Bertrand Russell was famously critical of American philosophers like William James and their radical theories of truth. According to Russell, James and the other American pragmatists defined truth in terms of what is momentarily useful or comforting, when truth is really about correspondence to an objective reality. But Russell’s attack rests on a caricature, argues philosopher John Kaag. James and the American pragmatists had a far more sophisticated account, one grounded in the recognition that we can never arrive at a final truth or confront reality as such. Instead we engage with reality through experience, in a continual negotiation with a world that resists us.

The quarrel between William James and Bertrand Russell over the nature of truth is a spectacle in the history of philosophy, the drama of which rests on a caricature: James, the American pragmatist, supposedly reduces truth to whatever beliefs happen to be useful or comforting, while Russell, with the sharp edge of analytic clarity, exposes the absurdity of such a position. Truth, Russell tells us, must be something more than what works. It must correspond to the facts, indifferent to the accidents of human interest or need. It is an elegant objection, and I have come to think that in its elegance lies its seduction. But like many philosophical objections that survive mostly by repetition, it fails to take its opponent’s best case on its own well-reasoned terms.   

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Human beings never confront reality as such—they confront it through experience, through a gradual negotiation with the world that resists them.

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Let’s get something very clear straight away: James never claimed that truth was a matter of mere convenience or momentary utility. John Dewey might have made this mistake occasionally, but James did not. James’s pragmatism, at its core, is a philosophy of experience—not experience in the fleeting, subjective sense, but experience extended, socialized, and tested across the rough surfaces of reality. It is not unlike C.S. Peirce’s conception of truth as an approximation to the facts in the infinite long run, tested scientifically by observation and experience. Once this is understood, Russell’s critique begins to falter.

Russell’s own account of the matter is clear. In The Problems of Philosophy, he writes: “The correspondence theory of truth consists in the view that a belief is true when there is a corresponding fact and is false when there is no such corresponding fact”. The attraction of this view is obvious: it promises to keep truth objective, to insulate it from human frailty, from the flux of feeling and fashion. But this insulation is purchased at a steep price. It ignores, or at least underestimates, the fact that human beings never confront reality as such—they confront it through experience, through a gradual negotiation with the world that resists them.

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Truth is not manufactured out of preference; it is discovered in the labor of life.

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James’s challenge is not that correspondence is wrong, but that it is epistemologically idle unless fleshed out by the ways in which human beings can verify—or, better and more realistic—falsify it. In Pragmatism, he famously writes: “The true… is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.” He immediately qualifies this, saying that “expedient” here must not be confused with the merely agreeable or fleetingly useful. It is not the immediate payoff of a belief that makes it true, but its capacity to work “in the long run and on the whole of life’s experience.”