_provided it is consistently adhered to_. One has as much right to
identify knowledge with complete assurance, as I have to identify it
with anything else. Considerable justification in the common use of
language, in common sense, may be found for defining knowledge as
complete assurance. But even upon this definition, the fulfilling
experience is not, as such, complete assurance, and hence not a
knowledge. Assurance, cognitive validation, and guaranteeship, follow
from it, but are not coincident with its occurrence. It _gives_,
but _is_ not, assurance. The concrete construction of a story, the
manipulation of a machine, the hunting with the dogs, is not, so far as
it _is_ fulfilment, a confirmation of meanings previously entertained
as cognitional; that is, is not contemporaneously experienced as
such. To think of prior schemes, symbols, meanings, as fulfilled in a
subsequent experience, is reflectively to present in their relations
to one another both the meanings and the experiences in which they
are, as a matter of fact, embodied. This reflective attitude cannot
be identical with the fulfilment experience itself; it occurs only
in retrospect when the worth of the meanings, or cognitive ideas, is
critically inspected in the light of their fulfilment; or it occurs
as an interruption of the fulfilling experience. The hunter stops
his hunting as a fulfilment to reflect that he made a mistake in his
idea of his dog, or again, that his dog is everything he thought he
was--that his notion of him is confirmed. Or, the man stops the actual
construction of his machine and turns back upon his plan in correction
or in admiring estimate of its value. _The fulfilling experience is not
of itself knowledge_, then, even if we identify knowledge with fulness
of assurance or guarantee. Moreover it gives, affords, assurance only
in reference to a situation which we have not yet considered.[12]
Before the category of confirmation or refutation can be introduced,
there must be something which _means_ to mean something and which
therefore can be guaranteed or nullified by the issue--and this
is precisely what we have not as yet found. We must return to our
instance and introduce a further complication. Let us suppose that
the smell quale recurs at a later date, and that it recurs neither
as the original _S_ nor yet as the final Σ but as an _S_’ which is
fated or charged with the sense of the possibility of a fulfilment
like unto Σ. The _S_’ that recurs is aware of something else which
it means, which it intends to effect through an operation incited
by it and without which its own presence is abortive, and, so to
say, unjustified, senseless. Now we have an experience which is
_cognitional_, not merely cognitive; which is contemporaneously aware
of meaning something beyond itself, instead of having this meaning
ascribed by another at a later period. _The odor knows the rose; the
rose is known by the odor; and the import of each term is constituted
by the relationship in which it stands to the other._ That is, the
import of the smell is the indicating and demanding relation which it
sustains to the enjoyment of the rose as its fulfilling experience;
while this enjoyment is just the content or definition of what the
smell consciously meant, _i.e._, meant to mean. Both the thing
meaning and the thing meant are elements in the same situation. Both
are present, but both are not present in the same way. In fact, one
is present as-_not_-present-in-the-same-way-in-which-the-other-is.
It is present as something to be rendered present in the same way
through the intervention of an operation. We must not balk at a purely
verbal difficulty. It suggests a verbal inconsistency to speak of
a thing present-as-absent. But all ideal contents, all aims (that
is, things aimed at) are present in just such fashion. Things can
be presented as absent, just as they can be presented as hard or
soft, black or white, six inches or fifty rods away from the body.
The assumption that an ideal content must be either totally absent,
or else present _in just the same fashion_ as it will be when it is
realized, is not only dogmatic, but self-contradictory. The only
way in which an ideal content can be experienced at all is to be
presented as _not-present-in-the-same-way_ in which something else is
present, the latter kind of presence affording the standard or type
of _satisfactory_ presence. When present in the same way it ceases to
be an ideal content. Not a contrast of bare existence over against
non-existence, or of present consciousness over against reality out of
present consciousness, but of a satisfactory with an unsatisfactory
mode of presence makes the difference between the “really” and the
“ideally” present.
In terms of our illustration, handling and enjoying the rose are
present, but they are not present in the same way that the smell is
present. They are present as _going_ to be there in the same way,
through an operation which the smell stands sponsor for. The situation
is inherently an uneasy one--one in which everything hangs upon the
performance of the operation indicated; upon the adequacy of movement
as a connecting link, or real adjustment of the thing meaning and
the thing meant. Generalizing from the instance, we get the following
definition: An experience is a knowledge, if in its quale there is an
experienced distinction and connection of two elements of the following
sort: _one means or intends the presence of the other in the same
fashion in which itself is already present, while the other is that
which, while not present in the same fashion, must become so present
if the meaning or intention of its companion or yoke-fellow is to be
fulfilled through the operation it sets up_.
