The name 'pragmatism,' with its suggestions of action, has been an
unfortunate choice, I have to admit, and has played into the hands of
this mistake. But no word could protect the doctrine from critics so
blind to the nature of the inquiry that, when Dr. Schiller speaks of
ideas 'working' well, the only thing they think of is their immediate
workings in the physical environment, their enabling us to make money,
or gain some similar 'practical' advantage. Ideas do work thus, of
course, immediately or remotely; but they work indefinitely inside of
the mental world also. Not crediting us with this rudimentary insight,
our critics treat our view as offering itself exclusively to engineers,
doctors, financiers, and men of action generally, who need some sort
of a rough and ready weltanschauung, but have no time or wit to study
genuine philosophy. It is usually described as a characteristically
American movement, a sort of bobtailed scheme of thought, excellently
fitted for the man on the street, who naturally hates theory and wants
cash returns immediately.
It is quite true that, when the refined theoretic question that
pragmatism begins with is once answered, secondary corollaries of a
practical sort follow. Investigation shows that, in the function called
truth, previous realities are not the only independent variables. To
a certain extent our ideas, being realities, are also independent
variables, and, just as they follow other reality and fit it, so, in
a measure, does other reality follow and fit them. When they add
themselves to being, they partly redetermine the existent, so that
reality as a whole appears incompletely definable unless ideas also
are kept account of. This pragmatist doctrine, exhibiting our ideas
as complemental factors of reality, throws open (since our ideas are
instigators of our action) a wide window upon human action, as well as a
wide license to originality in thought. But few things could be sillier
than to ignore the prior epistemological edifice in which the window is
built, or to talk as if pragmatism began and ended at the window. This,
nevertheless, is what our critics do almost without exception. They
ignore our primary step and its motive, and make the relation to action,
which is our secondary achievement, primary.
THIRD MISUNDERSTANDING: PRAGMATISTS CUT THEMSELVES OFF FROM THE RIGHT TO
BELIEVE IN EJECTIVE REALITIES.
They do so, according to the critics, by making the truth of our beliefs
consist in their verifiability, and their verifiability in the way in
which they do work for us. Professor Stout, in his otherwise admirable
and hopeful review of Schiller in Mind for October, 1897, considers that
this ought to lead Schiller (could he sincerely realize the effects of
his own doctrine) to the absurd consequence of being unable to believe
genuinely in another man's headache, even were the headache there.
He can only 'postulate' it for the sake of the working value of the
postulate to himself. The postulate guides certain of his acts and leads
to advantageous consequences; but the moment he understands fully that
the postulate is true ONLY (!) in this sense, it ceases (or should
cease) to be true for him that the other man really HAS a headache. All
that makes the postulate most precious then evaporates: his interest in
his fellow-man 'becomes a veiled form of self-interest, and his world
grows cold, dull, and heartless.'
Such an objection makes a curious muddle of the pragmatist's universe
of discourse. Within that universe the pragmatist finds some one with
a headache or other feeling, and some one else who postulates that
feeling. Asking on what condition the postulate is 'true' the pragmatist
replies that, for the postulator at any rate, it is true just
in proportion as to believe in it works in him the fuller sum of
satisfactions. What is it that is satisfactory here? Surely to BELIEVE
in the postulated object, namely, in the really existing feeling of
the other man. But how (especially if the postulator were himself a
thoroughgoing pragmatist) could it ever be satisfactory to him NOT
to believe in that feeling, so long as, in Professor Stout's words,
disbelief 'made the world seem to him cold, dull, and heartless'?
Disbelief would seem, on pragmatist principles, quite out of the
question under such conditions, unless the heartlessness of the world
were made probable already on other grounds. And since the belief in the
headache, true for the subject assumed in the pragmatist's universe of
discourse, is also true for the pragmatist who for his epitemologizing
purposes has assumed that entire universe, why is it not true in that
universe absolutely? The headache believed in is a reality there, and no
extant mind disbelieves it, neither the critic's mind nor his subject's!
