[Footnote: Reprint from the Journal of Philosophy, July 18,1907.]
My failure in making converts to my conception of truth seems, if I
may judge by what I hear in conversation, almost complete. An ordinary
philosopher would feel disheartened, and a common choleric sinner would
curse God and die, after such a reception. But instead of taking counsel
of despair, I make bold to vary my statements, in the faint hope that
repeated droppings may wear upon the stone, and that my formulas may
seem less obscure if surrounded by something more of a 'mass' whereby to
apperceive them.
For fear of compromising other pragmatists, whoe'er they be, I will
speak of the conception which I am trying to make intelligible, as my
own conception. I first published it in the year 1885, in the first
article reprinted in the present book. Essential theses of this article
were independently supported in 1893 and 1895 by Professor D. S. Miller
[Footnote: Philosophical Review, vol. ii, p. 408, and Psychological
Review, vol. ii, p. 533.] and were repeated by me in a presidential
address on 'The knowing of things together' [Footnote: The relevant
parts of which are printed above, p. 43.] in 1895. Professor Strong,
in an article in the Journal of Philosophy, etc., [Footnote: Vol. i,
p. 253.] entitled 'A naturalistic theory of the reference of thought
to reality,' called our account 'the James-Miller theory of cognition,'
and, as I understood him, gave it his adhesion. Yet, such is the
difficulty of writing clearly in these penetralia of philosophy, that
each of these revered colleagues informs me privately that the account
of truth I now give--which to me is but that earlier statement more
completely set forth--is to him inadequate, and seems to leave the gist
of real cognition out. If such near friends disagree, what can I hope
from remoter ones, and what from unfriendly critics?
Yet I feel so sure that the fault must lie in my lame forms of statement
and not in my doctrine, that I am fain to try once more to express
myself.
Are there not some general distinctions which it may help us to agree
about in advance? Professor Strong distinguishes between what he calls
'saltatory' and what he calls 'ambulatory' relations. 'Difference,' for
example, is saltatory, jumping as it were immediately from one term
to another, but 'distance' in time or space is made out of intervening
parts of experience through which we ambulate in succession. Years ago,
when T. H. Green's ideas were most influential, I was much troubled
by his criticisms of english sensationalism. One of his disciples in
particular would always say to me, 'Yes! TERMS may indeed be possibly
sensational in origin; but RELATIONS, what are they but pure acts of
the intellect coming upon the sensations from above, and of a higher
nature?' I well remember the sudden relief it gave me to perceive one
day that SPACE-relations at any rate were homogeneous with the terms
between which they mediated. The terms were spaces, and the relations
were other intervening spaces. [Footnote: See my Principles of
Psychology, vol. ii, pp. 148-153.] For the Greenites space-relations had
been saltatory, for me they became thenceforward ambulatory.
Now the most general way of contrasting my view of knowledge with the
popular view (which is also the view of most epistemologists) is to call
my view ambulatory, and the other view saltatory; and the most general
way of characterizing the two views is by saying that my view describes
knowing as it exists concretely, while the other view only describes its
results abstractly taken.
I fear that most of my recalcitrant readers fail to recognize that what
is ambulatory in the concrete may be taken so abstractly as to appear
saltatory. Distance, for example, is made abstract by emptying out
whatever is particular in the concrete intervals--it is reduced thus
to a sole 'difference,' a difference of 'place,' which is a logical or
saltatory distinction, a so-called 'pure relation.'
The same is true of the relation called 'knowing,' which may connect
an idea with a reality. My own account of this relation is ambulatory
through and through. I say that we know an object by means of an idea,
whenever we ambulate towards the object under the impulse which the idea
communicates. If we believe in so-called 'sensible' realities, the idea
may not only send us towards its object, but may put the latter into our
very hand, make it our immediate sensation. But, if, as most reflective
people opine, sensible realities are not 'real' realities, but only
their appearances, our idea brings us at least so far, puts us in touch
with reality's most authentic appearances and substitutes. In any case
our idea brings us into the object's neighborhood, practical or ideal,
gets us into commerce with it, helps us towards its closer acquaintance,
enables us to foresee it, class it, compare it, deduce it,--in short, to
deal with it as we could not were the idea not in our possession.