II
We now return briefly to the question of knowledge as acquaintance, and
at greater length to that of knowledge as assurance, or as fulfilment
which confirms and validates. With the recurrence of the odor as
meaning something beyond itself, there is apprehension, knowledge
_that_. One may now say I know what a _rose_ smells like; or I know
what _this_ smell is like; I am acquainted with the rose’s agreeable
odor. In short, on the basis of a present quality, the odor anticipates
and forestalls some further trait.
We have also the conditions of knowledge of the confirmation and
refutation type. In the working out of the situation just described,
in the transformation, self-indicated and self-demanded, of the
tensional into a harmonious or satisfactory situation, fulfilment
_or_ disappointment results. The odor either does or does not fulfil
itself in the rose. The smell as intention is borne out by the facts,
or is nullified. As has already been pointed out, the subsequent
experience of the fulfilment type is not primarily a confirmation or
refutation. Its import is too vital, too urgent to be reduced _in
itself_ just to the value of testing an intention or meaning.[13]
But it gets _in reflection_ just such verificatory significance.
If the smell’s intention is unfulfilled, the discrepancy may throw
one back, in reflection, upon the original situation. Interesting
developments then occur. The smell meant a rose; and yet it did not
(so it turns out) mean a rose; it meant another flower, or something,
one can’t just tell what. Clearly there is _something else_ which
enters in; something else beyond the odor as it was first experienced
determined the validity of its meaning. Here then, perhaps, we have a
transcendental, as distinct from an experimental reference? _Only if
this something else makes no difference, or no detectable difference,
in the smell itself._ If the utmost observation and reflection can find
no difference in the smell quales that fail and those that succeed
in executing their intentions, then there is an outside controlling
and disturbing factor, which, since it is outside of the situation,
can never be utilized in knowledge, and hence can never be employed
in any concrete testing or verifying. In this case, knowing depends
upon an extra-experimental or transcendental factor. But this very
transcendental quality makes both confirmation and refutation,
correction, criticism, of the pretensions or meanings of things,
impossible. For the conceptions of truth and error, we must, upon
the transcendental basis, substitute those of accidental success or
failure. Sometimes the intention chances upon one, sometimes upon
another. Why or how, the gods only know--and they only if to them
the extra-experimental factor is not extra-experimental, but makes
a concrete difference in the concrete smell. But fortunately the
situation is not one to be thus described. The factor that determines
the success or failure, does institute a difference in the thing which
means the object, and this difference is detectable, once attention,
through failure, has been called to the need of its discovery. At the
very least, it makes this difference: the smell is infected with an
element of uncertainty of meaning--and this as a part of the thing
experienced, not for an observer. This additional _awareness_ at least
brings about an additional _wariness_. Meaning is more critical, and
operation more cautious.
But we need not stop here. Attention may be fully directed to the
subject of smells. Smells may become the object of knowledge. They
may take, _pro tempore_,[14] the place which the rose formerly
occupied. One may, that is, observe the cases in which odors mean
other things than just roses, may voluntarily produce new cases for
the sake of further inspection, and thus account for the cases where
meanings had been falsified in the issue; discriminate more carefully
the peculiarities of those meanings which the event verified, and
thus safeguard and bulwark to some extent the employing of similar
meanings in the future. Superficially, it may then seem as if odors
were treated after the fashion of Locke’s simple ideas, or Hume’s
“distinct ideas which are separate existences.” Smells apparently
assume an independent, isolated status during this period of
investigation. “Sensations,” as the laboratory psychologist and the
analytic psychologist generally studies them, are examples of just
such detached things. But egregious error results if we forget that
this seeming isolation and detachment is the outcome of a deliberate
scientific device--that it is simply a part of the scientific technique
of an inquiry directed upon securing _tested_ conclusions. Just and
only because odors (or any group of qualities) are parts of a connected
world are they signs of things beyond themselves; and only because they
are signs is it profitable and necessary to study them _as if_ they
were complete, self-enclosed entities.
