The instrumental theory acknowledges the objectivity of _meanings_ as
well as of data. They are referred to and employed in reflective
inquiry with the confidence attached to the hard facts of sense.
Pragmatic, as distinct from sensational, empiricism may claim to have
antedated neo-realism in criticism of resolution of meanings into
states or acts of consciousness. As previously noted, meanings are
indispensable instrumentalities of reflection, strictly coincident
with and correlative to what is analytically detected to be given, or
irremovably there. Data in their fragmentary character pose a problem;
they also define it. They suggest possible meanings. Whether they
_indicate_ them as well as suggest them is a question to be resolved.
But the meanings suggested are genuinely and existentially suggested,
and the problem described by the data cannot be solved without their
acknowledgment and use. That this instrumental necessity has led to a
metaphysical hypostatizing of meanings into essences or subsistences
having some sort of mysterious being apart from qualitative things
and changes is a source of regret; it is hardly an occasion for
surprise.
To be sure of our footing, let us return to empirical ground. It is as
certain an empirical fact that one thing suggests another as that fire
alters the thing burned. The suggesting thing has to be there or
given; something has to be there to do the suggesting. The suggested
thing is obviously not "there" in the same way as that which suggests;
if it were, it would not have to be suggested. A suggestion tends, in
the natural man, to excite action, to operate as a stimulus. I may
respond more readily and energetically to a suggested fire than to the
thing from which the suggestion sprang: that is, the thing by itself
may leave me cold, the thing as suggesting something else may move me
vigorously. The response if effected has all the force of a belief or
conviction. It is _as if_ we believed, on intellectual grounds, that
the thing _is_ a fire. But it is discovered that not all suggestions
are indications, or signifiers. The whale suggested by the cloud form
does not stand on the same level as the fire suggested by smoke, and
the suggested fire does not always turn out fire in fact. We are led
to examine the original point of departure and we find out that it was
not really smoke. In a world where skim-milk and cream suggestions,
acted upon, have respectively different consequences, and where a
thing suggests one as readily as the other (or skim-milk masquerades
as cream), the importance of examination of the thing exercising the
suggestive force prior to acting upon what it suggests is obvious.
Hence the act of response naturally stimulated is turned into channels
of inspection and experimental (physical) analysis. We move our body
to get a better hold on it, and we pick it to pieces to see what it
is.
This is the operation which we have been discussing in the last
section. But experience also testifies that the thing suggested is
worth attention on its own account. Perhaps we cannot get very readily
at the thing which, suggesting flame, suggests fire. It may be that
reflection upon the meaning (or conception), "fire," will help us.
Fire--here, there, or anywhere, the "essence" fire--means thus and so;
_if_ this thing really means fire, it will have certain traits,
certain attributes. Are they there? There are "flames" on the stage as
part of the scenery. Do they really indicate fire? Fire would mean
danger; but it is not possible that such a risk would be taken with an
audience (other meanings, risk, audience, danger, being brought in).
It must be something else. Well, it is probably colored tissue-paper
in strips rapidly blown about. This meaning leads us to closer
inspection; it directs our observations to hunt for corroborations or
negations. If conditions permitted, it would lead us to walk up and
get at the thing in close quarters. In short, devotion to a
suggestion, prior to accepting it as stimulus, leads first to other
suggestions which may be more applicable; and, secondly, it affords
the standpoint and the procedure of a physical experimentation to
detect those elements which are the more reliable signs, indicators
(evidence). _Suggestions thus treated are precisely what constitute
meanings, subsistences, essences_, etc. Without such development and
handling of what is suggested, the process of analyzing the situation
to get at its hard facts, and especially to get at just those which
have a right to determine inference, is haphazard--ineffectively done.
In the actual stress of any such needed determination it is of the
greatest importance to have a large stock of possible meanings to draw
on, and to have them ordered in such a way that we can develop each
promptly and accurately, and move quickly from one to another. It is
not to be wondered at then that we not only conserve such suggestions
as have been previously converted successfully into meanings, but also
that we (or some men at least) turn professional inquirers and
thinkers; that meanings are elaborated and ordered in related systems
quite apart from any immediately urgent situation; or that a realm of
"essences" is built up apart from that of existences.
