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).