The pragmatic conception of truth

In contrast with the view of truth as correspondence between a proposition and the way part of the world that belief concerns actually is, we consider briefly one of several views of truth called "pragmatic" conceptions. This view rejects the idea that truth is correspondence with reality, and says instead that a proposition is true if it is useful or beneficial for "us" to believe it. (Note that this is somewhat different from Peirce's idea that truth is the view which all who investigate sufficiently are bound to adopt.)

The obvious question about this view is "Who is 'us'?" Sometimes the advocates of this view assume that it doesn't matter very much who "us" is, since whatever it is useful for one group of people to believe will be pretty much the same as what will be useful to any other group. This means assuming that the various different groups in society are in harmony with each other, ignoring claims, such as Marx's, that what is beneficial for capitalists to believe may be the direct opposite of what is useful to the working class. Marxists maintain that capitalists find aid and comfort in the illusion that capitalism conforms to human nature or that it will go on forever, but that the working class will not benefit by believing such statements, which do not, in fact, correspond to reality.

If he realizes these conflicts of interest exist, the advocate of the pragmatic view of truth has two choices. He can choose to say that the statement "Capitalism will last forever" is neither true nor false, since neither that statement nor its opposite is beneficial for everyone to believe. In this case, there will be no truth of the matter on subjects where people have conflicting interests, a category which includes most subjects people actually argue about. The result would be that truth would be a label that could seldom be applied to anything at all.

The second possibility is that the defender of the pragmatic view of truth can say that when "us" refers to different groups, the result is different truths. Thus there will be "capitalist truth," and "worker truth," but no truth apart from these interest groups. The question of whether a view that one class finds useful is "really" true would be a nonsense question. Debates that seem to concern what the truth is would really be just be the clash of opposing propagandas.

Thus we can see that which ever choice is made, applying the pragmatic view of truth to a social world that is divided into classes must make the truth irrelevant. The result is that the pragmatic view usually appeals only to those who see class interests as very unimportant compared to what the different classes have in common. One common form of this view is nationalism, the idea that the various social groups and classes in a single country have interests that are more alike than different. If nationalism is false, then even with in a single country, taking different groups as "us" gives different criteria of truth. Even if the nationalist view is true, it still can give you different truths for different nations.

By 'ideology' we mean the ideas that serve the interests of some social group, whether or not they are true. The problem with the pragmatic conception of truth is that it seems not to be able to distinguish truth from ideology. This criticism applies in a somewhat different way to Peirce's view, too, since conflicting interests may mean that there is no view that all who investigate are bound to adopt.