The Theory of Truth in ‘Pragmatism’ and ‘The Meaning of Truth’.
In 1907 when he published his book “Pragmatism”, James, as we all know, was willing to accept the new theory of truth unreservedly. The hesitating on the margin, the mere interpreting of other’s views, are things of the past. From 1907 James’ position toward pragmatism as a truth-theory is unequivocal.
Throughout the book, as I should like to point out, James is using ‘pragmatism’ in two senses, and ‘truth’ in two senses. The two meanings of pragmatism he recognizes himself, and points out clearly the difference between pragmatism as a method for attaining clearness in our ideas and pragmatism as a theory of the truth or falsity of those ideas. But the two meanings of ‘truth’ he does not distinguish. And it is here that he differs from Dewey, as we shall presently see. He differed from Peirce on the question of the meaning of pragmatism—as to whether it could be developed to include a doctrine of truth as well as of clearness. He differs from Dewey on the question of ‘truth’—as to whether truth shall be used in both of the two specified senses or only in one of them.
The Ambiguity of ‘Satisfaction’—The double meaning of truth in James’ writing at this date may be indicated in this way: While truth is to be defined in terms of satisfaction, what is satisfaction? Does it mean that I am to be satisfied of a certain quality in the idea, or that I am to be satisfied by it? In other words, is the criterion of truth the fact that the idea leads as it promised or is it the fact that its leading, whether just as it promised or not, is desirable? Which, in short, are we to take as truth,—fulfilled expectations or value of results?
It is in failing to distinguish between these two that James involves himself, I believe, in most of his difficulties, and it is in the recognition and explicit indication of this difference that Dewey differentiates himself from James. We may pass on to cite specific instances in which James uses each of these criteria. We will find, of course, that there are passages which can be interpreted as meaning either value or fulfillment, but there are many in which the use of value as a criterion seems unmistakable.
The following quotations may be instanced: “If theological views prove to have value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. For how much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relation to the other truths that have also to be acknowledged”. For example, in so far as the Absolute affords comfort, it is not sterile; “it has that amount of value; it performs a concrete function. I myself ought to call the Absolute true ‘in so far forth’, then; and I unhesitatingly now do so”. (p.72).
“On pragmatic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true. Now whatever its residual difficulties may be, experience shows that it certainly does work, and that the problem is to build out and determine it so that it will combine satisfactorily with all the other working truths”. (p. 299).
“The true is the name for whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons”. (p. 76).
“Empirical psychologists … have denied the soul, save as the name for verifiable cohesions in our inner life. They redescend into the stream of experience with it, and cash it into so much small-change value in the way of ‘ideas’ and their connections with each other. The soul is good or ‘true’ for just so much, but no more”. (p. 92, italics mine).
“Since almost any object may some day become temporarily important, the advantage of having a stock of extra truths, of ideas that shall be true of merely possible situations, is obvious…. Whenever such extra truths become practically relevant to one of our emergencies, it passes from cold storage to do work in the world and our belief in it grows active. You can say of it then either that ’it is useful because it is true’ or that it is ‘true because it is useful’. Both these phrases mean exactly the same thing…. From this simple cue pragmatism gets her general notion of truth as something essentially bound up with the way in which one moment in our experience may lead us towards other moments which it will be worth while to have been led to. Primarily, and on the common-sense level, the truth of a state of mind means this function of a leading that is worth while”. (pp. 204-205, italics mine).
“To ‘agree’ in the widest sense with 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!… An idea that helps us to deal, whether practically or intellectually, with either 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——hold true of that reality”. (pp. 212-213).
“‘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”. (p. 222).
We may add a passage with the same bearing, from “The Meaning of Truth”. In this quotation James is retracting the statement made in the University of California Address that without the future there is no difference between theism and materialism. He says: “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, and so God remains for most men the truer hypothesis, and indeed remain so for definite pragmatic reasons”. (p. 189, notes).