The idea is thus, when functionally considered, an instrument for
enabling us the better to HAVE TO DO with the object and to act about
it. But it and the object are both of them bits of the general sheet
and tissue of reality at large; and when we say that the idea leads us
towards the object, that only means that it carries us forward
through intervening tracts of that reality into the object's closer
neighborhood, into the midst of its associates at least, be these its
physical neighbors, or be they its logical congeners only. Thus carried
into closer quarters, we are in an improved situation as regards
acquaintance and conduct; and we say that through the idea we now KNOW
the object better or more truly.
My thesis is that the knowing here is MADE by the ambulation through the
intervening experiences. If the idea led us nowhere, or FROM that object
instead of towards it, could we talk at all of its having any cognitive
quality? Surely not, for it is only when taken in conjunction with the
intermediate experiences that it gets related to THAT PARTICULAR OBJECT
rather than to any other part of nature. Those intermediaries determine
what particular knowing function it exerts. The terminus they guide
us to tells us what object it 'means,' the results they enrich us
with 'verify' or 'refute' it. Intervening experiences are thus as
indispensable foundations for a concrete relation of cognition as
intervening space is for a relation of distance. Cognition, whenever
we take it concretely, means determinate 'ambulation,' through
intermediaries, from a terminus a quo to, or towards, a terminus ad
quem. As the intermediaries are other than the termini, and connected
with them by the usual associative bonds (be these 'external' or be they
logical, i.e., classificatory, in character), there would appear to
be nothing especially unique about the processes of knowing. They fall
wholly within experience; and we need use, in describing them, no
other categories than those which we employ in describing other natural
processes.
But there exist no processes which we cannot also consider abstractly,
eviscerating them down to their essential skeletons or outlines; and
when we have treated the processes of knowing thus, we are easily led to
regard them as something altogether unparalleled in nature. For we first
empty idea, object and intermediaries of all their particularities, in
order to retain only a general scheme, and then we consider the latter
only in its function of giving a result, and not in its character of
being a process. In this treatment the intermediaries shrivel into the
form of a mere space of separation, while the idea and object retain
only the logical distinctness of being the end-terms that are separated.
In other words, the intermediaries which in their concrete particularity
form a bridge, evaporate ideally into an empty interval to cross, and
then, the relation of the end-terms having become saltatory, the whole
hocus-pocus of Erkenntnistheorie begins, and goes on unrestrained
by further concrete considerations. The idea, in 'meaning' an object
separated by an 'epistemological chasm' from itself, now executes what
Professor Ladd calls a 'salto mortale'; in knowing the object's nature,
it now 'transcends' its own. The object in turn becomes 'present' where
it is really absent, etc.; until a scheme remains upon our hands, the
sublime paradoxes of which some of us think that nothing short of an
'absolute' can explain.
The relation between idea and object, thus made abstract and saltatory,
is thenceforward opposed, as being more essential and previous, to its
own ambulatory self, and the more concrete description is branded as
either false or insufficient. The bridge of intermediaries, actual
or possible, which in every real case is what carries and defines the
knowing, gets treated as an episodic complication which need not even
potentially be there. I believe that this vulgar fallacy of opposing
abstractions to the concretes from which they are abstracted, is the
main reason why my account of knowing is deemed so unsatisfactory, and I
will therefore say a word more on that general point.