In the reflective determination of things with reference to their
specifically meaning other things, experiences of fulfilment,
disappointment, and going astray inevitably play an important and
recurrent _rôle_. They also are realistic facts, related in realistic
ways to the things that intend to mean other things and to the things
intended. When these fulfilments and refusals _are reflected upon_
in the determinate relations in which they stand to their relevant
meanings, they obtain a quality which is quite lacking to them in their
immediate occurrence as just fulfilments or disappointments; viz.,
the property of affording assurance and correction--of confirming
and refuting. Truth and falsity are not properties of any experience
or thing, in and of itself or in its first intention; _but of things
where the problem of assurance consciously enters in_. _Truth and
falsity present themselves as significant facts only in situations
in which specific meanings and their already experienced fulfilments
and non-fulfilments are intentionally compared and contrasted with
reference to the question of the worth, as to reliability of meaning,
of the given meaning or class of meanings._ Like knowledge itself,
truth is an experienced relation of things, and it has no meaning
outside of such relation,[15] any more than such adjectives as
comfortable applied to a lodging, correct applied to speech, persuasive
applied to an orator, etc., have worth apart from the _specific_ things
to which they are applied. It would be a great gain for logic and
epistemology, if we were always to translate the noun “truth” back into
the adjective “true,” and this back into the adverb “truly”; at least,
if we were to do so until we have familiarized ourselves thoroughly
with the fact that “truth” is an abstract noun, summarizing a quality
presented by specific affairs in their own specific contents.
III
I have attempted, in the foregoing pages, a description of the function
of knowledge in its own terms and on its merits--a description which
in intention is realistic, if by realistic we are content to mean
naturalistic, a description undertaken on the basis of what Mr.
Santayana has well called “following the lead of the subject-matter.”
Unfortunately at the present time all such undertakings contend with
a serious extraneous obstacle. Accomplishing the undertaking has
difficulties enough of its own to reckon with; and first attempts
are sure to be imperfect, if not radically wrong. But at present the
attempts are not, for the most part, even listened to on their own
account, they are not examined and criticised as naturalistic attempts.
_They are compared with undertakings of a wholly different nature, with
an epistemological theory of knowledge, and the assumptions of this
extraneous theory are taken as a ready-made standard by which to test
their validity._ Literally of course, “epistemology” means only theory
of knowledge; the term _might_ therefore have been employed simply as
a synonym for a descriptive logic; for a theory that takes knowledge
as it finds it and attempts to give the same kind of an account of it
that would be given of any other natural function or occurrence. But
the mere mention of what _might_ have been only accentuates what is.
The things that pass for epistemology all assume that knowledge is not
a natural function or event, but a mystery.
Epistemology starts from the assumption that certain conditions lie
back of knowledge. The mystery would be great enough if knowledge
were constituted by non-natural conditions back of knowledge, but the
mystery is increased by the fact that the conditions are defined so
as to be incompatible with knowledge. Hence the primary problem of
epistemology is: How is knowledge _überhaupt_, knowledge at large,
_possible_? Because of the incompatibility between the concrete
occurrence and function of knowledge and the conditions back of it to
which it must conform, a second problem arises: How is knowledge in
general, knowledge _überhaupt_, _valid_? Hence the complete divorce
in contemporary thought between epistemology as theory of knowledge
and logic as an account of the specific ways in which particular
beliefs that are better than other alternative beliefs regarding the
same matters are formed; and also the complete divorce between a
naturalistic, a biological and social psychology, setting forth how
the function of knowledge is evolved out of other natural activities,
and epistemology as an account of how knowledge is possible anyhow.
It is out of the question to set forth in this place in detail the
contrast between transcendental epistemology and an experimental theory
of knowledge. It may assist the understanding of the latter, however,
if I point out, baldly and briefly, how, _out of the distinctively
empirical situation_, there arise those assumptions which make
knowledge a mystery, and hence a topic for a peculiar branch of
philosophizing.
As just pointed out, epistemology makes the possibility of knowledge a
problem, because it assumes back of knowledge conditions incompatible
with the obvious traits of knowledge as it empirically exists. These
assumptions are that the organ or instrument of knowledge is not a
natural object, but some ready-made state of mind or consciousness,
something purely “subjective,” a peculiar kind of existence which
lives, moves, and has its being in a realm different from things to
be known; and that the ultimate goal and content of knowledge is a
fixed, ready-made thing which has no organic connections with the
origin, purpose, and growth of the attempt to know it, some kind of
_Ding-an-sich_ or absolute, extra-empirical “Reality.”
