Essays in Experimental Logic Part 8

With the development of empirical research, uncertainty or contingency is no longer regarded as infecting in a wholesale way an entire region, discrediting it save as it can be brought under the protecting aegis of universal truths as major premises. Uncertainty is now a matter of detail. It is the question whether the particular fact is really what it has been taken to be. It involves contrast, not of a fact as a fixed particular over against some fixed universal, but of the existing mode of apprehension with another possible better apprehension.

From the standpoint of reasoning and proof the intellectual field is absolutely measured out in advance. Certainty is located in one part, intellectual indeterminateness or uncertainty in another. But when thinking becomes research, when the doubt-inquiry function comes to its own, the problem is just: What is the fact?

Hence the extreme interest in details as such; in observing, collecting, and comparing particular causes, in a.n.a.lysis of structure down to its const.i.tuent elements, interest in atoms, cells, and in all matters of arrangement in s.p.a.ce and time. The microscope, telescope, and spectroscope, the scalpel and microtome, the kymograph and the camera are not mere material appendages to thinking; they are as integral parts of investigative thought as were _Barbara_, _Celarent_, etc., of the logic of reasoning. Facts must be discovered, and to accomplish this, apparent "facts" must be resolved into their elements. Things must be readjusted in order to be held free from intrusion of impertinent circ.u.mstance and misleading suggestion.

Instrumentalities of extending and rectifying research are, therefore, of themselves organs of thinking. The specialization of the sciences, the almost daily birth of a new science, is a logical necessity--not a mere historical episode. Every phase of experience must be investigated, and each characteristic aspect presents its own peculiar problems which demand, therefore, their own technique of investigation. The discovery of difficulties, the subst.i.tution of doubt for quiescent acceptance, are more important than the sanctioning of belief through proof. Hence the importance of noting apparent exceptions, negative instances, extreme cases, anomalies. The interest is in the discrepant because that stimulates inquiry, not in the fixed universal which would terminate it once for all. Hence the roaming over the earth and through the skies for new facts which may be incompatible with old theories, and which may suggest new points of view.

To ill.u.s.trate these matters in detail would be to write the history of every modern science. The interest in multiplying phenomena, in increasing the area of facts, in developing new distinctions of quant.i.ty, structure, and form, is obviously characteristic of modern science. But we do not always heed its logical significance--that it makes thinking to consist in the extension and control of contact with new material so as to lead regularly to the development of new experience.

The elevation of the region of facts--the formerly condemned region of the inherently contingent and variable--to something that invites and rewards inquiry, defines the import, therefore, of the larger aspects of modern science. This spirit prides itself upon being positivistic--it deals with the observed and the observable. It will have naught to do with ideas that cannot verify themselves by showing themselves _in propria persona_. It is not enough to present credentials from more sovereign truths. These are hardly acceptable even as letters of introduction. Refutation of Newton's claim, that he did not make hypotheses, by pointing out that no one was busier in this direction than he, and that scientific power is generally in direct ratio to ability to imagine possibilities, is as easy as it is irrelevant. The hypotheses, the thoughts, that Newton employed were of and about fact; they were for the sake of exacting and extending what can be apprehended. Instead of being sacrosanct truths affording a redemption by grace to facts otherwise ambiguous, they were the articulating of ordinary facts. Hence the notion of law changes. It is no longer something governing things and events from on high; it is the statement of their own order.

Thus the exiling of occult forces and qualities is not so much a specific achievement as it is a demand of the changed att.i.tude. When thinking consists in the detection and determination of observable detail, forces, forms, qualities at large, are thrown out of employment. They are not so much proved non-existent as rendered nugatory. Disuse breeds their degeneration. When the universal is but the order of the facts themselves, the mediating machinery disappears along with the essences. There is subst.i.tuted for the hierarchical world in which each degree in the scale has its righteousness imputed from above a world h.o.m.ogeneous in structure and in the scheme of its parts; the same in heaven, earth, and the uttermost parts of the sea.

