Essays in Experimental Logic Part 13

James's language occasionally leaves the impression that the fact of the inevitable involution of the personal factor in every belief gives some special sanction to some special belief. Mr. James says that his essay on the _right_ to believe was unluckily ent.i.tled the "_Will_ to believe" (p. 258). Well, even the term "right" is unfortunate, if the personal or belief factor is inevitable--unfortunate because it seems to indicate a privilege which might be exercised in special cases, in religion, for example, though not in science; or, because it suggests to some minds that the fact of the personal complicity involved in belief is a warrant for this or that special personal att.i.tude, instead of being a warning to locate and define it so as to accept responsibility for it. If we mean by "will" not something deliberate and consciously intentional (much less, something insincere), but an active personal partic.i.p.ation, then belief _as_ will, rather than either the right or the will to believe seems to phrase the matter correctly.

I have attempted to review not so much Mr. James's book as the present status of the pragmatic movement which is expressed in the book; and I have selected only those points which seem to bear directly upon matters of contemporary controversy. Even as an account of this limited field, the foregoing pages do an injustice to Mr. James, save as it is recognized that his lectures were "popular lectures," as the t.i.tle-page advises us. We cannot expect in such lectures the kind of explicitness which would satisfy the professional and technical interests that have inspired this review. Moreover, it is inevitable that the attempt to compose different points of view, hitherto unco-ordinated, into a single whole should give rise to problems foreign to any one factor of the synthesis, left to itself. The need and possibility of the discrimination of various elements in the pragmatic meaning of "practical," attempted in this review, would hardly have been recognized by me were it not for by-products of perplexity and confusion which Mr. James's combination has effected.

Mr. James has given so many evidences of the sincerity of his intellectual aims, that I trust to his pardon for the injustice which the character of my review may have done _him_, in view of whatever service it may render in clarifying the problem to which he is devoted.

As for the book itself, it is in any case beyond a critic's praise or blame. It is more likely to take place as a philosophical cla.s.sic than any other writing of our day. A critic who should attempt to appraise it would probably give one more ill.u.s.tration of the sterility of criticism compared with the productiveness of creative genius. Even those who dislike pragmatism can hardly fail to find much of profit in the exhibition of Mr. James's instinct for concrete facts, the breadth of his sympathies, and his illuminating insights. Unreserved frankness, lucid imagination, varied contacts with life digested into summary and trenchant conclusions, keen perceptions of human nature in the concrete, a constant sense of the subordination of philosophy to life, capacity to put things into an English which projects ideas as if bodily into s.p.a.ce till they are solid things to walk around and survey from different sides--these things are not so common in philosophy that they may not smell sweet even by the name of pragmatism.

FOOTNOTES:

[69] William James, _Pragmatism. A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking._ (Popular Lectures on Philosophy.) New York: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1907. Pp. xiii[+]309.

[70] Certain aspects of the doctrine are here purposely omitted, and will meet us later.

[71] Vol. IV, p. 547.

[72] Only those who have already lost in the idealistic confusion of existence and meaning will take this to mean that the object is those changes in our reactions.

[73] I a.s.sume that the reader is sufficiently familiar with Mr.

James's book not to be misled by the text into thinking that Mr. James himself discriminates as I have done these three types of problems from one another. He does not; but, none the less, the three formulae for the three situations are there.

[74] The idea of immortality, or the traditional theistic idea of G.o.d, for example, may produce its good consequences, not in virtue of the idea as idea, but from the character of the person who entertains the belief; or it may be the idea of the supreme value of ideal considerations, rather than that of their temporal duration, which works.

[75] "Eternal truth" is one of the most ambiguous phrases that philosophers trip over. It may mean eternally in existence; or that a statement which is ever true is always true (if it is true a fly is buzzing, it is eternally true that just now a fly buzzed); or it may mean that some truths, _in so far as wholly conceptual_, are irrelevant to any particular time determination, since they are non-existential in import--e.g., the truth of geometry dialectically taken--that is, without asking whether any particular existence exemplifies them.

[76] Such statements, it ought in fairness to be said, generally come when Mr. James is speaking of a doctrine which he does not himself believe, and arise, I think, in that fairness and frankness of Mr.

