PREFACE

THE pivotal part of my book named Pragmatism is its account of the

relation called 'truth' which may obtain between an idea (opinion,

belief, statement, or what not) and its object. 'Truth,' I there say,

'is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement,

as falsity means their disagreement, with reality. Pragmatists and

intellectualists both accept this definition as a matter of course.

'Where our ideas [do] not copy definitely their object, what does

agreement with that object mean? ... Pragmatism asks its usual question.

"Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference

will its being true make in any one's actual life? What experiences

[may] be different from those which would obtain if the belief were

false? How will the truth be realized? What, in short, is the truth's

cash-value in experiential terms?" The moment pragmatism asks this

question, it sees the answer: TRUE IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CAN

ASSIMILATE, VALIDATE, CORROBORATE, AND VERIFY. FALSE IDEAS ARE THOSE

THAT WE CANNOT. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have

true ideas; that therefore is the meaning of truth, for it is all that

truth is known as.

'The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth

HAPPENS to an idea. It BECOMES true, is MADE true by events. Its verity

IS in fact an event, a process, the process namely of its verifying

itself, its veriFICATION. Its validity is the process of its validATION.

[Footnote: But 'VERIFIABILITY,' I add, 'is as good as verification.

For one truth-process completed, there are a million in our lives

that function in [the] state of nascency. They lead us towards direct

verification; lead us into the surroundings of the object they envisage;

and then, if everything, runs on harmoniously, we are so sure that

verification is possible that we omit it, and are usually justified by

all that happens.']

'To agree in the widest sense with a reality can only mean to be guided

either straight up to it or into its surroundings, or to be put into

such working touch with it as to handle either it or something connected

with it better than if we disagreed. Better either intellectually or

practically .... Any idea that helps us to deal, whether practically or

intellectually, with either the reality or its belongings, that doesn't

entangle our progress in frustrations, that FITS, in fact, and adapts

our life to the reality's whole setting, will agree sufficiently to meet

the requirement. It will be true of that reality.

'THE TRUE, to put it very briefly, IS ONLY THE EXPEDIENT IN THE WAY OF

OUR THINKING, JUST AS THE RIGHT IS ONLY THE EXPEDIENT IN THE WAY OF OUR

BEHAVING. Expedient in almost any fashion, and expedient in the long

run and on the whole, of course; for what meets expediently all the

experience in sight won't necessarily meet all farther experiences

equally satisfactorily. Experience, as we know, has ways of BOILING

OVER, and making us correct our present formulas.'

This account of truth, following upon the similar ones given by Messrs.

Dewey and Schiller, has occasioned the liveliest discussion. Few critics

have defended it, most of them have scouted it. It seems evident that

the subject is a hard one to understand, under its apparent simplicity;

and evident also, I think, that the definitive settlement of it will

mark a turning-point in the history of epistemology, and consequently

in that of general philosophy. In order to make my own thought more

accessible to those who hereafter may have to study the question, I have

collected in the volume that follows all the work of my pen that bears

directly on the truth-question. My first statement was in 1884, in the

article that begins the present volume. The other papers follow in the

order of their publication. Two or three appear now for the first time.

One of the accusations which I oftenest have had to meet is that of

making the truth of our religious beliefs consist in their 'feeling

good' to us, and in nothing else. I regret to have given some excuse for

this charge, by the unguarded language in which, in the book Pragmatism,

I spoke of the truth of the belief of certain philosophers in the

absolute. Explaining why I do not believe in the absolute myself (p.

78), yet finding that it may secure 'moral holidays' to those who need

them, and is true in so far forth (if to gain moral holidays be a

good), [Footnote: Op. cit., p. 75.] I offered this as a conciliatory

olive-branch to my enemies. But they, as is only too common with such

offerings, trampled the gift under foot and turned and rent the giver. I

had counted too much on their good will--oh for the rarity of

Christian charity under the sun! Oh for the rarity of ordinary secular

intelligence also! I had supposed it to be matter of common observation

that, of two competing views of the universe which in all other respects

are equal, but of which the first denies some vital human need while

the second satisfies it, the second will be favored by sane men for the

simple reason that it makes the world seem more rational. To choose the

first view under such circumstances would be an ascetic act, an act of

philosophic self-denial of which no normal human being would be guilty.

Using the pragmatic test of the meaning of concepts, I had shown the

concept of the absolute to MEAN nothing but the holiday giver, the

banisher of cosmic fear. One's objective deliverance, when one says

'the absolute exists,' amounted, on my showing, just to this, that 'some

justification of a feeling of security in presence of the universe,'

exists, and that systematically to refuse to cultivate a feeling of

security would be to do violence to a tendency in one's emotional life

which might well be respected as prophetic.

