporate claims that are palpably false from a scientific point of view, but remember Peterson's distinction... a sharp axe is more true than a blunt axe; aside from truths to do with objective facts there are tool truths which may be sharp or blunt; one would hope both kinds of truth would interlock, but, alas, according to Peterson our cognitive abilities are just not up to the task, we can never know enough for them to fit perfectly together; and further, there are many truths we possess that represent the objective world improperly remain true true. Wisdom can thus be distinguished from fact; there is no requirement for wisdom to be grounded in fact; a wise man can be wise even if he has got his facts wrong (!).

Maxfield Parrish, 'Wise Man', 1914

If one knows the facts clearly enough one will know how to act; a wise principle is one that works in the world. This is one of Peterson's answers to postmodernism whereby there are an infinite number of interpretations of a finite set of facts and thus agreement is impossible on a canonical interpretation on a great piece of literature given that the number of interpretations that can be brought to bear upon it are infinite and thus why should we settle upon any interpretation thereby privileging one interpretation over another? For the postmodernist this amounts to power games; but for Peterson the postmodernist is neglecting the ethical constraints. A potentially infinite number of interpretations there may well be, but very few of them will work in the real world; very few will work in a way that doesn't either get us killed or doom us to failure because of our own stupidity over time; the number of interpretations are infinite; the number of applicable, functional interpretations is severely restricted; and that, for Peterson, is what constitutes ethics.

If we are presented with two truth claims and we wish to find out which one is true, empirical truth will be that which is tested by the scientific method, religious truth will that which is revealed through, well, revelation, in presumably some mystical form. Subjective truth (if such there be) will be that which is asserted as such subjectively; but Darwinian truth is neither argued for nor spoken of; it is that which survives and is passed on to the next generation. 'Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived', said Oscar Wilde, (1854 – 1900), somewhat contemptuously, and yet for Peterson this is precisely what makes Darwinian truth the bigger truth, between the quick and the dead the former have the advantage over the latter when it comes to matters of dispute; i.e., they have the advantage of being alive. For the best minds in a highly advanced and forward thinking society may discover the scientific truth required for splitting the atom, and the practical truth to develop a nuclear bomb, which then leads to the total annihilation of the society in a nuclear war. Now compare that to the society of ancient Egypt that stood still for four thousand years while its best minds were absorbed in burial customs. If such a society survives, whereas ours does not, and not necessarily through nuclear war but perhaps through defecating in our own nest, if I may so put it, then, for Peterson, the Egyptians attained Darwinian truth, though not scientific truth, (other than at an elementary level to attend to their burial customs; building pyramids etc.), and thereby, in that scenario, they could be said to be in possession of the bigger truth.

The objections to metaphorical truth and Darwinian truth are clear enough, apart from the fact that it offends those of us who like to cultivate a proper respect for the truth. 'If anyone could prove to me that Christ is outside the truth, and if the truth really did exclude Christ, I should prefer to stay with Christ and not with truth', said Fyodor Dostoyevsky, (1821 – 1881), who one suspects would not have been satisfied to be told that Christ may well be on the outside of objective factual truth but is well within metaphorical truth. Such notions on the nature of truth are correspondence theories of truth masquerading as pragmatic theories; they merely have odd ideas about what facts are. Facts, according to Peterson, are universally verified pieces of information or observation and are not in themselves each a little truth; for the ultimate adjudicator in the matter of truth is the Darwinian framework, that array of possibilities and restrictions that a form of life dependent upon reproduction for its continuance has to comply with in order to flourish; it is the ultimate source of falsification for whenever anything fails to hold true within such a framework not only is it disproven theoretically but it is obliterated from reality; it served no function in keeping us alive and well, and so it has gone.

Only that which passes the test of reality (however that may be understood) is totally verifiable; truth is fluid and must adapt for the holders of that truth to survive and thrive in a Darwinist natural world, and that which is true is that which is part of the larger truth that as yet been remains unfalsified within the Darwinian framework. And what of the factual? Facts are facts, yes? Well, not quite, from this perspective facts are subjected to conditional, local, and temporal restrictions; life is replete with the unknown, the untestable (in a laboratory), unexpected twists and turns; life is a live interactive process that cannot always be restricted by the factors that limit facts; on the contrary, a process of mental activity is necessary for the truth to emerge, and such truth cannot be completely separate from the forms of life that believe it. The greater truth confers its trueness upon its smaller constituents, much like in the system of Plato, (428/427 BC – 424/423 BC), the supreme form, the form of the Good, confers its goodness, which is to say its truth, upon that which is known, analogously to the sun illuminating terrestrial objects. As for the facts, they can be relevant or irrelevant to the greater truth regardless of whether they are valid or invalid; for the biggest challenge to our cognitive powers is that of meaningful existence, to which challenge is aligned our biggest cognitive standard, that of truth.