(1) It is not difficult to see at what point in the development
of natural knowledge, or the signifying of one thing by another,
there arises the notion of the knowing medium as something radically
different in the order of existence from the thing to be known. It
arises subsequent to the repeated experience of non-fulfilment, of
frustration and disappointment. The odor did not after all mean the
rose; it meant something quite different; and yet its indicative
function was exercised so forcibly that we could not help--or at least
_did_ not help--believing in the existence of the rose. This is a
familiar and typical kind of experience, one which very early leads
to the recognition that “things are not what they seem.” There are
two contrasted methods of dealing with this recognition: one is the
method indicated above (p. 93). We go more thoroughly, patiently, and
carefully into the facts of the case. We employ all sorts of methods,
invented for the purpose, of examining the things that are signs and
the things that are signified, and we experimentally produce various
situations, in order that we may tell _what_ smells mean roses _when_
roses are meant, what it is about the smell and the rose that led us
into error; and that we may be able to discriminate those cases in
which a suspended conclusion is all that circumstances admit. We simply
do the best we can to regulate our system of signs so that they become
as instructive as possible, utilizing for this purpose (as indicated
above) all possible experiences of success and of failure, and
deliberately instituting cases which will throw light on the specific
empirical causes of success and failure.
Now it so happens that when the facts of error were consciously
generalized and formulated, namely in Greek thought, such a technique
of specific inquiry and rectification did not exist--in fact, it hardly
could come into existence until _after_ error had been seized upon as
constituting a fundamental anomaly. Hence the method just outlined of
dealing with the situation was impossible. We can imagine disconsolate
ghosts willing to postpone any professed solution of the difficulty
till subsequent generations have thrown more light on the question
itself; we can hardly imagine passionate human beings exercising
such reserve. At all events, Greek thought provided what seemed a
satisfactory way out: there are two orders of existence, one permanent
and complete, the noumenal region, to which alone the characteristic
of Being is properly applicable, the other transitory, phenomenal,
sensible, a region of non-Being, or at least of mere Coming-to-be, a
region in which Being is hopelessly mixed with non-Being, with the
unreal. The former alone is the domain of knowledge, of truth; the
latter is the territory of opinion, confusion, and error. In short, the
contrast _within_ experience of the cases in which things successfully
and unsuccessfully maintained and executed the meanings of other things
was erected into a wholesale difference of status in the intrinsic
characters of the things involved in the two types of cases.
With the beginnings of modern thought, the region of the “unreal,” the
source of opinion and error, was located exclusively in the individual.
The object was _all_ real and _all_ satisfactory, but the “subject”
could approach the object only through his own subjective states,
his “sensations” and “ideas.” The Greek conception of two orders of
existence was retained, but instead of the two orders characterizing
the “universe” itself, one _was_ the universe, the other was the
individual mind trying to know that universe. This scheme would
obviously easily account for error and hallucination; but how could
_knowledge_, truth, ever come about such a basis? The Greek problem of
the possibility of error became the modern problem of the possibility
of knowledge.
Putting the matter in terms that are independent of history,
experiences of failure, disappointment, non-fulfilment of the
function of meaning and contention may lead the individual to the
path of science--to more careful and extensive investigation of
the things themselves, with a view to detecting specific sources
of error, and guarding against them, and regulating, so far as
possible, the conditions under which objects are bearers of meanings
beyond themselves. But impatient of such slow and tentative methods
(which insure not infallibility but increased probability of
valid conclusions), by reason of disappointment a person may turn
epistemologist. He may then take the discrepancy, the failure of the
smell to execute its own intended meaning, as a wholesale, rather
than as a specific fact: as evidence of a contrast in general between
things meaning and things meant, instead of as evidence of the need
of a more cautious and thorough inspection of odors and execution of
operations indicated by them. One may then say: Woe is me; smells are
only _my_ smells, subjective states existing in an order of being made
out of consciousness, while roses exist in another order made out of a
radically different sort of stuff; or, odors are made out of “finite”
consciousness as their stuff, while the real things, the objects which
fulfil them, are made out of an “infinite” consciousness as their
material. Hence some purely metaphysical tie has to be called in to
bring them into connection with each other. And yet this tie does not
concern knowledge; it does not make the meaning of one odor any more
correct than that of another, nor enable us to discriminate relative
degrees of correctness. As a principle of control, this transcendental
connection is related to all alike, and hence condemns and justifies
all alike.[16]