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

"nonfactual beliefs" or "necessary propositions," he recommends, among other things, reliance on convention. The really problematic category is made up of moral and aesthetic judgments, i.e., beliefs whose function is to satisfy our moral and emotional requirements. In this department James, assuming an indeterministic position, proposes that a belief is to be accounted true if it gives one satisfaction to hold. I have counted over a dozen definitions or near-definitions of truth James gave. The feature they share is that their conceptual drift is contextualist in the sense that the final test of an idea's validity is its coherence with the rest of one's experience. A sample of the typical Jamesian formulations: "the true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons;" or "truth happens to an idea;" or, "it is useful because it is true... it is true because it is useful;" or, one more, '"the true', to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as 'the righf is only the expedient in the way of our behaving..."

3 To be fair, I have to add that James did make certain, tentative and feeble, reservations at this point. Nonetheless, as A. J. Ayer has remarked, "it has been almost universally assumed by James's critics that he puts this forward unconditionally as a general criterion of truth."

4 If we accept the oft-repeated assertion that pragmatism is "uniquely and perhaps characteristically associated with American experience itself"

5 and that "in abstraction from this larger historical context, the movement is largely unintelligible,"

6 we can rightly suppose that in the late 19th century it emerged as a reflection upon already-existing procedures. Let me add at this point that Peirce, who was the first pragmatist to grapple with the 3 William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1907), pp. 76, 201, 204, 222. 4 Alfred Jules Ayer, The Origins of Pragmatism: Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sander Peirce and William James (London: Macmillan, 1968), p. 201. 5 Robert J. Mulvaney and Philip M. Zeltner (eds.) Pragmatism: Its Sources and Prospects (Columbia, S. C.: The Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1981), VII. 6 Ibid. 141