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.
