Pragmatism

Asking whether an idea faithfully « copies » a given reality is, for James, a pseudo-problem: a copy we could never set beside its model makes no detectable difference. One workable criterion then remains: an idea is true if, put to the test, it guides us smoothly through experience, knits our beliefs together and keeps its promises. The true thereby becomes a process, what gets verified in the course of inquiry, and not a property already lodged in the statement. The thesis targets the correspondence realism shared by rationalism and classical empiricism alike: Peirce tempers it, though, by placing at the horizon of indefinitely pursued inquiry a final opinion on which investigators would converge, which reintroduces a regulative form of reality.

Peirce, 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear' (1878) · James, Pragmatism (1907), lectures II and VI

Already in On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense, truth is defined as a mobile army of forgotten metaphors, a useful error without which a species could not live. The value of a judgment is measured by its fruitfulness for life, not by its correspondence to reality: a pragmatist-leaning position.

On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense, §1 · Beyond Good and Evil, §4

Peirce defines the true by the ideal limit of inquiry, not by its immediate success: the true opinion is the one all who inquire are fated to come to agree upon in the end, and the object of that final opinion is the real. Truth is thus neither a frozen copy of things nor the mere coherence of a system, but the point of convergence toward which a community of inquirers tends in the long run, provided it carries the inquiry far enough. This definition, which makes him a figure of the pragmatist pole, nonetheless keeps a realist core that sets him apart from James: the true is not « what works for me » nor what it is useful for me to believe, but what inquiry, constrained by a real independent of our desires, is fatally led to acknowledge. The individual's utility has no part in it.

How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878) · The Fixation of Belief (1877)

The truth of a thought is proved in praxis, not in pure theory: in practice man must prove the reality and power of his thinking. Whether a thought attains reality is a practical question: a strongly pragmatist conception of truth, without renouncing the ambition to grasp the real.

Theses on Feuerbach, II · Theses on Feuerbach, VIII (social life is essentially practical)

The distinction answers a formidable objection: if everything is empty, then suffering, the path, and the Buddha's teaching are empty too, and emptiness seems to wreck everything. Nāgārjuna meets it by distinguishing two registers of truth, not two worlds: at the conventional level, language and ordinary practices are fully valid; at the ultimate level, nothing has inherent existence. Far from excluding each other, they are mutually conditioning: the ultimate can only be pointed to by means of the conventional, and whoever takes emptiness for an ultimate thesis about the real is lost, as one is by a wrongly grasped snake. Conventional truth thus holds by its coherence of usage and its efficacy on the path, not by a correspondence to essences.

Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way), XXIV, 8-10 (the two truths)