Success in the Darwinian natural world requires meeting the daily challenge presented by truth; truth is removed from the grip of the theory formulators and put in the hands of a higher reviewing mechanism, the Darwinian framework, that can for all practical purposes invalidate their theories. And so it is that workable theories of the world are forever denied a final confirmation; the fact that we are still here provides a temporary assurance that we are at least not too wide of the mark in matters of truth, generally speaking, and this, the defenders of such a view maintain, delivers a modest while objective notion of truth in place of a perplexing and complex concept of truth that suggests a reality beyond our limited human cognitive abilities and sensibilities. Our mental equipage is not up to the task of accessing all facts and even were we able to arranging them into the most meaningful order would still be beyond our powers. The absolute truth is beyond our ken, but we can hold to truths that are true enough for us to flourish, and that indeed limitation should shape our general way of thinking; and so, the argument goes, Peterson does not so much confound truth as uplift it to its most essential level.

But I think not. The warning signals should have been clear enough upon my mentioning the influences of pragmatism, that of ordinary language philosophy, for instance, or the Canberra plan. In the case of the latter philosophy is taken primarily to rest upon the analysis of concepts; analytical philosophy generally will take a concept and ask, what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for such a concept to be the concept that it is? An imaginative process is undergone, various ingredients tried out (the limited number of ingredients that I mentioned above), this is Peterson's procedure. But somewhere in such an analytical process, with regard to the concept, we have lost it. The corpse has disappeared from the dissecting table. And in the case of ordinary language philosophy, metaphysical theories are taken primarily to rest upon linguistic shoulders. The distinctions I have just been through, on truth, facts etc., exist primarily on a language level and not on a factual level (unless you redefine 'fact' to suit your purposes, and so it goes on). Were I inclined to do so I could flip the Peterson script on its head and produce something different, for most of the heavy lifting, so to speak, in his theorising is performed at the level of language.

If one insists on being a pragmatist, however, there is no need to accept Weinsteinian and Petersonian evasions and equivocations; a pragmatist can acknowledge the importance of beliefs, a pragmatist can identify statements of beliefs as truth bearers, and a pragmatist can agree that the means of verifying such statements are truth makers. And the founders of post-positivism readily acknowledged the role of theory in imparting the meaning and interpretive context necessary for the concept of truth to make sense in the first place. There is no requirement for such epistemic irresponsibility, nor for the assumption of instrumentalism the corollay of which is truth may be defined as that which satisfies us. Wilfred Sellars, (1912 – 1989), had endorsed instead a quite different pragmatist conception of truth:

'For a proposition to be true is for it to be assertible, where this means not capable of being asserted … but correctly assertible; assertible, that is, in accordance with the relevant semantical rules, and on the basis of such additional, though unspecified, information as these rules may require… . ‘True’, then, means semantically assertible (‘S-assertible’) and the varieties of truth correspond to the relevant varieties of semantical rule'.

The varieties of truth to which Sellars refers include empirical truth, mathematical truth, legal truth, moral truth, etc. And the facts, as determined by our best empirical theories, determine what is the case, and of what is the case that it is the case; this is the Welby and Ramsey reading of Peirce, and to which Sellars, and W, V. Quine, (1908 – 2000), subscribed. And those same facts exhaust the meaning of the word 'truth' with no metaphorical left-overs. This is so for classical theories of truth that endeavour to comprehend through some kind of relation of correspondence that purports to hold between sentences and the world. James certainly held to a correspondence view of truth, while thinking about truth as that which is verified pragmatically by its effects. Others, such as Winfried Corduan, (1949 -), and Russell, argue that James made the pragmatic effects the meaning or the essence of truth, and thus opposing religious doctrines can be true provided that they work for their adherents. As Russell points out, this pragmatic view of truth requires that a belief is deemed to be true when its effects are good, i.e., it works, so that for James, according to Russell, 'Truth happens to an idea; it is made true by events.' But for this idea is to be useful, appropriately enough on the pragmatist’s view of truth, one must know two things before we know if a belief is true: 1) what is good, and 2) what the effects of this or that belief have to be. Such must be known prior to determining whether a belief is true, 'since it is only after we have decided that the effects of a belief are good that we have a right to call it 'true'. But if we must measure beliefs by usefulness there are many cases where we do not know what the usefulness of a belief will be ahead of time. I believe that Christopher Columbus arrived at the new world (new for Europeans at any rate) in 1492. If I were a Jamesian pragmatist, which thankfully I am not, this is not something I can simply look up in a book, I also have to determine its effects upon myself and others, its cash value, as James puts it; and this I cannot know ahead of time.

Salvador Dali, 'The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus', 1959

In the end however it is truth herself that will sort out the wheat from the chaff in discussions on the nature of truth. 'Truth is strong enough to overcome all human sophistries', said Aeschines, (389–314 BC).

Time now to take truth back out of the hands of the Darwinian viewing mechanism and to return it to the theory formulators; as already noted, theory has its role in imparting the meaning and interpretive context required for the concept of truth to make any sense; and rather than holding to the correspondence theory of truth, and dealing with the complications which that entails, I will next look at a different conception of the nature of truth; the coherence theory; put simply, the truth of a belief is dependent upon the degree to which all the other beliefs in a system of beliefs hang together.

All truths wait in all things,

They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,

They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,

The insignificant is as big to me as any,

(What is less or more than a touch?)

Logic and sermons never convince,

The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

(Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so,

Only what nobody denies is so.)

- Walt Whitman, (1819 - 1892)

The truth marches on …..

To be continued …..