James, so unusual in philosophers, which cause him to lean over backward--unpragmatically, it seems to me. As to the claim of his own doctrine, he consistently sticks to his statement: "Pent in, as the pragmatist, more than any one, sees himself to be, between the whole body of funded truths squeezed from the past and the coercions of the world of sense about him, who, so well as he, feels the immense pressure of objective control under which our minds perform their operations? If anyone imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandments one day, says Emerson" (p. 233).

[77] Of course, Mr. James holds that this "in so far" goes a very small way. See pp. 77-79. But even the slightest concession is, I think, non-pragmatic unless the satisfaction is relevant to the idea as intent. Now the satisfaction in question comes not from the idea as _idea_, but from its acceptance as _true_. Can a satisfaction dependent on an a.s.sumption that an idea is already true be relevant to testing the truth of an idea? And can an idea, like that of the absolute, which, if true, "absolutely" precludes any appeal to consequences as test of truth, be confirmed by use of the pragmatic test without sheer self-contradiction? In other words, we have a confusion of the test of an idea as idea, with that of the value of a belief as belief. On the other hand, it is quite possible that all Mr.

James intends by truth here is true (i.e., genuine) meaning at stake in the issue--true not as distinct from false, but from meaningless or verbal.

XIII

AN ADDED NOTE AS TO THE "PRACTICAL"

It is easier to start a legend than to prevent its continued circulation. No misconception of the instrumental logic has been more persistent than the belief that it makes knowledge merely a means to a practical end, or to the satisfaction of practical needs--practical being taking to signify some quite definite utilities of a material or bread-and-b.u.t.ter type. Habitual a.s.sociations aroused by the word "pragmatic" have been stronger than the most explicit and emphatic statements which any pragmatist has been able to make. But I again affirm that the term "pragmatic" means only the rule of referring all thinking, all reflective considerations, to _consequences_ for final meaning and test. Nothing is said about the nature of the consequences; they may be aesthetic, or moral, or political, or religious in quality--anything you please. All that the theory requires is that they be in some way consequences of thinking; not, indeed, of it alone, but of it acted upon in connection with other things. This is no after-thought inserted to lessen the force of objections. Mr. Peirce explained that he took the term "pragmatic"

from Kant, in order to denote empirical consequences. When he refers to their practical character it is only to indicate a criterion by which to avoid purely verbal disputes. Different consequences are alleged to const.i.tute rival meanings of a term. Is a difference more than merely one of formulation? The way to get an answer is to ask whether, if realized, these consequences would exact of us different modes of behavior. If they do not make such a difference in conduct the difference between them is conventional. It is not that consequences are themselves practical, but that practical consequences from them may at times be appealed to in order to decide the specific question of whether two proposed meanings differ save in words. Mr.

James says expressly that what is important is that the consequences should be specific, not that they should be active. When he said that general notions must "cash in," he meant of course that they must be translatable into verifiable specific things. But the words "cash in"

were enough for some of his critics, who pride themselves upon a logical rigor unattainable by mere pragmatists.

In the logical version of pragmatism termed instrumentalism, action or practice does indeed play a fundamental role. But it concerns not the nature of consequences but the nature of knowing. To use a term which is now more fas.h.i.+onable (and surely to some extent in consequence of pragmatism) than it was earlier, instrumentalism means a behaviorist theory of thinking and knowing. It means that knowing is literally something which we do; that a.n.a.lysis is ultimately physical and active; that meanings in their logical quality are standpoints, att.i.tudes, and methods of behaving toward facts, and that active experimentation is essential to verification. Put in another way it holds that thinking does not mean any transcendent states or acts suddenly introduced into a previously natural scene, but that the operations of knowing are (or are artfully derived from) natural responses of the organism, which const.i.tute knowing in virtue of the situation of doubt in which they arise and in virtue of the uses of inquiry, reconstruction, and control to which they are put. There is no warrant in the doctrine for carrying over _this_ practical quality into the consequences in which action culminates, and by which it is tested and corrected. A knowing as an act is instrumental to the resultant controlled and more significant situation; this does not imply anything about the intrinsic or the instrumental character of the consequent situation. That is whatever it may be in a given case.

