Some actual delusions which were not readily subjected to tests have been long useful in this way. “For instance, basing ourselves on Lafcadio Hearn, we might quite admit that the opinions summed up under the title ‘Ancestor-Worship’ had been … ‘exactly what was required’ by the former inhabitants of Japan”. “It was good for primitive man to believe that dead ancestors required to be fed and honored … because it induced savages to bring up their offspring instead of letting it perish. But although it was useful to hold that opinion, the opinion was false”. “Mankind has always wanted, perhaps always required, and certainly made itself, a stock of delusions and sophisms”.[10]
Perhaps we would all agree that the belief that ‘God is on our side’ has been useful to the tribe holding it. If has increased zeal and fighting efficiency tremendously. But since God can’t be on both sides, the belief of one party to the conflict is untrue, no matter how useful. To believe that (beneficial) tribal customs are enforced by the tribal gods is useful, but if the tribal gods are non-existent the belief is false. The beautiful imaginings of poets are sometimes useful in minimizing and disguising the hard and ugly reality, but when they will not test out they cannot be said because of their beauty or desirability to be true.
We must conclude then, that some delusions are useful. And we may go on and question James’ identification of truth and utility from another point of view. Instead of agreeing that true ideas and useful ideas are the same, we have shown that some useful ideas are false: but the converse is also demonstrable, that some true ideas are useless.
There are formulas in pure science which are of no use to anyone outside the science because their practical bearings, if such there be, have not yet been discovered, and are of no use to the scientist himself because, themselves the products of deduction, they as yet suggest nothing that can be developed farther from them. While these formulas may later be found useful in either of these senses—for ‘practical demands’ outside the science, or as a means to something else within the science—they are now already true quite apart from utility, because they will test out by fulfilling expectations.
Knowledge that is not useful is most striking in relation to ‘vice’. One may have a true idea as to how to lie and cheat, may know what cheating is and how it is done, and yet involve both himself and others in most unsatisfactory consequences. The person who is attempting to stop the use of liquor, and who to this end has located in a ‘dry’ district, may receive correct information as to the location of a ‘blind-tiger’—information which while true may bring about his downfall. Knowledge about any form of vice, true knowledge that can be tested out, may upon occasion be harmful to any extent we like.
We may conclude this section by citing a paragraph which will show the fallacious reasoning by which James came to identify the truth and the utility of ideas. At one point in replying to a criticism he says: “I can conceive no other objective content to the notion of an ideally perfect truth than that of penetration into not take its content as a true account of reality? The matter of the true is thus absolutely identical with the matter of the satisfactory. You may put either word first in your way of talking; but leave out that whole notion of satisfactory working or leading (which is the essence of my pragmatic account) and call truth a static, logical relation, independent even of possible leadings or satisfactions, and it seems to me that you cut all ground from under you”. (Meaning of Truth, p. 160).[11]
Now it is to be observed that this paragraph contains at least three logical fallacies. In the first sentence there is a false assumption, namely that ‘all that survives is valuable’. ‘Then’, we are given to understand, ‘since true ideas survive, they must be valuable’. No biologist would agree to this major premise. ‘Correlation’ preserves many things that are not valuable, as also do other factors.
In the second sentence there is an implied false conversion. The second sentence says, in substance, that all true ideas are satisfactory (valuable). This is supposed to prove the assertion of the first sentence, namely, that all satisfactory (valuable) ideas are true.
In the last sentence there is a false disjunction. Truth, it is stated, must either be satisfactory (valuable) working, or a static logical relation. We have tried to show that it may simply mean reliable working or working that leads as it promised. This may be neither predominantly valuable working nor a static logical relation.
The Relation of Satisfaction to Agreement and Consistency.—James continually reasserts that he has ‘remained an epistemological realist’, that he has ‘always postulated an independent reality’, that ideas to be true must ‘agree with reality’, etc.[12]