The ladder of values from the sublunary world with its irregular, extravagant, imperfect motion up to the stellar universe, with its self-returning perfect order, corresponded to the middle terms of the older logic. The steps were graduated, ascending from the indeterminate, una.s.sured matter of sense up to the eternal, unquestionable truths of rational perception. But when interest is occupied in finding out what anything and everything is, any fact is just as good as its fellow. The observable world is a democracy. The difference which makes a fact what it is is not an exclusive distinction, but a matter of position and quant.i.ty, an affair of locality and aggregation, traits which place all facts upon the same level, since all other observable facts also possess them and are, indeed, conjointly responsible for them. Laws are not edicts of a sovereign binding a world of subjects otherwise lawless; they are the agreements, the compacts of facts themselves, or, in the familiar language of Mill, the common attributes, the resemblances.

The emphasis of modern science upon control flows from the same source. Interest is in the new, in extension, in discovery. Inference is the advance into the unknown, the use of the established to win new worlds from the void. This requires and employs regulation--that is, method--in procedure. There cannot be a blind attack. A plan of campaign is needed. Hence the so-called practical applications of science, the Baconian "knowledge is power," the Comteian "science is prevision," are not extra-logical addenda or supererogatory benefits.

They are intrinsic to the logical method itself, which is just the orderly way of approaching new experiences so as to grasp and hold them.

The att.i.tude of research is necessarily toward the future. The application of science to the practical affairs of life, as in the stationary engine, or telephone, does not differ in principle from the determination of wave-lengths of light through the experimental control of the laboratory. Science lives only in arranging for new contacts, new insights. The school of Kant agrees with that of Mill in a.s.serting that judgment must, in order to be judgment, be synthetic or instructive; it must extend, inform, and purvey. When we recognize that this service of judgment in effecting growth of experience is not accidental, but that judgment means exactly the devising and using of suitable instrumentalities for this end, we remark that the so-called practical uses of science are only the further and freer play of the intrinsic movement of discovery itself.

We began with the a.s.sumption that thought is to be interpreted as a doubt-inquiry function, conducted for the purpose of arriving at that mental equilibrium known as a.s.surance or knowledge. We a.s.sumed that various stages of thinking could be marked out according to the amount of play which they give to doubt, and the consequent sincerity with which thinking is identified with free inquiry. Modern scientific procedure, as just set forth, seems to define the ideal or limit of this process. It is inquiry emanc.i.p.ated, universalized, whose sole aim and criterion is discovery, and hence it marks the terminus of our description. It is idle to conceal from ourselves, however, that scientific procedure as a practical undertaking, has not as yet reflected itself into any coherent and generally accepted theory of thinking, into any accepted doctrine of logic which is comparable to the Aristotelian. Kant's conviction that logic is a "complete and settled" science, which with absolutely "certain boundaries has gained nothing and lost nothing since Aristotle," is startlingly contradicted by the existing state of discussion of logical doctrine. The simple fact of the case is that there are at least three rival theories on the ground, each claiming to furnish the sole proper interpretation of the actual procedure of thought.

The Aristotelian logic is far from having withdrawn its claim. It still offers its framework as that into which the merely "empirical"

results of observation and experimental inquiry must be fitted if they are to be regarded as really "proved." Another school of logicians, starting professedly from modern psychology, discredits the whole traditional industry and reverses the Aristotelian theory of validity; it holds that only particular facts are self-supporting, and that the authority allowed to general principles is derivative and second hand.

A third school of philosophy claims, by a.n.a.lysis of science and experience, to justify the conclusion that the universe itself is a construction of thought, giving evidence throughout of the pervasive and const.i.tutive action of reason, and holds, consequently, that our logical processes are simply the reading off or coming to consciousness of the inherently rational structure already possessed by the universe in virtue of the presence within it of this pervasive and const.i.tutive action of thought. It thus denies both the claim of the traditional logic, that matters of experienced fact are mere particulars having their rationality in an external ground, and the claim of the empirical logic, that thought is just a gymnastic by which we vault from one presented fact to another remote in s.p.a.ce and time.

Which of the three doctrines is to be regarded as the legitimate exponent of the procedure of thought manifested in modern science?

