10 Quotes by William James about pragmatism

  • Author William James
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    Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?

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  • Author William James
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    Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest.We don’t lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make natureagain over by their aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them upand sets each one at work.

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  • Author William James
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    You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less a solution, then, than as a program for more work and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed. Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest. We don't lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make nature over again by their aid.

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  • Author William James
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    If my inborn faculties are good, I am a prophet; if poor, I am a failure: nature spews me out of her mouth, and there is an end of me.

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  • Author William James
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    It never occurs to most of us .. that the question 'what is the truth' is no real question (being irrelative to all conditions) and that the whole notion of the truth is an abstraction from the fact of truths in the plural, a mere useful summarizing phrase like the Latin language or the Law.

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