To test this idea I go to the window and through listening and
looking intently--the listening and the looking being modes of
behavior--organize into a single situation elements of existence and
meaning which were previously disconnected. In this way an idea is made
true; that which was a proposal or hypothesis is no longer merely a
propounding or a guess. If I had not reacted in a way appropriate to
the idea it would have remained a mere idea; at most a candidate for
truth that, unless acted upon upon the spot, would always have remained
a theory. Now in such a case--where the end to be accomplished is the
discovery of a certain order of facts--would the intellectualist claim
that apart from the forming and entertaining of some interpretation,
the category of truth has either existence or meaning? Will he claim
that without an original practical uneasiness introducing a practical
aim of inquiry there must have been, whether or no, an idea? Must
the world for some purely intellectual reason be intellectually
reduplicated? Could not that occurrence which I now identify as a noisy
street-car have retained, so far as pure intelligence is concerned,
its unidentified status of being mere physical alteration in a vast
unidentified complex of matter-in-motion? Was there any _intellectual_
necessity that compelled the event to arouse just this judgment,
that it meant a street-car? Was there any physical or metaphysical
necessity? Was there any necessity save a need of characterizing
it for some purpose of our own? And why should we be mealy-mouthed
about calling this need practical? If the necessity which led to the
formation and development of an intellectual judgment was purely
objective (whether physical or metaphysical) why should not the thing
have also to be characterized in countless millions of other ways; for
example, as to its distance from some crater in the moon, or its effect
upon the circulation of my blood, or upon my irascible neighbor’s
temper, or bearing upon the Monroe Doctrine? In short, do not
intellectual positions and statements mean new and significant events
in the treatment of things?
It is perhaps dangerous to attempt to follow the inner workings of
the processes by which truth is first identified with some superior
type of Reality, and then this Truth is taken as the criterion of the
truth of ideas; while all the time it is held that truth is something
already possessed by ideas as purely intellectual. But there seems
to be some ground for believing that this identification is due to a
twofold confusion, one having to do with ideas, and the other with
things. As to the first point: After an idea is made true, we naturally
say, in retrospect, “it _was_ true all the time.” Now this truism is
quite innocuous as a truism, being just a restatement of the fact that
the idea has, as matter of fact, worked successfully. But it may be
regarded not as a truism but as furnishing some additional knowledge;
as if it were, indeed, the dawning of a revelation regarding truth.
Then it is said that the idea worked or was verified because it was
already inherently, just as idea, the truth; the pragmatist, so it
is said, making the error of supposing that it is true because it
works. If one remembers that what the experimentalist means is that
the effective working of an idea and its truth are one and the same
thing--this working being neither the cause nor the evidence of truth
but its nature--it is hard to see the point of this statement. A
man under peculiarly precarious circumstances has been rescued from
drowning. A by-stander remarks that now he is a saved man. “Yes,”
replies some one, “but he was a saved man all the time, and the process
of rescuing, while it gives evidence of that fact, does not constitute
it.” Now even such a statement as pure tautology, as characterizing the
entire process in terms of its issue, is objectionable only in the fact
that, like all tautology, it seems to say something but does not. But
if it be regarded as revealing the earlier condition of affairs, apart
from the active process by which it was carried to a happy conclusion,
such a statement would be monstrously false; and would declare its
falsity in the fact that, if acted upon, the man would have been left
to drown. In like fashion, to say, _after the event_, that a given
idea was true all the time, is to lose sight of what makes an idea an
idea, its hypothetical character; and thereby deliberately to transform
it into brute dogma--something to which no canon of verification can
ever be applied. The intellectualist almost always treats the pragmatic
account as if it were, from the standpoint of the pragmatist as well as
from his own, a denial of the existence of truth, while it is nothing