While the Aristotelian logic is willing to waive a claim to be regarded as expounder of the actual procedure, it still insists upon its right to be regarded as the sole ultimate umpire of the validity or _proved_ character of the results reached. But the empirical and transcendental logics stand face to face as rivals, each a.s.serting that it alone tells the story of what science does and how it does it.

With the consciousness of this conflict my discussion in its present, or descriptive, phase must cease. Its close, however, suggests a further question. In so far as we adopt the conception that thinking is itself a doubt-inquiry process, must we not deny the claims of all of the three doctrines to be the articulate voicing of the methods of experimental science? Do they not all agree in setting up something fixed outside inquiry, supplying both its material and its limit? That the first principle and the empirical matters of fact of the Aristotelian logic fall outside the thinking process, and condemn the latter to a purely external and go-between agency, has been already sufficiently descanted upon. But it is also true that the fixed particulars, given facts, or sensations--whatever the empirical logician starts from--are material given ready-made to the thought-process, and externally limiting inquiry, instead of being distinctions arising within and because of search for truth. Nor, as regards this point, is the transcendental in any position to throw stones at the empirical logic. Thought "in itself" is so far from a process of inquiry that it is taken to be the eternal, fixed structure of the universe; _our_ thinking, involving doubt and investigation, is due wholly to our "finite," imperfect character, which condemns us to the task of merely imitating and reinstating "thought" in itself, once and forever complete, ready-made, fixed.

The practical procedure and practical a.s.sumptions of modern experimental science, since they make thinking essentially and not merely accidentally a process of discovery, seem irreconcilable with both the empirical and transcendental interpretations. At all events there is here sufficient discrepancy to give occasion for further search: Does not an account of thinking, basing itself on modern scientific procedure, demand a statement in which all the distinctions and terms of thought--judgment, concept, inference, subject, predicate, and copula of judgment, etc., _ad infinitum_--shall be interpreted simply and entirely as distinctive functions or divisions of labor within the doubt-inquiry process?

FOOTNOTES:

[46] _Logic_, Book IV, chap. ii, -- 2.

[47] _Logic_, Book II, chap. i, -- 1. I have changed the order of the sentences quoted, and have omitted some phrases.

VII

THE LOGICAL CHARACTER OF IDEAS

Said John Stuart Mill: "To draw inferences has been said to be the great business of life.... It is the only occupation in which the mind never ceases to be engaged." If this be so, it seems a pity that Mill did not recognize that this business identifies what we mean when we say "mind." If he had recognized this, he would have cast the weight of his immense influence not only against the conception that mind is a substance, but also against the conception that it is a collection of existential states or attributes without any substance in which to inhere; and he would thereby have done much to free logic from epistemological metaphysics. In any case, an account of intellectual operations and conditions from the standpoint of the role played and position occupied by them in the business of drawing inferences is a different sort of thing from an account of them as having an existence _per se_, from treating them as making up some sort of existential material distinct from the _things_ which figure in inference-drawing.

This latter type of treatment is that which underlies the psychology which itself has adopted uncritically the remnants of the metaphysics of soul substance: the idea of accidents without the substance.[48]

This a.s.sumption from metaphysical psychology--the a.s.sumption of consciousness as an existent stuff or existent process--is then carried over into an examination of knowledge, so as to make the theory of knowledge not logic (an account of the ways in which valid inferences or conclusions from things to other things are made), but epistemology.

