Imagine a sailor navigating by the stars who believes the night sky is a solid velvet dome with holes poked in it. Despite this wildly inaccurate cosmology, his map leads him safely to port every time. If truth is merely "what works," we are forced into a startling conclusion: the sailor’s "velvet dome" theory is true. This highlights the central tension between pragmatism and our deep-seated intuition that truth must correspond to an objective reality, independent of our success.
## The Specter of Anti-Realism
The most persistent critique of pragmatism is that it collapses into **anti-realism**—the view that there is no "mind-independent" world to which our beliefs must answer. While Charles Sanders Peirce maintained a form of realism, arguing that truth is the final opinion toward which all investigators would eventually gravitate, later pragmatists like William James moved the goalposts.
Critics argue that if truth is defined by utility, then truth becomes **subjective**. If two people find conflicting beliefs equally "useful" for their respective lives, pragmatism struggles to provide a neutral arbiter. This violates the "Correspondence Intuition": the belief that "The cat is on the mat" is true solely because of the physical orientation of a feline and a rug, not because believing it helps us avoid tripping.
## Rorty and the Linguistic Turn
In the 20th century, [Richard Rorty](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rorty/) pushed pragmatism to its anti-realist extreme. In his seminal work, *Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature*, Rorty argued that we should abandon the "God’s-eye view" entirely. He suggested that truth is not a matter of "getting reality right," but a matter of social "solidarity."
> "Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying."
> — Richard Rorty, *Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature* (1979)
For Rorty, language is not a "mirror" reflecting the world; it is a set of social practices. This perspective shifts philosophy from a quest for objective certainty to a "conversation" about what serves human purposes. To a realist, this sounds like a surrender to [relativism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativism), where "truth" is reduced to whatever a particular community finds convenient.
## The "Useful Falsehood" Problem
The primary friction between pragmatism and common sense lies in the existence of **useful falsehoods**. Consider the "placebo effect": a patient may believe a sugar pill is a potent medicine. This belief is "useful" (it triggers healing), but we intuitively label the belief "false" because it misrepresents the chemical nature of the pill.
Pragmatists counter this by refining what "working" actually means. A belief doesn't just need to "feel good"; it must hold up under the total pressure of all our other experiences. William James clarified that truth must be consistent with the rest of our knowledge:
> "The 'true' is only the expedient in the way of our thinking... expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run and on the whole of course."
> — William James, [Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5116/5116-h/5116-h.htm) (1907)
Ultimately, the debate hinges on whether "truth" is a discovery of what is already there, or a tool we manufacture to survive. While the realist fears that pragmatism loses the world, the pragmatist fears that the realist is chasing a ghost.