The contrast between ‘intellectual’ and ‘practical’ seems to make his position certain. If truth is tested by practical workings, as contrasted with intellectual workings, it cannot be said to be limited to fulfilled expectation.
The statement that the soul is good or true shows the same thing. The relation of truth to extraneous values is here beyond question. The other passages all bear, more or less obviously, in the same direction.
As James keeps restating his position, there are many of the definitions that could be interpreted to mean either values or fulfillments, and even a few which seem to refer to fulfillment alone. The two following examples can be taken to mean either:
“‘Truth’ in our ideas and beliefs means … that ideas (which themselves are but parts of our experience) become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience, to summarize them and get about among them by conceptual short-cuts instead of following the interminable succession of particular phenomena. Any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us prosperously from one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor, is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true instrumentally”. (p.58).
“A new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual’s desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock. It must both lean on old truth and grasp new fact; and its success … in doing this, is a matter for individual appreciation. When old truth grows, then, by new truth’s addition, it is for subjective reasons. We are in the process and obey the reasons. The new idea is truest which performs most felicitously its function of satisfying this double urgency. It makes itself true, gets itself classed as true, by the way it works.” (p.64).
But we can turn from these to a paragraph in which truth seems to be limited to fulfilled expectations alone.
“True ideas are those which we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those which 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….
“But what do validation and verification themselves pragmatically mean? They again signify certain practical consequences of the verified and validated idea…. They head us … through the acts and other ideas which they instigate, into or up to, or towards, other parts of experience with which we feel all the while … that the original ideas remain in agreement. The connections and transitions come to us from point to point as being progressive, harmonious, satisfactory. This function of agreeable leading is what we mean by an idea’s verification”. (pp.201-202).
The Relation of Truth to Utility—It seems certain from the foregoing that James means, at least at certain times, to define the true in terms of the valuable. Satisfaction he is using as satisfaction by rather than satisfaction of. As we have pointed out, one may be satisfied of the correctness of one’s idea without being at all satisfied by it. This distinction has been most clearly set forth by Boodin, in his discussion of ‘What pragmatism is not’, in the following words: “The truth satisfaction may run counter to any moral or esthetic satisfaction in the particular case. It may consist in the discovery that the friend we had backed had involved us in financial failure, that the picture we had bought from the catalogue description is anything but beautiful. But we are no longer uncertain as regards the truth. Our restlessness, so far as that particular curiosity is concerned, has come to an end”.[9]
It is clear then, that the discovery of truth is not to be identified with a predominantly satisfactory state of mind at the moment. Our state of mind at the moment may have only a grain of satisfaction, yet this is of so unique a kind and so entirely distinguishable from the other contents of the mind that it is perfectly practicable as a criterion. It is simply “the cessation of the irritation of a doubt”, as Peirce puts it, or the feeling that my idea has led as it promised. The feeling of fulfilled expectation is thus a very distinct and recognizable part of the whole general feeling commonly described as ‘satisfaction’. When ‘utility’ in our ideas, therefore, means a momentary feeling of dominant satisfaction, truth cannot be identified with it.
And neither, as I wish now to point out, can truth be identified with utility when utility means a long-run satisfactoriness, or satisfactoriness of the idea for a considerable number of people through a considerable period of time. The same objection arises here which we noted a moment ago—that the satisfaction may be quite indifferent to the special satisfaction arising from tests. As has been often shown, many ideas are satisfactory for a long period of time simply because they are not subjected to tests. “A hope is not a hope, a fear is not a fear, once either is recognized as unfounded…. A delusion is delusion only so long as it is not known to be one. A mistake can be built upon only so long as it is not suspected”.
