It is easier to start a legend than to prevent its continued
circulation. No misconception of the instrumental logic has been more
persistent than the belief that it makes knowledge merely a means to a
practical end, or to the satisfaction of practical needs--practical
being taking to signify some quite definite utilities of a material or
bread-and-butter type. Habitual associations aroused by the word
"pragmatic" have been stronger than the most explicit and emphatic
statements which any pragmatist has been able to make. But I again
affirm that the term "pragmatic" means only the rule of referring all
thinking, all reflective considerations, to _consequences_ for final
meaning and test. Nothing is said about the nature of the
consequences; they may be aesthetic, or moral, or political, or
religious in quality--anything you please. All that the theory
requires is that they be in some way consequences of thinking; not,
indeed, of it alone, but of it acted upon in connection with other
things. This is no after-thought inserted to lessen the force of
objections. Mr. Peirce explained that he took the term "pragmatic"
from Kant, in order to denote empirical consequences. When he refers
to their practical character it is only to indicate a criterion by
which to avoid purely verbal disputes. Different consequences are
alleged to constitute rival meanings of a term. Is a difference more
than merely one of formulation? The way to get an answer is to ask
whether, if realized, these consequences would exact of us different
modes of behavior. If they do not make such a difference in conduct
the difference between them is conventional. It is not that
consequences are themselves practical, but that practical consequences
from them may at times be appealed to in order to decide the specific
question of whether two proposed meanings differ save in words. Mr.
James says expressly that what is important is that the consequences
should be specific, not that they should be active. When he said that
general notions must "cash in," he meant of course that they must be
translatable into verifiable specific things. But the words "cash in"
were enough for some of his critics, who pride themselves upon a
logical rigor unattainable by mere pragmatists.
In the logical version of pragmatism termed instrumentalism, action or
practice does indeed play a fundamental rôle. But it concerns not the
nature of consequences but the nature of knowing. To use a term which
is now more fashionable (and surely to some extent in consequence of
pragmatism) than it was earlier, instrumentalism means a behaviorist
theory of thinking and knowing. It means that knowing is literally
something which we do; that analysis is ultimately physical and
active; that meanings in their logical quality are standpoints,
attitudes, and methods of behaving toward facts, and that active
experimentation is essential to verification. Put in another way it
holds that thinking does not mean any transcendent states or acts
suddenly introduced into a previously natural scene, but that the
operations of knowing are (or are artfully derived from) natural
responses of the organism, which constitute knowing in virtue of the
situation of doubt in which they arise and in virtue of the uses of
inquiry, reconstruction, and control to which they are put. There is
no warrant in the doctrine for carrying over _this_ practical quality
into the consequences in which action culminates, and by which it is
tested and corrected. A knowing as an act is instrumental to the
resultant controlled and more significant situation; this does not
imply anything about the intrinsic or the instrumental character of
the consequent situation. That is whatever it may be in a given case.
There is nothing novel nor heterodox in the notion that thinking is
instrumental. The very word is redolent of an _Organum_--whether
_novum_ or _veterum_. The term "instrumentality," applied to thinking,
raises at once, however, the question of whether thinking as a tool
falls within or without the subject-matter which it shapes into
knowledge. The answer of formal logic (adopted moreover by Kant and
followed in some way by all neo-Kantian logics) is unambiguous. To
call logic "formal" means precisely that mind or thought supplies
forms foreign to the original subject-matter, but yet required in
order that it should have the appropriate form of knowledge. In this
regard it deviates from the Aristotelian _Organon_ which it professes
to follow. For according to Aristotle, the processes of knowing--of
teaching and learning--which lead up to knowledge are but the
actualization through the potentialities of the human body of the
_same_ forms or natures which are previously actualized in Nature
through the potentialities of extra-organic bodies. Thinking which is
not instrumental to truth, which is merely formal in the modern sense,
would have been a monstrosity inconceivable to him. But the discarding
of the metaphysics of form and matter, of cyclic actualizations and
eternal species, deprived the Aristotelian "thought" of any place
within the scheme of things, and left it an activity with forms alien
to subject-matter. To conceive of thinking as instrumental to truth or
knowledge, and as a tool shaped out of the same subject-matter as that
to which it is applied, is but to return to the Aristotelian tradition
about logic. That the practice of science has in the meantime
substituted a logic of experimental discovery (of which definition and
classification are themselves but auxiliary tools) for a logic of
arrangement and exposition of what is already known, necessitates,
however, a very different sort of _Organon_. It makes necessary the
conception that the object of knowledge is not something with which
thinking sets out, but something with which it ends: something which
the processes of inquiry and testing, that constitute thinking,
themselves produce. Thus the object of knowledge is practical in the
sense that it depends upon a specific kind of practice for its
existence--for its existence as an object of knowledge. How practical
it may be in any other sense than this is quite another story. The
_object of knowledge_ marks an achieved triumph, a secured
control--that holds by the very nature of knowledge. What other uses
it may have depends upon its own inherent character, not upon anything
in the nature of knowledge. We do not know the origin and nature and
the cure of malaria till we can both produce and eliminate malaria;
the _value_ of either the production or the removal depends upon the
character of malaria in relation to other things. And so it is with
mathematical knowledge, or with knowledge of politics or art. Their
respective objects are not known till they are made in course of the
process of experimental thinking. Their usefulness when made is
whatever, from infinity to zero, experience may subsequently determine
it to be.