Cash Value

Suppose your phone tells you the pharmacy on the corner closes at nine. At half past eight you walk over, and the door opens. You would say the phone was right, and that the belief you formed from it was true. Now ask what that word ‘true’ amounted to.

Part of it seems to be a match between your belief and the world: the pharmacy really does close at nine. Another part is what happened to you. You acted on the belief, and it did not let you down. You got your medicine.

Most of the time these two parts arrive together, so we never have to choose between them. Today’s question is which one does the real work. When we call a belief true, are we describing a fit between an idea and the world, or how things go when we act on it?

A psychologist turned philosopher

William James (1842–1910) was born in New York City and spent most of his working life at Harvard. He trained in medicine before turning to psychology. His Principles of Psychology (1890) helped establish psychology as a science in America. His later The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) is still read by people who have never opened another philosophy book. His brother was the novelist Henry James.

James is worth hearing because he wrote about hard questions in ordinary language, and because he did more than anyone to spread the word pragmatism: the view that we should understand ideas by the practical difference they make. He credited the idea to his friend Charles Sanders Peirce, whom we met earlier this week. His best-known statement of it is Pragmatism (1907), a book made from public lectures he gave in Boston and New York.

What ‘cash value’ means

James borrowed a phrase from banking. A banknote is worth something only because it can be exchanged for real goods. James suggested that ideas are similar. An idea’s cash value is what it can be exchanged for in experience: what you can expect to see, do, or run into if the idea is true.

He put the test as a string of questions. “Grant an idea or belief to be true,” he wrote, “what concrete difference will its being true make in any one’s actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms?” (James, Pragmatism, 1907, Lecture VI).

His answer was that “True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we can not” (James, Pragmatism, 1907, Lecture VI). In short, James says: a true idea is one that holds up when you lean on it.

Take the pharmacy again. Your belief about closing time leads you somewhere. You walk over, the door opens, the lights are on. Each step confirms the belief, and for James that confirming process is what its truth consists in. He gave a similar example of someone lost and hungry in a forest who comes upon what looks like a cow path. Believing there is a house at the end of it matters, because following that belief is what saves them. James went so far as to say that “Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events” (James, Pragmatism, 1907, Lecture VI).

James did not deny that true ideas agree with reality. His claim was that ‘agreement’ means nothing more mysterious than this: the idea guides us through experience without leading us into collision with it.

Why critics heard ‘whatever pays’

The trouble came from some of James’s own sentences. “The true,” he wrote, “to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving” (James, Pragmatism, 1907, Lecture VI). ‘Expedient’ means useful or advantageous. Read quickly, that sounds like believe whatever benefits you.

He went further on religion: “On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true” (James, Pragmatism, 1907, Lecture VIII). Critics asked whether a belief could be true because it comforts us.

Two British philosophers pressed the point in 1908. G. E. Moore argued that plenty of useful beliefs are false and plenty of true ones are useless. Bertrand Russell argued that James had confused a possible sign of truth with truth itself. On James’s account, Russell suggested, the belief that other people exist would be true because it is useful to believe it, when it seems to be true simply because other people exist.

James replied in The Meaning of Truth (1909), complaining that he had been misread. He said he meant usefulness over the long run and across all of experience, including the stubborn facts that refuse to go away because we dislike them. Scholars still disagree about whether this reply rescues his view or quietly changes it. My own view is that James meant something defensible but phrased it in ways that invited the worst reading, and I don’t think the question is settled.

Peirce takes his word back

The dates here need care. Peirce had worked out the core idea in the 1870s, but the word ‘pragmatism’ reached a wide public through a lecture James gave in 1898. By the early 1900s it had spread widely, taken up by writers such as F. C. S. Schiller in England and a group of Italian thinkers, and used loosely in popular magazines.

Peirce disliked where it had gone. His own version was narrower. It was a method for making the meaning of ideas clear, especially in science, and not a theory that truth is whatever satisfies us. In 1905, two years before Pragmatism appeared, he announced a new name for his position, ‘pragmaticism’, a word he called “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers” (Peirce, “What Pragmatism Is,” The Monist, 1905).

Scholars disagree about how much Peirce was aiming at James in particular. The two men stayed friends, and James had helped Peirce through years of poverty. Peirce’s complaint seems directed at the wider spread of the word, though he had reservations about James’s version as well.

Behind this quarrel sits a much older one. If truth depends on how ideas work out for us, then human beings begin to look like the judges of what is true. Tomorrow we go back to ancient Greece, where that thought was first argued out, and ask: Plato or Protagoras?