Some actual delusions which were not readily subjected to tests have been long useful in this way. “For instance, basing ourselves on Lafcadio Hearn, we might quite admit that the opinions summed up under the title ‘Ancestor-Worship’ had been … ‘exactly what was required’ by the former inhabitants of Japan”. “It was good for primitive man to believe that dead ancestors required to be fed and honored … because it induced savages to bring up their offspring instead of letting it perish. But although it was useful to hold that opinion, the opinion was false”. “Mankind has always wanted, perhaps always required, and certainly made itself, a stock of delusions and sophisms”.[10]
Perhaps we would all agree that the belief that ‘God is on our side’ has been useful to the tribe holding it. If has increased zeal and fighting efficiency tremendously. But since God can’t be on both sides, the belief of one party to the conflict is untrue, no matter how useful. To believe that (beneficial) tribal customs are enforced by the tribal gods is useful, but if the tribal gods are non-existent the belief is false. The beautiful imaginings of poets are sometimes useful in minimizing and disguising the hard and ugly reality, but when they will not test out they cannot be said because of their beauty or desirability to be true.
We must conclude then, that some delusions are useful. And we may go on and question James’ identification of truth and utility from another point of view. Instead of agreeing that true ideas and useful ideas are the same, we have shown that some useful ideas are false: but the converse is also demonstrable, that some true ideas are useless.
There are formulas in pure science which are of no use to anyone outside the science because their practical bearings, if such there be, have not yet been discovered, and are of no use to the scientist himself because, themselves the products of deduction, they as yet suggest nothing that can be developed farther from them. While these formulas may later be found useful in either of these senses—for ‘practical demands’ outside the science, or as a means to something else within the science—they are now already true quite apart from utility, because they will test out by fulfilling expectations.
Knowledge that is not useful is most striking in relation to ‘vice’. One may have a true idea as to how to lie and cheat, may know what cheating is and how it is done, and yet involve both himself and others in most unsatisfactory consequences. The person who is attempting to stop the use of liquor, and who to this end has located in a ‘dry’ district, may receive correct information as to the location of a ‘blind-tiger’—information which while true may bring about his downfall. Knowledge about any form of vice, true knowledge that can be tested out, may upon occasion be harmful to any extent we like.
We may conclude this section by citing a paragraph which will show the fallacious reasoning by which James came to identify the truth and the utility of ideas. At one point in replying to a criticism he says: “I can conceive no other objective content to the notion of an ideally perfect truth than that of penetration into not take its content as a true account of reality? The matter of the true is thus absolutely identical with the matter of the satisfactory. You may put either word first in your way of talking; but leave out that whole notion of satisfactory working or leading (which is the essence of my pragmatic account) and call truth a static, logical relation, independent even of possible leadings or satisfactions, and it seems to me that you cut all ground from under you”. (Meaning of Truth, p. 160).[11]
Now it is to be observed that this paragraph contains at least three logical fallacies. In the first sentence there is a false assumption, namely that ‘all that survives is valuable’. ‘Then’, we are given to understand, ‘since true ideas survive, they must be valuable’. No biologist would agree to this major premise. ‘Correlation’ preserves many things that are not valuable, as also do other factors.
In the second sentence there is an implied false conversion. The second sentence says, in substance, that all true ideas are satisfactory (valuable). This is supposed to prove the assertion of the first sentence, namely, that all satisfactory (valuable) ideas are true.
In the last sentence there is a false disjunction. Truth, it is stated, must either be satisfactory (valuable) working, or a static logical relation. We have tried to show that it may simply mean reliable working or working that leads as it promised. This may be neither predominantly valuable working nor a static logical relation.
The Relation of Satisfaction to Agreement and Consistency.—James continually reasserts that he has ‘remained an epistemological realist’, that he has ‘always postulated an independent reality’, that ideas to be true must ‘agree with reality’, etc.[12]
Reality he defines most clearly as follows:
“‘Reality’ is in general what truths have to take account of….
“The first part of reality from this point of view is the flux of our sensations. Sensations are forced upon us…. Over their nature, order and quantity we have as good as no control….
