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- P r a g m a t i s m ,
A N e w N a m e f o r S o m e
O l d W a y s o f T h i n k i n g
L e c t u r e V I
P r a g m a t i s m ' s C o n c e p t i o n
o f T r u t h
- _____________________________________________
- When Clerk Maxwell was a child it is written that he had a mania for having
everything explained to him, and that when people put him off with vague verbal
accounts of any phenomenon he would interrupt them impatiently by saying, "Yes;
but I want you to tell me the PARTICULAR GO of it!" Had his question been about
truth, only a pragmatist could have told him the particular go of it. I believe
that our contemporary pragmatists, especially Messrs. Schiller and Dewey, have
given the only tenable account of this subject. It is a very ticklish subject,
sending subtle rootlets into all kinds of crannies, and hard to treat in the
sketchy way that alone befits a public lecture. But the Schiller-Dewey view of
truth has been so ferociously attacked by rationalistic philosophers, and so
abominably misunderstood, that here, if anywhere, is the point where a clear and
simple statement should be made.
I fully expect to see the pragmatist view of truth run through the classic
stages of a theory's career. First, you know, a new theory is attacked as
absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally
it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves
discovered it. Our doctrine of truth is at present in the first of these three
stages, with symptoms of the second stage having begun in certain quarters. I
wish that this lecture might help it beyond the first stage in the eyes of many
of you.
Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our
ideas. It means their 'agreement,' as falsity means their disagreement, with
'reality.' Pragmatists and intellectualists both accept this definition as a
matter of course. They begin to quarrel only after the question is raised as to
what may precisely be meant by the term 'agreement,' and what by the term
'reality,' when reality is taken as something for our ideas to agree with.
In answering these questions the pragmatists are more analytic and
painstaking, the intellectualists more offhand and irreflective. The popular
notion is that a true idea must copy its reality. Like other popular views, this
one follows the analogy of the most usual experience. Our true ideas of sensible
things do indeed copy them. Shut your eyes and think of yonder clock on the
wall, and you get just such a true picture or copy of its dial. But your idea of
its 'works' (unless you are a clock-maker) is much less of a copy, yet it passes
muster, for it in no way clashes with the reality. Even tho it should shrink to
the mere word 'works,' that word still serves you truly; and when you speak of
the 'time-keeping function' of the clock, or of its spring's 'elasticity,' it is
hard to see exactly what your ideas can copy.
You perceive that there is a problem here. Where our ideas cannot copy
definitely their object, what does agreement with that object mean? Some
idealists seem to say that they are true whenever they are what God means that
we ought to think about that object. Others hold the copy-view all through, and
speak as if our ideas possessed truth just in proportion as they approach to
being copies of the Absolute's eternal way of thinking.
These views, you see, invite pragmatistic discussion. But the great
assumption of the intellectualists is that truth means essentially an inert
static relation. When you've got your true idea of anything, there's an end of
the matter. You're in possession; you KNOW; you have fulfilled your thinking
destiny. You are where you ought to be mentally; you have obeyed your
categorical imperative; and nothing more need follow on that climax of your
rational destiny. Epistemologically you are in stable equilibrium.
Pragmatism, on the other hand, asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or
belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make
in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will
be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in
short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?"
The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: TRUE IDEAS ARE
THOSE THAT WE CAN ASSIMILATE, VALIDATE, CORROBORATE AND VERIFY. FALSE IDEAS ARE
THOSE THAT WE CANNOT. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have
true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth
is known-as.
This thesis is what I have to defend. The truth of an idea is not a stagnant
property inherent in it. Truth HAPPENS to an idea. It BECOMES true, is MADE true
by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its
verifying itself, its veri-FICATION. Its validity is the process of its
valid-ATION.
But what do the words verification and validation themselves pragmatically
mean? They again signify certain practical consequences of the verified and
validated idea. It is hard to find any one phrase that characterizes these
consequences better than the ordinary agreement-formula - just such consequences
being what we have in mind whenever we say that our ideas 'agree' with reality.
They lead us, namely, through the acts and other ideas which they instigate,
into or up to, or towards, other parts of experience with which we feel all the
while-such feeling being among our potentialities - that the original ideas remain
in agreement. The connexions and transitions come to us from point to point as
being progressive, harmonious, satisfactory. This function of agreeable leading
is what we mean by an idea's verification. Such an account is vague and it
sounds at first quite trivial, but it has results which it will take the rest of
my hour to explain.