Any vehicle of conjunction, if all its particularities are abstracted
from it, will leave us with nothing on our hands but the original
disjunction which it bridged over. But to escape treating the resultant
self-contradiction as an achievement of dialectical profundity, all we
need is to restore some part, no matter how small, of what we have taken
away. In the case of the epistemological chasm the first reasonable step
is to remember that the chasm was filled with SOME empirical material,
whether ideational or sensational, which performed SOME bridging
function and saved us from the mortal leap. Restoring thus the
indispensable modicum of reality to the matter of our discussion, we
find our abstract treatment genuinely useful. We escape entanglement
with special cases without at the same time falling into gratuitous
paradoxes. We can now describe the general features of cognition, tell
what on the whole it DOES FOR US, in a universal way.
We must remember that this whole inquiry into knowing grows up on a
reflective level. In any real moment of knowing, what we are thinking of
is our object, not the way in which we ourselves are momentarily knowing
it. We at this moment, as it happens, have knowing itself for our
object; but I think that the reader will agree that his present knowing
of that object is included only abstractly, and by anticipation, in
the results he may reach. What he concretely has before his mind, as he
reasons, is some supposed objective instance of knowing, as he conceives
it to go on in some other person, or recalls it from his own past. As
such, he, the critic, sees it to contain both an idea and an object, and
processes by which the knower is guided from the one towards the other.
He sees that the idea is remote from the object, and that, whether
through intermediaries or not, it genuinely HAS TO DO with it. He sees
that it thus works beyond its immediate being, and lays hold of a
remote reality; it jumps across, transcends itself. It does all this by
extraneous aid, to be sure, but when the aid has come, it HAS done it
and the result is secure. Why not talk of results by themselves, then,
without considering means? Why not treat the idea as simply grasping
or intuiting the reality, of its having the faculty anyhow, of shooting
over nature behind the scenes and knowing things immediately and
directly? Why need we always lug in the bridging?--it only retards our
discourse to do so.
Such abstract talk about cognition's results is surely convenient; and
it is surely as legitimate as it is convenient, SO LONG AS WE DO NOT
FORGET OR POSITIVELY DENY, WHAT IT IGNORES. We may on occasion say
that our idea meant ALWAYS that particular object, that it led us there
because it was OF it intrinsically and essentially. We may insist that
its verification follows upon that original cognitive virtue in it--and
all the rest--and we shall do no harm so long as we know that these are
only short cuts in our thinking. They are positively true accounts of
fact AS FAR AS THEY GO, only they leave vast tracts of fact out of the
account, tracts of tact that have to be reinstated to make the accounts
literally true of any real case. But if, not merely passively ignoring
the intermediaries, you actively deny them [Footnote: This is the
fallacy which I have called 'vicious intellectualism' in my book A
Pluralistic Universe, Longmans, Green & Co., 1909.] to be even potential
requisites for the results you are so struck by, your epistemology goes
to irremediable smash. You are as far off the track as an historian
would be, if, lost in admiration of Napoleon's personal power, he were
to ignore his marshals and his armies, and were to accuse you of
error in describing his conquests as effected by their means. Of such
abstractness and one-sidedness I accuse most of the critics of my own
account.
In the second lecture of the book Pragmatism, I used the illustration
of a squirrel scrambling round a tree-trunk to keep out of sight of
a pursuing man: both go round the tree, but does the man go round the
squirrel? It all depends, I said, on what you mean by going round.' In
one sense of the word the man 'goes round,' in another sense he does
not. I settled the dispute by pragmatically distinguishing the senses.
But I told how some disputants had called my distinction a shuffling
evasion and taken their stand on what they called 'plain honest English
going-round.'
In such a simple case few people would object to letting the term in
dispute be translated into its concreter equivalents. But in the case
of a complex function like our knowing they act differently. I give full
concrete particular value for the ideas of knowing in every case I can
think of, yet my critics insist that 'plain honest English knowing' is
left out of my account. They write as if the minus were on my side and
the plus on theirs.
The essence of the matter for me is that altho knowing can be both
abstractly and concretely described, and altho the abstract descriptions
are often useful enough, yet they are all sucked up and absorbed without
residuum into the concreter ones, and contain nothing of any essentially
other or higher nature, which the concrete descriptions can be justly
accused of leaving behind. Knowing is just a natural process like any
other. There is no ambulatory process whatsoever, the results of which
we may not describe, if we prefer to, in saltatory terms, or represent
in static formulation. Suppose, e.g., that we say a man is 'prudent.'