We have, therefore, the result (so unfortunate for logic) that logic is not free to go its own way, but is compromised by the a.s.sumption that knowledge goes on not in terms of things (I use "things" in the broadest sense, as equaling _res_, and covering affairs, concerns, acts, as well as "things" in the narrower sense), but in terms of a relation _between_ things and a peculiar existence made up of consciousness, or else between things and functional operations of this existence. If it could be shown that psychology is essentially not a science of states of consciousness, but of behavior, conceived as a process of continuous readjustment, then the undoubted facts which go by the name of sensation, perception, image, emotion, concept, would be interpreted to mean peculiar (i.e., specifically qualitative) epochs, phases, and crises in the scheme of behavior. The supposedly scientific basis for the belief that states of consciousness inherently define a separate type of existence would be done away with. Inferential knowledge, knowledge involving reflection, _psychologically_ viewed, would be a.s.similated to a certain mode of readaptation of functions, involving shock and the need of control; 'knowledge' in the sense of direct non-reflective presence of things would be identified (psychologically) with relatively stable or completed adjustments. I can not profess to speak for psychologists, but it is an obvious characteristic of the contemporary status of psychology that one school (the so-called functional or dynamic) operates with nothing more than a conventional and perfunctory reference to "states of consciousness"; while the orthodox school makes constant concessions to ideas of the behavior type. It introduces the conceptions of fatigue, practice, and habituation. It makes its fundamental cla.s.sifications on the basis of physiological distinctions (e.g., the centrally initiated and the peripherally initiated), which, from a biological standpoint, are certainly distinctions of structures involved in the performance of acts.

One of the aims of the _Studies in Logical Theory_ was to show, on the negative or critical side, that the type of logical theory which professedly starts its account of knowledge from mere states of consciousness is compelled at every crucial juncture to a.s.sume _things_, and to define its so-called mental states in terms of things;[49] and, on the positive side, to show that, logically considered, such distinctions as sensation, image, etc., mark instruments and crises in the development of controlled judgment, i.e., of inferential conclusions. It was perhaps not surprising that this effort should have been criticized not on its own merits, but on the a.s.sumption that this correspondence of the (functional) psychological and the logical points of view was intended in terms of the psychology which obtained in the _critic's_ mind--to wit, the psychology based on the a.s.sumption of consciousness as a separate existence or process.

These considerations suggest that before we can intelligently raise the question of the truth of ideas we must consider their status in judgment, judgment being regarded as the typical expression of the inferential operation. (1) Do ideas present themselves except in situations which are doubtful and inquired into? Do they exist side by side with the facts when the facts are themselves known? Do they exist except when judgment is in suspense? (2) Are "ideas" anything else except the suggestions, conjectures, hypotheses, theories (I use an ascending scale of terms) tentatively entertained during a suspended conclusion? (3) Do they have any part to play in the conduct of inquiry? Do they serve to direct observation, colligate data, and guide experimentation, or are they otiose?[50] (4) If the ideas have a function in directing the reflective process (expressed in judgment), does success in performing the function (that is, in directing to a conclusion which is stable) have anything to do with the logical worth or validity of the ideas? (5) And, finally, does validity have anything to do with truth? Does "truth" mean something inherently different from the fact that the conclusion of one judgment (the known fact, previously unknown, in which judging terminates) is itself applicable in further situations of doubt and inquiry? And is judgment properly more than tentative save as it terminates in a known fact, i.e., a fact present without the intermediary of reflection?

When these questions--I mean, of course, questions which are exemplified in these queries--are answered, we shall, perhaps, have gone as far as it is possible to go with reference to the _logical_ character of ideas. The question may then recur as to whether the "ideas" of the epistemologist (that is, existences in a purely "private stream of consciousness") remain as something over and above, not yet accounted for; or whether they are perversions and misrepresentations of logical characters. I propose to give a brief dogmatic reply in the latter sense. Where, and in so far as, there are unquestioned objects, there is no "consciousness." There are just things. When there is uncertainty, there are dubious, suspected objects--things hinted at, guessed at. Such objects have a distinct status, and it is the part of good sense to give them, as occupying that status, a distinct caption. "Consciousness" is a term often used for this purpose; and I see no objection to that term, _provided_ it is recognized to mean such objects as are problematic, plus the fact that in their problematic character they may be used, as effectively as accredited objects, to direct observations and experiments which finally relieve the doubtful features of the situation. Such "objects"

may turn out to be valid, or they may not. But, in any case, they may be used. They may be internally manipulated and developed through ratiocination into explicit statement of their implications; they may be employed as standpoints for selecting and arranging data, and as methods for conducting experiments. In short, they are not merely hypothetical; they are _working_ hypotheses. Meanwhile, their aloofness from accredited objectivity may lead us to characterize them as merely ideas, or even as "mental states," provided once more we mean by mental state just this logical status.