“The second part of reality, as something that our beliefs must also take account of, is the relations that obtain between their copies in our minds. This part falls into two sub-parts: (1) the relations that are mutable and accidental, as those of date and place; and (2) those that are fixed and essential because they are grounded on the inner nature of their terms. Both sorts of relation are matters of immediate perception. Both are ‘facts’….
“The third part of reality, additional to these perceptions (tho largely based upon them), is the previous truths of which every new inquiry takes account”. (Pragmatism, p. 244).
An idea’s agreement with reality, or better with all those parts of reality, means a satisfactory relation of the idea to them. Relation to the sensational part of reality is found satisfactory when the idea leads to it without jar or discord. “… What do the words verification and validation themselves pragmatically mean? They again signify certain practical consequences of the verified and validated idea. It is hard to find any one phrase that characterizes these consequences better than the ordinary agreement-formula—just such consequences being what we have in mind when we say that our ideas ‘agree’ with reality. They lead us, namely, through the acts and other ideas which they instigate, into and up to, or towards, other parts of experience with which we feel all the while … that the original ideas remain in agreement. The connections and transitions come to us from point to point as being progressive, harmonious, satisfactory. This function of agreeable leading is what we mean by an idea’s verification”. (Pragmatism, pp. 201-2).
An idea’s relation to the other parts of reality is conceived more broadly. Thus pragmatism’s “only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of life’s demands, nothing being omitted. If theological ideas should do this, if the notion of God, in particular, should prove to do it, how could pragmatism possibly deny God’s existence? She could see no meaning in treating as ‘not true’ a notion that was pragmatically so successful. What other kind of truth could there be, for her, than all this agreement with concrete reality”? (Pragmatism, p. 80, italics mine). Agreement with reality here means ability to satisfy the sum of life’s demands.
James considers that this leaves little room for license in the choice of our beliefs. “Between the coercions of the sensible order and those of the ideal order, our mind is thus wedged tightly”. “Our (any) theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences. It must derange common sense and previous belief as little as possible, and it must lead to some sensible terminus or other that can be verified exactly. To ‘work’ means both these things; and the squeeze is so tight that there is little loose play for any hypothesis. Our theories are thus wedged and controlled as nothing else is”. “Pent in, as the pragmatist more than anyone else 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”. (Pragmatism, pp. 211, 217, 233).
Now on the contrary it immediately occurs to a reader that if reality be simply “what truths have to take account of”, and if taking-account-of merely means agreeing in such a way as to satisfy “the collectivity of life’s demands”, then the proportion in which these parts of reality will count will vary enormously. One person may find the ‘previous-truths’ part of reality to make such a strong ‘demand’ that he will disregard ‘principles’ or reasoning almost entirely.
Another may disregard the ‘sensational’ part of reality, and give no consideration whatever to ‘scientific’ results. These things, in fact, are exactly the things that do take place. The opinionated person, the crank, the fanatic, as well as the merely prejudiced, all refuse to open their minds and give any particular consideration to such kinds of evidence. There is therefore a great deal of room for license, and a great deal of license practiced, when the agreement of our ideas with reality means nothing more than their satisfactoriness to our lives’ demands.
How James fell into this error is shown, I believe, by his overestimation of the common man’s regard for truth, and especially for consistency. Thus he remarks: “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…. Above all we find consistency satisfactory, consistency between the present idea and the entire rest of our mental equipment….” “After man’s interest in breathing freely, the greatest of all his interests (because it never fluctuates or remits, as most of his physical interests do), is his interest in consistency, in feeling that what he now thinks goes with what he thinks on other occasions”. (Meaning of Truth, pp. 192, 211).
