Chapter 1 - James’s Children?

Summary

The first chapter asks whether there is a threatening slippery slope from William James's pragmatist conception of truth (as presented in his 1907 work, Pragmatism), via Richard Rorty's radical neopragmatism, to Donald Trump's and other populists' fragmentation of the concept of truth, or even ultimately to the destruction of truth depicted in George Orwell's dystopic novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), whose character O'Brien was interestingly analyzed by Rorty in a 1989 essay on Orwell, arguing for the primacy of freedom over truth. The chapter criticizes Rortyan pragmatism by arguing that the concept of freedom also presupposes the concept of truth (and not just the other way round), also suggesting that, despite the unclarity of some of James's original ideas about truth, there is a sound core to the Jamesian conception of the pursuit of truth. It is, furthermore, suggested that the concept of truth may itself receive a plurality of interpretations within a (meta-level) pragmatist understanding of truth, one of them being the realistic correspondence account, which remains highly relevant, e.g., in the context of combatting post-truth politics.

Together with a group of Finnish colleagues, I have since 1999 been involved in writing and revising a series of philosophy textbooks for high-school students, published by a Finnish publishing house specializing in textbooks and nonfiction. In an introductory volume published in 2005, we included a brief discussion of “the pragmatist theory of truth” in the context of a more general exploration of the concept of truth. As textbooks usually, our books also include plenty of pictures, hopefully keeping their young readers alert. For the truth-theoretical section, we decided to use a photograph of Donald Trump, picturing him with his bestseller, How to Get Rich (2004). In those years, Trump was not at all well known in my home country Finland, although he was already at that point a famous celebrity in the United States. I cannot remember who decided to use the picture in the book; I certainly had no idea whatsoever who this guy in the photograph was, and I had never heard of him before. The point of the photograph was obvious: by using it we asked our prospective readers whether the sentences of Trump’s books are true if they make their author (or, possibly, their reader) rich and if they in that sense pragmatically “work.” Getting rich would then be their concrete “cash value.”

1.1 Vulgar Pragmatism?

Little, of course, did we know. I could never have imagined that I would write another book – this book – seriously asking whether there is a slippery slope leading from William James (one of my favorite philosophers) all the way down to Donald Trump, and even beyond, but this is precisely what I am now doing. One might argue that if Trump is a pragmatist, he is certainly a most vulgar pragmatist.¹ Susan Haack (1995) once called Richard Rorty’s pragmatism “vulgar,” contrasting it with Peircean pragmatism, in particular (see also Haack 1998), but it should be obvious that there can be no serious comparison between pragmatist intellectuals like Rorty (no matter how controversial their views might be) and truly vulgar “pragmatists” like Trump – many of whose pronouncements are not only false but degrading, insulting, full of hate, and a continuous threat not just to global economy but also to world peace. After the US 2020 Elections, there is reason to hope that the chaos caused by the disgraceful Trump presidency will be over as soon as possible (and that any possible readers of this book in the coming years need not worry about it anymore, though they will then undoubtedly have many new things to worry about), but I do believe that we must seriously consider how exactly pragmatism is related to the kind of attitude to truth and reality that we find him, and his supporters, exemplifying. The worry that there might indeed be something like a slippery slope from James – via Rorty – to Trump is to be taken seriously: Are post-factualists “James’s children,” and if so, in what sense exactly?²

There is no need to describe even in general terms the ways in which Trump and his supporters, like many other populists in many other countries, on the one hand deliberately lie in order to advance their own pursuits, and on the other hand just do not seem to care about the distinction between truth and falsehood at all – or seem to care about it only in the crudest possible “pragmatic” sense of having their own interests served.³ We all know very well how Trump’s disrespect for truth was consistently manifested⁴ in his actions and public statements as president, including his incredible flow of tweets. In an extremely crude sense of pragmatism, those speech acts openly loathsome of truth and of the commitment to pursue the truth may have been pragmatically “true,” as they did bring Trump to his powerful position.⁵ They indeed pragmatically “worked” for him – but they certainly do not seem to work from the point of view of those suffering from the political and economic catastrophes of his presidency. In this situation, many people disillusioned by recent political developments talk about “post-factualism” and the “post-truth era,” and if there is any individual who can act as a face for this cultural situation, it is presumably Trump (surrounded, of course, by an alarming number of leaders of major countries all over the world who share the willingness to sacrifice truth in the interest of greed and power). The slight re-emergence of the recognition of the value of science, knowledge, and truth due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 might have changed this situation a bit, but I am afraid we just need to wait for a while to see, once again, brutal political attempts to opportunistically use a crisis like the pandemic for selfish and/or narrowly nationalist purposes.

Ironically, on the page next to the one with Trump’s picture in our 2005 textbook, we placed a picture of a Soviet citizen reading the newspaper Pravda (meaning “truth”). Every statement contained in the pages of that official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had passed the strict censorship of the Soviet authorities. There was just one official truth available: the view the Party held. Our situation today, with the Soviet Union fortunately long gone (along with most – though not all – cruel communist administrations), is quite different: in Trump’s era, there seem to be no shared truth (or shared falsity) available at all but just a confusing rhapsody of self-serving tweets. Nonetheless, we might be in an equally serious danger of losing contact with truth and reality.

I will now ask whether the pragmatists are in some ways guilty of this development. The two main figures I will focus on in this chapter are, unsurprisingly, James and Rorty. There is no point in offering any close reading of their well-known views here,⁶ but I will explore them in the context of the worries many of us share regarding the truth-degrading populists in our confusing political world today.

