"The Arbitrament of the Big Battalions": Russell's Argument Linking James's Account of Truth to Authoritarian Violence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Bertrand Russell argued that William James's pragmatic account of truth implies that truth is not objective and that James's abandonment of objective truth makes it inevitable that violence will be used to settle disagreements, including political disagreements. On my view, there is an inconsistency in James's account of truth that yields two different readings of that account, one on which the truth of the belief that p does require, and another on which it does not require, that it actually be the case that p . I argue that Russell's criticism of James fails if it is directed against the first reading of James's account of truth, because on that first reading, there is such a thing as objective truth. However, Russell's criticism fairs better against the second reading of James's account—that is, it fairs better once its conclusion is weakened, from the claim that James's account makes it inevitable that violence will result from disagreements, to the claim that when violence is in fact used to end a disagreement and succeeds in doing so, the victor is the one who has the true belief.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".