心理学史第四章.pptVIP

Jamess assertion that the value of a truth depends upon its use to the individual who holds it is known as pragmatism. Additional tenets of Jamess pragmatism include the view that the world is a mosaic of diverse experiences that can only be properly understood through an application of radical empiricism. Radical empiricism, distinct from everyday scientific empiricism, presumes that nature and experience can never be frozen for absolutely objective analysis, that, at the very least, the mind of the observer will affect the outcome of any empirical approach to truth since, empirically, the mind and nature are inseparable. Jamess emphasis on diversity as the default human condition — over and against duality, especially Hegelian dialectical duality — has maintained a strong influence in American culture, especially among liberals (see Richard Rorty), and his radical empiricism lies in the background of contemporary relativism. Jamess description of the mind-world connection, which he described in terms of a stream of consciousness, had a direct and significant impact on avant-garde and modernist literature and art. In What Pragmatism Means, James writes that the central point of his own doctrine of truth is, in brief, that truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and coordinate with it. Truth is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons. Richard Rorty claims that James did not mean to give a theory of truth with this statement and that we should not regard it as such. However, other pragmatism scholars such as Susan Haack and Howard Mounce do not share Rortys instrumentalist interpretation of James. [7] In The Meaning of Truth, James speaks of truth in relativistic terms: The critics [sc., the critic of pragmatism] trouble...seems to come from his taking the word true irrelatively, whereas the pragmatist always means true for him who exper