Have our opponents any better brand of truth in this real universe of
ours that they can show us? [Footnote: I see here a chance to forestall
a criticism which some one may make on Lecture III of my Pragmatism,
where, on pp. 96-100, I said that 'God' and 'Matter' might be regarded
as synonymous terms, so long as no differing future consequences were
deducible from the two conceptions. The passage was transcribed from my
address at the California Philosophical Union, reprinted in the Journal
of Philosophy, vol. i, p. 673. I had no sooner given the address than
I perceived a flaw in that part of it; but I have left the passage
unaltered ever since, because the flaw did not spoil its illustrative
value. The flaw was evident when, as a case analogous to that of a
godless universe, I thought of what I called an 'automatic sweetheart,'
meaning a soulless body which should be absolutely indistinguishable
from a spiritually animated maiden, laughing, talking, blushing, nursing
us, and performing all feminine offices as tactfully and sweetly as if
a soul were in her. Would any one regard her as a full equivalent?
Certainly not, and why? Because, framed as we are, our egoism craves
above all things inward sympathy and recognition, love and admiration.
The outward treatment is valued mainly as an expression, as a
manifestation of the accompanying consciousness believed in.
Pragmatically, then, belief in the automatic sweetheart would not work,
and is point of fact no one treats it as a serious hypothesis. The
godless universe would be exactly similar. Even if matter could do
every outward thing that God does, the idea of it would not work as
satisfactorily, because the chief call for a God on modern men's part
is for a being who will inwardly recognize them and judge them
sympathetically. Matter disappoints this craving of our ego, so God
remains for most men the truer hypothesis, and indeed remains so for
definite pragmatic reasons.]
So much for the third misunderstanding, which is but one specification
of the following still wider one.
FOURTH MISUNDERSTANDING: NO PRAGMATIST CAN BE A REALIST IN HIS
EPISTEMOLOGY.
This is supposed to follow from his statement that the truth of our
beliefs consists in general in their giving satisfaction. Of course
satisfaction per se is a subjective condition; so the conclusion is
drawn that truth falls wholly inside of the subject, who then may
manufacture it at his pleasure. True beliefs become thus wayward
affections, severed from all responsibility to other parts of
experience.
It is difficult to excuse such a parody of the pragmatist's opinion,
ignoring as it does every element but one of his universe of discourse.
The terms of which that universe consists positively forbid any
non-realistic interpretation of the function of knowledge defined there.
The pragmatizing epistemologist posits there a reality and a mind with
ideas. What, now, he asks, can make those ideas true of that reality?
Ordinary epistemology contents itself with the vague statement that the
ideas must 'correspond' or 'agree'; the pragmatist insists on being more
concrete, and asks what such 'agreement' may mean in detail. He finds
first that the ideas must point to or lead towards THAT reality and no
other, and then that the pointings and leadings must yield satisfaction
as their result. So far the pragmatist is hardly less abstract than the
ordinary slouchy epistemologist; but as he defines himself farther, he
grows more concrete. The entire quarrel of the intellectualist with him
is over his concreteness, intellectualism contending that the vaguer and
more abstract account is here the more profound. The concrete pointing
and leading are conceived by the pragmatist to be the work of other
portions of the same universe to which the reality and the mind belong,
intermediary verifying bits of experience with which the mind at one
end, and the reality at the other, are joined. The 'satisfaction,' in
turn, is no abstract satisfaction ueberhaupt, felt by an unspecified
being, but is assumed to consist of such satisfactions (in the plural)
as concretely existing men actually do find in their beliefs. As we
humans are constituted in point of fact, we find that to believe in
other men's minds, in independent physical realities, in past events, in
eternal logical relations, is satisfactory. We find hope satisfactory.
We often find it satisfactory to cease to doubt. Above all we find
CONSISTENCY satisfactory, consistency between the present idea and the
entire rest of our mental equipment, including the whole order of our
sensations, and that of our intuitions of likeness and difference, and
our whole stock of previously acquired truths.