Apparently my absolutist critics fail to see the workings of their own

minds in any such picture, so all that I can do is to apologize, and

take my offering back. The absolute is true in NO way then, and least of

all, by the verdict of the critics, in the way which I assigned!

My treatment of 'God,' 'freedom,' and 'design' was similar. Reducing,

by the pragmatic test, the meaning of each of these concepts to its

positive experienceable operation, I showed them all to mean the same

thing, viz., the presence of 'promise' in the world. 'God or no God?'

means 'promise or no promise?' It seems to me that the alternative is

objective enough, being a question as to whether the cosmos has one

character or another, even though our own provisional answer be made

on subjective grounds. Nevertheless christian and non-christian critics

alike accuse me of summoning people to say 'God exists,' EVEN WHEN HE

DOESN'T EXIST, because forsooth in my philosophy the 'truth' of the

saying doesn't really mean that he exists in any shape whatever, but

only that to say so feels good.

Most of the pragmatist and anti-pragmatist warfare is over what the word

'truth' shall be held to signify, and not over any of the facts embodied

in truth-situations; for both pragmatists and anti-pragmatists believe

in existent objects, just as they believe in our ideas of them. The

difference is that when the pragmatists speak of truth, they mean

exclusively some thing about the ideas, namely their workableness;

whereas when anti-pragmatists speak of truth they seem most often to

mean something about the objects. Since the pragmatist, if he agrees

that an idea is 'really' true, also agrees to whatever it says about

its object; and since most anti-pragmatists have already come round

to agreeing that, if the object exists, the idea that it does so is

workable; there would seem so little left to fight about that I might

well be asked why instead of reprinting my share in so much verbal

wrangling, I do not show my sense of 'values' by burning it all up.

I understand the question and I will give my answer. I am interested

in another doctrine in philosophy to which I give the name of radical

empiricism, and it seems to me that the establishment of the pragmatist

theory of truth is a step of first-rate importance in making radical

empiricism prevail. Radical empiricism consists first of a postulate,

next of a statement of fact, and finally of a generalized conclusion.

The postulate is that the only things that shall be debatable among

philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience.

[Things of an unexperienceable nature may exist ad libitum, but they

form no part of the material for philosophic debate.]

The statement of fact is that the relations between things, conjunctive

as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular

experience, neither more so nor less so, than the things themselves.

The generalized conclusion is that therefore the parts of experience

hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts

of experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no

extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own

right a concatenated or continuous structure.

The great obstacle to radical empiricism in the contemporary mind is the

rooted rationalist belief that experience as immediately given is all

disjunction and no conjunction, and that to make one world out of this

separateness, a higher unifying agency must be there. In the prevalent

idealism this agency is represented as the absolute all-witness which

'relates' things together by throwing 'categories' over them like a

net. The most peculiar and unique, perhaps, of all these categories is

supposed to be the truth-relation, which connects parts of reality in

pairs, making of one of them a knower, and of the other a thing known,

yet which is itself contentless experientially, neither describable,

explicable, nor reduceable to lower terms, and denotable only by

uttering the name 'truth.'

The pragmatist view, on the contrary, of the truth-relation is that it

has a definite content, and that everything in it is experienceable.

Its whole nature can be told in positive terms. The 'workableness'

which ideas must have, in order to be true, means particular workings,

physical or intellectual, actual or possible, which they may set up

from next to next inside of concrete experience. Were this pragmatic

contention admitted, one great point in the victory of radical

empiricism would also be scored, for the relation between an object and

the idea that truly knows it, is held by rationalists to be nothing of

this describable sort, but to stand outside of all possible temporal

experience; and on the relation, so interpreted, rationalism is wonted

to make its last most obdurate rally.

Now the anti-pragmatist contentions which I try to meet in this volume

can be so easily used by rationalists as weapons of resistance, not only

to pragmatism but to radical empiricism also (for if the truth-relation

were transcendent, others might be so too), that I feel strongly the

strategical importance of having them definitely met and got out of

the way. What our critics most persistently keep saying is that though

workings go with truth, yet they do not constitute it. It is numerically

additional to them, prior to them, explanatory OF them, and in no wise

to be explained BY them, we are incessantly told. The first point for

our enemies to establish, therefore, is that SOMETHING numerically

additional and prior to the workings is involved in the truth of

an idea. Since the OBJECT is additional, and usually prior, most

rationalists plead IT, and boldly accuse us of denying it. This leaves

on the bystanders the impression--since we cannot reasonably deny the

existence of the object--that our account of truth breaks down, and that

our critics have driven us from the field. Altho in various places in

this volume I try to refute the slanderous charge that we deny real

existence, I will say here again, for the sake of emphasis, that the

existence of the object, whenever the idea asserts it 'truly,' is the

only reason, in innumerable cases, why the idea does work successfully,

if it work at all; and that it seems an abuse of language, to say

the least, to transfer the word 'truth' from the idea to the object's

existence, when the falsehood of ideas that won't work is explained by

that existence as well as the truth of those that will.

