Cash Value: Katherine Ryan, William James, and... getting on with it

I was reading this piece in The Guardian this morning about comedian Katherine Ryan. She doesn't spend time worrying whether the entertainment industry should work the way it does. She describes how it actually works and moves forward accordingly. “I love money,” she says simply, without apology or shame. This is pragmatism: the view that some approaches succeed and others fail, so you'd better figure out which ones work and act accordingly.

This matters philosophically more than you might think. In an age when we've realised that all observation is theory-laden there is no objective “reality” – only different approaches towards the world.

So instead of sitting in solipsism, how can we find a method to tell the difference between approaches that work and those that don't? Let me introduce some dead white male philosophers who definitely never would have appeared on a comedy stage.

The problem: there's no “view from nowhere”

When Norwood Russell Hanson looked at how scientists work, he noticed something unsettling: two researchers with different theoretical frameworks could look at the same phenomenon and literally see different things. How can that be? He realised that there is no truly objective position, no “view from nowhere” from which to observe the world without your perspective shaping what you perceive.

We're not talking about opinion or interpretation here. It's about the actual structure of observation. When you look at data, your theories about what the data means shape what you see. A climate scientist and a climate sceptic aren't just disagreeing about what it means that CO2 is rising: they're encountering different phenomena, because their conceptual frameworks filter the world differently.

The temptation is to say that all approaches are equally valid, that there's no objective fact of the matter, just competing narratives. That feels... a bit problematic?

But to return to Katherine Ryan, she didn't sit around theorising about what the entertainment industry should value. She was a single mother on low pay, and didn't have time to waste. So she observed what the entertainment actually rewarded by testing different approaches. She revised her strategy when things weren't working, and got results.

This is pragmatism in action. It's an approach that avoids both of the traps: a naive realism that pretends we can see the world without theoretical filters, and a paralysing relativism that says all perspectives are “equally true.”

The Pragmatist response

Charles Sanders Peirce, often called the father of Pragmatism, took all of this seriously. He argued that truth isn't something you possess or fail to possess in any single moment. Instead, truth is a direction of travel.

Properly conducted, “inquiry” tends toward stable opinions that resist our biases. These should remain steady even when new investigators take up the same questions. He imagined a “community of inquirers” testing beliefs against experience, each trying different approaches and revising when the world pushes back.

Over time, across many investigators, convergence happens. You may remember the idea of an asymptotic line from school: a curved line that gets ever closer to another line. This is similar: we get closer to, but never actually reach capital-T Truth. It ends up being good enough: the diamond either is or isn't hard. If we test it enough times, across enough people, in enough contexts, we can converge on an opinion that the evidence supports.

This convergence never finishes, as you're always approaching truth asymptotically. You're always fallible as any belief might be overturned by future evidence. Peirce called this fallibilism, which is not the same as saying all beliefs are equally false. Instead, it's that some approaches produce stable results and others don't; some approximations work better than others.

William James, who had an equally impressive beard, took Peirce's ideas and made them more immediately practical. He asked: what difference does a belief make to your actual life, right now? He was interested in beliefs that help us deal with our experiences successfully. James put it memorably by talking about the cash value of truth (hence this blog post's equivocal title).

If you have two competing beliefs, both plausible and coherent, look at what results they produce in practice. The belief that helps you act effectively and generates the results you're seeking is the “truer” approximation. Not capital-T True forever, just true enough to act on.

An example

I'm a big fan of The Adventure Podcast and a recent episode features Adam Weymouth. He was an environmental activist who believed in direct action such as protests, confrontation, and political pressure. These were his beliefs at the time about how change happens and informed both his identity and his work.

But he began to realise that protests and confrontation weren't shifting people's opinions. Despite enormous personal sacrifice such as arrests, legal battles, and burnout, the activism wasn't producing the change he wanted. In other words, he'd tested a theory about how the world works, and the world kept giving him feedback that his approach wasn't getting the results he desired.

So what he did next was pragmatic. He didn't abandon his commitment to environmental issues or decide that “nothing matters.” Instead, he revised his theory about how change actually happens. Weymouth moved from direct confrontation to storytelling, writing Lone Wolf where he walked in the footsteps of a real wolf who had journeyed a thousand miles across Europe. This was not activism in the traditional sense, but narrative. It was slower, more oblique, and more human.

As he tells it, this works differently. This isn't because narrative is objectively true and activism objectively false. It's because stories create understanding in ways that confrontation sometimes doesn't. Stories can produce results that slogans and demands can't. Reality, in the form of how people actually respond, pushed Weymouth to correct his formula.

The virtue of practical wisdom

Aristotle called practical wisdom phronesis. It's the ability to discern what works in particular situations, not through abstract principle alone, but through experience and judgement. It's knowing what to do, and when, in specific circumstances.

Pragmatism is, in many ways, an epistemology (theory of knowledge) for phronesis. It helps us understand that knowledge isn't primarily about grasping “eternal truths” but about knowing how to act successfully. It's about developing the wisdom to tell the difference between what you can influence and what you can't, between what works in practice and what doesn't.

Adam Weymouth developed phronesis about environmental communication not from a textbook, but from years of testing different approaches and learning from failure. Katherine Ryan has phronesis about building a career in entertainment. Neither pretends to have discovered an objective, eternal truth, but both have beliefs that have proven their worth through practice.

This is why I count myself as a Pragmatist. It's a philosophical tradition that views language and thought as tools for problem-solving and action, not for trying to create a mirror of reality. At its core is an understanding that you cannot know the world without having a perspective. This does not make all perspectives somehow “equally valid” but instead means that you should test your approaches against reality, observe what works, revise what doesn't, and gradually get better at navigating the world as it actually is.

None of this guarantees success, but it does give you a direction of travel.

Good luck!