THE PRAGMATIST THEORY OF TRUTH
The pragmatist theory that "truth" is a belief which works well
sometimes conflicts with common-sense and not with logic. It is commonly
supposed that it is always better to be sometimes right than to be never
right. But this is by no means true. For example, consider the case of a
watch which has stopped; it is exactly right twice every day. A watch,
on the other hand, which is always five minutes slow is never exactly
right. And yet there can be no question but that a belief in the
accuracy of the watch which was never right would, on the whole, produce
better results than such a belief in the one which had altogether
stopped. The pragmatist would, then, conclude that the watch which was
always inaccurate gave truer results than the one which was sometimes
accurate. In this conclusion the pragmatist would seem to be correct,
and this is an instance of how the false premisses of pragmatism may
give rise to true conclusions.
From the text written above the church clock in a certain English
village, "Be ye ready, for ye know not the time," it would be concluded
that the clock never stopped for a period as long as twelve hours. For
the text is rather a vague symbolical expression of a propositional
function which is asserted to be true at all instants. The proposition
that a presumably not illiterate and credulous observer of the clock at
any definite instant does not know the time implies, then, that the
clock is always wrong. Now, if the clock stopped for twelve hours, it
would be absolutely right at least once. It must be right twice if it
were right at the first instant it stopped or the last instant at which
it went;[42] but the second possibility is excluded by hypothesis, and
the occurrence of the first possibility--or of the analogous possibility
of the stopped clock being right three times in twenty-four hours--does
not affect the present question. Hence the clock can never stop for
twelve hours.
The pragmatist's criterion of truth appears to be far more difficult to
apply than the Bellman's,[43] that what he said three times is true, and
to give results just as insecure.
FOOTNOTES:
[42] Both cases cannot occur; the question is similar to that arising in
the discussion of the mortality of Socrates (see Chapter XXII).
[43] See Appendix K.