II
We now return briefly to the question of knowledge as acquaintance, and at greater length to that of knowledge as assurance, or as fulfilment which confirms and validates. With the recurrence of the odor as meaning something beyond itself, there is apprehension, knowledge that. One may now say I know what a rose smells like; or I know what this smell is like; I am acquainted with the rose’s agreeable odor. In short, on the basis of a present quality, the odor anticipates and forestalls some further trait.
We have also the conditions of knowledge of the confirmation and refutation type. In the working out of the situation just described, in the transformation, self-indicated and self-demanded, of the tensional into a harmonious or satisfactory situation, fulfilment or disappointment results. The odor either does or does not fulfil itself in the rose. The smell as intention is borne out by the facts, or is nullified. As has already been pointed out, the subsequent experience of the fulfilment type is not primarily a confirmation or refutation. Its import is too vital, too urgent to be reduced in itself just to the value of testing an intention or meaning.[13] But it gets in reflection just such verificatory significance. If the smell’s intention is unfulfilled, the discrepancy may throw one back, in reflection, upon the original situation. Interesting developments then occur. The smell meant a rose; and yet it did not (so it turns out) mean a rose; it meant another flower, or something, one can’t just tell what. Clearly there is something else which enters in; something else beyond the odor as it was first experienced determined the validity of its meaning. Here then, perhaps, we have a transcendental, as distinct from an experimental reference? Only if this something else makes no difference, or no detectable difference, in the smell itself. If the utmost observation and reflection can find no difference in the smell quales that fail and those that succeed in executing their intentions, then there is an outside controlling and disturbing factor, which, since it is outside of the situation, can never be utilized in knowledge, and hence can never be employed in any concrete testing or verifying. In this case, knowing depends upon an extra-experimental or transcendental factor. But this very transcendental quality makes both confirmation and refutation, correction, criticism, of the pretensions or meanings of things, impossible. For the conceptions of truth and error, we must, upon the transcendental basis, substitute those of accidental success or failure. Sometimes the intention chances upon one, sometimes upon another. Why or how, the gods only know—and they only if to them the extra-experimental factor is not extra-experimental, but makes a concrete difference in the concrete smell. But fortunately the situation is not one to be thus described. The factor that determines the success or failure, does institute a difference in the thing which means the object, and this difference is detectable, once attention, through failure, has been called to the need of its discovery. At the very least, it makes this difference: the smell is infected with an element of uncertainty of meaning—and this as a part of the thing experienced, not for an observer. This additional awareness at least brings about an additional wariness. Meaning is more critical, and operation more cautious.
But we need not stop here. Attention may be fully directed to the subject of smells. Smells may become the object of knowledge. They may take, pro tempore,[14] the place which the rose formerly occupied. One may, that is, observe the cases in which 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. Superficially, it may then seem as if odors were treated after the fashion of Locke’s simple ideas, or Hume’s “distinct ideas which are separate existences.” Smells apparently assume an independent, isolated status during this period of investigation. “Sensations,” as the laboratory psychologist and the analytic psychologist generally studies them, are examples of just such detached things. But egregious error results if we forget that this seeming isolation and detachment is the outcome of a deliberate scientific device—that it is simply a part of the scientific technique of an inquiry directed upon securing tested conclusions. Just and only because odors (or any group of qualities) are parts of a connected world are they signs of things beyond themselves; and only because they are signs is it profitable and necessary to study them as if they were complete, self-enclosed entities.
In the reflective determination of things with reference to their specifically meaning other things, experiences of fulfilment, disappointment, and going astray inevitably play an important and recurrent rôle. They also are realistic facts, related in realistic ways to the things that intend to mean other things and to the things intended. When these fulfilments and refusals are reflected upon in the determinate relations in which they stand to their relevant meanings, they obtain a quality which is quite lacking to them in their immediate occurrence as just fulfilments or disappointments; viz., the property of affording assurance and correction—of confirming and refuting. 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 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,[15] any more than such adjectives as comfortable applied to a lodging, correct applied to speech, persuasive applied to an orator, etc., have worth apart from the specific things to which they are applied. It would be a great gain for logic and epistemology, if we were always to translate the noun “truth” back into the adjective “true,” and this back into the adverb “truly”; at least, if we were to do so until we have familiarized ourselves thoroughly with the fact that “truth” is an abstract noun, summarizing a quality presented by specific affairs in their own specific contents.