What makes something 'true'?
William James, the father of American pragmatism, argued that truth is what works.
William James saw truth not as a fixed, eternal object but as something that works—an idea is true if it has practical value in our lived experience. Truth, for James, is not found but made through a process of verification in real life.
“Truth is what works.”
– William James
His approach strongly resonates with how we evaluate AI systems today—not by internal mechanisms alone, but by how they function in the real world.
To explain pragmatism, James shared a famous anecdote:
A man tries to see a squirrel on a tree. As he walks around the tree, the squirrel also moves around the opposite side, so the man never gets a full view. His friends ask:
“Did the man go around the squirrel or not?”
James replies:
“That depends on what you mean by ‘around.’”
If “around” means moving in all four directions (north, east, south, west), then yes. But if it means changing position relative to the squirrel’s front, side, and back, then no.
The key insight? Concepts gain clarity only when defined in practical, result-oriented terms—a hallmark of pragmatism.
James described human consciousness not as a fixed structure but as a continuous flow. He coined the term “stream of consciousness” to describe this ever-changing, selective, personal mental activity.
James argued that consciousness includes a temporal sense of self—a feeling of being “here now,” “having been,” and “becoming.” This idea later influenced phenomenologists like Husserl and Henri Bergson’s concept of durée (duration).
Although Charles Sanders Peirce first introduced the term pragmatism, it was William James who made it famous.
James’s ideas are deeply relevant to how we understand and evaluate AI today.
AI is physically just circuits and code. But when we interact with it, it may comfort us, offer intelligent answers, and solve problems. From a pragmatic lens, that makes it function like a mind.
Even if AI doesn’t have emotions or consciousness in the biological sense, its effects on us are real. That interaction creates meaning—just as James claimed about consciousness.
William James emphasized:
James’s thought teaches us to focus less on the essence of AI and more on its impact.
In evaluating AI systems, we shouldn’t just ask, “Is it conscious?”
Instead, we should ask, “Does it affect us like a conscious being would?”
That shift—from what something is to what it does—is at the heart of pragmatism. And it’s a powerful way to understand not just AI, but the knowledge-based society we live in today.