There is nothing novel nor heterodox in the notion that thinking is instrumental. The very word is redolent of an _Organum_--whether _novum_ or _veterum_. The term "instrumentality," applied to thinking, raises at once, however, the question of whether thinking as a tool falls within or without the subject-matter which it shapes into knowledge. The answer of formal logic (adopted moreover by Kant and followed in some way by all neo-Kantian logics) is unambiguous. To call logic "formal" means precisely that mind or thought supplies forms foreign to the original subject-matter, but yet required in order that it should have the appropriate form of knowledge. In this regard it deviates from the Aristotelian _Organon_ which it professes to follow. For according to Aristotle, the processes of knowing--of teaching and learning--which lead up to knowledge are but the actualization through the potentialities of the human body of the _same_ forms or natures which are previously actualized in Nature through the potentialities of extra-organic bodies. Thinking which is not instrumental to truth, which is merely formal in the modern sense, would have been a monstrosity inconceivable to him. But the discarding of the metaphysics of form and matter, of cyclic actualizations and eternal species, deprived the Aristotelian "thought" of any place within the scheme of things, and left it an activity with forms alien to subject-matter. To conceive of thinking as instrumental to truth or knowledge, and as a tool shaped out of the same subject-matter as that to which it is applied, is but to return to the Aristotelian tradition about logic. That the practice of science has in the meantime subst.i.tuted a logic of experimental discovery (of which definition and cla.s.sification are themselves but auxiliary tools) for a logic of arrangement and exposition of what is already known, necessitates, however, a very different sort of _Organon_. It makes necessary the conception that the object of knowledge is not something with which thinking sets out, but something with which it ends: something which the processes of inquiry and testing, that const.i.tute thinking, themselves produce. Thus the object of knowledge is practical in the sense that it depends upon a specific kind of practice for its existence--for its existence as an object of knowledge. How practical it may be in any other sense than this is quite another story. The _object of knowledge_ marks an achieved triumph, a secured control--that holds by the very nature of knowledge. What other uses it may have depends upon its own inherent character, not upon anything in the nature of knowledge. We do not know the origin and nature and the cure of malaria till we can both produce and eliminate malaria; the _value_ of either the production or the removal depends upon the character of malaria in relation to other things. And so it is with mathematical knowledge, or with knowledge of politics or art. Their respective objects are not known till they are made in course of the process of experimental thinking. Their usefulness when made is whatever, from infinity to zero, experience may subsequently determine it to be.

XIV

THE LOGIC OF JUDGMENTS OF PRACTICE

THEIR NATURE

In introducing the discussion, I shall first say a word to avoid possible misunderstandings. It may be objected that such a term as "practical judgment" is misleading; that the term "practical judgment"

is a misnomer, and a dangerous one, since all judgments by their very nature are intellectual or theoretical. Consequently, there is a danger that the term will lead us to treat as judgment and knowledge something which is not really knowledge at all and thus start us on the road which ends in mysticism or obscurantism. All this is admitted. I do not mean by practical judgment a type of judgment having a different organ and source from other judgments. I mean simply a kind of judgment having a specific type of subject-matter.

Propositions exist relating to _agenda_--to things to do or be done, judgments of a situation demanding action. There are, for example, propositions of the form: M. N. should do thus and so; it is better, wiser, more prudent, right, advisable, opportune, expedient, etc., to act thus and so. And this is the type of judgment I denote practical.

It may also be objected that this type of subject-matter is not distinctive; that there is no ground for marking it off from judgments of the form _SP_, or _mRn_. I am willing, again, to admit that such may turn out to be the fact. But meanwhile the prima facie difference is worth considering, if only for the sake of reaching a conclusion as to whether or no there is a kind of subject-matter so distinctive as to imply a distinctive logical form. To a.s.sume in advance that the subject-matter of practical judgments _must_ be reducible to the form _SP_ or _mRn_ is a.s.suredly as gratuitous as the contrary a.s.sumption. It begs one of the most important questions about the world which can be asked: the nature of time. Moreover, current discussion exhibits, if not a complete void, at least a decided lacuna as to propositions of this type. Mr. Russell has recently said that of the two parts of logic the first enumerates or inventories the different kinds or forms of propositions.[78] It is noticeable that he does not even mention this kind as a possible kind. Yet it is conceivable that this omission seriously compromises the discussion of other kinds.

