Said John Stuart Mill: "To draw inferences has been said to be the
great business of life.... It is the only occupation in which the mind
never ceases to be engaged." If this be so, it seems a pity that Mill
did not recognize that this business identifies what we mean when we
say "mind." If he had recognized this, he would have cast the weight
of his immense influence not only against the conception that mind is
a substance, but also against the conception that it is a collection
of existential states or attributes without any substance in which to
inhere; and he would thereby have done much to free logic from
epistemological metaphysics. In any case, an account of intellectual
operations and conditions from the standpoint of the rôle played and
position occupied by them in the business of drawing inferences is a
different sort of thing from an account of them as having an existence
_per se_, from treating them as making up some sort of existential
material distinct from the _things_ which figure in inference-drawing.
This latter type of treatment is that which underlies the psychology
which itself has adopted uncritically the remnants of the metaphysics
of soul substance: the idea of accidents without the substance.[48]
This assumption from metaphysical psychology--the assumption of
consciousness as an existent stuff or existent process--is then
carried over into an examination of knowledge, so as to make the
theory of knowledge not logic (an account of the ways in which valid
inferences or conclusions from things to other things are made), but
epistemology.
We have, therefore, the result (so unfortunate for logic) that logic
is not free to go its own way, but is compromised by the assumption
that knowledge goes on not in terms of things (I use "things" in the
broadest sense, as equaling _res_, and covering affairs, concerns,
acts, as well as "things" in the narrower sense), but in terms of a
relation _between_ things and a peculiar existence made up of
consciousness, or else between things and functional operations of
this existence. If it could be shown that psychology is essentially
not a science of states of consciousness, but of behavior, conceived
as a process of continuous readjustment, then the undoubted facts
which go by the name of sensation, perception, image, emotion,
concept, would be interpreted to mean peculiar (i.e., specifically
qualitative) epochs, phases, and crises in the scheme of behavior. The
supposedly scientific basis for the belief that states of
consciousness inherently define a separate type of existence would be
done away with. Inferential knowledge, knowledge involving reflection,
_psychologically_ viewed, would be assimilated to a certain mode of
readaptation of functions, involving shock and the need of control;
'knowledge' in the sense of direct non-reflective presence of things
would be identified (psychologically) with relatively stable or
completed adjustments. I can not profess to speak for psychologists,
but it is an obvious characteristic of the contemporary status of
psychology that one school (the so-called functional or dynamic)
operates with nothing more than a conventional and perfunctory
reference to "states of consciousness"; while the orthodox school
makes constant concessions to ideas of the behavior type. It
introduces the conceptions of fatigue, practice, and habituation. It
makes its fundamental classifications on the basis of physiological
distinctions (e.g., the centrally initiated and the peripherally
initiated), which, from a biological standpoint, are certainly
distinctions of structures involved in the performance of acts.
One of the aims of the _Studies in Logical Theory_ was to show, on the
negative or critical side, that the type of logical theory which
professedly starts its account of knowledge from mere states of
consciousness is compelled at every crucial juncture to assume
_things_, and to define its so-called mental states in terms of
things;[49] and, on the positive side, to show that, logically
considered, such distinctions as sensation, image, etc., mark
instruments and crises in the development of controlled judgment,
i.e., of inferential conclusions. It was perhaps not surprising that
this effort should have been criticized not on its own merits, but on
the assumption that this correspondence of the (functional)
psychological and the logical points of view was intended in terms of
the psychology which obtained in the _critic's_ mind--to wit, the
psychology based on the assumption of consciousness as a separate
existence or process.
These considerations suggest that before we can intelligently raise
the question of the truth of ideas we must consider their status in
judgment, judgment being regarded as the typical expression of the
inferential operation. (1) Do ideas present themselves except in
situations which are doubtful and inquired into? Do they exist side by
side with the facts when the facts are themselves known? Do they exist
except when judgment is in suspense? (2) Are "ideas" anything else
except the suggestions, conjectures, hypotheses, theories (I use an
ascending scale of terms) tentatively entertained during a suspended
conclusion? (3) Do they have any part to play in the conduct of
inquiry? Do they serve to direct observation, colligate data, and
guide experimentation, or are they otiose?[50] (4) If the ideas have a
function in directing the reflective process (expressed in judgment),
does success in performing the function (that is, in directing to a
conclusion which is stable) have anything to do with the logical worth
or validity of the ideas? (5) And, finally, does validity have
anything to do with truth? Does "truth" mean something inherently
different from the fact that the conclusion of one judgment (the known
fact, previously unknown, in which judging terminates) is itself
applicable in further situations of doubt and inquiry? And is judgment
properly more than tentative save as it terminates in a known fact,
i.e., a fact present without the intermediary of reflection?