The general method of James on this point, then, is to define truth in terms of satisfaction and then to try to show that these satisfactions cannot be secured illegitimately. That is, that we must defer to experimental findings, to consistency, and to other checks on opinion. Consistency must be satisfactory because people are so constituted as to find it so. Agreement with reality, where reality means epistemological reality, is satisfactory for the same reason. And agreement with reality, where reality includes in addition principles and previous truths, must be satisfactory because agreement in this case merely means such taking-account-of as will satisfy the greater proportion of the demands of life. In other words, by defining agreement in this case in terms of satisfactions, he makes it certain that agreement and satisfaction will coincide by the device of arguing in a circle. It turns out that, from over-anxiety to assure the coincidence of agreement and satisfaction, he entirely loses the possibility of using reality and agreement with reality in the usual sense of checks on satisfactions.
CHAPTER III.
The Pragmatic Doctrine as Set Forth by Dewey.
The position of Dewey is best represented in his paper called “The Experimental Theory of Knowledge”.[13] In the method of presentation, this article is much like James’ account “The Function of Cognition”. Both assume some simple type of consciousness and study it by gradually introducing more and more complexity. In aim, also, the two are similar, for the purpose of each is simply to describe. Dewey attempts here to tell of a knowing just as one describes any other object, concern, or event. “What we want”, he announces “is just something which takes itself for knowledge, rightly or wrongly”.
Let us suppose, then, that we have simply a floating odor. If this odor starts changes that end in picking and enjoying a rose, what sort of changes must these be to involve some where within their course that which we call knowledge?
Now it can be shown, first, that there is a difference between knowing and mere presence in consciousness. If the smell is simply displaced by a felt movement, and this in turn is displaced by the enjoyment of the rose, in such a way that there is no experience of connection between the three stages of the process,—that is, without the appearance of memory or anticipation,—then “such an experience neither is, in whole or in part, a knowledge”. “Acquaintance is presence honored by an escort; presence is introduced as familiar, or an association springs up to greet it. Acquaintance always implies a little friendliness; a trace of re-knowing, of anticipatory welcome or dread of the trait to follow…. To be a smell (or anything else) is one thing, to be known as a smell, another; to be a ‘feeling’ is one thing, to be known as a ‘feeling’ is another. The first is thinghood; existence indubitable, direct; in this way all things are that are in ‘consciousness’ at all. The second is reflected being, things indicating and calling for other things—something offering the possibility of truth and hence of falsity. The first is genuine immediacy; the second (in the instance discussed) a pseudo-immediacy, which in the same breath that it proclaims its immediacy smuggles in another term (and one which is unexperienced both in itself and in its relation) the subject of ‘consciousness’, to which the immediate is related…. To be acquainted with a thing is to be assured (from the standpoint of the experience itself) that it is of such and such a character; that it will behave, if given an opportunity, in such and such a way; that the obviously and flagrantly present trait is associated with fellow traits that will show themselves if the leading of the present trait is followed out. To be acquainted is to anticipate to some extent, on the basis of previous experience”. (pp. 81, 82).
Besides mere existence, there is another type of experience which is often confused with knowledge,—a type which Dewey calls the ‘cognitive’ as distinct from genuine knowledge or the ‘cognitional’. In this experience “we retrospectively attribute intellectual force and function to the smell”. This involves memory but not anticipation. As we look back from the enjoyment of the rose, we can say that in a sense the odor meant the rose, even though it led us here blindly. That is, if the odor suggests the finding of its cause, without specifying what the cause is, and if we then search about and find the rose, we can say that the odor meant the rose in the sense that it actually led to the discovery of it. “Yet the smell is not cognitional because it did not knowingly intend to mean this, but is found, after the event, to have meant it”. (p. 84).
Now, “before the category of confirmation or refutation can be introduced, there must be something which means to mean something”. Let us therefore introduce a further complexity into the illustration. Let us suppose that the smell occurs at a later date, and is then “aware of something else which it means, which it intends to effect by an operation incited by it and without which its own presence is abortive, and, so to say, unjustified, senseless”. Here we have something “which is contemporaneously aware of meaning something beyond itself, instead of having this meaning ascribed to it by another at a later period. The odor knows the rose, the rose is known by the odor, and the import of each term is constituted by the relationship in which it stands to the other”. (p. 88). This is the genuine ‘cognitional’ experience.
