ABSTRACT
William James highlighted brilliantly the extent to which the pragmatist philosophy was connected with deep transformations in exact sciences, which lead to an “enormously rapid multiplication of theories” and make it possible that nowadays people have many logics, many geometries, many physical and chemical hypotheses. Scientific laws, James suggested, appeared thus as “conceptual shorthand”, whereas “our mind has become tolerant of symbol instead of reproduction, of approximation instead of exactness, of plasticity instead of rigor”. In a disputed passage, James claimed in a deplorable, metaphoric way that truth was a sort of a credit system: “Our thoughts and beliefs ‘pass,’ so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them”. In Vienna it was clear from the beginning, and in opposition to the suspects nourished by the academic philosophers in the neighboring Germany, that James was foreign to an alleged “unscientific” and yankee way of conceiving the meaning of truth.