but a statement of its nature. When the intellectualist realizes this,
he will, I hope, ask himself: What, then, on the pragmatic basis is
meant by the proposition that an idea is true all the time? If the
statement that an idea was true all the time has no meaning except that
the idea was one which as matter of fact succeeded through action in
achieving its intent, mere reiteration that the idea was true all the
time or it could not have succeeded, does not take us far.[24]
On the side of things, _reality_ is identified with truth; then on the
principle that two things that are equal to the same thing are equal
to each other, truth as idea and truth as reality are taken to be one
and the same thing. Wherever there is an improved or tested idea, an
idea which has made good, there is a concrete existence in the way of a
completed or harmonized situation. The same activity which proves the
idea constructs an inherently satisfied situation out of an inherently
dissentient one,--for it is precisely the capacity of the idea as an
aim and method of action to determine such transformation that is the
criterion of its truth. Now unless all the elements in the situation
are held steadily in view, the specific way in which the harmonized
reality affords the criterion of truth (namely, through its function of
being the last term of a process of active determination) is lost from
sight; and the achieved existence in its merely existent character,
apart from its practical or fulfilment character, is treated as The
Truth. But when the reality is thus separated from the process by which
it is achieved, when it is taken just as given, it is neither truth
nor a criterion of truth. It is a state of facts like any other. The
achieved telephone is a criterion of the validity of a certain prior
idea in so far as it is the fulfilment of activities that embody the
nature of that idea, but just as telephone, as a machine actually in
existence, it is no more truth nor criterion of truth than is a crack
in the wall or a cobble-stone on the street.
The intervening term that mediates and completes the confusion of truth
with ideas on one hand and “reality” on the other, is, I think, the
fact that ideas after they have been tested in action are employed
in the development and grounding of further beliefs. There are cases
in which an idea ceases to exist as idea as soon as it is made true;
this is so as matter of fact and it is impossible to conceive any
reason why it should not be so in point of theory. Such is the case, I
take it, with a large part--possibly the major portion--of the ideas
that mediate the smaller and transient crises of daily practice.
I cannot imagine the situation in which the truth to which I have
referred above--the verification of a certain idea about a certain
noise--would ever function again as truth--save as I have given it a
function in this paper by using it as a corroboration of a certain
theory. Such ideas mostly cease, giving way to a matter-of-fact status:
say, the perception of the noisy street-car. One at the time may say
“My idea regarding that noise was a true idea”; or one may not even
go so far as that, he may just stop with the eventual perception.
But the tested idea need not ever recur as a factor of proof in any
other problem. Such, however, is conspicuously not the case with
our scientific ideas. In its first value, the idea or hypothesis of
gravitation entertained by Newton, stood, when verified, on exactly
the same level as the hypothesis regarding the noise in the street.
Theoretically, that truth might have been so isolated that its truth
character would disappear from thought as soon as a certain factual
condition was ascertained. But practically quite the opposite has
happened. The idea operates in many other inquiries, and operates no
longer as mere idea, but as _proved_ idea. Such truths get an “eternal”
status;--one irrespective of application just now and here, because
there are so many nows and heres in which they are useful. Just as to
say an idea was true all the time is a way of saying _in retrospect_
that it has come out in a certain fashion, so to say that an idea is
“eternally true” is to indicate _prospective_ modes of application
which are indefinitely anticipated. Its meaning, therefore, is
strictly pragmatic. It does not indicate a property inherent in the
idea as intellectualized existence, but denotes a property of use and
employment. Always at hand when needed is a good enough eternal for
reasonably minded persons.
IV
I have gone from the very general considerations which occupied us in
the earlier portions of this article to matters which relatively at
least are specific. I conclude with a summary in the hope that it may
bind together the earlier and the later parts of this paper.
