Professor Pratt has returned to the charge in a whole book, [Footnote
1: J. B. Pratt: What is Pragmatism. New York, The Macmillan Company,
1909.--The comments I have printed were written in March, 1909, after
some of the articles printed later in the present volume.] which for
its clearness and good temper deserves to supersede all the rest of
the anti-pragmatistic literature. I wish it might do so; for its author
admits all MY essential contentions, simply distinguishing my account
of truth as 'modified' pragmatism from Schiller's and Dewey's, which he
calls pragmatism of the 'radical' sort. As I myself understand Dewey and
Schiller, our views absolutely agree, in spite of our different modes of
statement; but I have enough trouble of my own in life without having to
defend my friends, so I abandon them provisionally to the tender mercy
of Professor Pratt's interpretations, utterly erroneous tho I deem these
to be. My reply as regards myself can be very short, for I prefer to
consider only essentials, and Dr. Pratt's whole book hardly takes the
matter farther than the article to which I retort in Part I of the
present paper.
He repeats the 'as'-formula, as if it were something that I, along with
other pragmatists, had denied, [Footnote: Op. cit., pp. 77-80.] whereas
I have only asked those who insist so on its importance to do something
more than merely utter it--to explicate it, for example, and tell us
what its so great importance consists in. I myself agree most cordially
that for an idea to be true the object must be 'as' the idea declares
it, but I explicate the 'as'-ness as meaning the idea's verifiability.
Now since Dr. Pratt denies none of these verifying 'workings' for which
I have pleaded, but only insists on their inability to serve as the
fundamentum of the truth-relation, it seems that there is really nothing
in the line of FACT about which we differ, and that the issue between us
is solely as to how far the notion of workableness or verifiability
is an essential part of the notion of 'trueness'--'trueness' being Dr.
Pratt's present name for the character of as-ness in the true idea.
I maintain that there is no meaning left in this notion of as-ness or
trueness if no reference to the possibility of concrete working on the
part of the idea is made.
Take an example where there can be no possible working. Suppose I have
an idea to which I give utterance by the vocable 'skrkl,' claiming at
the same time that it is true. Who now can say that it is FALSE, for why
may there not be somewhere in the unplumbed depths of the cosmos some
object with which 'skrkl' can agree and have trueness in Dr. Pratt's
sense? On the other hand who can say that it is TRUE, for who can lay
his hand on that object and show that it and nothing else is what I MEAN
by my word? But yet again, who can gainsay any one who shall call my
word utterly IRRELATIVE to other reality, and treat it as a bare fact in
my mind, devoid of any cognitive function whatever. One of these
three alternatives must surely be predicated of it. For it not to be
irrelevant (or not-cognitive in nature), an object of some kind must be
provided which it may refer to. Supposing that object provided, whether
'skrkl' is true or false of it, depends, according to Professor Pratt,
on no intermediating condition whatever. The trueness or the falsity is
even now immediately, absolutely, and positively there.
I, on the other hand, demand a cosmic environment of some kind to
establish which of them is there rather than utter irrelevancy.
[Footnote: Dr. Pratt, singularly enough, disposes of this primal
postulate of all pragmatic epistemology, by saying that the pragmatist
'unconsciously surrenders his whole case by smuggling in the idea of a
conditioning environment which determines whether or not the experience
can work, and which cannot itself be identified with the experience or
any part of it' (pp. 167-168). The 'experience' means here of course the
idea, or belief; and the expression 'smuggling in' is to the last degree
diverting. If any epistemologist could dispense with a conditioning
environment, it would seem to be the antipragmatist, with his immediate
saltatory trueness, independent of work done. The mediating pathway
which the environment supplies is the very essence of the pragmatist's
explanation.] I then say, first, that unless some sort of a natural path
exists between the 'skrkl' and THAT object, distinguishable among the
innumerable pathways that run among all the realities of the universe,
linking them promiscuously with one another, there is nothing there to
constitute even the POSSIBILITY OF ITS REFERRING to that object rather
than to any other.
I say furthermore that unless it have some TENDENCY TO FOLLOW UP THAT
PATH, there is nothing to constitute its INTENTION to refer to the
object in question.
Finally, I say that unless the path be strown with possibilities
of frustration or encouragement, and offer some sort of terminal
satisfaction or contradiction, there is nothing to constitute its
agreement or disagreement with that object, or to constitute the as-ness
(or 'not-as-ness') in which the trueness (or falseness) is said to
consist.
I think that Dr. Pratt ought to do something more than repeat the name
'trueness,' in answer to my pathetic question whether that there be not
some CONSTITUTION to a relation as important as this. The pathway, the
tendency, the corroborating or contradicting progress, need not in every
case be experienced in full, but I don't see, if the universe doesn't
contain them among its possibilities of furniture, what LOGICAL MATERIAL
FOR DEFINING the trueness of my idea is left. But if it do contain them,
they and they only are the logical material required.