Let me begin by reminding you of the fact that the possession of true
thoughts means everywhere the possession of invaluable instruments of action;
and that our duty to gain truth, so far from being a blank command from out of
the blue, or a 'stunt' self-imposed by our intellect, can account for itself by
excellent practical reasons.
The importance to human life of having true beliefs about matters of fact is
a thing too notorious. We live in a world of realities that can be infinitely
useful or infinitely harmful. Ideas that tell us which of them to expect count
as the true ideas in all this primary sphere of verification, and the pursuit of
such ideas is a primary human duty. The possession of truth, so far from being
here an end in itself, is only a preliminary means towards other vital
satisfactions. If I am lost in the woods and starved, and find what looks like a
cow-path, it is of the utmost importance that I should think of a human
habitation at the end of it, for if I do so and follow it, I save myself. The
true thought is useful here because the house which is its object is useful. The
practical value of true ideas is thus primarily derived from the practical
importance of their objects to us. Their objects are, indeed, not important at
all times. I may on another occasion have no use for the house; and then my idea
of it, however verifiable, will be practically irrelevant, and had better remain
latent. Yet since almost any object may some day become temporarily important,
the advantage of having a general stock of extra truths, of ideas that shall be
true of merely possible situations, is obvious. We store such extra truths away
in our memories, and with the overflow we fill our books of reference. Whenever
such an extra truth becomes practically relevant to one of our emergencies, it
passes from cold-storage to do work in the world, and our belief in it grows
active. You can say of it then either that 'it is useful because it is true' or
that 'it is true because it is useful.' Both these phrases mean exactly the same
thing, namely that here is an idea that gets fulfilled and can be verified. True
is the name for whatever idea starts the verification-process, useful is the
name for its completed function in experience. True ideas would never have been
singled out as such, would never have acquired a class-name, least of all a name
suggesting value, unless they had been useful from the outset in this way.
From this simple cue pragmatism gets her general notion of truth as something
essentially bound up with the way in which one moment in our experience may lead
us towards other moments which it will be worth while to have been led to.
Primarily, and on the common-sense level, the truth of a state of mind means
this function of A LEADING THAT IS WORTH WHILE. When a moment in our experience,
of any kind whatever, inspires us with a thought that is true, that means that
sooner or later we dip by that thought's guidance into the particulars of
experience again and make advantageous connexion with them. This is a vague
enough statement, but I beg you to retain it, for it is essential.
Our experience meanwhile is all shot through with regularities. One bit of it
can warn us to get ready for another bit, can 'intend' or be 'significant of'
that remoter object. The object's advent is the significance's verification.
Truth, in these cases, meaning nothing but eventual verification, is manifestly
incompatible with waywardness on our part. Woe to him whose beliefs play fast
and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience: they will
lead him nowhere or else make false connexions.
By 'realities' or 'objects' here, we mean either things of common sense,
sensibly present, or else common-sense relations, such as dates, places,
distances, kinds, activities. Following our mental image of a house along the
cow-path, we actually come to see the house; we get the image's full
verification. SUCH SIMPLY AND FULLY VERIFIED LEADINGS ARE CERTAINLY THE
ORIGINALS AND PROTOTYPES OF THE TRUTH-PROCESS. Experience offers indeed other
forms of truth-process, but they are all conceivable as being primary
verifications arrested, multiplied or substituted one for another.
Take, for instance, yonder object on the wall. You and I consider it to be a
'clock,' altho no one of us has seen the hidden works that make it one. We let
our notion pass for true without attempting to verify. If truths mean
verification-process essentially, ought we then to call such unverified truths
as this abortive? No, for they form the overwhelmingly large number of the
truths we live by. Indirect as well as direct verifications pass muster. Where
circumstantial evidence is sufficient, we can go without eye-witnessing. Just
as we here assume Japan to exist without ever having been there, because it
WORKS to do so, everything we know conspiring with the belief, and nothing
interfering, so we assume that thing to be a clock. We USE it as a clock,
regulating the length of our lecture by it. The verification of the assumption
here means its leading to no frustration or contradiction. VerifiABILITY of
wheels and weights and pendulum is as good as verification. For one
truth-process completed there are a million in our lives that function in this
state of nascency. They turn us TOWARDS direct verification; lead us into the
SURROUNDINGS of the objects they envisage; and then, if everything runs on
harmoniously, we are so sure that verification is possible that we omit it, and
are usually justified by all that happens.
Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and
beliefs 'pass,' so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so
long as nobody refuses them. But this all points to direct face-to-face
verifications somewhere, without which the fabric of truth collapses like a
financial system with no cash-basis whatever. You accept my verification of one
thing, I yours of another. We trade on each other's truth. But beliefs verified
concretely by SOMEBODY are the posts of the whole superstructure.
Another great reason - beside economy of time - for waiving complete verification
in the usual business of life is that all things exist in kinds and not singly.
Our world is found once for all to have that peculiarity. So that when we have
once directly verified our ideas about one specimen of a kind, we consider
ourselves free to apply them to other specimens without verification. A mind
that habitually discerns the kind of thing before it, and acts by the law of the
kind immediately, without pausing to verify, will be a 'true' mind in
ninety-nine out of a hundred emergencies, proved so by its conduct fitting
everything it meets, and getting no refutation.
INDIRECTLY OR ONLY POTENTIALLY VERIFYING PROCESSES MAY THUS BE TRUE AS WELL
AS FULL VERIFICATION-PROCESSES. They work as true processes would work, give us
the same advantages, and claim our recognition for the same reasons. All this on
the common-sense level of, matters of fact, which we are alone considering.
But matters of fact are not our only stock in trade. RELATIONS AMONG PURELY
MENTAL IDEAS form another sphere where true and false beliefs obtain, and here
the beliefs are absolute, or unconditional. When they are true they bear the
name either of definitions or of principles. It is either a principle or a
definition that 1 and 1 make 2, that 2 and 1 make 3, and so on; that white
differs less from gray than it does from black; that when the cause begins to
act the effect also commences. Such propositions hold of all possible 'ones,' of
all conceivable 'whites' and 'grays' and 'causes.' The objects here are mental
objects. Their relations are perceptually obvious at a glance, and no
sense-verification is necessary. Moreover, once true, always true, of those same
mental objects. Truth here has an 'eternal' character. If you can find a
concrete thing anywhere that is 'one' or 'white' or 'gray,' or an 'effect,' then
your principles will everlastingly apply to it. It is but a case of ascertaining
the kind, and then applying the law of its kind to the particular object. You
are sure to get truth if you can but name the kind rightly, for your mental
relations hold good of everything of that kind without exception. If you then,
nevertheless, failed to get truth concretely, you would say that you had classed
your real objects wrongly.
In this realm of mental relations, truth again is an affair of leading. We
relate one abstract idea with another, framing in the end great systems of
logical and mathematical truth, under the respective terms of which the sensible
facts of experience eventually arrange themselves, so that our eternal truths
hold good of realities also. This marriage of fact and theory is endlessly
fertile. What we say is here already true in advance of special verification, IF
WE HAVE SUBSUMED OUR OBJECTS RIGHTLY. Our ready-made ideal framework for all
sorts of possible objects follows from the very structure of our thinking. We
can no more play fast and loose with these abstract relations than we can do so
with our sense-experiences. They coerce us; we must treat them consistently,
whether or not we like the results. The rules of addition apply to our debts as
rigorously as to our assets. The hundredth decimal of pi, the ratio of the
circumference to its diameter, is predetermined ideally now, tho no one may have
computed it. If we should ever need the figure in our dealings with an actual
circle we should need to have it given rightly, calculated by the usual rules;
for it is the same kind of truth that those rules elsewhere calculate.
Between the coercions of the sensible order and those of the ideal order, our
mind is thus wedged tightly. Our ideas must agree with realities, be such
realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under
penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration. So far, intellectualists can
raise no protest. They can only say that we have barely touched the skin of the
matter.
Realities mean, then, either concrete facts, or abstract kinds of things and
relations perceived intuitively between them. They furthermore and thirdly mean,
as things that new ideas of ours must no less take account of, the whole body of
other truths already in our possession. But what now does 'agreement' with such
three-fold realities mean? - to use again the definition that is current.
