'Truth' is what works

If one is a  Darwinian one stops  thinking of the universe as somehow ‘spiritual’ in character.

Instead one starts thinking of human selves and human languages as just devices which evolution had recently cobbled together. 

More important, he stopped thinking of the universe as having an intrinsic nature, as something which one might get right once and for all. The universe is just what languages describe, and there are as many languages, as many alternative descriptions, as there are purposes to be served by such descriptions. Darwin’s language, for example, is not to be preferred to Hegel’s because it corresponds better to reality, or is more ‘scientific’, but simply because using it will get us more of what  we ought to want. 

The nice thing about Darwin was not that he got human beings right, but that he made available a way of describing human beings which enabled us to discard a lot of unfruitful questions which had been posed by other ways of describing them. The nice thing about the pragmatist theory of truth is not that it gets truth right, but that it frees us from a picture which has been holding us captive, a picture which has made us less hopefully and cheerfully experimental than we might become once we have shrugged it off. The same goes for the pragmatists’ theory that truth is what works.