No more can logic kill the pragmatist’s behavior:  his act of utterance, so far from contradicting, accurately exemplifies the matter which he utters.  What is the matter which he utters?  In part, it is this, that truth, concretely considered, is an attribute of our beliefs, and that these are attitudes that follow satisfactions.  The ideas around which the satisfactions cluster are primarily only hypotheses that challenge or summon a belief to come and take its stand upon them.  The pragmatist’s idea of truth is just such a challenge.  He finds it ultra-satisfactory to accept it, and takes his own stand accordingly.  But, being gregarious as they are, men seek to spread their beliefs, to awaken imitation, to infect others.  Why should not you also find the same belief satisfactory? thinks the pragmatist, and forthwith endeavors to convert you.  You and he will then believe similarly; you will hold up your subject-end of a truth, which will be a truth objective and irreversible if the reality holds up the object-end by being itself present simultaneously.  What there is of self-contradiction in all this I confess I cannot discover.  The pragmatist’s conduct in his own case seems to me on the contrary admirably to illustrate his universal formula; and of all epistemologists, he is perhaps the only one who is irreproachably self-consistent.

Sixth misunderstanding:  Pragmatism explains not what truth is, but only how it is arrived at.

In point of fact it tells us both, tells us what it is incidentally to telling us how it is arrived at,—­for what is arrived at except just what the truth is?  If I tell you how to get to the railroad station, don’t I implicitly introduce you to the what, to the being and nature of that edifice?  It is quite true that the abstract word ‘how’ hasn’t the same meaning as the abstract word ‘what,’ but in this universe of concrete facts you cannot keep hows and whats asunder.  The reasons why I find it satisfactory to believe that any idea is true, the how of my arriving at that belief, may be among the very reasons why the idea is true in reality.  If not, I summon the anti-pragmatist to explain the impossibility articulately.

His trouble seems to me mainly to arise from his fixed inability to understand how a concrete statement can possibly mean as much, or be as valuable, as an abstract one.  I said above that the main quarrel between us and our critics was that of concreteness versus abstractness.  This is the place to develop that point farther.