I find this abuse prevailing among my most accomplished adversaries. But

once establish the proper verbal custom, let the word 'truth' represent

a property of the idea, cease to make it something mysteriously

connected with the object known, and the path opens fair and wide, as

I believe, to the discussion of radical empiricism on its merits. The

truth of an idea will then mean only its workings, or that in it which

by ordinary psychological laws sets up those workings; it will mean

neither the idea's object, nor anything 'saltatory' inside the idea,

that terms drawn from experience cannot describe.

One word more, ere I end this preface. A distinction is sometimes made

between Dewey, Schiller and myself, as if I, in supposing the object's

existence, made a concession to popular prejudice which they, as more

radical pragmatists, refuse to make. As I myself understand these

authors, we all three absolutely agree in admitting the transcendency of

the object (provided it be an experienceable object) to the subject, in

the truth-relation. Dewey in particular has insisted almost ad nauseam

that the whole meaning of our cognitive states and processes lies in

the way they intervene in the control and revaluation of independent

existences or facts. His account of knowledge is not only absurd, but

meaningless, unless independent existences be there of which our ideas

take account, and for the transformation of which they work. But because

he and Schiller refuse to discuss objects and relations 'transcendent'

in the sense of being ALTOGETHER TRANS-EXPERIENTIAL, their critics

pounce on sentences in their writings to that effect to show that they

deny the existence WITHIN THE REALM OF EXPERIENCE of objects external

to the ideas that declare their presence there. [Footnote: It gives me

pleasure to welcome Professor Carveth Read into the pragmatistic church,

so far as his epistemology goes. See his vigorous book, The Metaphysics

of Nature, 2d Edition, Appendix A. (London, Black, 1908.) The work What

is Reality? by Francis Howe Johnson (Boston, 1891), of which I make the

acquaintance only while correcting these proofs, contains some striking

anticipations of the later pragmatist view. The Psychology of Thinking,

by Irving E. Miller (New York, Macmillan Co., 1909), which has just

appeared, is one of the most convincing pragmatist document yet

published, tho it does not use the word 'pragmatism' at all. While I

am making references, I cannot refrain from inserting one to the

extraordinarily acute article by H. V. Knox in the Quarterly Review for

April, 1909.]

It seems incredible that educated and apparently sincere critics should

so fail to catch their adversary's point of view.

What misleads so many of them is possibly also the fact that the

universes of discourse of Schiller, Dewey, and myself are panoramas of

different extent, and that what the one postulates explicitly the other

provisionally leaves only in a state of implication, while the reader

thereupon considers it to be denied. Schiller's universe is the

smallest, being essentially a psychological one. He starts with but one

sort of thing, truth-claims, but is led ultimately to the independent

objective facts which they assert, inasmuch as the most successfully

validated of all claims is that such facts are there. My universe is

more essentially epistemological. I start with two things, the objective

facts and the claims, and indicate which claims, the facts being there,

will work successfully as the latter's substitutes and which will not.

I call the former claims true. Dewey's panorama, if I understand this

colleague, is the widest of the three, but I refrain from giving my own

account of its complexity. Suffice it that he holds as firmly as I do to

objects independent of our judgments. If I am wrong in saying this,

he must correct me. I decline in this matter to be corrected at second

hand.

I have not pretended in the following pages to consider all the critics

of my account of truth, such as Messrs. Taylor, Lovejoy, Gardiner,

Bakewell, Creighton, Hibben, Parodi, Salter, Carus, Lalande, Mentre,

McTaggart, G. E. Moore, Ladd and others, especially not Professor

Schinz, who has published under the title of Anti-pragmatisme an amusing

sociological romance. Some of these critics seem to me to labor under an

inability almost pathetic, to understand the thesis which they seek to

refute. I imagine that most of their difficulties have been answered

by anticipation elsewhere in this volume, and I am sure that my readers

will thank me for not adding more repetition to the fearful amount that

is already there.