Additional specimens of practical judgments may be given: He had better consult a physician; it would not be advisable for you to invest in those bonds; the United States should either modify its Monroe Doctrine or else make more efficient military preparations; this is a good time to build a house; if I do that I shall be doing wrong, etc. It is silly to dwell upon the practical importance of judgments of this sort, but not wholly silly to say that their practical importance arouses suspicion as to the grounds of their neglect in discussion of logical forms in general. Regarding them, we may say:

1. Their subject-matter implies an incomplete situation. This incompleteness is not psychical. Something is "there," but what is there does not const.i.tute the entire objective situation. _As_ there, it requires something else. Only after this something else has been supplied will the given coincide with the full subject-matter. This consideration has an important bearing upon the conception of the indeterminate and contingent. It is sometimes a.s.sumed (both by adherents and by opponents) that the validity of these notions entails that the _given_ is itself indeterminate--which appears to be nonsense. The logical implication is that of a subject-matter as yet _unterminated_, unfinished, or not wholly given. The implication is of future things. Moreover, the incompleteness is not personal. I mean by this that the situation is not confined _within_ the one making the judgment; the practical judgment is neither exclusively nor primarily about one's self. On the contrary, it is a judgment about one's self only as it is a judgment about the situation in which one is included, and in which a mult.i.tude of other factors external to self are included. The contrary a.s.sumption is so constantly made about moral judgments that this statement must appear dogmatic. But surely the prima facie case is that when I judge that I should not give money to the street beggar I am judging the nature of an objective situation, and that the conclusion about myself is governed by the proposition about the situation in which I happen to be included. The full, complex proposition includes the beggar, social conditions and consequences, a charity organization society, etc., on exactly the same footing as it contains myself. Aside from the fact that it seems impossible to defend the "objectivity" of moral propositions on any other ground, we may at least point to the fact that judgments of policy, whether made about ourselves or some other agent, are certainly judgments of a _situation_ which is temporarily unfinished.

"Now is a good time for me to buy certain railway bonds" is a judgment about myself only because it is primarily a judgment about hundreds of factors wholly external to myself. If the genuine existence of such propositions be admitted, the only question about moral judgments is whether or no they are cases of practical judgments as the latter have been defined--a question of utmost importance for moral theory, but not of crucial import for our logical discussion.

2. Their subject-matter implies that the proposition is itself a factor in the completion of the situation, carrying it forward to its conclusion. According as the judgment is that this or that should be done, the situation will, when completed, have this or that subject-matter. The proposition that it is well to do this is a proposition to treat the given in a certain way. Since the way is established by the proposition, the proposition is _a_ determining factor in the outcome. As a proposition about the supplementation of the given, it is a factor _in_ the supplementation--and this not as an extraneous matter, something subsequent to the proposition, but in its own logical force. Here is found, prima facie at least, a marked distinction of the practical proposition from descriptive and narrative propositions, from the familiar _SP_ propositions and from those of pure mathematics. The latter imply that the proposition does not enter into the const.i.tution of the subject-matter of the proposition. There also is a distinction from another kind of contingent proposition, namely, that which has the form: "He has started for your house"; "The house is still burning"; "It will probably rain." The unfinishedness of the given is implied in these propositions, but it is not implied that the proposition is a factor in determining their completion.

3. The subject-matter implies that it makes a difference how the given is terminated: that one outcome is better than another, and that the proposition is to be a factor in securing (as far as may be) the better. In other words, there is something objectively at stake in the forming of the proposition. A right or wrong _descriptive_ judgment (a judgment confined to the given, whether temporal, spatial, or subsistent) does not affect its subject-matter; it does not help or hinder its development, for by hypothesis it has no development. But a practical proposition affects the subject-matter for better or worse, for it is a judgment as to the condition (the thing to be done) of the existence of the complete subject-matter.[79]

4. A practical proposition is binary. It is a judgment that the given is to be treated in a specified way; it is also a judgment that the given admits of such treatment, that it admits of a specified objective termination. It is a judgment, at the same stroke, of end--the result to be brought about--and of means. Ethical theories which disconnect the discussion of ends--as so many of them do--from determination of means, thereby take discussion of ends out of the region of judgment. If there be such ends, they have no intellectual status.