Here it is that pragmatism and intellectualism begin to part company.
Primarily, no doubt, to agree means to copy, but we saw that the mere word
'clock' would do instead of a mental picture of its works, and that of many
realities our ideas can only be symbols and not copies. 'Past time,' 'power,'
'spontaneity' - how can our mind copy such realities?
To 'agree' in the widest sense with a reality, CAN ONLY MEAN TO BE GUIDED
EITHER STRAIGHT UP TO IT OR INTO ITS SURROUNDINGS, OR TO BE PUT INTO SUCH
WORKING TOUCH WITH IT AS TO HANDLE EITHER IT OR SOMETHING CONNECTED WITH IT
BETTER THAN IF WE DISAGREED. Better either intellectually or practically! And
often agreement will only mean the negative fact that nothing contradictory from
the quarter of that reality comes to interfere with the way in which our ideas
guide us elsewhere. To copy a reality is, indeed, one very important way of
agreeing with it, but it is far from being essential. The essential thing is the
process of being guided. Any idea that helps us to DEAL, whether practically or
intellectually, with either the reality or its belongings, that doesn't entangle
our progress in frustrations, that FITS, in fact, and adapts our life to the
reality's whole setting, will agree sufficiently to meet the requirement. It
will hold true of that reality.
Thus, NAMES are just as 'true' or 'false' as definite mental pictures are.
They set up similar verification-processes, and lead to fully equivalent
practical results.
All human thinking gets discursified; we exchange ideas; we lend and borrow
verifications, get them from one another by means of social intercourse. All
truth thus gets verbally built out, stored up, and made available for everyone.
Hence, we must TALK consistently just as we must THINK consistently: for both in
talk and thought we deal with kinds. Names are arbitrary, but once understood
they must be kept to. We mustn't now call Abel 'Cain' or Cain 'Abel.' If we do,
we ungear ourselves from the whole book of Genesis, and from all its connexions
with the universe of speech and fact down to the present time. We throw
ourselves out of whatever truth that entire system of speech and fact may
embody.
The overwhelming majority of our true ideas admit of no direct or
face-to-face verification-those of past history, for example, as of Cain and
Abel. The stream of time can be remounted only verbally, or verified indirectly
by the present prolongations or effects of what the past harbored. Yet if they
agree with these verbalities and effects, we can know that our ideas of the past
are true. AS TRUE AS PAST TIME ITSELF WAS, so true was Julius Caesar, so true
were antediluvian monsters, all in their proper dates and settings. That past
time itself was, is guaranteed by its coherence with everything that's present.
True as the present is, the past was also.
Agreement thus turns out to be essentially an affair of leading - leading that
is useful because it is into quarters that contain objects that are important.
True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as
directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability and
flowing human intercourse. They lead away from excentricity and isolation, from
foiled and barren thinking. The untrammeled flowing of the leading-process, its
general freedom from clash and contradiction, passes for its indirect
verification; but all roads lead to Rome, and in the end and eventually, all
true processes must lead to the face of directly verifying sensible experiences
SOMEWHERE, which somebody's ideas have copied.
Such is the large loose way in which the pragmatist interprets the word
agreement. He treats it altogether practically. He lets it cover any process of
conduction from a present idea to a future terminus, provided only it run
prosperously. It is only thus that 'scientific' ideas, flying as they do beyond
common sense, can be said to agree with their realities. It is, as I have
already said, as if reality were made of ether, atoms or electrons, but we
mustn't think so literally. The term 'energy' doesn't even pretend to stand for
anything 'objective.' It is only a way of measuring the surface of phenomena so
as to string their changes on a simple formula.
Yet in the choice of these man-made formulas we cannot be capricious with
impunity any more than we can be capricious on the common-sense practical level.
We must find a theory that will WORK; and that means something extremely
difficult; for our theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain
new experiences. It must derange common sense and previous belief as little as
possible, and it must lead to some sensible terminus or other that can be
verified exactly. To 'work' means both these things; and the squeeze is so tight
that there is little loose play for any hypothesis. Our theories are wedged and
controlled as nothing else is. Yet sometimes alternative theoretic formulas are
equally compatible with all the truths we know, and then we choose between them
for subjective reasons. We choose the kind of theory to which we are already
partial; we follow 'elegance' or 'economy.' Clerk Maxwell somewhere says it
would be "poor scientific taste" to choose the more complicated of two equally
well-evidenced conceptions; and you will all agree with him. Truth in science is
what gives us the maximum possible sum of satisfactions, taste included, but
consistency both with previous truth and with novel fact is always the most
imperious claimant.
