I’m finishing up with that profound and profoundly frustrating work by William James, The Meaning of Truth. He claims:
It is between the idea and the object that the truth-relation is to be sought and it involves both terms. [page 165]
No, but, once again, his error carries more insight than the truest thoughts of many serious thinkers, perhaps most. He conjectures that truth lies seen in some sort of blurry space between idea and object. Blur there is, but it’s a blur around and inside that object.
There are no disembodied ideas. There are no disembodied truths accessible to human beings. The same idea can, usually will, arise from more than one object. A multitude of objects can be shaped from the same truths.
Before going on, I’ll make an apology of sorts to William James. He was so dedicated to a sort of agnosticism of religious and metaphysical beliefs that he was prone to not following up on his own insights but it would have been hard for a sane thinker — prior to the forced acceptance of quantum theory and the theories of relativity and the theory of transfinite numbers — to have thought of things and time and space as being shaped from abstractions, hard to have thought of the human mind as being an encapsulation of the world, in those early years of the recent explosive growth of empirical knowledge and of the abstract knowledge drawn from, feeding into, and overlapping with that empirical knowledge. It’s possible that the ancient Pythagoreans had some insights into this possibility but, if so, they quickly and prematurely concretized their insights into some sort of dogmatic and cultic form. Even, or perhaps especially, those of us who think God, or the gods, to have given us special revelations have to be careful to keep our understanding of empirical reality connected to but distinct from those revelations. Those, including likely Einstein, whose one God is Created Being itself, will naturally and legitimately intermingle any revelations and empirical knowledge.
Modern physics has probed thing-like being to find hints of ever-smaller things and also hints of the totality of concrete being we call the universe. For the most part, what they’ve found has been a sort of being eerily similar to the things we can see and touch but different in a way that hints quite strongly of abstraction, of being that’s not quite this or that until specific concrete relationships are formed at the proper level. Similar comments can be made about a number of fields in mathematics.
That should be obscure enough for most inclined to metaphysical thought and I’ll turn to critiquing the language used by James in the above quote.
An idea, in the sense of something formed in the human brain, isn’t something which exists independent of created being. It’s an approximation to some aspect of either abstract or concrete being. I’m pretty sure that James knew this and nearly as sure that he was trying to get at that point but by way of a reaching out into a space of sorts found between the thinker and the object. In this way of thinking, mostly the right way to think when a concrete being grapples with abstractions: an idea of a circle is an approximation of some abstract relationship captured in the various definitions of a circle, a line formed by points equidistant from a single point and now seen as a formalism or abstraction of that relationship. An idea of a tree is an approximation to some very complex relationships between family lines of organisms which are now seem as parts of narratives explored by evolutionary biologists. And so there are some very complex entanglements of abstractions out there in our world.
William James most certainly didn’t think that either truths or ideas exist independently of objects or at least of objective being. Unlike me, he didn’t even seem to accept truths transcendent to empirical reality, though transmitted through that empirical reality. He may have known that those objects, being involved in more or less continuous acts, are entwined in streams of activity which we can roughly label as narrations even before we deal with purpose or with a morally purposeful Creator or morally purposeful actors or observers. Ideas are human approximations to the `truer’, or at least more abstract, nature of objects and of narrative actions, but even the most abstract of ideas are entangled in narrative streams. This is one of the strange lessons of the modern exploration of some very deep abstractions: no matter how abstract and useless a mathematician intends his work, some computer scientist or particle physicist will find a concrete application.
Perhaps William James should have said:
It is inside the object, often very deep inside the object, but also around the object, that the idea is to be found which is an approximation to truth. A human creature can only see the truth in the entanglement of object, the human ideas related to that object, and some prior understanding of the truths from which that object was shaped.
At least that’s what I would say, though it would be nice if I could find a more elegant expression. The careful reader will note I’ve complicated matters a little by adding in a touch of what might be called `Bayesian blending’, but don’t worry about that because it’s another way of talking about nurturing and reforming our intellectual inheritance and also our own minds as they grow and mature. But here’s an additional claim which might help to clarify what I mean:
Traditional Realisms or — equivalently — Idealisms have erred in seeing that things and something-like-idea have not fully independent being but even the sublime Plato himself made the mistake of confusing ideas and truths.