I am perplexed by the superior importance which Dr. Pratt attributes
to abstract trueness over concrete verifiability in an idea, and I wish
that he might be moved to explain. It is prior to verification, to be
sure, but so is the verifiability for which I contend prior, just as a
man's 'mortality' (which is nothing but the possibility of his death) is
prior to his death, but it can hardly be that this abstract priority of
all possibility to its correlative fact is what so obstinate a quarrel
is about. I think it probable that Dr. Pratt is vaguely thinking
of something concreter than this. The trueness of an idea must mean
SOMETHING DEFINITE IN IT THAT DETERMINES ITS TENDENCY TO WORK, and
indeed towards this object rather than towards that. Undoubtedly there
is something of this sort in the idea, just as there is something in man
that accounts for his tendency towards death, and in bread that accounts
for its tendency to nourish. What that something is in the case of truth
psychology tells us: the idea has associates peculiar to itself, motor
as well as ideational; it tends by its place and nature to call these
into being, one after another; and the appearance of them in succession
is what we mean by the 'workings' of the idea. According to what they
are, does the trueness or falseness which the idea harbored come to
light. These tendencies have still earlier conditions which, in a
general way, biology, psychology and biography can trace. This whole
chain of natural causal conditions produces a resultant state of things
in which new relations, not simply causal, can now be found, or into
which they can now be introduced,--the relations namely which we
epistemologists study, relations of adaptation, of substitutability, of
instrumentality, of reference and of truth.
The prior causal conditions, altho there could be no knowing of any
kind, true or false, without them, are but preliminary to the question
of what makes the ideas true or false when once their tendencies have
been obeyed. The tendencies must exist in some shape anyhow, but their
fruits are truth, falsity, or irrelevancy, according to what they
concretely turn out to be. They are not 'saltatory' at any rate, for
they evoke their consequences contiguously, from next to next only; and
not until the final result of the whole associative sequence, actual
or potential, is in our mental sight, can we feel sure what its
epistemological significance, if it have any, may be. True knowing is,
in fine, not substantially, in itself, or 'as such,' inside of the idea
from the first, any more than mortality AS SUCH is inside of the man, or
nourishment AS SUCH inside of the bread. Something else is there first,
that practically MAKES FOR knowing, dying or nourishing, as the case may
be. That something is the 'nature' namely of the first term, be it idea,
man, or bread, that operates to start the causal chain of processes
which, when completed, is the complex fact to which we give whatever
functional name best fits the case. Another nature, another chain of
cognitive workings; and then either another object known or the same
object known differently, will ensue.
Dr. Pratt perplexes me again by seeming to charge Dewey and Schiller
[Footnote: Page 200] (I am not sure that he charges me) with an account
of truth which would allow the object believed in not to exist, even
if the belief in it were true. 'Since the truth of an idea,' he writes,
'means merely the fact that the idea works, that fact is all that you
mean when you say the idea is true' (p. 206). 'WHEN YOU SAY THE IDEA IS
TRUE'--does that mean true for YOU, the critic, or true for the believer
whom you are describing? The critic's trouble over this seems to come
from his taking the word 'true' irrelatively, whereas the pragmatist
always means 'true for him who experiences the workings.' 'But is the
object REALLY true or not?'--the critic then seems to ask,--as if
the pragmatist were bound to throw in a whole ontology on top of his
epistemology and tell us what realities indubitably exist. 'One world at
a time,' would seem to be the right reply here.
One other trouble of Dr. Pratt's must be noticed. It concerns the
'transcendence' of the object. When our ideas have worked so as to bring
us flat up against the object, NEXT to it, 'is our relation to it then
ambulatory or saltatory?' Dr. Pratt asks. If YOUR headache be my object,
'MY experiences break off where yours begin,' Dr. Pratt writes,
and 'this fact is of great importance, for it bars out the sense of
transition and fulfilment which forms so important an element in the
pragmatist description of knowledge--the sense of fulfilment due to a
continuous passage from the original idea to the known object. If this
comes at all when I know your headache, it comes not with the object,
but quite on my side of the "epistemological gulf." The gulf is still
there to be transcended.' (p. 158).
Some day of course, or even now somewhere in the larger life of
the universe, different men's headaches may become confluent or be
'co-conscious.' Here and now, however, headaches do transcend each other
and, when not felt, can be known only conceptually. My idea is that
you really have a headache; it works well with what I see of your
expression, and with what I hear you say; but it doesn't put me in
possession of the headache itself. I am still at one remove, and the
headache 'transcends' me, even tho it be in nowise transcendent of human
experience generally. Bit the 'gulf' here is that which the pragmatist
epistemology itself fixes in the very first words it uses, by
saying there must be an object and an idea. The idea however doesn't
immediately leap the gulf, it only works from next to next so as to
bridge it, fully or approximately. If it bridges it, in the pragmatist's
vision of his hypothetical universe, it can be called a 'true' idea.
If it only MIGHT bridge it, but doesn't, or if it throws a bridge
distinctly AT it, it still has, in the onlooking pragmatist's eyes, what
Professor Pratt calls 'trueness.' But to ask the pragmatist thereupon
whether, when it thus fails to coalesce bodily with the object, it is
REALLY true or has REAL trueness,--in other words whether the headache
he supposes, and supposes the thinker he supposes, to believe in, be
a real headache or not,--is to step from his hypothetical universe of
discourse into the altogether different world of natural fact.