I have led you through a very sandy desert. But now, if I may be allowed so
vulgar an expression, we begin to taste the milk in the cocoanut. Our
rationalist critics here discharge their batteries upon us, and to reply to them
will take us out from all this dryness into full sight of a momentous
philosophical alternative.
Our account of truth is an account of truths in the plural, of processes of
leading, realized in rebus, and having only this quality in common, that they
PAY. They pay by guiding us into or towards some part of a system that dips at
numerous points into sense-percepts, which we may copy mentally or not, but with
which at any rate we are now in the kind of commerce vaguely designated as
verification. Truth for us is simply a collective name for
verification-processes, just as health, wealth, strength, etc., are names for
other processes connected with life, and also pursued because it pays to pursue
them. Truth is MADE, just as health, wealth and strength are made, in the course
of experience.
Here rationalism is instantaneously up in arms against us. I can imagine a
rationalist to talk as follows:
"Truth is not made," he will say; "it absolutely obtains, being a unique
relation that does not wait upon any process, but shoots straight over the head
of experience, and hits its reality every time. Our belief that yon thing on the
wall is a clock is true already, altho no one in the whole history of the world
should verify it. The bare quality of standing in that transcendent relation is
what makes any thought true that possesses it, whether or not there be
verification. You pragmatists put the cart before the horse in making truth's
being reside in verification-processes. These are merely signs of its being,
merely our lame ways of ascertaining after the fact, which of our ideas already
has possessed the wondrous quality. The quality itself is timeless, like all
essences and natures. Thoughts partake of it directly, as they partake of
falsity or of irrelevancy. It can't be analyzed away into pragmatic
consequences."
The whole plausibility of this rationalist tirade is due to the fact to which
we have already paid so much attention. In our world, namely, abounding as it
does in things of similar kinds and similarly associated, one verification
serves for others of its kind, and one great use of knowing things is to be led
not so much to them as to their associates, especially to human talk about them.
The quality of truth, obtaining ante rem, pragmatically means, then, the fact
that in such a world innumerable ideas work better by their indirect or possible
than by their direct and actual verification. Truth ante rem means only
verifiability, then; or else it is a case of the stock rationalist trick of
treating the NAME of a concrete phenomenal reality as an independent prior
entity, and placing it behind the reality as its explanation. Professor Mach
quotes somewhere an epigram of Lessing's:
Sagt Hänschen Schlau zu Vetter Fritz,
"Wie kommt es, Vetter Fritzen,
Daß grad' die Reichsten in der Welt,
Das meiste Geld besitzen?"
Hänschen Schlau here treats the principle 'wealth' as something distinct from
the facts denoted by the man's being rich. It antedates them; the facts become
only a sort of secondary coincidence with the rich man's essential nature.
In the case of 'wealth' we all see the fallacy. We know that wealth is but a
name for concrete processes that certain men's lives play a part in, and not a
natural excellence found in Messrs. Rockefeller and Carnegie, but not in the
rest of us.
Like wealth, health also lives in rebus. It is a name for processes, as
digestion, circulation, sleep, etc., that go on happily, tho in this instance we
are more inclined to think of it as a principle and to say the man digests and
sleeps so well BECAUSE he is so healthy.
With 'strength' we are, I think, more rationalistic still, and decidedly
inclined to treat it as an excellence pre-existing in the man and explanatory of
the herculean performances of his muscles.
With 'truth' most people go over the border entirely, and treat the
rationalistic account as self-evident. But really all these words in TH are
exactly similar. Truth exists ante rem just as much and as little as the other
things do.
The scholastics, following Aristotle, made much of the distinction between
habit and act. Health in actu means, among other things, good sleeping and
digesting. But a healthy man need not always be sleeping, or always digesting,
any more than a wealthy man need be always handling money, or a strong man
always lifting weights. All such qualities sink to the status of 'habits'
between their times of exercise; and similarly truth becomes a habit of certain
of our ideas and beliefs in their intervals of rest from their verifying
activities. But those activities are the root of the whole matter, and the
condition of there being any habit to exist in the intervals.