1.2 William James on Truth

It needs to be emphasized that, far from leading to radical relativism or political opportunism, James’s (as well as Dewey’s) pragmatism functions as a link between acknowledging the crucial relevance of the concept of truth, on the one hand, and emphasizing individual diversity and spontaneity, on the other.⁷ It is through Jamesian pragmatism that we can bring the notion of truth itself to bear on the analysis of human experiential plurality and unique individuality (see also, e.g., Cormier 2001; Capps 2019). This requires, however, that we not only maintain that there is a plurality of truths, or that truths may be relativized to a plurality of practice-laden human perspectives of inquiry, but seriously try to understand and reconceptualize the concept of truth itself from a Jamesian pragmatist perspective. Pragmatic pluralism in a Jamesian style insists that our individual perspectives and commitments to truth-seeking matter to what truth is or means for us. This is clear in James: truth is always truth-for-someone-in-particular, an individual person, a human being actively pursuing truth both generally and in, for example, their existential, ethical, or religious lives; it is not abstract or antecedently existing truth-in-general.⁸

The pragmatist theory of truth is far from uncontroversial, as anyone who ever read undergraduate textbooks on truth knows. We may, however, approach it in terms of the distinction between truth and truthfulness (very interestingly analyzed in Williams 2002). These are clearly different notions, but they are also connected. One may pursue truthfulness without thereby having true beliefs; one can be truthful also when one is mistaken, insofar as one sincerely seeks to believe truths and avoid falsehoods and also honestly seeks to tell the truth whenever possible (and whenever the truth to be told is relevant). Clearly, whatever one’s theory of truth is, one should in some way distinguish between truth and truthfulness.

On the other hand, certain accounts of truth, such as the pragmatist one, may be more promising than some others in articulating the intimate relation between those two concepts. We might say that this distinction is “softened” in James’s pragmatist conception of truth, which rather explicitly turns truth into a value to be pursued in individual and social life rather than mind- and value-independent objective propositional truth corresponding to facts that are just “there” no matter how we as truth-seekers (or truth-tellers) engage with or relate ourselves to them. In pragmatism, the concept of truth is not primarily conceptualized or investigated as an objective and static relation obtaining between our thoughts or statements, on the one hand, and something external to those thoughts and statements, on the other – namely, a relation obtaining independently of us and our practices of inquiry – but as a processual and practice-laden engagement with the world we live in, inherently connected with valuational, especially ethical, concepts such as sincerity and truthfulness that are used to evaluate our processes of inquiry. Truth in the Jamesian sense is, hence, richer and broader than mere propositional truth precisely because it incorporates truthfulness – a normative commitment to truth inherent in our practices of seeking and telling the truth – as a dimension of the notion of truth itself.

Truth, then, is a normative property of our practices of thought and inquiry in a wide sense and in this way something that our practice-embedded life with the concepts we naturally and habitually employ involves, not merely a formal semantic property of statements or a metaphysical property of propositions that could be detached from that context of life practices. Its normativity is, moreover, both epistemic and ethical.⁹ James’s pragmatic conception of truth hence crucially accommodates truthfulness, as truth belongs to the ethical field of interhuman relations of mutual dependence and acknowledgment. Truth is an element of this “being with others” (to borrow a Heideggerian term out of context), while being inherently linked with our deeply individual ways of living our own unique lives, too. It also incorporates an acknowledgment of at least potential if not always actual inner truth (and truthfulness) of others’ experiences.¹⁰

Jamesian pragmatic truth is, furthermore, inextricably entangled with our individual existential concerns; therefore, it is indistinguishable from James’s general individualism (see, e.g., Pawelski 2007). Individuals’ responses to their existential life-challenges vary considerably, and any ethically, politically, existentially, or religiously relevant conception of truth must in some sense appreciate this temperamental¹¹ variability – without succumbing to the temptations of uncritical subjectivism or relativism, though. Now, if we for ethical reasons do wish to take seriously the Jamesian approach to individual diversity (see also Chapter 2), as I think we should, then we must pay attention to what he says about the “plasticity” of truth and about truth being a “species of good” in Lecture II of Pragmatism:

Truth independent; truth that we find merely; truth no longer malleable to human need; truth incorrigible, in a word; such truth exists indeed superabundantly – or is supposed to exist by rationalistically minded thinkers; but then it means only the dead heart of the living tree, and its being there means only that truth also has its paleontology and its “prescription,” and may grow stiff with years of veteran service and petrified in men’s regard by sheer antiquity. But how plastic even the oldest truths nevertheless really are has been vividly shown in our day by the transformation of logical and mathematical ideas, a transformation which seems even to be invading physics.

(James 1975 [1907], 37)

… truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it. The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.

(James 1975 [1907], 42)

Another famous Jamesian formulation (in Lecture VI) relevant here is this:

Pragmatism, on the other hand [in contrast to other accounts of truth], asks its usual question. “Grant an idea or belief to be true,” it says, “what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone’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?”

The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: true ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify; false ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known-as. This thesis is what I have to defend. The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.

(James 1975 [1907], 97)

Note how easy it is to interpret such ideas in the “vulgar” way. One might think that truth “happens” to an idea when that idea leads to useful or satisfactory results in one’s life – such as one’s becoming rich and powerful, for instance. However, it should be obvious that, no matter how careless James’s formulations were, such crude pragmatism was never even close to his own view. He is unclear and controversial, to be sure, but he is certainly not recommending that we just replace truth with our subjective wishful thinking or political and economic pursuit of power.¹²

Several outstanding James scholars have already shown how nuanced James’s view on truth is – also in the political sphere – so I only need to cite a few readings to emphasize this point. For example, in his discussion of James’s theory of truth, which I find highly pertinent to these concerns, Jose Medina (2010) defends Jamesian pluralism in a politically relevant manner (cf. also Pihlström 2013, chapter 4). In ethics and politics, Medina tells us, we can never reach an “absolute” conception of what is universally best for human beings and societies, but different suggestions, opinions, experiential perspectives, and interests must have their say – that is, must be acknowledged as (at least potentially) truthful. A conception of political solidarity can, then, be grounded in Jamesian ideas about truth. James maintains not only pluralism and individualism but also (on Medina’s reading) a relational conception of individual identities: nothing exists in a self-sustained manner but everything that there is finds its place in reality only as part(s) of networks of mutual interdependence. Such a metaphysics of diversity and relationality needs, furthermore, something like the concept of acknowledgment: we must sincerely (which is not to say uncritically) respond to even those perspectives on life that we find alien or even repulsive, though this is much more easily said than done. While James’s pluralism and relationalism are, according to Medina, elements of a metaphysical view according to which everything must be understood in relation to other things, in terms of ubiquitous relationality, they are irreducibly ethical and political ideas, applying even to the reality of the (epistemic, ethical, political) self.