To judge that I should see a physician implies that the given elements of the situation should be completed in a specific way and also that they afford the conditions which make the proposed completion practicable. The proposition concerns both resources and obstacles--intellectual determination of elements lying in the way of, say, proper vigor, and of elements which can be utilized to get around or surmount these obstacles. The judgment regarding the need of a physician implies the existence of hindrances in the pursuit of the normal occupations of life, but it equally implies the existence of positive factors which may be set in motion to surmount the hindrances and reinstate normal pursuits.

It is worth while to call attention to the reciprocal character of the practical judgment in its bearing upon the statement of means. From the side of the end, the reciprocal nature locates and condemns utopianism and romanticism: what is sometimes called idealism. From the side of means, it locates and condemns materialism and predeterminism: what is sometimes called mechanism. By materialism I mean the conception that the given contains exhaustively the entire subject-matter of practical judgment: that the facts in their givenness are all "there is to it."

The given is undoubtedly just what it is; it is determinate throughout.

But it is the given _of_ something to be done. The survey and inventory of present conditions (of facts) are not something complete in themselves; they exist for the sake of an intelligent determination of what is to be done, of what is required to complete the given. To conceive the given in any such way, then, as to imply that it negates in its given character the possibility of any doing, of any modification, is self-contradictory. As a part of a practical judgment, the discovery that a man is suffering from an illness is not a discovery that he must suffer, or that the subsequent course of events is determined by his illness; it is the indication of a needed and a possible course by which to restore health. Even the discovery that the illness is hopeless falls within this principle. It is an indication not to waste time and money on certain fruitless endeavors, to prepare affairs with respect to death, etc. It is also an indication of search for conditions which will render in the future similar cases remediable, not hopeless. The whole case for the genuineness of practical judgments stands or falls with this principle. It is open to question. But decision as to its validity must rest upon empirical evidence. It cannot be ruled out of court by a dialectic development of the implications of propositions about what is already given or what has already happened. That is, its invalidity cannot be deduced from an a.s.sertion that the character of the scientific judgment as a discovery and statement of what is forbids it, much less from an a.n.a.lysis of mathematical propositions. For this method only begs the question.

Unless the facts are complicated by the surrept.i.tious introduction of some preconception, the prima facie empirical case is that the scientific judgment--the determinate diagnosis--favors instead of forbidding the doctrine of a possibility of change of the given. To overthrow this presumption means, I repeat, to discover specific evidence which makes it impossible. And in view of the immense body of empirical evidence showing that we add to control of what is given (the subject-matter of scientific judgment) by means of scientific judgment, the likelihood of any such discovery seems slight.

These considerations throw light upon the proper meaning of (practical) idealism and of mechanism. Idealism in action does not seem to be anything except an explicit recognition of just the implications we have been considering. It signifies a recognition that the given is given _as_ obstacles to one course of active development or completion and _as_ resources for another course by which development of the situation directly blocked may be indirectly secured. It is not a blind instinct of hopefulness or that miscellaneous obscurantist emotionalism often called optimism, any more than it is utopianism. It is recognition of the increased liberation and redirection of the course of events achieved through accurate discovery. Or, more specifically, it is this recognition operating as a ruling motive in extending the work of discovery and utilizing its results.

"Mechanism" means the reciprocal recognition on the side of means. It is the recognition of the import within the practical judgment, of the given, of fact, in its determinate character. The facts in their isolation, taken as complete in themselves, are not mechanistic. At most, they just are, and that is the end of them. They are mechanistic as indicating the mechanism, the means, of accomplis.h.i.+ng the possibilities which they indicate. Apart from a forward look (the antic.i.p.ation of the future movement of affairs) mechanism is a meaningless conception. There is no sense in applying the conception to a finished world, to any scene which is simply and only done with.

Propositions regarding a past world, just as past (not as furnis.h.i.+ng the conditions of what is to be done), might be complete and accurate, but they would be of the nature of a complex catalogue. To introduce, in addition, the conception of mechanism is to introduce the implication of possibilities of future accomplishment.[80]

5. The judgment of what is to be done implies, as we have just seen, a statement of what the given facts of the situation are, taken as indications of the course to pursue and of the means to be employed in its pursuit. Such a statement demands accuracy. Completeness is not so much an additional requirement as it is a condition of accuracy. For accuracy depends fundamentally upon relevancy to the determination of what is to be done. Completeness does not mean exhaustiveness _per se_, but adequacy as respects end and its means. To include too much, or what is irrelevant, is a violation of the demand for accuracy quite as well as to leave out--to fail to discover--what is important.