When the odor recurs ‘cognitionally’, both the odor and the rose are present in the same experience, though both are not present in the same way. “Things can be presented as absent, just as they can be presented as hard or soft”. The enjoyment of the rose is present as going to be there in the same way that the odor is. “The situation is inherently an uneasy one—one in which everything hangs upon the performance of the operation indicated; upon the adequacy of movement as a connecting link, or real adjustment of the thing meaning and the thing meant. Generalizing from this instance, we get the following definition: An experience is a knowledge, if in its quale there is an experienced distinction and connection of two elements of the following sort: one means or intends the presence of the other in the same fashion in which it itself is already present, while the other is that which, while not present in the same fashion, must become present if the meaning or intention of its companion or yoke-fellow is to be fulfilled through the operation it sets up”. (p. 90).
Now in the transformation from this tensional situation into a harmonious situation, there is an experience either of fulfilment or disappointment. If there is a disappointment of expectation, this may throw one back in reflection upon the original situation. The smell, we may say, seemed to mean a rose, yet it did not in fact lead to a rose. There is something else which enters in. We then begin an investigation. “Smells may become the object of knowledge. They may take, pro tempore, the place which the rose formerly occupied. One may, that is, observe the cases in which the odors mean other things than just roses, may voluntarily produce new cases for the sake of further inspection; and thus account for the cases where meanings had been falsified in the issue; discriminate more carefully the peculiarities of those meanings which the event verified, and thus safeguard and bulwark to some extent the employing of similar meanings in the future”. (p. 93). When we reflect upon these fulfilments or refusals, we find in them a quality “quite lacking to them in their immediate occurrence as just fulfilments and disappointments”,—the quality of affording assurance and correction. “Truth and falsity are not properties of any experience or thing, in and of itself or in its first intention; but of things where the problem of assurance consciously enters in. Truth and falsity present themselves as significant facts only in situations in which specific meanings and their already experienced fulfilments and non-fulfilments are intentionally compared and contrasted with reference to the question of the worth, as to the reliability of meaning, of the given meaning or class of meanings. Like knowledge itself, truth is an experienced relation of things, and it has no meaning outside of such relation”. (p. 95).
Though this paper is by title a discussion of a theory of knowledge, we may find in this last paragraph a very clear relating of the whole to a theory of truth. If we attempt to differentiate in this article between knowledge and truth, we find that while Dewey uses ‘knowledge’ to refer either to the prospective or to the retrospective end of the experimental experience, he evidently intends to limit truth to the retrospective or confirmatory end of the experience. When he says, “Truth and falsity are not properties of any experience or thing in and of itself or in its first intention, but of things where the problem of assurance consciously enters in. Truth and falsity present themselves as significant facts only in situations in which specific meanings and their already experienced fulfilments are intentionally compared and contrasted with reference to the question of the worth, as to reliability of meaning, of the given meaning or class of meanings”, it seems that truth is to be confined to retrospective experience. The truth of an idea means that it allows one at its fulfilment to look back at its former meaning and think of it as now confirmed. The difference between knowledge and truth is then a difference in the time at which the developing experience is examined. If one takes the experience at the appearance of the knowing odor, he gets acquaintance; if one takes it at the stage at which it has developed into a confirmation, he gets truth. Knowledge may be either stage of the experience of verification, but truth is confined to the later, confirmatory, stage.
Truth, then, is simply a matter of confirmation of prediction or of fulfilment of expectation. An idea is made true by leading as it promised. And an idea is made false when it leads to refutation of expectation. There seems to be no necessity here for an absolute reality for the ideas to conform to, or ‘correspond’ to, for truth is a certain kind of relation between the ideas themselves—the relation, namely, of leading to fulfilment of expectations.