'The true,' to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our
thinking, just as 'the right' is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.
Expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run and on the whole
of course; for what meets expediently all the experience in sight won't
necessarily meet all farther experiences equally satisfactorily. Experience, as
we know, has ways of BOILING OVER, and making us correct our present
formulas.
The 'absolutely' true, meaning what no farther experience will ever alter, is
that ideal vanishing-point towards which we imagine that all our temporary
truths will some day converge. It runs on all fours with the perfectly wise man,
and with the absolutely complete experience; and, if these ideals are ever
realized, they will all be realized together. Meanwhile we have to live to-day
by what truth we can get to-day, and be ready to-morrow to call it falsehood.
Ptolemaic astronomy, euclidean space, aristotelian logic, scholastic
metaphysics, were expedient for centuries, but human experience has boiled over
those limits, and we now call these things only relatively true, or true within
those borders of experience. 'Absolutely' they are false; for we know that those
limits were casual, and might have been transcended by past theorists just as
they are by present thinkers.
When new experiences lead to retrospective judgments, using the past tense,
what these judgments utter WAS true, even tho no past thinker had been led
there. We live forwards, a Danish thinker has said, but we understand backwards.
The present sheds a backward light on the world's previous processes. They may
have been truth-processes for the actors in them. They are not so for one who
knows the later revelations of the story.
This regulative notion of a potential better truth to be established later,
possibly to be established some day absolutely, and having powers of retroactive
legislation, turns its face, like all pragmatist notions, towards concreteness
of fact, and towards the future. Like the half-truths, the absolute truth will
have to be MADE, made as a relation incidental to the growth of a mass of
verification-experience, to which the half-true ideas are all along contributing
their quota.
I have already insisted on the fact that truth is made largely out of
previous truths. Men's beliefs at any time are so much experience funded. But
the beliefs are themselves parts of the sum total of the world's experience, and
become matter, therefore, for the next day's funding operations. So far as
reality means experienceable reality, both it and the truths men gain about it
are everlastingly in process of mutation-mutation towards a definite goal, it
may be - but still mutation.
Mathematicians can solve problems with two variables. On the Newtonian
theory, for instance, acceleration varies with distance, but distance also
varies with acceleration. In the realm of truth-processes facts come
independently and determine our beliefs provisionally. But these beliefs make us
act, and as fast as they do so, they bring into sight or into existence new
facts which re-determine the beliefs accordingly. So the whole coil and ball of
truth, as it rolls up, is the product of a double influence. Truths emerge from
facts; but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again
create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The
'facts' themselves meanwhile are not TRUE. They simply ARE. Truth is the
function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.
The case is like a snowball's growth, due as it is to the distribution of the
snow on the one hand, and to the successive pushes of the boys on the other,
with these factors co-determining each other incessantly.
The most fateful point of difference between being a rationalist and being a
pragmatist is now fully in sight. Experience is in mutation, and our
psychological ascertainments of truth are in mutation - so much rationalism will
allow; but never that either reality itself or truth itself is mutable. Reality
stands complete and ready-made from all eternity, rationalism insists, and the
agreement of our ideas with it is that unique unanalyzable virtue in them of
which she has already told us. As that intrinsic excellence, their truth has
nothing to do with our experiences. It adds nothing to the content of
experience. It makes no difference to reality itself; it is supervenient, inert,
static, a reflexion merely. It doesn't EXIST, it HOLDS or OBTAINS, it belongs to
another dimension from that of either facts or fact-relations, belongs, in
short, to the epistemological dimension - and with that big word rationalism
closes the discussion.
Thus, just as pragmatism faces forward to the future, so does rationalism
here again face backward to a past eternity. True to her inveterate habit,
rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks that when an abstraction once is
named, we own an oracular solution.
The tremendous pregnancy in the way of consequences for life of this radical
difference of outlook will only become apparent in my later lectures. I wish
meanwhile to close this lecture by showing that rationalism's sublimity does not
save it from inanity.