It is precisely in this context that we should, according to Medina, appreciate James’s theory of truth. True beliefs are, as James says, “good to live by”; when maintaining a belief, any belief, we are responsible for its consequences in our lives, and in those of others. The pragmatic “theory” of truth – which should not be called a “theory,” in order to avoid seeing it as a rival to, say, the “correspondence theory” – invokes not only, say, the satisfactory or agreeable consequences of true beliefs but also ethical ideas such as solidarity and justice in terms of which the functionality of our beliefs ought to be measured. Therefore, we may say that truth (in the pragmatic sense), truthfulness, and the acknowledgment of otherness are conceptually tied to each other in James’s pragmatism. One cannot genuinely pursue truth in the Jamesian sense unless one also acknowledges, or at least truthfully seeks to acknowledge, others’ perspectives on reality – indeed, the uniqueness of such individual perspectives, and their potentially opening up genuine novelties. If we take this articulation of Jamesian pragmatic truth seriously, then we can immediately see how vulgar a “Trumpist” version of pragmatism is. Trump’s views may in some sense be “satisfactory” or “agreeable” for him and his opportunistic (or cynical and disillusioned) supporters, but they can hardly be said to truly acknowledge other perspectives on the world, let alone to honor any commitment to pursuing the truth independently of personal or political benefit. The Jamesian pragmatist may also say that there is no sincerity in vulgar pragmatism at all – and hence no truth, either.

The pragmatist account of truth is insightfully connected with James’s moral philosophy by Sarin Marchetti (2015, 33), one of the most perceptive recent commentators of James. It is easy for us to agree with his general claim that pragmatism as a philosophical method also incorporates a fundamentally ethical intention based on a conception of ethics as self-transformation and self-cultivation.¹³ He maintains that James is not primarily advancing a theory of truth but “using pragmatism to unstiffen our views on truth and put them to work” (Marchetti 2015, 169). We are invited to rethink the meaning of truth “in our lives,” and James is therefore offering us a “genealogical phenomenology” of this concept (Marchetti 2015, 177).¹⁴ Truth is something that processually functions in our ethical world-engagement, not a static relation between our beliefs (which are not static, either, but dynamically developing habits of action) and an allegedly independent external world. The concept of truth is also interestingly entangled with James’s important but often neglected metaphor of blindness: “We are morally blind when we fail to see how the sources of truth are nested in the very meaning those experiences have for those who have them …” – and the most serious blindness is our losing touch “with the meaning of our own truths and experiences.” (Marchetti 2015, 202, 205)¹⁵

In a more recent paper, Marchetti persuasively argues that James, who is not conventionally read as a political thinker, stands in an original manner in the tradition of liberal thought, largely due to his conception of the self “as contingent and mobile” (Marchetti 2019, 193). According to James, we live in a world of risk and uncertainty, and understanding human freedom as an ethically and politically (and not merely metaphysically) loaded concept is a practical necessity in this situation. Marchetti goes as far as to claim that James’s “entire philosophical vision” can be regarded as “a positive response to chance, possibility, and probability” (Marchetti 2019, 197). I find this suggestion compatible with my own proposal to view James’s pragmatism as framed by an “antitheodicist” attitude to evil and suffering as something contingent (i.e., avoidable) to be fought against, never to be just accepted as a necessary element of a deterministic universe (see Chapter 6). I find it extremely important for our understanding of James’s pragmatism to insist, with Marchetti, that the Jamesian conception of “freedom as self-transformation” offers us no metaphysical grounding for morality but on the contrary reminds us that our moral reactions to the world we live in contribute to (re)shaping our reality into whatever structure it may take (Marchetti 2019, 200).¹⁶ Therefore, the concept of truth, as pragmatically construed, is also inseparably linked with our duty to view the world taking seriously the contingencies of evil and suffering we find around us (cf. also Pihlström 2020a, as well as Chapter 6).

Marchetti’s remarks on James can also be read as a warning against tendencies to overlook the thoroughly ethical character of the concept of freedom. From the perspective of (Marchetti’s) James, it makes little sense to try to settle the metaphysics of freedom independently of the – often painful – ethical employment of freedom (see also Chapter 4). The Jamesian pragmatist pursuit of truth is never a pursuit of pure metaphysical truth in abstraction of ethical concerns about how to live in this world.¹⁷

The scholars I have briefly cited (Medina and Marchetti) are of course only individual voices among many. They nevertheless help us appreciate a certain approach to Jamesian truth that is inherently ethical. I have tried to capture this basic idea by using the concept of truthfulness, but that is obviously only one possible concept that can be employed here. Regarding the active union of truth and ethics, I find myself mostly in agreement with Medina’s and Marchetti’s readings (without going into any more detail here).¹⁸ However, we will now have to move on to the worry that James’s pragmatist account of truth might be easily developed into a direction that turns problematic, especially in our “post-truth” era.

