ABSTRACT
The pragmatist theory that “truth” is a belief which works well sometimes conflicts with common-sense and not with logic. It is commonly supposed that it is always better to be sometimes right than to be never right. But this is by no means true. For example, consider the case of a watch which has stopped; it is exactly right twice every day. A watch, on the other hand, which is always five minutes slow is never exactly right. And yet there can be no question but that a belief in the accuracy of the watch which was never right would, on the whole, produce better results than such a belief in the one which had altogether stopped. The pragmatist would, then, conclude that the watch which was always inaccurate gave truer results than the one which was sometimes accurate. In this conclusion the pragmatist would seem to be correct, and this is an instance of how the false premisses of pragmatism may give rise to true conclusions.