When these questions--I mean, of course, questions which are
exemplified in these queries--are answered, we shall, perhaps, have
gone as far as it is possible to go with reference to the _logical_
character of ideas. The question may then recur as to whether the
"ideas" of the epistemologist (that is, existences in a purely
"private stream of consciousness") remain as something over and above,
not yet accounted for; or whether they are perversions and
misrepresentations of logical characters. I propose to give a brief
dogmatic reply in the latter sense. Where, and in so far as, there are
unquestioned objects, there is no "consciousness." There are just
things. When there is uncertainty, there are dubious, suspected
objects--things hinted at, guessed at. Such objects have a distinct
status, and it is the part of good sense to give them, as occupying
that status, a distinct caption. "Consciousness" is a term often used
for this purpose; and I see no objection to that term, _provided_ it
is recognized to mean such objects as are problematic, plus the fact
that in their problematic character they may be used, as effectively
as accredited objects, to direct observations and experiments which
finally relieve the doubtful features of the situation. Such "objects"
may turn out to be valid, or they may not. But, in any case, they may
be used. They may be internally manipulated and developed through
ratiocination into explicit statement of their implications; they may
be employed as standpoints for selecting and arranging data, and as
methods for conducting experiments. In short, they are not merely
hypothetical; they are _working_ hypotheses. Meanwhile, their
aloofness from accredited objectivity may lead us to characterize them
as merely ideas, or even as "mental states," provided once more we
mean by mental state just this logical status.
We have examples of such ideas in symbols. A symbol, I take it, is
always itself, existentially, a particular object. A word, an
algebraic sign, is just as much a concrete existence as is a horse, a
fire-engine, or a flyspeck. But its value resides in its
representative character: in its suggestive and directive force for
operations that when performed lead us to non-symbolic objects, which
without symbolic operations would not be apprehended, or at least
would not be so easily apprehended. It is, I think, worth noting that
the capacity (_a_) for regarding objects as mere symbols and (_b_) for
employing symbols instrumentally furnishes the only safeguard against
dogmatism, i.e., uncritical acceptance of any suggestion that comes to
us vividly; and also that it furnishes the only basis for
intelligently controlled experiments.
I do not think, however, that we should have the tendency to regard
ideas as _private_, as personal, if we stopped short at this point. If
we had only words or other symbols uttered by others, or written, or
printed, we might call them, when in objective suspense, mere ideas.
But we should hardly think of these ideas as our own. Such
extra-organic stimuli, however, are not adequate logical devices. They
are too rigid, too "objective" in their own existential status. Their
meaning and character are too definitely fixed. For effective
discovery we need things which are more easily manipulated, which are
more transitive, more easily dropped and changed. Intra-organic
events, adjustments _within_ the organism, that is, adjustments of the
organism considered not with reference to the environment but with
reference to one another, are much better suited to stand as
representatives of genuinely dubious objects. An object which is
_really_ doubted is by its nature precarious and inchoate, vague. What
_is_ a thing when it is not yet discovered and yet is tentatively
entertained and tested?
Ancient logic never got beyond the conception of an object whose
logical _place_, whose subsumptive position as a particular with
reference to some universal, was doubtful. It never got to the point
where it could search for particulars which in themselves as
particulars are doubtful. Hence it was a logic of proof, of deduction,
not of inquiry, of discovery, and of induction. It was hard up against
its own dilemma: How can a man inquire? For either he knows that for
which he seeks, and hence does not seek: or he does not know, in which
case he can not seek, nor could he tell if he found. The
individualistic movement of modern life detached, as it were, the
individual, and allowed personal (i.e., intra-organic) events to have,
transitively and temporarily, a worth of their own. These events are
continuous with extra-organic events (in origin and eventual
outcome); but they may be considered in temporary displacement as
uniquely existential. In this capacity they serve as means for the
elaboration of a delayed but more adequate response in a radically
different direction. So treated, they are tentative, dubious but
experimental, anticipations of an object. They are "subjective" (i.e.,
individualistic) surrogates of public, cosmic things, which may be so
manipulated and elaborated as to terminate in public things which
without them would not exist as empirical objects.[51]
The recognition then of intra-organic events, which are not merely
effects nor distorted refractions of cosmic objects, but inchoate
_future_ cosmic objects in process of experimental construction,
resolves, to my mind, the paradox of so-called subjective and private
things that have objective and universal reference, and that operate
so as to lead to objective consequences which test their own value.
When a man can say: This color is not necessarily the color of the
glass nor the picture nor even of an object reflected but is at least
an event in my nervous system, an event which I may refer to my
organism till I get _surety of other reference_--he is for the first
time emancipated from the dogmatism of unquestioned reference, and is
set upon a path of experimental inquiry.
I am not here concerned with trying to demonstrate that this is the
correct mode of interpretation. I am only concerned with pointing out
its radical difference from the view of a critic who, holding to the
two-world theory of existences which from the start are divided into
the fixedly objective and the fixedly psychical, interprets in terms
of his own theory the view that the distinction between the objective
and the subjective is a logical-practical distinction. Whether the
logical, as against the ontological, theory be true or false, it can
hardly be fruitfully discussed without a preliminary apprehension of
it as a logical conception.