1.3 Rorty (on Orwell) on Truth

Rorty is famous for advocating a version of pragmatism that endorses ethnocentrism (“we have to start from where we are,” acknowledging our historical contingency) and antirepresentationalism (which rejects any representational relations between language and reality, claiming that the traditional problems of realism and skepticism, among others, only arise in the context of representationalism). Here we cannot deal with the complex development of Rorty’s pragmatism, or even its approach to truth, since his early work in the 1960s and 1970s to his late proposals to replace systematic philosophy by “cultural politics”.¹⁹ I will merely focus on a specific strand of Rorty’s pragmatism, relevant to the worries about post-factualism and the pragmatist’s potential “slippery slope” raised in this chapter. As was suggested earlier (and as other James commentators like Marchetti have emphasized), the concept of truth, far from being restricted to the oft-ridiculed “pragmatist theory of truth,” is fundamentally important in pragmatist moral thought in general. It is in this context that we will now expand our horizon from James’s pragmatism to Rorty’s neopragmatism and especially to Rorty’s treatment of George Orwell.

While discussions of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) have often primarily dealt with Winston, the main protagonist of the novel, Rorty’s treatment of Nineteen Eighty-Four finds O’Brien, the Party torturer, the most important character of the novel.²⁰ In his essay on Orwell, “The Last Intellectual in Europe” (in Rorty 1989), Rorty rejects the standard realistic reading of Nineteen Eighty-Four, according to which the novel defends an objective notion of truth in the context of a penetrating moral critique of the horrible and humiliating way in which Winston is made to believe that two plus two equals five. Consistently with his well-known position (if it can be regarded as a philosophical “position” at all), Rorty denies that “there are any plain moral facts out there in the world, […] any truths independent of language, [or] any neutral ground on which to stand and argue that either torture or kindness are preferable to the other” (Rorty 1989, 173). Orwell’s significance lies in a novel redescription of what is possible: he convinced us that “nothing in the nature of truth, or man [sic], or history” will block the conceivable scenario that “the same developments which had made human equality technically possible might make endless slavery possible” (Rorty 1989, 175). Hence, O’Brien, the “Party intellectual,” is Orwell’s key invention, and Orwell, crucially, offers no answer to O’Brien’s position: “He does not view O’Brien as crazy, misguided, seduced by a mistaken theory, or blind to the moral facts. He simply views him as dangerous and as possible.” (Rorty 1989, 176)

While O’Brien is, of course, an extreme character, it may not be too far-fetched to speculate that today people may increasingly recognize the thoroughgoing contingency of our form of life by recognizing, alarmingly, that things could, even in stable Western democracies, turn really bad really rapidly. Whether O’Brien is possible or not (and in what sense), there are certainly possible and extremely dangerous scenarios that might imaginably change our lives into truly Orwellian-like dystopic directions. The rise of “post-truth” populist politics, the inability of world leaders to come up with any clear and sufficiently efficient strategies to combat the deepening environmental crisis, and unexpected threats such as the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 may all have increased our awareness of the precariousness of our cultural situation.

The key idea we should arrive at by contemplating the Orwellian situation, according to Rorty, is that truth as such does not matter: “[…] what matters is your ability to talk to other people about what seems to you true, not what is in fact true”.²¹ In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston’s self is destroyed as he is made to believe that two plus two equals five – and to utter, “Do it to Julia!”, when faced with his worst fear, the rats. Rorty points out that this is something that Winston “could not utter sincerely and still be able to put himself back together” (Rorty 1989, 179). The notion of sincerity is highly central here, as it obviously establishes a link to the key idea of truthfulness that I above claimed to find at the heart of James’s account of truth.

Maintaining a basic distinction between truth and falsity – a distinction not messed up by any vulgarization of the pragmatist account of truth – is, however, necessary for the concepts of sincerity and truthfulness to function. Insofar as Rorty’s pragmatism carries Jamesian pragmatism into a certain extreme, we will be left wondering whether there is any way to stop on the slippery slope arguably leading from James to Rorty (and eventually bringing in, with horror, first post-factualists like Trump and then Orwell’s O’Brien). Reality must still be contrasted with unreality, while truth and truthfulness must be opposed not only to falsity but also to lying and self-deception, as well as other kinds of loss of sincerity that may follow from the collapse of the truth vs. falsity distinction itself. What we find here is, as we might say, the problem of realism in its existential dimensions. This is, arguably, the core pragmatic meaning of the problem of realism and truth, and therefore the very possibility of ethical truthfulness is a key pragmatist issue to be dealt with in any critical examination of the Jamesian-Rortyan engagement with truth. While pragmatists have had very interesting things to say about realism and truth in the more conventional areas of this discussion, including, for example, scientific realism and moral realism, the full-blown pragmatic significance of realism and truth is brought into the focus only when we approach the matter in this Orwellian context rightly emphasized by Rorty.²²

By destroying Winston’s capacity for sincerely uttering something and still being able to “put himself back together,” O’Brien leads us to imagine the possibility of evil that renders truthfulness itself impossible. Our problem now is that this will then collapse the Jamesian pragmatist conception of truth as well, given that it starts from a kind of pragmatic softening of the notion of objective truth culminating in the “truth happens to an idea” view that we may find characteristic of James’s ethically grounded metaphysics of truth, and his pragmatism generally, as inherited by Rorty.²³

While James only resisted certain metaphysically realistic forms of metaphysics, especially Hegelian monistic absolute idealism (and corresponding metaphysical realisms), without thereby abandoning metaphysics altogether (see Pihlström 2008a, 2009, 2015), Rorty’s reading of Orwell is deeply grounded in his rejection of all forms of metaphysics. According to Rorty, Orwell is urging us that “whether our future rulers are more like O’Brien or more like J. S. Mill does not depend […] on deep facts about human nature” or on any “large necessary truths about human nature and its relation to truth and justice” but on “a lot of small contingent facts” (Rorty 1989, 187–188). Now, this is hard to deny; various minor contingent facts have enormous influence on how our world and societies develop. We should certainly join Rorty in maintaining that our form of life does not depend on “big” metaphysical Truths or Facts but is constantly shaped by “small” historical contingencies. This is also a very important message of Rortyan ironism: our firmest moral commitments, our “final vocabularies,” are historically contingent, and we ought to fully acknowledge this contingency even when resolutely defending such final vocabularies, including, say, the idea of universal human rights.²⁴ But the worry is that if we give up (even pragmatically rearticulated) objective truth entirely, we will end up giving up the very possibility of sincerity, too, and that is something we need for resisting the future of all possible O’Briens’ Newspeak seeking to justify not merely lies but also evil, suffering, and torture.