That suggestion occurs is doubtless a mystery, but so is it a mystery
that hydrogen and oxygen make water. It is one of the hard, brute
facts that we have to take account of. We can investigate the
conditions under which the happening takes place, we can trace the
consequences which flow from the happening. By these means we can so
control the happening that it will take place in a more secure and
fruitful manner. But all this depends upon the hearty acceptance of
the happening as fact. Suggestion does not of itself yield meanings;
it yields only suggested things. But the moment we take a suggested
thing and develop it in connection with other meanings and employ it
as a guide of investigation (a method of inquiry), that moment we have
a full-fledged meaning on our hands, possessing all the verifiable
features which have been imported at any time to ideas, forms,
species, essences, subsistences. This empirical identification of
meaning by means of the specific fact of suggestion cuts deep--if
Occam's razor still cuts.
A suggestion lies between adequate stimulation and logical indication.
A cry of fire may start us running without reflection; we may have
learned, as children are taught in school, to react without
questioning. There is overt stimulation, but no suggesting. But if the
response is held off or postponed, it may persist as suggestion: the
cry suggests fire and suggests the advisability of flight. We may, in
a sense we must, call suggestion "mental." But it is important to note
what is meant by this term. Fire, running, getting burned, are not
mental; they are physical. But in their status of being suggested they
may be called mental when we recognize this distinctive status. This
means no more than that they are implicated in a specific way in a
reflective situation, in virtue of which they are susceptible of
certain modes of treatment. Their status as suggested by certain
features of the actual situation (and possibly meant or indicated as
well as suggested) may be definitely fixed; then we get meanings,
logical terms--determinations.[7]
Words are of course the agencies of fixation chiefly employed, though
any kind of physical existence--a gesture, a muscular contraction in
the finger or leg or chest--under ready command may be used. What is
essential is that there be a specific physical existence at hand which
may be used to concrete and hold on to the suggestion, so that the
latter may be handled on its own account. Until thus detached and
refixed there are things suggested, but hardly _a_ suggestion; things
meant, but hardly a meaning; things ideated, but hardly an idea. And
the suggested thing until detached is still too literal, too tied up
with other things, to be further developed or to be successfully used
as a method of experimentation in new directions so as to bring to
light new traits.
As data are signs which _indicate_ other existences, so meanings are
signs which _imply_ other meanings.[8] I am doubtful, for example,
whether _this_ is a man or not; that is, I am doubtful as to some given
traits when they are taken as signs or evidences, but I am inclined to
the hypothesis of a man. Having such a tentative or conceptual object
in mind, I am enabled to explore economically and effectively, instead
of at random, what is present, _provided_ I can elaborate the
implications of the term "man." To develop its implications is all one
with telling its meaning in connection with other meanings. Being a man
means, for example, speaking when spoken to--another meaning which need
have been no part of "man" as originally suggested. This meaning of
"answering questions" will then suggest a procedure which the term
"man" in its first meaning did not possess; it is an implication or
implied meaning which puts me in a new and possibly more fruitful
relation to the thing. (The process of developing implications is
usually termed "discourse" or ratiocination.) Now, be it noted,
replying to questions is no part of the _definition_ of man; it would
not be now an implication of Plato or of the Russian Czar for me. In
other words, there is something in the actual situation which suggests
_inquiring_ as well as _man_; and it is the interaction between these
two suggestions which is fruitful. There is consequently no mystery
about the fruitfulness of deduction--though this fruitfulness has been
urged as though it offered an insuperable objection to instrumentalism.
On the contrary, instrumentalism is the only theory to which deduction
is not a mystery. If a variety of wheels and cams and rods which have
been invented with reference to doing a given task are put together,
one expects from the assembled parts a result which could not have been
got from any one of them separately or from all of them together in a
heap. Because they are independent and unlike structures, working on
one another, something new happens. The same is true of terms in
relation to one another. When these are brought to bear upon one
another, something new, something quite unexpected happens, quite as
when one tries an acid with which he is not familiar upon a rock with
which he is unfamiliar--that is, unfamiliar in such a conjunction, in
spite of intimate acquaintance elsewhere. A definition may fix a
certain modicum of meaning in the abstract, as we say; it is a
specification of a minimum which gives the point of departure in every
interaction of a term with other terms. But nothing follows from the
definition by itself or in isolation. It is explicit (boringly so) and
has no implications. But bring it in connection with another term with
which it has not previously interacted and it may behave in the most
delightful or in the most disgustingly disappointing way. The
necessity for independent terms is made obvious in the modern theory of
axioms. It escapes attention in much of the contemporary logic of
transitive and non-transitive, symmetrical and non-symmetrical relations,
because the terms are so loaded that there are no propositions at all,
but only discriminations of orders of terms. The terms which figure
in the discussions, in other words, are correlatives--"brother,"
"parent," "up," "to the right of," "like," "greater," "after."
