This seems the commonest mistake. Scepticism, positivism, and
agnosticism agree with ordinary dogmatic rationalism in presupposing
that everybody knows what the word 'truth' means, without further
explanation. But the former doctrines then either suggest or declare
that real truth, absolute truth, is inaccessible to us, and that we
must fain put up with relative or phenomenal truth as its next best
substitute. By scepticism this is treated as an unsatisfactory state of
affairs, while positivism and agnosticism are cheerful about it, call
real truth sour grapes, and consider phenomenal truth quite sufficient
for all our 'practical' purposes.
In point of fact, nothing could be farther from all this than what
pragmatism has to say of truth. Its thesis is an altogether previous
one. It leaves off where these other theories begin, having contented
itself with the word truth's DEFINITION. 'No matter whether any mind
extant in the universe possess truth or not,' it asks, 'what does
the notion of truth signify IDEALLY?' 'What kind of things would true
judgments be IN CASE they existed?' The answer which pragmatism offers
is intended to cover the most complete truth that can be conceived of,
'absolute' truth if you like, as well as truth of the most relative and
imperfect description. This question of what truth would be like if it
did exist, belongs obviously to a purely speculative field of inquiry.
It is not a theory about any sort of reality, or about what kind of
knowledge is actually possible; it abstracts from particular terms
altogether, and defines the nature of a possible relation between two of
them.
As Kant's question about synthetic judgments had escaped previous
philosophers, so the pragmatist question is not only so subtile as to
have escaped attention hitherto, but even so subtile, it would seem,
that when openly broached now, dogmatists and sceptics alike fail to
apprehend it, and deem the pragmatist to be treating of something wholly
different. He insists, they say (I quote an actual critic), 'that the
greater problems are insoluble by human intelligence, that our need of
knowing truly is artificial and illusory, and that our reason, incapable
of reaching the foundations of reality, must turn itself exclusively
towards ACTION.' There could not be a worse misapprehension.