Our account of truth is an account of truths in the plural of processes of leading, realized in rebus( actuality) and having only this quality in common that they pay. They pay by guiding us into or toward some part of a system that dips at numerous points into sense-precepts, which we may copy mentally or not, but with which at any rate we are now in the kind of commerce vaguely designated as verification.
Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification-processes, just as health, wealth, strength etc., are names for other processes connected with life and also pursued because it pays to pursue them. Truth is made, just as health, wealth and strength are made, in the course of experience.
Our belief that yon thing on the wall is a clock is true already, although no one in the history of the world should verify it. The bare quality of standing in that transcendent relation is what makes any thought true that possesses it, whether or not there be verification.
You pragmatists put the cart before the horse in making truth’s being reside in verification-process. These are merely signs of being, merely our lame way of ascertaining after the fact, which of our ideas already has possessed the wondrous quality. The quality itself is timeless, like all essences and natures. Thoughts partake of it directly, as they partake of falsity or of irrelevancy. It can’t be analyzed away into pragmatic consequences.
William James, in his 1907 essay Pragmatism’s Concept of Truth explains how truth is a vacillating concept that forms an energetic response from us. We protect our truths. But what we protect most is the verification of truth. That fact is obvious in the struggle to accept same-sex marriages. Church leaders say there’s no truth in gay and lesbian unions, and they verify their position by quoting the Bible or man-made laws of the church.
The church faithful believe the truth that exists in the Bible. They believe in church laws that claim marriage is for a man and a woman and beliefs become truths. But those truths are verifications of constructed truths, not truths that are innately rooted in consciousness.
We base our lives on truths that are designed by the perceptions of others. We don’t search inside of us and feel the truth of being one with all that exists in this particular time sequence. We are truth advocates, but we allow half-truths to rule our decision making, and we allow them control our choices.
Real truths are innate truths. They are subjective verifications of what we already know to be true. We already know that marriage is not part of a government license. Marriage is a contract between two people that want to share life’s challenges together. Friends of the same sex form similar contracts every day. The contract of marriage takes that bond of true friendship to another level. Marriage is an innate truth, not a religious or political one
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