It is, indeed, one thing to accept, reasonably, historical contingency and to reject any unpragmatic overblown metaphysics of “deep facts about human nature”; it is quite another thing to give up even a minimal pragmatic sense of objective truth required not only for truthfulness and sincerity but for their very possibility (and, hence, for the possibility of insincerity as well, because insincerity is possible only insofar as sincerity is possible, and vice versa), that is, the very possibility of keeping in touch with “the meaning of our own truths and experiences” (quoting Marchetti’s apt phrase again). The fact that this discussion rapidly rises onto a meta-level invoking the conditions for the possibility of, among other things, individual sincerity can be regarded as a preliminary reason for considering pragmatism from a Kantian transcendental point of view – a suggestion I will get back to in the later chapters.

I want to emphasize that I am not claiming Rorty (or James) to maintain, in any straightforward sense, an erroneous conception of truth (or facts, or history). However, if Rorty is right in his comments on truth (whatever it means to say this, given the alarming disappearance, in his neopragmatism, of the distinction between being right and being regarded as being right by one’s cultural peers),²⁵ then we may be in a bigger trouble regarding the place of truth in our lives than we may have naively believed. We may lack not only political but also sufficient philosophical resources for dealing with people like Trump. Jamesian pragmatism seems to take the correct, indeed vital, step toward integrating the ethically and existentially normative notion of truthfulness into the pragmatist account of truth itself, as we briefly saw. However, insofar as this kind of pragmatism develops into something like Rorty’s neopragmatism, which lets the notion of truth drop out as unimportant, the end result is not only an insightful emphasis on historical contingency²⁶ but also the possible fragmentation of truthfulness itself, which seems to depend on a relatively robust distinction between truth and falsity. What this shows is a quasi-Rortyan point: Orwell is more important, and O’Brien more dangerous, than we might have thought; and so is, arguably, someone like Trump. Therefore, furthermore, Rorty’s version of pragmatism as an intermediary stage between James and full-blow post-factualism is also more important than many pragmatism scholars might want to admit. Paradoxically, precisely due to the insightfulness of his claims, Rorty in effect deprives us of the linguistic, literary, and philosophical resources that we might have seen Orwell as equipping us with.

This criticism of Rorty comes close to James Conant’s (2000) in my view devastating attack on Rorty’s reading of Orwell.²⁷ According to Conant, Rorty is committed to (or even obsessed by) the same philosophical prejudices as his metaphysically realist²⁸ opponents in claiming that notions such as objectivity, facts, or historical truth are not in the focus of Orwell’s worries. Conant argues that Rorty fails to see that there is an “ordinary”²⁹ way of using these and related concepts that need not be construed either metaphysically realistically or antirealistically (or in a Rortyan deflated manner); hence, “when our intellectual options are confined to a forced choice between Realist and Rortian theses […] we are unable to recover the thoughts Orwell sought to express […]” (Conant 2000, 279–280). Conant obviously does not dispute Rorty’s (or Orwell’s) emphasis on historical contingency, but he argues that in a perfectly ordinary sense, “the demise of ‘the possibility of truth’” could still be an extremely scary scenario (Conant 2000, 285–286). In Conant’s view, Orwell’s novel is primarily “about the possibility of a state of affairs in which the concept of objective truth has faded as far out of someone’s world as it conceivably can” (Conant 2000, 297),³⁰ and therefore it is directly relevant to our concerns here.³¹

Conant contests in a thoroughgoing manner Rorty’s deflated reading of O’Brien’s character as someone who simply enjoys torturing Winston and seeks to “break him” for no particular reason (see Conant 2000, especially 290). Truth and truthfulness do, he maintains, occupy a central place in Orwell’s analysis of what is really frightening in totalitarianism; in this way, the debate between Rorty and Conant on these notions in the context of Nineteen Eighty-Four directly continues the general pragmatist elaborations on truth and truthfulness.³² O’Brien’s “unqualified denial of the idea that (what Orwell calls) ‘the concept of objective truth’ has application to the past” (Conant 2000, 308) can be directly applied to Jamesian sincerity and truthfulness. It must be possible for the Jamesian pragmatist to argue that O’Brien has given up any ethical commitment to truthfulness through his arbitrary reduction of truth to the opinion of the Party. But then, pace Rorty, freedom and the availability of the concept of objective truth are inseparable:

What [Orwell’s] novel aims to make manifest is that if reality control and doublethink were ever to be practiced on a systematic scale, the possibility of an individual speaking the truth and the possibility of an individual controlling her own mind would begin simultaneously to fade out of the world. The preservation of freedom and the preservation of truth represent a single indivisible task for Orwell – a task common to literature and politics.

(Conant 2000, 310.)

No matter how exactly we should interpret Orwell and Rorty, this is a fundamentally important link between freedom and truth, a link also needed to make sense of the very idea of truthfulness in its pragmatist meaning. In particular, the preservation of individual freedom and truth – the task Conant argues is shared by literature and politics – is inseparably intertwined with the need to fight against “the corruption of language,” which corrupts our concepts and, thus, thought itself (Conant 2000, 313). This inseparability of freedom and truth also indicates how important it is to examine the pragmatist conception of truth in relation to individuals’ existential pursuits, as we will do in the later chapters.