The pragmatist, being himself a man, and imagining in general no
contrary lines of truer belief than ours about the 'reality' which he
has laid at the base of his epistemological discussion, is willing to
treat our satisfactions as possibly really true guides to it, not as
guides true solely for US. It would seem here to be the duty of his
critics to show with some explicitness why, being our subjective
feelings, these satisfactions can not yield 'objective' truth. The
beliefs which they accompany 'posit' the assumed reality, 'correspond'
and 'agree' with it, and 'fit' it in perfectly definite and assignable
ways, through the sequent trains of thought and action which form
their verification, so merely to insist on using these words abstractly
instead of concretely is no way of driving the pragmatist from the
field,--his more concrete account virtually includes his critic's. If
our critics have any definite idea of a truth more objectively grounded
than the kind we propose, why do they not show it more articulately?
As they stand, they remind one of Hegel's man who wanted 'fruit,' but
rejected cherries, pears, and grapes, because they were not fruit in the
abstract. We offer them the full quart-pot, and they cry for the empty
quart-capacity.
But here I think I hear some critic retort as follows: 'If satisfactions
are all that is needed to make truth, how about the notorious fact that
errors are so often satisfactory? And how about the equally notorious
fact that certain true beliefs may cause the bitterest dissatisfaction?
Isn't it clear that not the satisfaction which it gives, but the
relation of the belief TO THE REALITY is all that makes it true? Suppose
there were no such reality, and that the satisfactions yet remained:
would they not then effectively work falsehood? Can they consequently be
treated distinctively as the truth-builders? It is the INHERENT RELATION
TO REALITY of a belief that gives us that specific TRUTH-satisfaction,
compared with which all other satisfactions are the hollowest humbug.
The satisfaction of KNOWING TRULY is thus the only one which the
pragmatist ought to have considered. As a PSYCHOLOGICAL SENTIMENT,
the anti-pragmatist gladly concedes it to him, but then only as a
concomitant of truth, not as a constituent. What CONSTITUTES truth
is not the sentiment, but the purely logical or objective function of
rightly cognizing the reality, and the pragmatist's failure to reduce
this function to lower values is patent.'
Such anti-pragmatism as this seems to me a tissue of confusion. To begin
with, when the pragmatist says 'indispensable,' it confounds this with
'sufficient.' The pragmatist calls satisfactions indispensable for
truth-building, but I have everywhere called them insufficient unless
reality be also incidentally led to. If the reality assumed were
cancelled from the pragmatist's universe of discourse, he would
straightway give the name of falsehoods to the beliefs remaining, in
spite of all their satisfactoriness. For him, as for his critic, there
can be no truth if there is nothing to be true about. Ideas are so
much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives
them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatist I have so carefully
posited 'reality' AB INITIO, and why, throughout my whole discussion, I
remain an epistemological realist. [Footnote: I need hardly remind
the reader that both sense-percepts and percepts of ideal relation
(comparisons, etc.) should be classed among the realities. The bulk of
our mental 'stock' consists of truths concerning these terms.]
The anti-pragmatist is guilty of the further confusion of imagining
that, in undertaking to give him an account of what truth formally
means, we are assuming at the same time to provide a warrant for
it, trying to define the occasions when he can be sure of materially
possessing it. Our making it hinge on a reality so 'independent' that
when it comes, truth comes, and when it goes, truth goes with it,
disappoints this naive expectation, so he deems our description
unsatisfactory. I suspect that under this confusion lies the still
deeper one of not discriminating sufficiently between the two notions,
truth and reality. Realities are not TRUE, they ARE; and beliefs are
true OF them. But I suspect that in the anti-pragmatist mind the two
notions sometimes swap their attributes. The reality itself, I fear, is
treated as if 'true' and conversely. Whoso tells us of the one, it is
then supposed, must also be telling us of the other; and a true idea
must in a manner BE, or at least YIELD without extraneous aid, the
reality it cognitively is possessed of.
To this absolute-idealistic demand pragmatism simply opposes its non
possumus. If there is to be truth, it says, both realities and beliefs
about them must conspire to make it; but whether there ever is such a
thing, or how anyone can be sure that his own beliefs possess it, it
never pretends to determine. That truth-satisfaction par excellence
which may tinge a belief unsatisfactory in other ways, it easily
explains as the feeling of consistency with the stock of previous
truths, or supposed truths, of which one's whole past experience may
have left one in possession.