1. The condition which antecedes and provokes any particular exercise
of reflective knowing is always one of discrepancy, struggle,
“collision.” This condition is practical, for it involves the habits
and interests of the organism, an agent. This does not mean that the
struggle is merely personal, or subjective, or psychological. The
agent or individual is one factor in the situation--not the situation
something subsisting in the individual. The individual has to be
identified in the situation, before any situation can be referred--as
in psychology--to the individual. But the discrepancy calls out and
controls reflective knowing only as the fortunes of an agent are
implicated in the crisis. Certain elements stand out as obstacles,
as interferences, as deficiencies--in short as unsatisfactory and as
requiring something for their completion. Other elements stand out
as wanted--as required, as a satisfaction which does not exist. This
clash (an accompaniment of all desire) between the given and the
wanted, between the present and the absent, is at once the root and
the type of that peculiar paradoxical relation between existence and
meaning which Bradley insists upon as the essence of judgment. It
is not irrational in the sense that we are dealing with appearance
wholesale, but it is non-rational--an evidence that we are dealing with
a practical affair.
2. The intellectual or reflective and logical is a _statement_ of
this conflict: an attempt to describe and define it. It is, as it
were, the practical clash held off at arm’s length for inspection
and investigation. In this way brute blind reaction against the
unsatisfactoriness of the situation is suspended. Action is turned
into the channel of observing, of inferring, of reasoning, or defining
means and end. It is this change in the quality of activity, from
directly overt, to indirect, or inquiring with view to stating, that
constitutes the _specific_ nature of reflective practice to which Mr.
Bradley calls attention. The discovery of the nature of the conflict
supplies materials for the fact or existence side of the judgement.
The conception or projection of the object in which the conflict
would be terminated furnishes material for the meaning side of the
judgment. It is ideal because anticipatory, just as the fact side
is existential, because reminiscent or recording. Hence the two are
necessarily both distinguished from and yet referred to each other:
only through location of a problem can a solution be conceived; only
in reference to the intent of finding a solution can the elements of
a problem be selected and interpreted. In origin and in destiny, this
correlative determination of existence and meaning is tentative and
experimental. The aim of the subject of the judgment is not to include
all possible reality, but to select those elements of a reality that
are useful in locating the source and nature of the difficulty in
hand. The aim of the predicate is not to bunch all possible meaning
and refer it in one final act indiscriminately to all existence, but
to state the standpoint and method through which the difficulty of the
particular situation may most effectively be dealt with. The selection
of what is relevant to the characterization of the problem and the
projection of the method of dealing with it are theoretic, hypothetic,
intellectual:--that is, they are tentative ways of viewing the matter
for the sake of guiding, economizing, and freeing the activities
through which it may _really_ be dealt with.
3. The criterion of the worth of the idea is thus the capacity of
the idea (as a definition of the end or outcome in terms of what is
likely to be serviceable as a method) to operate in fulfilling the
object for the sake of which it was projected. Capacity of operation
in this fashion is the test, measure, or criterion of truth. Hence the
criterion is practical in the most overt sense of that term. We may,
if we choose, regard the object in which the idea terminates through
its use in guiding action, as the criterion; but if we so choose, it is
at our peril that we forget that this object serves as criterion in its
capacity of fulfilment and not as sheer objective existence.
4. Difficulties overlap; problems recur which resemble each other
in the kind of treatment they demand for solution. Various modes of
activity with their respective ends, going on at some time more or
less independently, get organized into single comprehensive systems of
behavior. The solution of one problem is found to create difficulties
elsewhere; or the truth that is made in the solution of one problem
is found to afford an effective method of dealing with questions
arising apparently from unallied sources. Thus certain tested ideas
in performing a constant or recurrent function secure a certain
permanent status. The prospective use of such truths, the satisfaction
that we anticipate in their employ, the assurance of control that we
feel in their possession, becomes relatively much more important than
the circumstances under which they were first made true. In becoming
permanent resources, such tested ideas get a generalized energy of
position. They are truths in general, truths “in themselves” or in the
abstract, truths to which positive value is assigned on their own
account. Such truths are the “eternal truths” of current discussion.