Even so, in the interest of being fair to Rorty, we can still try to understand the situation in Rortyan terms. Rorty, famously, rejects the very idea of our being responsible or answerable to any non-human objective reality – traditionally presupposed, he believes, in realist accounts of truth – and emphasizes that we can only be answerable to human audiences.³³ This could be analyzed as a relation of acknowledgment: we acknowledge human audiences as our potential rational critics in a way we cannot acknowledge any non-human reality, thereby also acknowledging a shared normative form of life (cf. Chapter 5). Thus formulated, Rorty is not very far from Jamesian truthfulness, which involves the continuous challenge of acknowledging others’ perspectives on the world. However, part of our response to a (relevant) audience is a response to an audience (at least potentially) sincerely using the concepts of objective reality and truth. We have to recognize the relevance of those concepts by recognizing the relevant audience. This is a case of what has been called “mediated recognition” (cf. Koskinen 2017, 2019): we recognize the normatively binding status of the concepts of objective reality and truth by recognizing the appropriate audience(s) and our responsibility or answerability toward it/them. We thus derivatively acknowledge objective reality itself by being answerable, and recognizing ourselves as being answerable, to an audience (e.g., our potential rational critics) that might challenge our views on reality or our entitlement to the truth we claim to possess. Rorty’s well-known rhetoric emphasizing our answerability to other human beings in contrast to our answerability to an imagined deity or the realist’s mind- and language-independent “world” is simplistic and misleading, because it is precisely by being answerable to other human beings that we indicate our sharing a normative form of life with them in a shared world – or, in brief, our sharing a common world.

Now, one major problem here – to recapitulate our worries once more – is that our relevant audience could change in an Orwellian manner. The use and (thus) meaning (recalling the broadly pragmatist and Wittgensteinian idea that “meaning is use”)³⁴ of the concept of objective truth could even be destroyed. Then the kind of mediated recognition alluded to here would no longer work. In some sense there would no longer be any audience we would be responsible to anymore. And there would then be no views to have on anything anymore. Rational thought would collapse. In other words, we can recognize each other as using the concept of an objective reality (and a related concept of truth), and thereby acknowledge each other and ourselves as being normatively – truthfully – committed to pursuing objective truth about reality – but only until O’Brien gets us. Then that commitment collapses, and so does our acknowledgment of each other as genuine users of the notion of truth. So does, then, our commitment to sincerity and truthfulness, which are needed for any moral and political seriousness. All this reminds us that our pursuing the truth, as well as our merely thinking, takes place in a contingent and precarious world whose structures may unpredictably and uncontrollably change – even beyond recognition.

Rorty, then, seems to be right in reminding us about how dangerous O’Brien is – and, thus, about how fragile our life with truth is. But for this same reason he is wrong about the idea that defending freedom would be sufficient for defending truth. It is certainly necessary but hardly sufficient. In particular, negative freedom from external constraints is not enough: what is needed is positive freedom and the responsibility that goes together with such freedom, hence sincere commitment to truth-seeking, something that the Jamesian integration of truth with truthfulness takes some steps toward articulating. There certainly is a kind of unrestricted (negative) freedom in American politics, for instance, but truth apparently has not been able to “take care of itself”.³⁵ Moreover, Rorty (1989, 188) himself needs to use the concept of truth – and related concepts such as the ones of fact and reality – when telling us that “[w]hat our future rulers will be like will not be determined by any large necessary truths about human nature and its relation to truth and justice, but by a lot of small contingent facts”.

Interestingly, Rorty also maintains the following: “If we are ironic enough about our final vocabularies, and curious enough about everyone else’s, we do not have to worry about whether we are in direct contact with moral reality, or whether we are blinded by ideology, or whether we are being weakly ‘relativistic.’” (Rorty 1989, 176–177.) This is, indeed, a very big “if”. We do need to worry about these matters because we can never be sure that we are, or will remain, able to be “ironic enough” and “curious enough” – indeed, precisely because of the kind of contingency and precariousness Rorty himself brilliantly analyzes.³⁶ These attitudes themselves require a commitment to truthfulness; they are inherently normative attitudes that presuppose a comprehensive context of genuine epistemic and ethical commitments. Our need to maintain a pragmatic conception of truth more realistic than Rorty’s can thus be seen to be based on Jamesian pragmatic reasons. Moreover, this need emerges as a result of our taking seriously a crucial Rortyan lesson about the fundamental contingency of even our most basic conceptual commitments. It is precisely due to the fragility of truth – the possibility that O’Brien might arrive, as Orwell warns us, destroying our ability of distinguishing between truth and falsity – that we must cherish our Jamesian capacities of responding, with ethical sincerity and truthfulness, to others’ perspectives along with our own continuous commitment to pursuing the truth. The most important moral we must draw from our reading of Rorty is the seriousness – the sincerity – we should attach to our realization of such contingency and fragility constitutive of the human condition. We need not agree with Rorty’s analysis of truth and freedom in order to incorporate this moral into our (more Jamesian) pragmatism.³⁷

1.4 Reflexivity, Pluralism, and Critical Philosophy

In order to further emphasize the political significance of the issue of truth, let me, before concluding this chapter, very briefly compare these pragmatist elaborations on our need to be committed to the pursuit of truth – and the related integration of truth and truthfulness – to Hannah Arendt’s views on truth (and Richard Bernstein’s useful reading of Arendt), especially as they are articulated in Arendt’s “Truth and Politics,” an essay originally published in 1967 (see Arendt 2003).³⁸

Arendt not only offered us an analysis of totalitarianism of lasting relevance and an equally lasting defense of human spontaneity in its ethical and political dimensions but also an ever more timely account of the significance of the concept of truth. In “Truth and Politics,” she carefully examines the often antagonistic relation between truthfulness and political action, drawing attention to deliberate lying as a political force – and one may argue that her views are, for well-known reasons, even more relevant today than they were half a century ago (see also Bernstein 2018, 67–83). She reminds us that while truth itself is “powerless,” it is also irreplaceable; political force, persuasion, or violence cannot substitute it, and “[t]o look upon politics from the perspective of truth […] means to take one’s stand outside the political realm,” from “the standpoint of the truthteller” (Arendt 2003, 570). This kind of critical distance necessary for an adequate understanding of the relation between truth and politics requires the age-old project of “disinterested pursuit of truth” (Arendt 2003, 573). It is, of course, this very project that the populist culture of “post-truth” raising into power people like Trump seeks to suppress.