When, namely, you ask rationalists, instead of accusing pragmatism of
desecrating the notion of truth, to define it themselves by saying exactly what
THEY understand by it, the only positive attempts I can think of are these
two:
1. "Truth is just the system of propositions which have an un-conditional
claim to be recognized as valid." 1)
2. Truth is a name for all those judgments which we find ourselves under
obligation to make by a kind of imperative duty. 2)
The first thing that strikes one in such definitions is their unutterable
triviality. They are absolutely true, of course, but absolutely insignificant
until you handle them pragmatically. What do you mean by 'claim' here, and what
do you mean by 'duty'? As summary names for the concrete reasons why thinking in
true ways is overwhelmingly expedient and good for mortal men, it is all right
to talk of claims on reality's part to be agreed with, and of obligations on our
part to agree. We feel both the claims and the obligations, and we feel them for
just those reasons.
But the rationalists who talk of claim and obligation EXPRESSLY SAY THAT THEY
HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH OUR PRACTICAL INTERESTS OR PERSONAL REASONS. Our reasons
for agreeing are psychological facts, they say, relative to each thinker, and to
the accidents of his life. They are his evidence merely, they are no part of the
life of truth itself. That life transacts itself in a purely logical or
epistemological, as distinguished from a psychological, dimension, and its
claims antedate and exceed all personal motivations whatsoever. Tho neither man
nor God should ever ascertain truth, the word would still have to be defined as
that which OUGHT to be ascertained and recognized.
There never was a more exquisite example of an idea abstracted from the
concretes of experience and then used to oppose and negate what it was
abstracted from.
Philosophy and common life abound in similar instances. The 'sentimentalist
fallacy' is to shed tears over abstract justice and generosity, beauty, etc.,
and never to know these qualities when you meet them in the street, because
there the circumstances make them vulgar. Thus I read in the privately printed
biography of an eminently rationalistic mind: "It was strange that with such
admiration for beauty in the abstract, my brother had no enthusiasm for fine
architecture, for beautiful painting, or for flowers." And in almost the last
philosophic work I have read, I find such passages as the following: "Justice is
ideal, solely ideal. Reason conceives that it ought to exist, but experience
shows that it can-not. ... Truth, which ought to be, cannot be. ... Reason is
deformed by experience. As soon as reason enters experience, it becomes contrary
to reason."
The rationalist's fallacy here is exactly like the sentimentalist's. Both
extract a quality from the muddy particulars of experience, and find it so pure
when extracted that they contrast it with each and all its muddy instances as an
opposite and higher nature. All the while it is THEIR nature. It is the nature
of truths to be validated, verified. It pays for our ideas to be validated. Our
obligation to seek truth is part of our general obligation to do what pays. The
payments true ideas bring are the sole why of our duty to follow them.
Identical whys exist in the case of wealth and health. Truth makes no other
kind of claim and imposes no other kind of ought than health and wealth do. All
these claims are conditional; the concrete benefits we gain are what we mean by
calling the pursuit a duty. In the case of truth, untrue beliefs work as
perniciously in the long run as true beliefs work beneficially. Talking
abstractly, the quality 'true' may thus be said to grow absolutely precious, and
the quality 'untrue' absolutely damnable: the one may be called good, the other
bad, unconditionally. We ought to think the true, we ought to shun the false,
imperatively.
But if we treat all this abstraction literally and oppose it to its mother
soil in experience, see what a preposterous position we work ourselves into.
We cannot then take a step forward in our actual thinking. When shall I
acknowledge this truth and when that? Shall the acknowledgment be loud? - or
silent? If sometimes loud, sometimes silent, which NOW? When may a truth go into
cold-storage in the encyclopedia? and when shall it come out for battle? Must I
constantly be repeating the truth 'twice two are four' because of its eternal
claim on recognition? or is it sometimes irrelevant? Must my thoughts dwell
night and day on my personal sins and blemishes, because I truly have them? - or
may I sink and ignore them in order to be a decent social unit, and not a mass
of morbid melancholy and apology?
It is quite evident that our obligation to acknowledge truth, so far from
being unconditional, is tremendously conditioned. Truth with a big T, and in the
singular, claims abstractly to be recognized, of course; but concrete truths in
the plural need be recognized only when their recognition is expedient. A truth
must always be preferred to a falsehood when both relate to the situation; but
when neither does, truth is as little of a duty as falsehood. If you ask me what
o'clock it is and I tell you that I live at 95 Irving Street, my answer may
indeed be true, but you don't see why it is my duty to give it. A false address
would be as much to the purpose.