Such terms are not logical terms; they are _halves_ of such terms as
"brother-other-offspring-of-the-same-parents"; "parent-child";
"up-down"; "right-left"; "thing-similar-to-another-thing";
"greater-less"; "after-before." They express positions in a
_determined_ situation; they are _relatives_, not relations. They lack
implications, being explicit. But a man who is a brother and also a
rival in love, and a poorer man than his rival brother, expresses an
interaction of different terms from which something might happen: terms
with implications, terms constituting a proposition, which a
correlative term never does--till brought into conjunction with a term
of which it is not a relative. To have called a thing "up" or "brother"
is to have already solved its import in some situation. It is dead till
set to work in some _other_ situation.
Experience shows, moreover, that certain qualities of things are much
more fruitful and much more controllable than others when taken as
meanings to be used in drawing conclusions. The term must be of a
nature to develop a method of behavior by which to test whether it is
the meaning of the situation. Since it is desirable to have a stock of
meanings on hand which are so connected that we can move readily from
one to another in any direction, the stock is effective in just the
degree in which it has been worked into a system--a comprehensive and
orderly arrangement. Hence, while all meanings are derived from things
which antedate suggestion--or thinking or "consciousness"--not all
qualities are equally fitted to be meanings of a wide efficiency, and
it is a work of art to select the proper qualities for doing the work.
This corresponds to the working over of raw material into an effective
tool. A spade or a watchspring is made out of antecedent material, but
does not pre-exist as a ready-made tool; and, the more delicate and
complicated the work which it has to do, the more art intervenes.
These summary remarks will have to pass muster as indicating what a
more extensive treatment of a mathematical system of terms would show.
Man began by working such qualities as hate and love and fear and
beauty into the meanings by which to interpret and control the
perplexities of life. When they demonstrated their inefficacy, he had
recourse to such qualities as heavy and light, wet and dry, making
them into natural essences or explanatory and regulatory meanings.
That Greek mediaeval science did not get very far on these lines is a
commonplace. Scientific progress and practical control as systematic
and deliberate matters date from the century of Galileo, when
qualities which lend themselves to mathematical treatment were seized
upon. "The most promising of these ideal systems at first were of
course the richer ones, the sentimental ones. The baldest and least
promising ones were the mathematical ones; but the history of the
latter's application is a history of steadily advancing successes,
while that of the sentimentally richer ones is one of relative
sterility and failure."[9]
There is no problem of why and how the plow fits, or applies to, the
garden, or the watchspring to time-keeping. They were made for those
respective purposes; the question is how well they do their work, and
how they can be reshaped to do it better. Yet they were made out of
physical material; men used ready limbs or roots of trees with which
to plow before they used metal. We do not measure the worth or reality
of the tool by its closeness to its natural prototype, but by its
efficiency in doing its work--which connotes a great deal of
intervening art. The theory proposed for mathematical distinctions and
relations is precisely analogous. They are not the creations of mind
except in the sense in which a telephone is a creation of mind. They
fit nature because they are derived from natural conditions. Things
naturally bulge, so to speak, and naturally alter. To seize upon
these qualities, to develop them into keys for discovering the
meanings of brute, isolated events, and to accomplish this
effectively, to develop and order them till they become economical
tools (and tools upon tools) for making an unknown and uncertain
situation into a known and certain one, is the recorded triumph of
human intelligence. The terms and propositions of mathematics are not
fictions; they are not called into being by that particular act of
mind in which they are used. No more is a self-binding reaper a
figment, nor is it called momentarily into being by the man who wants
to harvest his grain. But both alike are works of art, constructed for
a purpose in doing the things which have to be done.
