The American Pragmatist William James says a curious thing about truth: that it can change.

Truth is a property of statements about reality. If I say “The cat is on the mat” and the cat is indeed on the mat, then my statement is true. If the cat moves off the mat, as cats do, then the statement becomes false. So of course the truth of a statement changes if the reality that it’s about changes. But James means something more. He says that even if the reality doesn’t change, the truth of statements about it can and do change. His view implies that it was once true that the earth is flat and now it has become true that it’s not. That’s not as ridiculous as it sounds. The key to understanding his assertion is to recognize the point of view from which he makes it.

From an objective, third-person point of view remarks such as these make no sense.

… ideas … become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience ….^[1]

Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.^[2]

How can an idea become true? Surely it is either true or not. People used to think that the earth was flat. Now we know that it’s round (technically, it’s an oblate spheroid). James seems to be saying that the proposition “The earth is flat” used to be true but now it’s false. Does that mean that the earth itself has changed shape? Surely not.^[3] Was the idea that the earth is flat true many years ago but now false? Or has the idea always been false, and now we have finally recognized its falsehood? Most people would affirm the latter. In fact, the founder of Pragmatism, C.S. Peirce, so disliked the idea of truth as mutable that he called it one of the “seeds of death” by which James allowed his pragmatism to become “infected.”^[4]

James says

[An idea] makes itself true, gets itself classed as true, by the way it works.^[5]

Here he seems to attribute agency to ideas. But ideas are not agents; they are mental objects. They are thoughts, which can be entirely private or shared among others, but don’t act on their own. Presumably James speaks figuratively, not literally, but the point remains: how can an idea become true?

The answer is two-fold. The first is that James is less precise than we might like. By “truth” James means truth as we experience it. He says,

[By] the word ‘true’ … the pragmatist always means ‘true for him who experiences the workings [of a chain of reasoning].’^[6]

He means by “truth” what we take to be true. If he had said that ideas become more or less believable as we accumulate evidence instead of more or less true, we would have no trouble with his words.

The second part of the answer has to do with why James uses such language. He speaks of truth from a first-person phenomenological point of view, an approach he used throughout his life. From his monumental Principles of Psychology (1890) through his famous Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) to his Pragmatism (1906), in which he speaks favorably of “inner personal experiences,”^[7] he always had an appreciation for how things appear to us subjectively.

Think of walking toward a tree or a building or any other physical object. As you approach it, it seems to get bigger, and as you walk away, it seems to get smaller. In reality it stays the same size, of course, and it’s only your perspective on it that changes. (By “reality” I mean the taken-for-granted world that we all inhabit together.) Even though the object’s physical size doesn’t change, its perceived size certainly does. From a first-person point of view, it’s quite reasonable to say that it gets bigger as we get nearer to it.

Just so, an idea—say, that the earth revolves around the sun instead of the other way around—first appears ridiculous and fallacious, then appears more plausible and finally appears to be true. From a third-person, objective standpoint we say that the idea finally appears to us as true or that we finally believe it. From a first-person perspective, we can say that the idea has become true. The statements mean the same thing; they are just expressed differently.

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References

Peirce, C.S. Collected Papers, Electronic Edition. Online publication https://colorysemiotica.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/peirce-collectedpapers.pdf as of 30 November 2025.

Putnam, Hilary. Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

James, William. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907. Available online at https://www.google.com/books/edition/Pragmatism_a_new_name_for_some_old_ways/UGBRAAAAYAAJ as of 9 July 2020.

James, William. The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to ‘Pragmatism’. London: Longman, Green, and Co., 1909. Available online at https://dn790006.ca.archive.org/0/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.264519/2015.264519.The-Meaning.pdf as of 26 July 2024.

Notes

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[1] James, Pragmatism, p. 58.

[2] James, Pragmatism, p. 201.

[3] Putnam, Reason, Truth and History, p. 55.

[4] Peirce, Collected Papers, section 6.485.

[5] James, Pragmatism, pp. 64.

[6] James, The Meaning of Truth, p. 177

[7] James, Pragmatism, p. 109.