With this admission that there are conditions that limit the application of
the abstract imperative, THE PRAGMATISTIC TREATMENT OF TRUTH SWEEPS BACK UPON US
IN ITS FULNESS. Our duty to agree with reality is seen to be grounded in a
perfect jungle of concrete expediencies.
When Berkeley had explained what people meant by matter, people thought that
he denied matter's existence. When Messrs. Schiller and Dewey now explain what
people mean by truth, they are accused of denying ITS existence. These
pragmatists destroy all objective standards, critics say, and put foolishness
and wisdom on one level. A favorite formula for describing Mr. Schiller's
doctrines and mine is that we are persons who think that by saying whatever you
find it pleasant to say and calling it truth you fulfil every pragmatistic
requirement.
I leave it to you to judge whether this be not an impudent slander. Pent in,
as the pragmatist more than anyone else sees himself to be, between the whole
body of funded truths squeezed from the past and the coercions of the world of
sense about him, who so well as he feels the immense pressure of objective
control under which our minds perform their operations? If anyone imagines that
this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day, says Emerson. We have
heard much of late of the uses of the imagination in science. It is high time to
urge the use of a little imagination in philosophy. The unwillingness of some of
our critics to read any but the silliest of possible meanings into our
statements is as discreditable to their imaginations as anything I know in
recent philosophic history. Schiller says the true is that which 'works.'
Thereupon he is treated as one who limits verification to the lowest material
utilities. Dewey says truth is what gives 'satisfaction.' He is treated as one
who believes in calling everything true which, if it were true, would be
pleasant.
Our critics certainly need more imagination of realities. I have honestly
tried to stretch my own imagination and to read the best possible meaning into
the rationalist conception, but I have to confess that it still completely
baffles me. The notion of a reality calling on us to 'agree' with it, and that
for no reasons, but simply because its claim is 'unconditional' or
'transcendent,' is one that I can make neither head nor tail of. I try to
imagine myself as the sole reality in the world, and then to imagine what more I
would 'claim' if I were allowed to. If you suggest the possibility of my
claiming that a mind should come into being from out of the void inane and stand
and COPY me, I can indeed imagine what the copying might mean, but I can conjure
up no motive. What good it would do me to be copied, or what good it would do
that mind to copy me, if farther consequences are expressly and in principle
ruled out as motives for the claim (as they are by our rationalist authorities)
I cannot fathom. When the Irishman's admirers ran him along to the place of
banquet in a sedan chair with no bottom, he said, "Faith, if it wasn't for the
honor of the thing, I might as well have come on foot." So here: but for the
honor of the thing, I might as well have remained uncopied. Copying is one
genuine mode of knowing (which for some strange reason our contemporary
transcendentalists seem to be tumbling over each other to repudiate); but when
we get beyond copying, and fall back on unnamed forms of agreeing that are
expressly denied to be either copyings or leadings or fittings, or any other
processes pragmatically definable, the WHAT of the 'agreement' claimed becomes
as unintelligible as the why of it. Neither content nor motive can be imagine
for it. It is an absolutely meaningless abstraction. 3)
Surely in this field of truth it is the pragmatists and not the rationalists
who are the more genuine defenders of the universe's rationality.
____________
1)
A. E. Taylor, Philosophical Review, vol. xiv, p. 288.
2)
H. Rickert, Der Gegenstand der Erkenntniß, chapter on 'Die Urtheilsnothwendigkeit.'
3)
I am not forgetting that Professor Rickert long ago gave up the whole notion of truth being founded on agreement with reality. Reality, according to him, is whatever agrees with truth, and truth is founded solely on our primal duty. This fantastic flight, together with Mr. Joachim's candid confession of failure in his book THE NATURE OF TRUTH, seems to me to mark the bankruptcy of rationalism when dealing with this subject. Rickert deals with part of the pragmatistic position under the head of what he calls 'Relativismus.' I cannot discuss his text here. Suffice it to say that his argumentation in that chapter is so feeble as to seem almost incredible in so generally able a writer.]
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