A Critical Analysis Of James's Concept Of Truth Reflected In Pragmatism

Pragmatism is the first philosophical ideology generated in the U.S. during the process that America developed into a powerful country in industry and agriculture from an agricultural country. Pragmatism embodies the spirit of American people to change their living environment by hard work and innovation and absorbs empirism, evolutionism, German classical philosophy, scientific methodology and experimental psychology from traditional western theory. Its essence is that philosophy should be established in real life, definite faith should be regarded as the starting point for action, taking action is the main means of making a life, the exploitation and innovation are the basic attitudes towards life, and the highest goal of a life is to make achievements.The view of truth is the core of pragmatism. James firstly put forward the truth theory of pragmatism due to his dissatisfaction with the traditional view of truth. He thought that traditional truth theory was built on the division of subject and object. Such theory mistook the objective as the truth itself and became a dead and unchangeable doctrine, or considered things only within pure subjective consciousness. The traditional truth can not well describe the meaning and value of truth and so James proposed pragmatism truth to eliminate the shortcomings of traditional truth.The theoretical basis of James'truth is as followings. The first basis is psychology, the truth believes that the psychological activities are based on material and physical activities, ideology can not exist independently and ideology can not come into existence and have any change without the function of brain. The theory points out that ideology is not purely a spiritual activity, but consists with physical activity, which means that on the one hand, James'truth includes some factors of materialism; on the other hand, the truth is not static and dead but changeable and evolutive. The second basis is thorough empiricism, and this is the base of James'truth in entering into life and avoiding the controversy over materialism and idealism. He enriched and altered the traditional empiricism and pointed out that there was only one kind of original material in the world and all of the things were made from such material. He also claimed that cognizance and being cognized were the two ends in pure experience and believed that material and ideology were both consistent with experience. The third basis is that experience is direct life and its ilk, the understanding to pure experience depends on its role in life.From its basis, we can see that James's pragmatism is methodological philosophy which takes truth as its core and tries to remove all the absoluteness of ontology beyond real life, which means that pragmatism is not only a way, in fact if we do not recognize the absolute ontology of abstract, we must recognize the experience world that we live in. From this viewpoint, pragmatism is a discussion against metaphysics and ultimate ontology, pays attention to people's actual experiences, rather than combats the metaphysical way of thinking. By this way, James exceeded the idealism and materialism.James elaborated on the truth from criticizing traditional correspondence theory and ended in explaining correspondence, actuality, effectiveness and confirmation. James agrees that truth is a kind of correspondence. The key point is the understanding of correspondence. James thought that correspondence was not only a copy, but also a kind of guidance and confirmation. As for actuality, James explained from the perspective of empiricism and believed that actuality was not independent of individuals and changeless, but could be created by people. The creation here did not refer to one generated subjectively but an actuality that people experienced and human-based material. With regard to confirmation, James reviewed direct and indirect confirmation, emphasized experiences but did not oppose to rational. The explanation of the effectiveness is the direct cause that caused trouble for James. Its meaning is different from what we understand in our daily life, but a specific philosophical term. It means that the role of truth in guiding our thinking and actuality to coordinate with the former truth. It is clear that the effectiveness here is not usefulness for a particular person. The misunderstanding rests on understanding philosophy concept in life language. On the surface it seems right, in fact, the concept was mistaken, totally a kind of sophistry. The truth is a successful relationship between the two experiences since it is a valuable guide. One concept is true since it can act as a valuable guide. So the so-called usefulness refers to the value and effectiveness of a concept, rather than the usefulness to a specific individual. And the usefulness can not be used to judge whether a truth is subjective idealism or not.Finally, through analyzing James'truth from the perspective of Marxism, the paper aims to clarify the source of this misunderstanding firstly and point out that such truth and the truth of Marxism have certain things in common secondly. The two types of theories are the same to some extent in opposing to traditional correspondence and ontology, stressing people's initiative and the pluralism of truth, paying attention to practice and humanism and upholding the dialectics of truth, which is the difference of James'truth from others. The reasonable factors of James truth are conducive to enriching and developing Marxism truth. At the same time, the paper pointed out that James'truth is theoretically different from Marxism truth. Finally, the paper pointed out erroneous tendencies of James'truth, which shows that James'truth is halfway, and one of the reasons for being attacked.In short, James'view of truth is a challenge to traditional one. It opened up a new vision for us and had a profound impact on the contemporary new pragmatism. James'truth no longer focused on the nature of truth but paid attention to the process of the truth; it no longer stressed the reflective function of the truth, but appreciates the guiding role of the truth. James himself no longer worshipped the objectivity of truth but revealed the impartibility between the truth and human values, interest and temperament. What James research is the truth closely related to our present life, which is affirmative. Meanwhile, dialectical analysis should also be made to avoid the misleading by erroneous tendencies of James'theory.