We have examples of such ideas in symbols. A symbol, I take it, is always itself, existentially, a particular object. A word, an algebraic sign, is just as much a concrete existence as is a horse, a fire-engine, or a flyspeck. But its value resides in its representative character: in its suggestive and directive force for operations that when performed lead us to non-symbolic objects, which without symbolic operations would not be apprehended, or at least would not be so easily apprehended. It is, I think, worth noting that the capacity (_a_) for regarding objects as mere symbols and (_b_) for employing symbols instrumentally furnishes the only safeguard against dogmatism, i.e., uncritical acceptance of any suggestion that comes to us vividly; and also that it furnishes the only basis for intelligently controlled experiments.

I do not think, however, that we should have the tendency to regard ideas as _private_, as personal, if we stopped short at this point. If we had only words or other symbols uttered by others, or written, or printed, we might call them, when in objective suspense, mere ideas.

But we should hardly think of these ideas as our own. Such extra-organic stimuli, however, are not adequate logical devices. They are too rigid, too "objective" in their own existential status. Their meaning and character are too definitely fixed. For effective discovery we need things which are more easily manipulated, which are more transitive, more easily dropped and changed. Intra-organic events, adjustments _within_ the organism, that is, adjustments of the organism considered not with reference to the environment but with reference to one another, are much better suited to stand as representatives of genuinely dubious objects. An object which is _really_ doubted is by its nature precarious and inchoate, vague. What _is_ a thing when it is not yet discovered and yet is tentatively entertained and tested?

Ancient logic never got beyond the conception of an object whose logical _place_, whose subsumptive position as a particular with reference to some universal, was doubtful. It never got to the point where it could search for particulars which in themselves as particulars are doubtful. Hence it was a logic of proof, of deduction, not of inquiry, of discovery, and of induction. It was hard up against its own dilemma: How can a man inquire? For either he knows that for which he seeks, and hence does not seek: or he does not know, in which case he can not seek, nor could he tell if he found. The individualistic movement of modern life detached, as it were, the individual, and allowed personal (i.e., intra-organic) events to have, transitively and temporarily, a worth of their own. These events are continuous with extra-organic events (in origin and eventual outcome); but they may be considered in temporary displacement as uniquely existential. In this capacity they serve as means for the elaboration of a delayed but more adequate response in a radically different direction. So treated, they are tentative, dubious but experimental, antic.i.p.ations of an object. They are "subjective" (i.e., individualistic) surrogates of public, cosmic things, which may be so manipulated and elaborated as to terminate in public things which without them would not exist as empirical objects.[51]

The recognition then of intra-organic events, which are not merely effects nor distorted refractions of cosmic objects, but inchoate _future_ cosmic objects in process of experimental construction, resolves, to my mind, the paradox of so-called subjective and private things that have objective and universal reference, and that operate so as to lead to objective consequences which test their own value.

When a man can say: This color is not necessarily the color of the gla.s.s nor the picture nor even of an object reflected but is at least an event in my nervous system, an event which I may refer to my organism till I get _surety of other reference_--he is for the first time emanc.i.p.ated from the dogmatism of unquestioned reference, and is set upon a path of experimental inquiry.

I am not here concerned with trying to demonstrate that this is the correct mode of interpretation. I am only concerned with pointing out its radical difference from the view of a critic who, holding to the two-world theory of existences which from the start are divided into the fixedly objective and the fixedly psychical, interprets in terms of his own theory the view that the distinction between the objective and the subjective is a logical-practical distinction. Whether the logical, as against the ontological, theory be true or false, it can hardly be fruitfully discussed without a preliminary apprehension of it as a logical conception.

FOOTNOTES:

[48] This conception of "consciousness" as a sort of reduplicate world of things comes to us, I think, chiefly from Hume's conception that the "_mind_ is nothing but a heap, a collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations."--_Treatise of Human Nature_, Book I, Part IV, sec. 2. For the evolution of this sort of notion out of the immaterial substance notion, see Bush, "A Factor in the Genesis of Idealism," in the James _Festschrift_.