We may say of terms what Santayana so happily said of expression:
"Expression is a misleading term which suggests that something
previously known is imitated or rendered; whereas the expression is
itself an original fact, the values of which are then referred to the
thing expressed, much as the honors of a Chinese mandarin are
attributed retroactively to his parents." The natural history of
imputation of virtue should prove to the philosopher a profitable
theme. Even in its most superstitious forms (perhaps more _obviously_
in them than elsewhere) it testifies to the sense of a service to be
performed and to a demand for application. The superstition lies in
making the application to antecedents and to ancestors, where it is
but a shroud, instead of to descendants, where it is a generating
factor.
Every reflection leaves behind it a double effect. Its immediate
outcome is (as I tried to show earlier) the direct reorganization of a
situation, a reorganization which confers upon its contents new
increments of intrinsic meaning. Its indirect and intellectual product
is the defining of a meaning which (when fixed by a suitable
existence) is a resource in subsequent investigations. I would not
despise the assistance lent by the words "term" and "proposition." As
slang has it, a pitched baseball is to the batter a "proposition"; it
states, or makes explicit, what he has to deal with next amid all the
surrounding and momentarily irrelevant circumstance. Every statement
extracts and sets forth the net result of reflection up to date as a
condition of subsequent reflection. This extraction of the kernel of
past reflections makes possible a throwing to one side of all the
consequences of prior false and futile steps; it enables one to
dispense with the experiences themselves and to deal only with their
_net_ profit. In a favorite phrase of realism, it gives an object "as
if there were no experience." It is unnecessary to descant upon the
economy of this procedure. It eliminates everything which in spite of
its immediate urgency, or vividness, or weight of past authority, is
rubbish for the purpose in hand. It enables one to get down to
business with just that which (presumably) is of importance in
subsequent procedure. It is no wonder that these logical kernels have
been elevated into metaphysical essences.
The word "term" suggests the limiting condition of every process of
reflection. It sets a fence beyond which it is, presumably, a waste to
wander--an error. It sets forth that which _must_ be taken into
account--a limit which is inescapable, something which is to
ratiocination what the brute datum is to observation. In classic
phrase, it is a notion, that is, a _noting_, of the distinctions which
have been fixed for the purposes of the kind of inquiry now engaged
in. One has only to compare the terms of present scientific discourse
with those of, say, Aristotle, to see that the importance of terms as
instruments of a proper survey of and attack upon existential
situations is such that the terms resulting naturally and
spontaneously from reflection have been dropped and more effective
ones substituted. In one sense, they are all equally objective;
aquosity is as genuine, as well as more obvious, a notion as the
present chemical conception. But the latter is able to enter a much
wider scope of inquiries and to figure in them more prosperously.
As a special class of scientific inquirers develops, terms that were
originally _by-products_ of reflection become primary objects for the
intellectual class. The "troubles" which occasion reflection are then
_intellectual_ troubles, discrepancies within some current scheme of
propositions and terms. The situation which undergoes reorganization
and increase of comprised significance is that of the subject-matter
of specialized investigation. Nevertheless the same general method
recurs within it, and the resulting objects--the terms and
propositions--are for all, except those who produce them, instruments,
not terminal objects. The objection to analytic realism as a
metaphysics of existence is not so much an undue formalism as its
affront to the commonsense-world of action, appreciation, and
affection. The affront, due to hypostatizing terms into objects, is as
great as that of idealism. A naïve realism withstands both affronts.
My interest, however, is not to animadvert upon analytic realism. It
is to show how the main tenets of instrumental logic stand in relation
to considerations which, although ignored by the idealism which was
current when the theory received its first formulation, demand
attention: the objective status of data and terms with respect to
states of mind or acts of awareness. I have tried to show that the
theory, without mutilation or torturing, makes provision for these
considerations. They are not objections to it; they are considerations
which are involved in it. There are questions at issue, but they
concern not matters of logic but matters of fact. They are questions
of the _existential_ setting of certain logical distinctions and
relations. As to the comparative merits of the two schemes, I have
nothing to say beyond what has been said, save that the tendency of
the analytic realism is inevitably to treat a difference between the
logic of inquiry and of dialectic as if it were itself a matter to be
settled by the logic of dialectic. I confess to some fear that a
philosophy which fails to identify science with terms and propositions
about things which are not terms and propositions, will first
exaggerate and then misconstrue the function of dialectics, and land
philosophy in a formalism like unto the scholasticism from which the
older empiricism with all its defects emancipated those who took it to
heart.