Now, is such disinterestedness available in pragmatism? Isn’t pragmatism, especially the Jamesian version of pragmatism we are preoccupied with here (let alone the Rortyan one), inevitably “interest-driven,” and doesn’t its individualism therefore open the doors for political manipulation and disrespect for truth? Why, more generally, is the concept of truth important for a sound appreciation of pragmatic pluralism and human diversity, after all (see also Chapter 2), and why exactly should we aim at a pragmatist articulation of this concept in the first place?

A key to this issue is reflexivity: pragmatism – better than other philosophical approaches, I believe – is able to acknowledge the meta-level “interests” guiding our pursuit of disinterestedness itself. We pragmatically need a concept of truth not serving any particular need or interest – or, perhaps better, a concept of truth only, or primarily, serving the need or interest of maximal disinterestedness. This is compatible with maintaining that we pragmatically need a deep pluralism (but not shallow relativism) about truth. The reflection we are engaging in here, with the help of Arendt as well as James and Rorty, is in a crucial sense internal to pragmatism. We are asking what kind of purposes our different philosophical conceptualizations of truth, including the traditional realist (correspondence) one and the more comprehensive pragmatist one, are able to serve. In this sense, Jamesian pragmatism, I would like to suggest, “wins” at the meta-level. Its potential collapse to Trumpist populism or O’Brien’s destruction of truth is definitely a threat to be taken very seriously – especially if one is willing to take seriously Rorty’s ways of developing Jamesian and Deweyan pragmatism – but there is no reason to believe that a slide down the slippery slope is unavoidable. By drawing attention to the continuous meta-level critical (and self-critical) inquiry into our own commitments, and the truthful commitment to ameliorating our practices of truth (in science, ethics, politics, and everywhere else as well), we should be able to stop that slide. But where exactly it can be stopped is a question that needs to be asked again and again in varying historical and cultural contexts.

One important aspect of pragmatic pluralism about truth is that very different human discourses and/or practices can indeed be taken to be “truth-apt” in the sense of engaging with truth and seeking truths about the ways things are (as seen from the perspectives of those discourses or practices). For example, the pragmatic pluralist should not, in my view, claim that “moral truths” are only second-rate in relation to, or derivative from, more fundamental scientific truths about the natural world. Nor should the pragmatic pluralist maintain that the truths we pursue in, say, humanistic scholarship concerning history, religion, or literature are second-rate in comparison to the truth of natural-scientific theories. There can be genuine and full-blown truth available in all these areas as much as there is in the sciences,³⁹ but the concept of truth need not function exactly in the same way within all those very different practices. Moral truths, for instance, can be quite as genuine, as “really true” as scientific truths, or truths about the everyday world around us. The pragmatist point here is a contextualizing one: truths are true in different contexts based on, or driven by, our purposive practices. It is only within such contexts and practices that any “truthmaking” takes place – or is even possible.⁴⁰

In the end, I believe, we should at a meta-level defend a pragmatically pluralistic view about truth itself:⁴¹ there are many truths about truth, including realism and the related correspondence theory of truth, to be defended within pragmatism. These truths about truth are themselves context-embedded; for instance, we may need a realist correspondence-theoretical account of truth within a political discourse opposing populism (and O’Brien), but we may, and in my view do, need a pragmatist account within a more purely academic discourse on truth.⁴² A kind of pragmatic realism is certainly worth striving for: in the “post-factual” era of powerful populists, we should not too much emphasize the pragmatic “plasticity” of truth but, rather, the objectivity and realism inherent even in the Jamesian pragmatic conception of truth.⁴³ The “truth” about these issues is itself a pragmatic, contextual matter. This, I would like to suggest, is how the pragmatic conception of truth operates at the meta-level. Far from encouraging us to slide down to irresponsible relativism or populism, Jamesian pragmatism urges us to take responsibility for our practice-laden employments of the concept of truth within our everyday, scientific, ethical, political, and religious lives (and any other sectors of human life for that matter). This irreducibly ethical nature of truth, integrated with the explicitly normative notion of truthfulness, is something that arguably only a sufficiently deeply pragmatic account of truth can fully accommodate. Moreover, pluralism does not entail that all discourses that we may take as potentially truth-apt in the end are truth-apt. As I will suggest in Chapter 6, there are reasons – pragmatic reasons – to remain uncertain and undecided about the truth-aptness of religious discourses, for example, but this is, again, to respect the notion of truth instead of downgrading it.

It might be asked whether truth itself is “really” pragmatically “plastic” in the sense that any truths about truth depend on our pragmatic contexts or whether this contextuality or plasticity is, so to speak, merely epistemic in the sense that it only concerns our conceptions of truth (and their justifiability) instead of the nature of truth itself. Rather than backing out of this game, the pragmatist should, in my view, push pragmatism further, arguing that it is the nature of truth itself (not merely our conception of that nature) that contextually depends on our practices of living with truth and accounting for what we take to be its “nature” within our epistemic and ethical inquiries. We need more, not less, pragmatism; creating our concept of truth, we are also responsible for creating realistic (correspondence-theoretical) contexts for its employment.

