Truls Ljungström’s Reviews > The Meaning of Truth > Status Update
Truls Ljungström
is 25% done
Nevertheless this probable flexibility of temper in him has been used to convict the humanist of sin. Believing as he does, that truth lies in rebus, and is at every moment our own line of most propitious reaction, he stands forever debarred, as I have heard a learned colleague say, from trying to convert opponents, for does not their view, being THEIR most propitious momentary reaction, already fill the bill?
— Aug 21, 2026 01:08PM
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Truls’s Previous Updates
Truls Ljungström
is 80% done
Without abstract concepts to handle our perceptual particulars / Using concepts along with the particulars, we become bipedal. We throw our concept forward, get a foothold on the consequence/, and draw our percept up, travelling thus with a hop, over the surface of life at a vastly rapider rate than if we merely waded through the thickness of the particulars as accident rained them down upon our heads.
— Aug 23, 2026 04:24AM
Truls Ljungström
is 80% done
To be helped to anticipate consequences is always a gain, and such being the help that abstract concepts give us, it is obvious that their use is fulfilled only when we get back again into concrete particulars by their means, bearing the consequences in our minds, and enriching our notion of the original objects therewithal.
— Aug 23, 2026 04:23AM
Truls Ljungström
is 80% done
Abstract concepts, such as elasticity, voluminousness, disconnectedness, are salient aspects of our concrete experiences which we find it useful to single out. Useful, because we are then reminded of other things that offer those same aspects; and, if the aspects carry consequences in those other things, we can return to our first things, expecting those same consequences to accrue.
— Aug 23, 2026 04:23AM
Truls Ljungström
is 60% done
The pragmatizing epistemologist posits there a reality and a mind with ideas. What, now, he asks, can make those ideas true of that reality? Ordinary epistemology contents itself with the vague statement that the ideas must 'correspond' or 'agree'; the pragmatist insists on being more concrete, and asks what such 'agreement' may mean in detail.
— Aug 23, 2026 04:01AM
Truls Ljungström
is 60% done
True beliefs become thus wayward affections, severed from all responsibility to other parts of experience.
It is difficult to excuse such a parody of the pragmatist's opinion, ignoring as it does every element but one of his universe of discourse. The terms of which that universe consists positively forbid any non-realistic interpretation of the function of knowledge defined there.
— Aug 23, 2026 04:01AM
It is difficult to excuse such a parody of the pragmatist's opinion, ignoring as it does every element but one of his universe of discourse. The terms of which that universe consists positively forbid any non-realistic interpretation of the function of knowledge defined there.
Truls Ljungström
is 60% done
FOURTH MISUNDERSTANDING: NO PRAGMATIST CAN BE A REALIST IN HIS EPISTEMOLOGY.
This is supposed to follow from his statement that the truth of our beliefs consists in general in their giving satisfaction. Of course satisfaction per se is a subjective condition; so the conclusion is drawn that truth falls wholly inside of the subject, who then may manufacture it at his pleasure.
— Aug 23, 2026 04:01AM
This is supposed to follow from his statement that the truth of our beliefs consists in general in their giving satisfaction. Of course satisfaction per se is a subjective condition; so the conclusion is drawn that truth falls wholly inside of the subject, who then may manufacture it at his pleasure.
Truls Ljungström
is 45% done
I well remember the sudden relief it gave me to perceive one day that SPACE-relations at any rate were homogeneous with the terms between which they mediated. The terms were spaces, and the relations were other intervening spaces. [Footnote: See my Principles of Psychology, vol. ii, pp. 148-153.] For the Greenites space-relations had been saltatory, for me they became thenceforward ambulatory.
— Aug 23, 2026 03:58AM
Truls Ljungström
is 45% done
Years ago, when T. H. Green's ideas were most influential, I was much troubled by his criticisms of english sensationalism. One of his disciples in particular would always say to me, 'Yes! TERMS may indeed be possibly sensational in origin; but RELATIONS, what are they but pure acts of the intellect coming upon the sensations from above, and of a higher nature?'
— Aug 23, 2026 03:58AM
Truls Ljungström
is 45% done
Are there not some general distinctions which it may help us to agree about in advance? Professor Strong distinguishes between what he calls 'saltatory' and what he calls 'ambulatory' relations. 'Difference,' for example, is saltatory, jumping as it were immediately from one term to another, but 'distance' in time or space is made out of intervening parts of experience through which we ambulate in succession.
— Aug 23, 2026 03:58AM
Truls Ljungström
is 25% done
Where is there any contradiction? Whatever truth may be said to be, that is the kind of truth which the saying can be held to carry. The TEMPER which a saying may comport is an extra-logical matter. It may indeed be hotter in some individual absolutist than in a humanist, but it need not be so in another. And the humanist, for his part, is perfectly consistent in compassing sea and land to make one proselyte.
— Aug 21, 2026 01:10PM