"In the present year of grace 1908 the term "pragmatism"--if not the doctrine--celebrates its tenth brithday. Before the controversy over the mode of philosophy designated by it enters upon a second decade, it is perhaps not too much to ask that contemporary philosophers should agree to attach some single and stable meaning to the term. There appears to be as yet no sufficiently clear and general recognition, among contributors to that controversy, of the fact that the pragmatist is not merely three but may gentlemen at once."
I. Pragmatist Theories of Meaning
1. The "meaning" of any judgment consists wholly in the future experiences, active or passive, predicted by it.II. Pragmatism as an Epistemologically Functionless Theory concerning the "Nature" of Truth.
2. The meaning of any judgment consists in the future consequences of believing it.
13. The meaning of any idea or judgment always consists in part in the apprehension of the relation of some object to a purpose.
3. The truth of a judgment "consists in" the complete realization of the experience (or series of experiences) to which the judgment had antecedently pointed; propositions are not, but only become, true.III. Pragmatist Theories of Knowledge, i.e., of the Criterion of the Validity of a Judgment.
4. Those general propositions are true which so far, in the past experience, have had their implied predictions realized; and there is no other criterion of truth of a judgment.IV. Pragmatism as an Ontological Theory
5. Those general propositions are true which have in past experience proved biologically serviceable to those who have lived by them; and this "liveableness" is the ultimate criterion of the truth of a judgment.7. All apprehension of truth is a species of "satisfaction"; the true judgment meets some need, and all transition from doubt to conviction is a passage from a state of at least partial dissatisfaction to a state of relative satisfaction and harmony. This is strictly only a psychological observation, not an epistemological one; it becomes the latter by illicit interpretation into one of the two following.
8. The criterion of the truth of a judgment is its satisfactoriness, as such; satisfaction is "many dimensional," but all the dimensions are of commensurable epistemological value, and the maximum bulk of satisfaction in a judgment is the mark of its validity.
9. The criterion of the truth of a judgment is the degree in which it meets the "theoretic" demands of our nature; these demands are special and distinctive, but their realization is none the less a kind of "satisfaction". 10. The sole criterion of the truth of a judgment is its practical serviceableness as a postulate; there is no general truth except postulated truth, resulting from some motivated determination of the will; "necessary" truths do not exist.
11. There are some necessary truths, but these are neither many nor practically adequate; and beyond them the resort to postulates is needful and legitimate.
12. Among the postulates which it is legitimate to take as the equivalent of truth, those which subserve the activities and enrich the content of the moral, esthetic, and religious life have a co-ordinate place with those which are presupposed by common sense and physical science as the basis of the activities of the physical life.
6. Temporal becoming is a fundamental character of reality; in this becoming the processes of consciousness have their essential and creative part. The future is strictly nonreal and its character is partly indeterminate, dependent upon movements of consciousness the nature and direction of which can be wholly known only at the moments in which they become real in experience (Sometimes more or less confused with 3.)