But are not all pragmatists sure that their own belief is right? their
enemies will ask at this point; and this leads me to the
FIFTH MISUNDERSTANDING: WHAT PRAGMATISTS SAY IS INCONSISTENT WITH THEIR
SAYING SO.
A correspondent puts this objection as follows: 'When you say to your
audience, "pragmatism is the truth concerning truth," the first truth is
different from the second. About the first you and they are not to be at
odds; you are not giving them liberty to take or leave it according as
it works satisfactorily or not for their private uses. Yet the second
truth, which ought to describe and include the first, affirms this
liberty. Thus the INTENT of your utterance seems to contradict the
CONTENT of it.'
General scepticism has always received this same classic refutation.
'You have to dogmatize,' the rationalists say to the sceptics,' whenever
you express the sceptical position; so your lives keep contradicting
your thesis.' One would suppose that the impotence of so hoary an
argument to abate in the slightest degree the amount of general
scepticism in the world might have led some rationalists themselves to
doubt whether these instantaneous logical refutations are such
fatal ways, after all, of killing off live mental attitudes. General
scepticism is the live mental attitude of refusing to conclude. It is
a permanent torpor of the will, renewing itself in detail towards each
successive thesis that offers, and you can no more kill it off by logic
than you can kill off obstinacy or practical joking. This is why it is
so irritating. Your consistent sceptic never puts his scepticism into
a formal proposition,--he simply chooses it as a habit. He provokingly
hangs back when he might so easily join us in saying yes, but he is
not illogical or stupid,--on the contrary, he often impresses us by his
intellectual superiority. This is the REAL scepticism that rationalists
have to meet, and their logic does not even touch it.
No more can logic kill the pragmatist's behavior: his act of utterance,
so far from contradicting, accurately exemplifies the matter which he
utters. What is the matter which he utters? In part, it is this, that
truth, concretely considered, is an attribute of our beliefs, and that
these are attitudes that follow satisfactions. The ideas around which
the satisfactions cluster are primarily only hypotheses that
challenge or summon a belief to come and take its stand upon them.
The pragmatist's idea of truth is just such a challenge. He finds it
ultra-satisfactory to accept it, and takes his own stand accordingly.
But, being gregarious as they are, men seek to spread their beliefs,
to awaken imitation, to infect others. Why should not YOU also find the
same belief satisfactory? thinks the pragmatist, and forthwith endeavors
to convert you. You and he will then believe similarly; you will hold
up your subject-end of a truth, which will be a truth objective and
irreversible if the reality holds up the object-end by being itself
present simultaneously. What there is of self-contradiction in all this
I confess I cannot discover. The pragmatist's conduct in his own case
seems to me on the contrary admirably to illustrate his universal
formula; and of all epistemologists, he is perhaps the only one who is
irreproachably self-consistent.
SIXTH MISUNDERSTANDING: PRAGMATISM EXPLAINS NOT WHAT TRUTH IS, BUT ONLY
HOW IT IS ARRIVED AT.
In point of fact it tells us both, tells us what it is incidentally to
telling us how it is arrived at,--for what IS arrived at except just
what the truth is? If I tell you how to get to the railroad station,
don't I implicitly introduce you to the WHAT, to the being and nature of
that edifice? It is quite true that the abstract WORD 'how' hasn't
the same meaning as the abstract WORD 'what,' but in this universe of
concrete facts you cannot keep hows and whats asunder. The reasons why
I find it satisfactory to believe that any idea is true, the HOW of my
arriving at that belief, may be among the very reasons why the idea IS
true in reality. If not, I summon the anti-pragmatist to explain the
impossibility articulately.
His trouble seems to me mainly to arise from his fixed inability to
understand how a concrete statement can possibly mean as much, or be as
valuable, as an abstract one. I said above that the main quarrel between
us and our critics was that of concreteness VERSUS abstractness. This is
the place to develop that point farther.