Concretely, that means that he takes out insurance, hedges in betting,
looks before he leaps. Do such acts CONSTITUTE the prudence? ARE they
the man qua prudent?
Or is the prudence something by itself and independent of them? As a
constant habit in him, a permanent tone of character, it is convenient
to call him prudent in abstraction from any one of his acts, prudent in
general and without specification, and to say the acts follow from the
pre-existing prudence. There are peculiarities in his psycho-physical
system that make him act prudently; and there are tendencies to
association in our thoughts that prompt some of them to make for truth
and others for error. But would the man be prudent in the absence of
each and all of the acts? Or would the thoughts be true if they had no
associative or impulsive tendencies? Surely we have no right to oppose
static essences in this way to the moving processes in which they live
embedded.
My bedroom is above my library. Does the 'aboveness' here mean
aught that is different from the concrete spaces which have to be
moved-through in getting from the one to the other? It means, you may
say, a pure topographic relation, a sort of architect's plan among the
eternal essences. But that is not the full aboveness, it is only an
abbreviated substitute that on occasion may lead my mind towards truer,
i.e., fuller, dealings with the real aboveness. It is not an aboveness
ante rem, it is a post rem extract from the aboveness in rebus. We
may indeed talk, for certain conveniences, as if the abstract scheme
preceded, we may say 'I must go up stairs because of the essential
aboveness,' just as we may say that the man 'does prudent acts because
of his ingrained prudence,' or that our ideas 'lead us truly because of
their intrinsic truth.' But this should not debar us on other occasions
from using completer forms of description. A concrete matter of fact
always remains identical under any form of description, as when we say
of a line, now that it runs from left to right, and now that it runs
from right to left. These are but names of one and the same fact, one
more expedient to use at one time, one at another. The full facts of
cognition, whatever be the way in which we talk about them, even when
we talk most abstractly, stand inalterably given in the actualities and
possibilities of the experience-continuum. [Footnote 1: The ultimate
object or terminus of a cognitive process may in certain instances lie
beyond the direct experience of the particular cognizer, but it, of
course, must exist as part of the total universe of experience whose
constitution, with cognition in it, the critic is discussing.] But my
critics treat my own more concrete talk as if IT were the kind that
sinned by its inadequacy, and as if the full continuum left something
out.
A favorite way of opposing the more abstract to the more concrete
account is to accuse those who favor the latter of 'confounding
psychology with logic.' Our critics say that when we are asked what
truth MEANS, we reply by telling only how it is ARRIVED-AT. But since a
meaning is a logical relation, static, independent of time, how can it
possibly be identified, they say, with any concrete man's experience,
perishing as this does at the instant of its production? This, indeed,
sounds profound, but I challenge the profundity. I defy any one to show
any difference between logic and psychology here. The logical relation
stands to the psychological relation between idea and object only as
saltatory abstractness stands to ambulatory concreteness. Both relations
need a psychological vehicle; and the 'logical' one is simply the
'psychological' one disemboweled of its fulness, and reduced to a bare
abstractional scheme.
A while ago a prisoner, on being released, tried to assassinate the
judge who had sentenced him. He had apparently succeeded in conceiving
the judge timelessly, had reduced him to a bare logical meaning, that
of being his 'enemy and persecutor,' by stripping off all the concrete
conditions (as jury's verdict, official obligation, absence of personal
spite, possibly sympathy) that gave its full psychological character to
the sentence as a particular man's act in time. Truly the sentence WAS
inimical to the culprit; but which idea of it is the truer one, that
bare logical definition of it, or its full psychological specification?
The anti-pragmatists ought in consistency to stand up for the criminal's
view of the case, treat the judge as the latter's logical enemy, and bar
out the other conditions as so much inessential psychological stuff.