Truth in science is what gives us the maximum
possible sum of satisfactions, taste included, but consistency both
with previous truth and with novel fact is always the most imperious
claimant.
I have led you through a very sandy desert. But now, if I may be
allowed so vulgar an expression, we begin to taste the milk in the
cocoanut. Our rationalist critics here discharge their batteries
upon us, and to reply to them will take us out from all this dryness
into full sight of a momentous philosophical alternative.
Our account of truth is an account of truths in the plural, of
processes of leading, realized in rebus, and having only this
quality in common, that they PAY. They pay by guiding us into or
towards some part of a system that dips at numerous points into
sense-percepts, which we may copy mentally or not, but with which at
any rate we are now in the kind of commerce vaguely designated as
verification. Truth for us is simply a collective name for
verification-processes, just as health, wealth, strength, etc., are
names for other processes connected with life, and also pursued
because it pays to pursue them. Truth is MADE, just as health,
wealth and strength are made, in the course of experience.
Pages:
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183