THE PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OF TRUTH AND ITS MISUNDERSTANDERS [Footnote:
Reprint from the Philosophical Review, January, 1908 (vol. xvii, p. 1).]
The account of truth given in my volume entitled Pragmatism,
continues to meet with such persistent misunderstanding that I
am tempted to make a final brief reply. My ideas may well deserve
refutation, but they can get none till they are conceived of in their
proper shape. The fantastic character of the current misconceptions
shows how unfamiliar is the concrete point of view which pragmatism
assumes. Persons who are familiar with a conception move about so
easily in it that they understand each other at a hint, and can converse
without anxiously attending to their P's and Q's. I have to admit, in
view of the results, that we have assumed too ready an intelligence,
and consequently in many places used a language too slipshod. We should
never have spoken elliptically. The critics have boggled at every word
they could boggle at, and refused to take the spirit rather than the
letter of our discourse. This seems to show a genuine unfamiliarity in
the whole point of view. It also shows, I think, that the second stage
of opposition, which has already begun to express itself in the stock
phrase that 'what is new is not true, and what is true not new,' in
pragmatism, is insincere. If we said nothing in any degree new, why
was our meaning so desperately hard to catch? The blame cannot be laid
wholly upon our obscurity of speech, for in other subjects we have
attained to making ourselves understood. But recriminations are
tasteless; and, as far as I personally am concerned, I am sure that some
of the misconception I complain of is due to my doctrine of truth being
surrounded in that volume of popular lectures by a lot of other opinions
not necessarily implicated with it, so that a reader may very naturally
have grown confused. For this I am to blame,--likewise for omitting
certain explicit cautions, which the pages that follow will now in part
supply.