Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1993. [Vol. 1.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 21)

STUDIES - Zsolt Virágos: Some Observations on Myth and Practical' Pragmatism in American Culture

United States appears to be one of the top consumers and generators of myth. Some obvious domains of these special areas are ethnic consciousness, racism, certain areas of literature and literary scholarship, political thought, or national history. As regards this last department, it might be illustrative to quote N. Cords and P. Gerster: "Comparatively, it appears that American history is more myth-laden than that of any other Western nation".

2 The questions we should answer at this point are these: (1) What, after all, is the pragmatic conception of truth? (2) What were those conditions of intellectual uncertainty and confusion that served as the formative dispositions and historical origins of pragmatism? In other words, was it a habitual bias in social practice that the pragmatists tried to capture in the net of philosophical conceptualization? In this brief essay I must pass over many of the technical and conceptual aspects of pragmatic thought. The pragmatic theory of truth itself can be reconstructed from a complex of contributory beliefs and assertions, some supporting others. In this sense, the dominant and most influential member of the triumvirate was William James, often regarded as the American pragmatist, though Peirce also made significant contributions, especially in his 1877 essay, "The Fixation of Belief," which appeared in Popular Science Monthly, and in "How To Make Our Ideas Clear," which was published in the following year. Peirce argued, basically on behavioral grounds, that beliefs are really rules for acting and that the meaning of having a belief can only be discovered by assessing its consequences for action. James's most relevant works in this respect are the title essay in his The Will to Believe (1897), his lectures on Pragmatism (1907), and The Meaning of Truth (1909), its sequel. Declining to accept what he calls the agnostic rules for truthseeking, James analyzes the question of truth in three classes of propositions and recommends criteria of validation for each one. In matters of empirical fact the suggested touchstone of corroboration is direct, face-toface empirical verification. In the category of a priori truths, which he calls 2 Nicholas Cords and Patrick Gerster (eds.) Myth and the American Experience (Encino, Calif.: Glencoe Publishing Co., 1978). vol. I, XI. 140