The Meaning Of Truth

As one of the founders of the pragmatism in the United States, William James is also a profound psychologist. He gains great compliments as one of the founders of functionalism psychology school home and aboard. James's contribution to the contemporary philosophy mainly lies in the conversation on the question of the truth. He discards the tradition viewpoint taking subject and object as two separated part, making modifying to the correspondence theory by himself on the current basis in a bid to eliminate the contradictory between subject and object into which he melt the value of human beings. From his point, truth means the correspondence with empirical, flexible and polynary characteristics instead of dogmatic mechanical and unitary ones. We are looking for a method for pursuing truth and knowledge rather than making a definition of what is the truth.The view of truth in James plays an important role in contemporary philosophy. On one hand, his view on truth has more factors of human beings, purpose as well as difference has been taken into account, especially that he put forward that truth is under condition, providing a new perspective for philosophy exploring; on the other hand, the way that James analyze truth from the beginning of recognition and language aspect also provides reference for the development and mature in contemporary philosophy. With his characteristics, James put the ontology and epistemology together and put his views of truth on the basis of epistemology. On one hand, he sticks to ontology that the object is a reality and truth lies in correspondence between subject and object while on the other hand, this type of correspondence is not simply a single reflection of object. The traditional correspondence theory can't make a satisfactory explanation to many phenomenon which can convert to dogmatism easily and do bad for the extension of knowledge on account of that subject have a reaction to the object. This essay is going to analyze a great number of shortcomings from misunderstanding of tradition philosophy as well as constituted factors and get rid of the misunderstanding to the philosophy of James's truth with a further analysis so as to demonstrate the meaning and truth of James eventually.This article is divided into three parts to make analysis to the views of truth on James:the first part mainly introduce the background of the truth of James. In this part, I analyze the condition of the truth of James from home and aboard in the first place. Secondly, the happening background of the truth of James goes to study from the aspect of history, nature and science and philosophy. The second part, as the body of this article takes three parts to analyze the truth. First of all, James overturns the point view of realism from traditional philosophy and holds the point that being as a objective existence is not equal to truth which is not the result of consciousness only, but it is formed by many factors from subjective as well as objective then I make an assay of characteristics and conditions which is need in the process of forming truth in the terms of the beginning of cognition. In the point view of James, cognition has a characteristic of transcendence. In other words, cognition is only taken as a dream until it has transcended itself and takes material out of itself as object then it qualifies as cognition. Only does object have connection with subject and perception has similarity with object then object just can be recognized by subject. In the last of this part, this article analyzes two factors constituted views of truth on James, that is, truth on the sense of science and religion. Then, all emphasis goes to its characteristics of plurality, conditionality as well as value. At the end of this part, it demonstrates its modern value on James'view of truth in three parts:In the first place, this article refers to a paper from Betty to discuss James' views of truth in a sense of religion, which aims to demonstrate that truth in a sense of cognition hasn't truth or false and ties with utility. Secondly, James'philosophy is also very important in the interior part of pragmatism which is take a role as summarizing the works of formers and set up a road for the latter. Thirdly, the method analyzing the truth combined with the specific condition that James uses will also give important implication to the discussion of the truth for the modern analytical philosophy.