In the present question, the links of experience sequent upon an idea,
which mediate between it and a reality, form and for the pragmatist
indeed ARE, the CONCRETE relation of truth that may obtain between the
idea and that reality. They, he says, are all that we mean when we speak
of the idea 'pointing' to the reality, 'fitting' it, 'corresponding'
with it, or 'agreeing' with it,--they or other similar mediating trains
of verification. Such mediating events make the idea 'true.' The idea
itself, if it exists at all, is also a concrete event: so pragmatism
insists that truth in the singular is only a collective name for truths
in the plural, these consisting always of series of definite events; and
that what intellectualism calls the truth, the inherent truth, of any
one such series is only the abstract name for its truthfulness in act,
for the fact that the ideas there do lead to the supposed reality in a
way that we consider satisfactory.
The pragmatist himself has no objection to abstractions. Elliptically,
and 'for short,' he relies on them as much as any one, ending upon
innumerable occasions that their comparative emptiness makes of them
useful substitutes for the overfulness of the facts he meets, with. But
he never ascribes to them a higher grade of reality. The full reality
of a truth for him is always some process of verification, in which the
abstract property of connecting ideas with objects truly is workingly
embodied. Meanwhile it is endlessly serviceable to be able to talk of
properties abstractly and apart from their working, to find them the
same in innumerable cases, to take them 'out of time,' and to treat
of their relations to other similar abstractions. We thus form whole
universes of platonic ideas ante rem, universes in posse, tho none of
them exists effectively except in rebus. Countless relations obtain
there which nobody experiences as obtaining,--as, in the eternal
universe of musical relations, for example, the notes of Aennchen von
Tharau were a lovely melody long ere mortal ears ever heard them. Even
so the music of the future sleeps now, to be awakened hereafter. Or, if
we take the world of geometrical relations, the thousandth decimal of
'pi' sleeps there, tho no one may ever try to compute it. Or, if we take
the universe of 'fitting,' countless coats 'fit' backs, and countless
boots 'fit' feet, on which they are not practically FITTED; countless
stones 'fit' gaps in walls into which no one seeks to fit them actually.
In the same way countless opinions 'fit' realities, and countless truths
are valid, tho no thinker ever thinks them.
For the anti-pragmatist these prior timeless relations are the
presupposition of the concrete ones, and possess the profounder dignity
and value. The actual workings of our ideas in verification-processes
are as naught in comparison with the 'obtainings' of this discarnate
truth within them.
For the pragmatist, on the contrary,--all discarnate truth is static,
impotent, and relatively spectral, full truth being the truth that
energizes and does battle. Can any one suppose that the sleeping quality
of truth would ever have been abstracted or have received a name, if
truths had remained forever in that storage-vault of essential timeless
'agreements' and had never been embodied in any panting struggle of
men's live ideas for verification? Surely no more than the abstract
property of 'fitting' would have received a name, if in our world
there had been no backs or feet or gaps in walls to be actually fitted.
EXISTENTIAL truth is incidental to the actual competition of opinions.
ESSENTIAL truth, the truth of the intellectualists, the truth with no
one thinking it, is like the coat that fits tho no one has ever tried
it on, like the music that no ear has listened to. It is less real, not
more real, than the verified article; and to attribute a superior
degree of glory to it seems little more than a piece of perverse
abstraction-worship. As well might a pencil insist that the outline
is the essential thing in all pictorial representation, and chide
the paint-brush and the camera for omitting it, forgetting that THEIR
pictures not only contain the whole outline, but a hundred other things
in addition. Pragmatist truth contains the whole of intellectualist
truth and a hundred other things in addition. Intellectualist truth is
then only pragmatist truth in posse. That on innumerable occasions men
do substitute truth in posse or verifiability, for verification or truth
in act, is a fact to which no one attributes more importance than the
pragmatist: he emphasizes the practical utility of such a habit. But
he does not on that account consider truth in posse,--truth not alive
enough ever to have been asserted or questioned or contradicted, to be
the metaphysically prior thing, to which truths in act are tributary and
subsidiary. When intellectualists do this, pragmatism charges them with
inverting the real relation. Truth in posse MEANS only truths in act;
and he insists that these latter take precedence in the order of logic
as well as in that of being.