As soon as we have climbed onto a meta-level viewing our practices of truth at a critical distance, there are many kinds of further reflexive questions that may be posed: can we really say, for instance, that philosophical theories (about truth, or about anything else), such as pragmatism, are themselves true or false, and in what sense exactly (e.g., in a pragmatist sense)?⁴⁴ Is it sufficient for a pragmatist to maintain that pragmatism itself is pragmatically true? This is related to the question how far a form of pragmatic naturalism can be carried in metaphilosophical reflections. According to philosophical naturalists, even realism may be an empirical theory about science and truth.⁴⁵ Whatever kind of naturalism is available to the pragmatist, it should at least be self-consciously non-reductive, and thus the pragmatic naturalist must constantly face the challenge that it may be problematic to use the concept of truth in the same sense when applied to philosophical theories as it is used when applied to, say, scientific theories. I must leave this issue open here.⁴⁶

In any event, something like critical philosophy is vitally needed to stop the slide along the slippery slope from James via Rorty to Orwell’s O’Brien (cf. also Skowroński and Pihlström 2019; see further Chapter 3). Critical philosophy (in my sense here) is both pragmatist and Kantian in its willingness to take seriously the reflexive questions that haunt us whenever we employ the notion of truth or other concepts we are normatively committed to in the very activities of using or presupposing any concepts whatsoever. In quasi-Kantian terms, I would like to phrase the main result of this chapter as follows: just like Kant saw empirical realism as possible only on the assumption of transcendental idealism, a reasonable form of realism in our contemporary society (and academia) not only needs to embrace a qualified (correspondence) account of objective truth but must at the meta-level be grounded in transcendental pragmatism that makes such realism and objectivity possible. It is a historical irony of pragmatism that already the founder of the tradition, Peirce (1877), appreciated the profound link between our very ability of fixing belief and the concept of truth. Even though we need not, as pragmatists today, stick to the Peircean version of pragmatism – and certainly this book does not argue for a Peircean approach but, rather, a (broadly) Jamesian one – we must never fail in the manner of Rorty, or Trump, to find that link important.

Obviously, while I hope to have provided reasons for a moderate step toward realism that I think the pragmatist needs to take when considering the notion of truth along the lines proposed here, the more general realism issue at the core of pragmatism will not be settled in this chapter, or this book. A number of questions related to this overall theme will remain open. Let me, by way of closing this chapter, briefly comment on just one of them. Critically engaging with attempts to integrate realism with pragmatism in a (quasi-)Kantian context (including some of my own earlier proposals in this framework), Ilkka Niiniluoto (2019, 32–33) maintains that there is a tension between the pragmatist view that metaphysical theses about the “world in itself” are “fruitless,” as we do not possess the metaphysical realist’s imagined “God’s-Eye View,” on the one hand, and the claim that we should not draw any metaphysical distinction between the Kantian noumenal and phenomenal “worlds,” as the two are “identical,” on the other hand. This is, he argues, because our knowledge of the phenomenal world – the world empirically knowable by human beings through our epistemic practices, particularly science – would also yield knowledge of the metaphysical noumenal world if the two “worlds” are indeed one and the same.

While interpreting Kant as a “two worlds” thinker here, Niiniluoto is sensitive to the possibility of a “one world” reading, too.⁴⁷ I am not convinced, however, that the basic identity of the “two worlds” (from the perspective of the “one world” interpretation) causes the kinds of difficulties he suggests, because the identity claim should not (I would prefer to say) be understood as an ontological statement from a standpoint that would be prior to a transcendental analysis of the necessary conditions for the possibility of cognizing an objective reality in the first place – an analysis which includes, if this chapter is on the right track, also an ethical dimension. The “identity” here is something that a pragmatically conducted transcendental inquiry (rather than any ontological inquiry that would be methodologically and/or metaphysically prior to it) yields, instead of being available to us independently of the transcendental standpoint. It is not an identity claim that we can make from a “God’s-Eye View” that we might imagine to be somehow external to both of those “worlds”.⁴⁸ When viewing our commitment to the concept of truth from within our practices of employing this concept, that is, in a context thoroughly structured by that commitment itself, we cannot take a step back and “measure” our realism against how things stand in the real world independently of our practices of pursuing truth about it. Our pragmatist investigation of truth is then ipso facto transcendental. I will try to clarify this thought in the later chapters more explicitly defending a “Kantian” account of (Jamesian) pragmatism.

I am tempted to view the pragmatic commitment to realism as a kind of necessary commitment to a Grenzbegriff we cannot avoid postulating as soon as we start inquiring (pragmatically and/or transcendentally) into what the objectively existing reality is “for us,” or what is true about it. In sum, pragmatic realism in the sense in which I am prepared to be committed to it will have to be formulated in an unashamed Kantian way, as a kind of transcendental thesis, or combining transcendental pragmatism with empirical realism. The active interplay of pragmatism and transcendental philosophy will come up throughout the chapters to follow, while detailed systematic engagements with this issue are beyond the scope of the present investigation.

This chapter has, I hope, set the tone for the inquiries to follow. We will need to elaborate, guided by Jamesian pragmatism, much further on individual (especially religious) diversity and pluralism in truth-seeking (Chapter 2), sincerity and transcendental inquiry in the Kantian context of critical philosophy (Chapter 3), individual existential choices of life (Chapter 4), the very structure of our shared normative frameworks making any individual choices possible for us, already alluded to here (Chapter 5), and the heavy ethical burden of making sincere commitments when it comes to religious and other existential matters, in particular (Chapter 6). We will thus next turn to a deeper reflection on our individual, especially religious, pursuit of truth, thereby enriching our picture of Jamesian pragmatic pluralism.