They naturally and properly add to their intellectual and to their
practical worth a certain esthetic quality. They are interesting to
contemplate, and their contemplation arouses emotions of admiration
and reverence. To make these emotions the basis of assigning peculiar
inherent sanctity to them apart from their warrant in use, is simply
to give way to that mood which in primitive man is the cause of
attributing magical efficacy to physical things. Esthetically such
truths are more than instrumentalities. But to ignore both the
instrumental and the esthetic aspect, and to ascribe values due to an
instrumental and esthetic character to some interior and _a priori_
constitution of truth is to make fetishes of them.
We may not exaggerate the permanence and stability of such truths with
respect to their recurring and prospective use. It is only relatively
that they are unchanging. When applied to new cases, used as resources
for coping with new difficulties, the oldest of truths are to some
extent remade. Indeed it is only through such application and such
remaking that truths retain their freshness and vitality. Otherwise
they are relegated to faint reminiscences of an antique tradition. Even
the truth that two and two make four has gained a new meaning, has had
its truth in some degree remade, in the development of the modern
theory of number. If we put ourselves in the attitude of a scientific
inquirer in asking what is the meaning of truth _per se_, there spring
up before us those ideas which are actively employed in the mastery
of new fields, in the organization of new materials. This is the
essential difference between truth and dogma; between the living and
the dead and decaying. Above all, it is in the region of moral truth
that this perception stands out. Moral truths that are not recreated in
application to the urgencies of the passing hour, no matter how true
in the place and time of their origin, are pernicious and misleading,
_i.e._, false. And it is perhaps through emphasizing this fact,
embodied in one form or another in every system of morals and in every
religion of moral import, that one most readily realizes the character
of truth.
A SHORT CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH[25]
_Pupil._ I am desirous, respected teacher, of forming an independent
judgment concerning the novel theory of truth that you are said to
profess. My eagerness is whetted because the theory as expounded
to me by my old teacher, Professor Purus Intellectus, so obviously
contravenes common sense, science, and philosophy that I do not
understand how it can be advanced in good faith by any reasonable man.
_Teacher._ As you are already somewhat acquainted with the theory (or
at least with what it purports to be), perhaps if you will set forth
in order your objections, it will appear that the theory that you are
acquainted with is not advanced by any reasonable persons, and that by
understanding the theory as it is you will also be led to embrace it.
_Pupil: Objection One._ Pragmatism makes truth a subjective affair,
namely the satisfaction afforded individuals by ideas, while everybody
knows that the truth of ideas depends upon their relation to things.
_Teacher: Reply._ If I were to reply that I hold to existences
independent of ideas, existences prior to, synchronous with, and
subsequent to ideas, that might seem to you to express only my personal
opinion and to have no logical connection with pragmatism. So I beg
to remind you that, according to pragmatism, ideas (judgments and
reasonings being included for convenience in this term) are attitudes
of response taken toward extra-ideal, extra-mental things. Instinct and
habit express, for instance, modes of response, but modes inadequate
for a progressive being, or for adaptation to an environment presenting
novel and unmastered features. Under such conditions, ideas are
their surrogates. The origin of an idea is thus in some empirical,
extra-mental situation which provokes ideas as modes of response, while
their meaning is found in the modifications--the “differences”--they
make in this extra-mental situation. Their validity is in turn measured
by their capacity to effect the transformation they intend. Origin,
content, and value--all alike are extra-ideational. The satisfaction
upon which the pragmatist dwells is just the better adjustment of
living beings to their environment effected by transformations of the
environment through forming and applying ideas.
_Pupil: Objection Two._ But, as I understand it and as you have
yourself confessed in your language, these external things, while they
may be external to the particular idea in question, are _empirical_;
they are just other experiences and so mental after all. You hold, I
have been informed, that truth is an _experienced_ relation, instead
of a relation between experience and what transcends it; why then be
mealy-mouthed (pardon my eagerness if it leads me astray) in admitting
that the whole business is intra-mental?
