William James Quotes About Truth
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To consider hypotheses is surely always better than to dogmatize ins blaue hinein
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Of all the beautiful truths pertaining to the soul None is more gladdening or fruitful than to know You can regenerate and make yourself what you will.
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Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The 'facts' themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.
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Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.
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Owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one
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[Pragmatism's] only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience's demands, nothing being omitted.
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Pragmatism 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?
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The most ancient parts of truth . . . also once were plastic. They also were called true for human reasons. They also mediated between still earlier truths and what in those days were novel observations. Purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts played no role whatsoever, is nowhere to be found. The reasons why we call things true is the reason why they are true, for to be true means only to perform this marriage-function.
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Our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is. Yet sometimes alternative theoretic formulas are equally compatible with all the truths we know, and then we choose between them for subjective reasons. We choose the kind of theory to which we are already partial: we follow 'elegenace' or 'economy'
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Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it
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We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.
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I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is true so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives
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Theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences
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Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality.
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The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.
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Essential truth, the truth of the intellectualists, the truth with no one thinking it, is like the coat that fits tho no one has ever tried it on, like the music that no ear has listened to. It is less real, not more real, than the verified article; and to attribute a superior degree of glory to it seems little more than a piece of perverse abstraction-worship.
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A new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock
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The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.
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We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
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Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification processes
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Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system
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In the last analysis, then, we believe that we all know and think about and talk about the same world because we believe our PERCEPTS are possessed by us in common
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Truth happens to an idea
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Truth in our ideas means their power to work.
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Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience; they will lead him nowhere or else make false connections
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Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.
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An experience, perceptual or conceptual, must conform to reality in order to be true
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To know an object is to lead to it through a context which the world provides
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The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.
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... if we take the universe of 'fitting,' countless coats 'fit' backs, and countless boots 'fit' feet, on which they are not practically fitted; countless stones 'fit' gaps in walls into which no one seeks to fit them actually. In the same way countless opinions 'fit' realities, and countless truths are valid, tho no thinker ever thinks them.
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