Clear recognition of this fact will enable one to avoid certain dialectic confusions. It has been argued that a judgment of given existence, or fact, cannot be hypothetical; that factuality and hypothetical character are contradictions in terms. They would be if the two qualifications were used in the same respect. But they are not. The hypothesis is that the facts which const.i.tute the terms of the proposition of the given are relevant and adequate for the purpose in hand--the determination of a possibility to be accomplished in action. The data may be as factual, as absolute as you please, and yet in no way guarantee that they are the data _of_ this particular judgment. Suppose the thing to be done is the formation of a prediction regarding the return of a comet. The prime difficulty is not in making observations, or in the mathematical calculations based upon them--difficult as these things may be. It is making sure that we have taken as data the observations really implicated in the doing rightly of this particular thing: that we have not left out something which is relevant, or included something which has nothing to do with the further movement of the comet. Darwin's hypothesis of natural selection does not stand or fall with the correctness of his propositions regarding breeding of animals in domestication. The facts of artificial selection may be as stated--in themselves there may be nothing hypothetical about them. But their bearing upon the origin of species _is_ a hypothesis. Logically, any factual proposition is a hypothetical proposition when it is made the basis of any inference.

6. The bearing of this remark upon the nature of the truth of practical judgments (including the judgment of what is given) is obvious. Their truth or falsity is const.i.tuted by the issue. The determination of end-means (const.i.tuting the terms and relations of the practical proposition) is hypothetical until the course of action indicated has been tried. The event or issue of such action _is_ the truth or falsity of the judgment. This is an immediate conclusion from the fact that only the issue gives the complete subject-matter. In this case, at least, verification and truth completely coincide--unless there is some serious error in the prior a.n.a.lysis.

This completes the account, preliminary to a consideration of other matters. But the account suggests another and independent question with respect to which I shall make an excursus. How far is it possible and legitimate to extend or generalize the results reached to apply to all propositions of facts? That is to say, is it possible and legitimate to treat all scientific or descriptive statements of matters of fact as implying indirectly if not directly, something to be done, future possibilities to be realized in action? The question as to legitimacy is too complicated to be discussed in an incidental way. But it cannot be denied that there is a possibility of such application, nor that the possibility is worth careful examination. We may frame at least a hypothesis that all judgments of fact have reference to a determination of courses of action to be tried and to the discovery of means for their realization. In the sense already explained all propositions which state discoveries or ascertainments, all categorical propositions, would be hypothetical, and their truth would coincide with their tested consequences effected by intelligent action.

This theory may be called pragmatism. But it is a type of pragmatism quite free from dependence upon a voluntaristic psychology. It is not complicated by reference to emotional satisfactions or the play of desires.

I am not arguing the point. But possibly critics of pragmatism would get a new light upon its meaning were they to set out with an a.n.a.lysis of ordinary practical judgments and then proceed to consider the bearing of its result upon judgments of facts and essences. Mr.

Bertrand Russell has remarked[81] that pragmatism originated as a theory about the truth of theories, but ignored the "truths of fact"

upon which theories rest and by which they are tested. I am not concerned to question this so far as the origin of pragmatism is concerned. Philosophy, at least, has been mainly a matter of theories; and Mr. James was conscientious enough to be troubled about the way in which the meaning of such theories is to be settled and the way in which they are to be tested. His pragmatism was in effect (as Mr.

Russell recognizes) a statement of the need of applying to philosophic theories the same kinds of test as are used in the theories of the inductive sciences. But this does not preclude the application of a like method to dealing with so-called "truths of fact." Facts may be facts, and yet not be the facts _of_ the inquiry in hand. In all scientific inquiry, however, to call them facts or data or truths of fact signifies that they are taken as the _relevant_ facts of the inference to be made. _If_ (as this would seem to indicate) they are then implicated however indirectly in a proposition about what is to be done, they are themselves theoretical in logical quality. Accuracy of statement and correctness of reasoning would then be factors in truth, but so also would be verification. Truth would be a triadic relation, but of a different sort from that expounded by Mr. Russell.