[책] Pragmatism and sociology: some excerpts

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Translation of: Pragmatisme et sociologie.

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Pragmatism and sociology

Émile Durkheim, John B. Allcock

출판사: CUP Archive, 1983

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Fourteenth Lecture: The variatins of truth

Let us return to the reasons that pragmatism gives us in order to prove that truth is subject to change. There are really two: (1) truth cannot be immutable bacause reality itself is not immutable; hence truth changes in time. (2) Truth cannot be one because this oneness would be incompatible with the diversity of minds; hence truth changes in space.

1. In order to be able to say that truth has varied in time, one would have to show that a propositin can legitimately be considered  true at a given moment and in particular circumstances, and that this same proposition at another moment and in other circumstances cannot be held to be true, even though it relates to the same object. This has not been shown. Pragmatism alleges that reality has changed; but does this mean that old truths become false? Reality can evolve without truth thereby ceasing to be truth. The laws of the physical world, for example, have remained what they were when life first appeared, and as the biological world has taken form.

2. The pragmatists base their case on the diversity of individual minds. But does progress perhaps not consist precisely in the removal of individual differences? Will the pragmatist them maintain that truth belongs only to the individual? This is a paradox that pragmatism itself has not dared to attempt to resolve.[1] Nor do the pragmatists explain what relatinship there is between the diversity of minds and the diversity of truth. From the fact that in penetrating individual minds, truth takes on diverse forms, it does not follow that truth in itself is multiple. In short, pragmatism offers no proof of the thesis that it advances, the thesis that truth is amorphous.

Yet this thesiis is not without some foundation, for it rests on certain facts. However, these facts, which the pragmatists sense only vaguely, must be restored to their true meaning. Let us see what explanation of them is offered by sociology.

Sociology introduces a relativism that rests on the relation between the physical environment on the one hand and man on the other. The physical environment presents a relative fixity. It undergoes evolution, of course; but reality neve ceases to be what it was in order to give way to a reality of a new kind, or to one consisting of new elements. The original world  survives under successive additions that enrich it. New realities were, in a sense, already present in the old ones.[2] The organic world does not abolish the physical world and the social world has not been formed in contradistinction to the organic world, but together with it.

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