This is the same criticism as that offered by Bertrand Russell of pragmatism in the early days of both, when the two were similarly-overshadowed by idealism (that of F.H. Bradley and T.H. Green in England and that of Josiah Royce in America). Russell wrote of the pragmatist's supposed conflation of truth with expediency that:
According to the pragmatists, to say "it is true that other people exist" means "it is useful to believe that other people exist." But if so, then these two phrases are merely different words for the same proposition; therefore when I believe the one I believe the other ('Transatlantic Truth' in the Albany Review, 1908, 400).
Russell believes that this equation of truth and belief is ridiculous. This can be highlighted by setting it against the background of an epistemology. Such contextualizing will reveal what we already knew all along: even though it might be true to believe that x, it won't always be useful to believe that x (and vice versa). Though we might, in a particular instance, find it useful to believe that walking under ladders is unsafe, it is certainly not true. Likewise, although it might be true that 'the snake that just bit me is not poisonous' it could be useful to believe this if it were also the case that 'I am the only person allergic to this particular snake's venom', since believing in the truth of the former would indicate that I should not go to the hospital, in which case I would be in a bind despite the truth of the latter (assuming I was not aware of my allergy).
The response to Russell is that the theory of truth proffered by pragmatists is, in fact, not a theory of truth at all, but more of an explanation of how to put truth to practical use in our lives, of how a belief comes to be true. The pragmatist is not concerned with whether or not we believe that x works; rather the pragmatist only wants to indicate that the truth of x is going to be, in the long run, a practical matter, determined by the efficacy (working) of belief that x. In other words, the believer's belief is about the object, and the pragmatic theory of truth is about that process of belief. Believing is discursively seperate from a theory of believing: this is what critics like Russell fail to acknowledge. Thus William James replied to Russell:
When I call a belief true, and define its truth to mean its workings, I certainly do not mean that the belief is a belief about the workings. It is a belief about the object, and I who talk about the workings am a different subject, with a different universe of discourse, from that of the believer of whose concrete thinking I profess to give an account.
The social proposition 'other men exist' and the pragmatist proposition 'it is expedient to believe that other men exist' come from different universes of discourse. One can believe the second without being logically compelled to believe the first; one can believe the first without having ever heard of the second; or one can believe them both. The first expresses the object of a belief, the second tells of one condition of the belief's power to maintain itself. There is no identity of any kind, save the term 'other men' which they contain in common, in the two propositions; and to treat them as mutually substitutable, or to insist that we shall do so, is to give up dealing with realities altogether ('Two English Critics', from The Meaning of Truth, 279).
For the pragmatist, truth is usefulness is not a logical connection, but a practical one that can only be revealed in the complexity of practice. In the long run, we are always going to believe in the truth of what it is useful to believe: to do otherwise would be to contradict ourselves, or submit to a serious form of scepticism or paranoia. Pragmatism does not so much define truth as utility (regrettably, James often put it this way), rather, pragmatists urge that we pay attention to the connection between these two and face up to the fact that, regardless of the metaphysical or epistemological status of x, we're not going to believe that it's true unless there is something, somewhere, to be gained by it (and this practical gain might even be as simple as: consistency in our methodologies of belief).
Many philosophers, Thomas Nagel is one, have also criticized the pragmatists for attempting to deprive our philosophical speculations of an essential ingredient: objectivity. Philosophy sans objectivity, they claim, leaves us with a boring mental exercise and nothing to strive for (the result is even worth for ethical philosophy, they say). The pragmatist rejoinder to this is simple: the philosophical speculations of Plato, Isaac Newton, or Ludwig Wittgenstein are just as interesting if viewed as piecemeal rhetorical gambits devoid of approximation to anything that might be called the Truth. To be interesting or useful, philosophically or scientifically, does not require that we need a notion of objective and nonrelativistic truth that we strive to approximate or represent in our philosophies. Rather, the pragmatists argue, such a notion of truth will only continually frustrate us philosophers, because we will always lack the guarantees and epistemological foundations we so fervently want to discover (a la Cartesian scepticism). There is real content in a pragmatist philosophy; only this content is not dependent upon an 'objective' 'outer' reality that supposedly backs this content up: a reality to which, by the way, we can never have certain access to given all the trappings of the relationships constured by foundationalism in epistemology.
A philosophy without objective content is only a philosophy centered in the communal and social spheres of life: and, a community (or a society) has tests of right and wrong that are just as constricting and compelling as any metaphysical entity might claim to be. Practical beliefs are just as constraining as physical realities. The pragmatist does not know how to reply to the argument that 'It is strange to think that communities which had no preference for truth as TRUTH rather than as expediency would be able to come to largely expedient conclusions about the world on this basis'. The pragmatist cannot imagine what it would be like to live in (or find) a community that strives to develop beliefs that work and are expedient, but nonetheless fails to do this on a consistent basis. A community that only relies on a rhetoric of 'practical success' would yield just as much, if not more, working beliefs as a community that relies on a rhetoric of 'objective and impartial truth'.
The objectivist philosopher is lead to make such bizarre statements as, 'It's expedient not to think of beggars as human (though it's not particularly cohesive with our overall picture)'. It is this 'overall picture' and 'cohesion' with it that concerns the pragmatist, because we realize that it is part and parcel of the practical horizon that informs and constrains our 'web of beliefs' (see W.V.O. Quine). I, personally, don't really think it would be all that expedient to think of beggars as inhuman; because they so obviously are human. Believing this might be expedient for our pocketbooks, but the pragmatist doesn't want to narrow our domain of discourse to only the economic, or only the scientific, etc.. There are also moral sentiments and emotional aspects of our lives that philosophy must take into account. That we feel sympathy for another hungry person is relevant. It is perhaps all that allows us to recognize the humanity in the homeless.
A philosophy (of truth), then, must take this into account. A notion of 'working in practice' always already admits to this complexity. It is perhaps in this that we find advantage of pragmatism over analytic philosophy: the latter is modeled after a scientific notion of human life (which is, of course, severely restricted in scope), whereas the former is modeled after a practical reflection on what humans do and care about. The latter admits to the complexity that philosophy must always strive to gather together within its reflection.