Physical experiences are the only means by which we learn. We experience the world around us through the five senses: touch, smell, sight, hearing, or taste. These sense impressions help us to understand what our world is like. We continuously build our knowledge of our world as we continue to experience it.
Our knowledge is incomplete and subject to error. Learning is a lifelong activity. Truth is tentative, based upon our experiences to that point. Even if there were an objective truth that is independent of us, we have no direct access to that reality. Instead, each person experiences different sense impressions and each person has a different understanding of reality. Our view of the world is useful to use only if it allows us to manipulate the world in a way that is useful to use. A concept, idea, or policy is true for us when the result of using it to manipulate the world proves useful or satisfactory to us.
A difficulty that arises in talking about pragmatism, new or old, is that pragmatism comes in so many forms. The most influential of the neopragmatists, pragmatism is primarily anti-philosophical. It is anti-representational, anti-universalist, and anti-foundational. Pragmatists keep trying to find ways of making anti-philosophical points in non-philosophical language. Pragmatism represents a kind of return to philosophy, a return, that is, from a false to a genuine philosophy. It is a return to a philosophy that, at last, addresses the loci of our real needs.
Pragmatism does not consider the question of God's existence. Rather the important concept is "Does a person's belief in God work satisfactorily for him?" When it is beneficial to believe in God and moral order in the universe, then this is the truth. Would it be "better" to believe or not believe? Pragmatism is........
