QuestionsCan we be certain of anything?A true idea is one that can be verified: truth happens to an idea
Can we be certain of anything?Through experience, with care

A true idea is one that can be verified: truth happens to an idea

The pragmatist theory of truth

William James 1842 · 1910Religious experiences are psychological facts to be studied seriously, and belief can be a legitimate venture.
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What it claims

Truth is not an immobile quality of the idea: it happens to it. An idea becomes true through the process that verifies it, and "the true" is what, in the long run, guides us well in our way of thinking.

Why

To call an idea true is to say it guides us well: we can verify it, confirm it and rely on it without being let down.

The same idea through history
William James1907Eight lectures in Boston and at Columbia, published in 1907. Lecture VI defends the conception of truth James attributes to Schiller and Dewey. He refines it in The Meaning of Truth (1909) to answer his critics.
In short

"A true idea is one that can be verified: truth happens to an idea" is an argument by William James (Pragmatism, Lecture VI, 1907, 1907) on the question "Can we be certain of anything?" (answer: through experience, with care). Its claim: Truth is not an immobile quality of the idea: it happens to it. An idea becomes true through the process that verifies it, and "the true" is what, in the long run, guides us well in our way of thinking. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P5). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 3 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Pragmatism, Lecture VI, 1907
Valid with an implicit premise

Everyone, says James, accepts that truth is an "agreement" between an idea and reality. The disagreement begins when we ask what "agreement" means. The popular view answers: a copy. For the clock on the wall, that is true: I can keep its image. But my idea of its works is much less of a copy, and for the past or for a "power" it is hard to see what it could copy; yet I speak truly or falsely. James then asks the pragmatists' usual question: what concrete difference does it make, in a life, that an idea is true? His answer: a true idea is one we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. Truth is therefore not an immobile quality sleeping inside the idea. It happens to it, through the experiences that confirm it. This thesis was fiercely attacked, notably because the formula "the true is what is advantageous" seems to confuse truth with usefulness. That is the debate below.

P1It is commonly said that an idea is true when it "agrees" with reality. Pragmatists and intellectualists both accept this definition. They part company over the meaning of "agreement".
P2To "agree" cannot always mean to "copy". Our idea of the hidden works of a clock is hardly a copy, and it is hard to see how one could copy the past or power. In the widest sense, to agree with a reality is to be guided toward it, or into its surroundings, so as to handle it better than if we disagreed.
P3To know what a word like "true" means, we must ask what concrete difference it makes in someone's experience that an idea is true rather than false.
P4That difference is that true ideas are those we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify, and false ideas are those we cannot.
P5 · implicit premiseThe practical difference truth makes in experience is all that "true" means for us: truth is nothing more than what shows up this way, with no further hidden property of agreement that experience could never reach.
Therefore truth is not an immobile quality of the idea: it happens to it. An idea becomes true through the process that verifies it, and "the true" is what, in the long run, guides us well in our way of thinking.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P5, the computer finds a case where true ideas are always recognised by their verification, yet truth is something other than that verification: for instance if an idea is true because things are so, and verification is merely our way of finding it out.
With P5 the argument is valid: the true is an agreement (P1), agreement is guidance (P2), guidance is measured by verification (P3 and P4), and P5 says this practical difference exhausts the meaning of "true". Without P5 it is not: from "we recognise a true idea by its verifying" it does not yet follow that "a true idea is nothing but one that verifies". Critics such as Russell dispute exactly this step: a criterion of truth is not its definition.
Analogy. A road map is "true" if it leads us home. We do not judge it by comparing it at a glance with the whole country, which is impossible: we judge it by use. Each time it guides us well it is verified a little more; if it gets us lost, it is false. For James, the truth of an idea is of this kind: a journey that succeeds, not a motionless portrait. Opponents answer that the map is good because the country is the way it is, and that this fact makes it true, before any journey.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Bertrand Russell 1910 · attacks the conclusion

Russell holds that James confuses the meaning of the word "true" with the effects of belief: "A exists" and "it is useful to believe that A exists" do not say the same thing. And the usefulness of a belief is far harder to establish than the fact it states. A false belief may be very advantageous, and a true one very awkward. The useful may be a sign of the true, it is not its definition.

James replies
William James 1907 · James's reply (the true runs into reality)
James does not say we may believe anything because it is pleasant. For him our ideas are wedged between two constraints: sensible facts and ideal relations. They must agree with these realities, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration. The true is the expedient in our way of thinking, but "in the long run and on the whole": what meets one experience expediently will not necessarily meet the next ones.
George Edward Moore 1907 · Counter-reply (a true idea may serve no purpose)
Moore holds, against James, that an idea may be true without believing it having any happy consequence, and that a belief with happy consequences may be false. If "true" meant "useful to believe", these two things would be contradictory, which they are not. For him, an idea's truth does not depend on its effects: verification makes it known, it does not make it.
The debate goes on (our summary) One can answer for James (Lecture VI) that, in life, "useful" first means "leads to the facts we seek": an idea that leads nowhere is not true in practice. But what Moore and James mean by "truth" is not the same thing, and the debate stays open between a theory that defines truth by verification and another that defines it by the fact.
Objection anticipated by James (the past) attacks premise 4

If the true is what has been verified, what of all the truths nobody ever verifies, like the past, or the works of a clock nobody opens? Should we call them "not yet true"?

James replies
William James 1907 · James's reply (credit)
No. Truth lives mostly on credit, like bank notes: our thoughts pass so long as nothing challenges them. It is enough that they can be verified, directly or through the effects they still have today. For the past, an idea of the past is true if it agrees with the traces it left: "as true as past time itself was, so true was Julius Caesar".
The debate goes on (our summary) The difficulty does not wholly disappear: "verifiable in principle" seems to presuppose that the fact is already there before verification. That is what James's opponent calls an independent fact, and what James calls a "ready-made" reality which he refuses to posit.
C
Charles Sanders Peirce 1905 · attacks the conclusion

Peirce, from whom James takes the word "pragmatism", finds the satisfaction James speaks of too individual. For him the true is the opinion on which all investigators would eventually agree, if inquiry went far enough. A belief that satisfies one man is not enough. In 1905 he renamed his own doctrine "pragmaticism", a name ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers.

James replies
William James 1907 · James's reply ("absolute" truth as a limit)
James keeps this idea: "absolute" truth, the one no further experience will alter, is the vanishing-point toward which we imagine our temporary truths will eventually converge. Meanwhile we must live by today's truth, ready to correct it tomorrow.
The debate goes on (our summary) Our summary: James joins Peirce on the horizon of inquiry, but he keeps a role for each person's satisfaction in today's truth, which Peirce finds too weak to define the true.