of thought about the world we live in, and the notions of one stage
have one kind of merit, those of another stage another kind. It is
impossible, however, to say that any stage as yet in sight is absolutely
more TRUE than any other. Common sense is the more CONSOLIDATED stage,
because it got its innings first, and made all language into its ally.
Whether it or science be the more AUGUST stage may be left to private
judgment. But neither consolidation nor augustness are decisive marks of
truth. If common sense were true, why should science have had to
brand the secondary qualities, to which our world owes all its living
interest, as false, and to invent an invisible world of points and
curves and mathematical equations instead? Why should it have needed
to transform causes and activities into laws of 'functional variation'?
Vainly did scholasticism, common sense's college-trained younger sister,
seek to stereotype the forms the human family had always talked with,
to make them definite and fix them for eternity. Substantial forms (in
other words our secondary qualities) hardly outlasted the year of our
Lord 1600. People were already tired of them then; and Galileo, and
Descartes, with his 'new philosophy,' gave them only a little later
their coup de grace.
But now if the new kinds of scientific 'thing,' the corpuscular and
etheric world, were essentially more 'true,' why should they have
excited so much criticism within the body of science itself? Scientific
logicians are saying on every hand that these entities and their
determinations, however definitely conceived, should not be held for
literally real. It is AS IF they existed; but in reality they are like
co-ordinates or logarithms, only artificial short-cuts for taking us
from one part to another of experience's flux. We can cipher fruitfully
with them; they serve us wonderfully; but we must not be their dupes.
There is no RINGING conclusion possible when we compare these types
of thinking, with a view to telling which is the more absolutely true.
Their naturalness, their intellectual economy, their fruitfulness for
practice, all start up as distinct tests of their veracity, and as a
result we get confused. Common sense is BETTER for one sphere of life,
science for another, philosophic criticism for a third; but whether
either be TRUER absolutely, Heaven only knows. Just now, if I understand
the matter rightly, we are witnessing a curious reversion to the
common-sense way of looking at physical nature, in the philosophy of
science favored by such men as Mach, Ostwald and Duhem. According to
these teachers no hypothesis is truer than any other in the sense of
being a more literal copy of reality. They are all but ways of talking
on our part, to be compared solely from the point of view of their USE.
The only literally true thing is REALITY; and the only reality we know
is, for these logicians, sensible reality, the flux of our sensations
and emotions as they pass. 'Energy' is the collective name (according
to Ostwald) for the sensations just as they present themselves (the
movement, heat, magnetic pull, or light, or whatever it may be) when
they are measured in certain ways. So measuring them, we are enabled
to describe the correlated changes which they show us, in formulas
matchless for their simplicity and fruitfulness for human use. They are
sovereign triumphs of economy in thought.
No one can fail to admire the 'energetic' philosophy. But the
hypersensible entities, the corpuscles and vibrations, hold their own
with most physicists and chemists, in spite of its appeal. It seems too
economical to be all-sufficient. Profusion, not economy, may after all
be reality's key-note.
I am dealing here with highly technical matters, hardly suitable for
popular lecturing, and in which my own competence is small. All the
better for my conclusion, however, which at this point is this. The
whole notion of truth, which naturally and without reflexion we assume
to mean the simple duplication by the mind of a ready-made and given
reality, proves hard to understand clearly. There is no simple test
available for adjudicating offhand between the divers types of thought
that claim to possess it. Common sense, common science or corpuscular
philosophy, ultra-critical science, or energetics, and critical or
idealistic philosophy, all seem insufficiently true in some regard and
leave some dissatisfaction. It is evident that the conflict of these so
widely differing systems obliges us to overhaul the very idea of truth,
for at present we have no definite notion of what the word may mean. I
shall face that task in my next lecture, and will add but a few words,
in finishing the present one.
There are only two points that I wish you to retain from the present
lecture. The first one relates to common sense. We have seen reason to
suspect it, to suspect that in spite of their being so venerable, of
their being so universally used and built into the very structure
of language, its categories may after all be only a collection of
extraordinarily successful hypotheses (historically discovered or
invented by single men, but gradually communicated, and used by
everybody) by which our forefathers have from time immemorial unified
and straightened the discontinuity of their immediate experiences,
and put themselves into an equilibrium with the surface of nature so
satisfactory for ordinary practical purposes that it certainly would
have lasted forever, but for the excessive intellectual vivacity of
Democritus, Archimedes, Galileo, Berkeley, and other excentric geniuses
whom the example of such men inflamed. Retain, I pray you, this
suspicion about common sense.
The other point is this. Ought not the existence of the various types of
thinking which we have reviewed, each so splendid for certain purposes,
yet all conflicting still, and neither one of them able to support a
claim of absolute veracity, to awaken a presumption favorable to the
pragmatistic view that all our theories are INSTRUMENTAL, are mental
modes of ADAPTATION to reality, rather than revelations or gnostic
answers to some divinely instituted world-enigma? I expressed this view
as clearly as I could in the second of these lectures. Certainly the
restlessness of the actual theoretic situation, the value for some
purposes of each thought-level, and the inability of either to expel the
others decisively, suggest this pragmatistic view, which I hope that the
next lectures may soon make entirely convincing. May there not after all
be a possible ambiguity in truth?
Lecture VI
Pragmatism's Conception of Truth
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.