_Teacher: Reply._ Your objection combines and confuses two things.
To disentangle them is to answer the objection. (1) The notion of
transcendence has a double meaning; first, it denotes that which lies
inherently and essentially beyond experience. It is interesting to note
that the opponents of pragmatism have been forced by the exigencies
of their hostility to resuscitate a doctrine supposedly dead: the
doctrine of unexperienceable, unknowable “Things in Themselves.” And
as if this were not enough, they identify Truth with relationship to
this unknowable. Thereby in behalf of the notion of Truth in general,
they land in scepticism with reference to the possibility of any truth
in particular. The pragmatist _is_ bound to deny _such_ transcendence.
(2) That he is thereby landed in pure subjectivism or the reduction of
every existence to the purely mental, follows only if experience means
only mental states. The critic appears to hold the Humian doctrine
that experience is made up of states of mind, of sensations and
ideas. It is then for _him_ to decide how, on _his_ basis, he escapes
subjective idealism, or “mentalism.” The pragmatist starts from a
much more commonplace notion of experience, that of the plain man who
never dreams that to experience a thing is first to destroy the thing
and then to substitute a mental state for it. More particularly, the
pragmatist has insisted that experience is a matter of functions and
habits, of active adjustments and re-adjustments, of co-ordinations
and activities, rather than of states of consciousness. To criticise
the pragmatist by reading into him exactly the notion of experience
that he denies and replaces, may be psychological and unregenerately
“pragmatic,” but it is hardly “intellectual.”
_Pupil: Objection Three._ You remind me, curiously enough, of a
contention of my old instructor to the effect that the pragmatist,
when criticised, always shifts his ground. To avoid solipsism and
subjectivism, he falls back on things independent of ideas, adducing
them in order to pass upon the truth or falsity of the latter. But
thereby he only covertly recognizes the intellectualistic standard.
Thus he swings unevenly between a denial of science and a clamorous
reiteration, in new phraseology, of what all philosophers hold.
_Teacher: Reply._ Your words have indeed a familiar sound. Apparently,
the average intellectualist has got so accustomed to taking truth as a
Relation at Large, without specification or analysis, that any attempt
at a concrete statement of just what the relationship is appears to
be a denial of the relation itself; in which case, he interprets an
occasional reminder from the pragmatist that the latter is, after all,
attempting to specify the nature of the relation, to be a surrender of
the pragmatist’s own case, since it admits after all that there is some
relation!
However that may be, the pragmatist holds that the relation in
question is one of correspondence between existence and thought;
but he holds that correspondence instead of being an ultimate and
unanalyzable mystery, to be defined by iteration, is precisely a
matter of cor-respondence in its plain, familiar sense. A condition of
dubious and conflicting tendencies calls out thinking as a method of
handling it. This condition produces its own appropriate consequences,
bearing its own fruits of weal and woe. The thoughts, the estimates,
intents, and projects it calls out, just because they are attitudes
of response and of attempted adjustment (_not_ mere “states of
consciousness”), produce their effects also. The kind of interlocking,
of interadjustment that then occurs between these two sorts of
consequences constitutes the correspondence that makes truth, just as
failure to respond to each other, to work together, constitutes mistake
and error--mishandling and wandering. This account may, of course, be
wrong--may involve a maladjustment of consequences--but the error in
the account, if it exists, must be specific and empirical, and cannot
be located by general epistemological accusations.
_Pupil: Objection Four._ Well, even admitting this version of
pragmatism, you cannot deny it still contravenes common sense; for,
according to you, the correspondence that constitutes truth does not
exist till _after_ ideas have worked, while common sense perceives and
knows that it is the antecedent agreement of the ideas with reality
that enables them to work. If you make the truth of the existence of a
Carboniferous age, or the landing of Columbus in 1492, depend upon a
future working of an idea about them, you commit yourself to the most
fantastic of philosophies.