[49] See, for example, p. 113. "Thus that which is 'nothing but a state of our consciousness' turns out straightway to be a specifically determined objective fact in a system of facts," and, p. 147, "actual sensation is determined as an event in a world of events."

[50] When it is said that an idea is a "plan of action," it must be remembered that the term "plan of action" is a formal term. It throws no light upon _what_ the action is with respect to which an idea is the plan. It may be chopping down a tree, finding a trail, or conducting a scientific research in mathematics, history, or chemistry.

[51] I owe this idea, both in its historical and in its logical aspects, to my former colleague, Professor Mead, of the University of Chicago.

VIII

THE CONTROL OF IDEAS BY FACTS

I

There is something a little baffling in much of the current discussion regarding the reference of ideas to facts. The not uncommon a.s.sumption is that there was a satisfactory and consistent theory of their relation in existence prior to the somewhat impertinent intrusion of a functional and practical interpretation of them. The way the instrumental logician has been turned upon by both idealist and realist is suggestive of the way in which the outsider who intervenes in a family jar is proverbially treated by both husband and wife, who manifest their unity by berating the third party.

I feel that the situation is due partly to various misapprehensions, inevitable perhaps in the first presentation of a new point of view[52] and multiplied in this instance by the coincidence of the presentation of this logical point of view with that of the larger philosophical movements, humanism and pragmatism. I wish here to undertake a summary statement of the logical view on its own account, hoping it may receive clearer understanding on its own merits.

In the first place it was (apart from the frightful confusion of logical theories) precisely the lack of an adequate and generally accepted theory of the nature of fact and idea, and of the kind of agreement or correspondence between them which const.i.tutes the truth of the idea, that led to the development of a functional theory of logic. A brief statement of the difficulties in the traditional views may therefore be pertinent. That fruitful thinking--thought that terminates in valid knowledge--goes on in terms of the distinction of facts and judgment, and that valid knowledge is precisely genuine correspondence or agreement, _of some sort_, of fact and judgment, is the common and undeniable a.s.sumption. But the discussions are largely carried on in terms of an epistemological dualism, rendering the solution of the problem impossible in virtue of the very terms in which it is stated. The distinction is at once identified with that between mind and matter, consciousness and objects, the psychical and the physical, where each of these terms is supposed to refer to some fixed order of existence, a world in itself. Then, of course, there comes up the question of the nature of the agreement, and of the recognition of it. What is the experience in which the survey of both idea and existence is made and their agreement recognized? Is it an idea? Is the agreement ultimately a matter of self-consistency of ideas? Then what has become of the postulate that truth is agreement of idea with existence beyond idea? Is it an absolute which transcends and absorbs the difference? Then, once more, what is the test of any specific judgment? What has become of the correspondence of fact and thought? Or, more urgently, since the pressing problem of life, of practice and of science, is the discrimination of the _relative_, or _superior_, validity of this or that theory, plan, or interpretation, what is the criterion of truth within present non-absolutistic experience, where the distinction between factual conditions and thoughts and the necessity of some working adjustment persist?

Putting the problem in yet another way, either both fact and idea are present all the time or else only one of them is present. But if the former, why should there be an idea at all, and why should it have to be tested by the fact? When we already have what we want, namely, existence, reality, why should we take up the wholly supernumerary task of forming more or less imperfect ideas of those facts, and then engage in the idle performance of testing them by what we already know to be? But if only ideas are present, it is idle to speak of comparing an idea with facts and testing its validity by its agreement. The elaboration and refinement of ideas to the uttermost still leaves us with an idea, and while a self-consistent idea stands a show of being true in a way in which an incoherent one does not, a self-consistent idea is still but a hypothesis, a candidate for truth. Ideas are not made true by getting bigger. But if only 'facts' are present, the whole conception of agreement is once more given up--not to mention that such a situation is one in which there is by definition no thinking or reflective factor at all.