I began by saying that the pragmatist refused to accept the Philosophical distinction between first-rate truth-by-correspondence-to-reality and second-rate truth-as-what-is-good-to-believe. I said that this raised the question of whether a culture could get along without Philosophy, without the Platonic attempt to sift out the merely contingent and conventional truths from the Truths which were something more than that.
— Consequences of Pragmatism, Introduction