our belief in it. Pragmatist philosophers twisted the meanings of words, so we have to make logical sense of pragmatism. William James, qualified his attitude by saying that a proposition's the premise of being true consists of being useful in the widest possible sense. I believe that Locke and Hobbes could be considered pragmatist philosophers. Man has no innate ideas and that makes truth arbitrary. Mental manipulations of words would exist because ideas are innate. Basically there are no simple ideas and everything could have multiple meanings. Does that make sense to you? Lets look back at the first sentence of this paper, man should humble himself as a child. If Locke and Hobbes had done this they would be singing a different tune. Its too easy to use that argument so let's use a war analogy to see how Locke's innate principle holds up. If a grenade is thrown into a bunker and I instinctively throw myself upon the grenade to save my platoon, I would have killed myself to save human life. That explains to me that there are innate ideas and that there is right and wrong. Hobbes believes that truth is no where to be found. This is either a very ridiculous notion or a very scary concept if he is correct. Since men create words and the words create the truth, truth then is a relative term. The coherence theory also concerns the meaning of knowledge. It states that a proposition's truth consists in its fitting into a coherent system of propositions. Beliefs cover everything and do not contradict each other. The coherence theory is undoubtedly the better theory even here if only because there is an elegant economy in having a single over-arching theory of truth that encompasses all situations. I believe that Marx has stayed consistent with the coherent theory. Whether he was right or wrong is not necessarily the point here, the point is that he did not contradict himself within his own writings. Instead of following all the historical writ...
