Mark Heller's Appropriateness and William James' Truth

Mark Heller's conception of appropriateness is similar to William James' conception of truth as far as practical usefulness is concerned, but these conceptions diverge insofar as Heller differentiates his conception of appropriateness from truth as it is conceived in standard logic.

We should first see what Heller's thoughts are on our everyday way of speaking and get to the importance of practical difference. From here we will see how Heller's notion of appropriateness is related to James' conception of truth and then the relation between appropriateness and the world.

The claims that we usually make are committed to our standard ontology, but our standard ontology is false according to Heller's arguments and is replaced by his four dimensional hunk ontology.

We seem to be committed to objects such as chairs. We might say that some chairs are larger other chairs, yet this claim is based on the standard ontological belief that chairs exist and is false. Another false claim would be that some chairs are larger than a mountain.

Of course, we do not think that these two claims have the same status. What is it that makes these two cases different? Heller says that there is a practical difference in making these two claims and that this kind of difference helps us to communicate.

Practical differences are important to James as they are for Heller. Take height for instance. When we do not need to get detailed information of the heights between people we can call them both "tall." In this situation we need not expend the extra effort to say that one man is 6-7 and another is 6-2. Though, if we were a basketball coach, we might need the extra detail to figure out at which position to play each player.

These utterances would be appropriate relative to the situations we use them in and for what we are trying to get across. James agrees, though he considers these utterances to be true, since in those situations they make a practical difference, while Heller considers them appropriate but false.

Williams James mentions that the true is useful and that the useful is true. Heller holds that the false can be useful, while the true can be not very useful at times or even hinder us in our everyday dealings in the world. One can say that for Heller what is useful is appropriateness.

For Heller, our conventions govern the use of appropriateness. Our everyday language and ontology is vague while the new ontology is precise. What is required of appropriateness is that the utterances we use at least capture a suitable amount of the content of the real world to work without being true.

An appropriate physical theory would produce results and capture enough of the true ontology to allow us to use it to make predictions or new technology. For James, the true ontology would be coextensive with the content of the physical theory.

Of course, the doctrine that the true is the useful and can evolve seems counter-intuitive, but makes much more sense in the light of Heller's conception of appropriateness, which is very similar to the one half of James' belief.