The pragmatic theory of truth as developed by Peirce, James, and Dewey

by Denton Loring Geyer

The method of science, therefore, is procedure based on the hypothesis that there are realities independent of what we may think them to be. This, it seems, is what Peirce regards as the fundamental principle of the ‘logic of science’. This principle, stated here in the first paper, is again stated as we have seen, towards the close of the second paper. There he says again, “All the followers of science are fully persuaded that the processes of investigation, if only pushed far enough, will give one certain solution to every question to which they can be applied…. Different minds may set out with the most antagonistic views, but the progress of investigation carries them by a force outside of themselves to one and the same conclusion…. This great law is embodied in the conception of truth and reality. That opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. This is the way I would explain reality”. (p.300).

It is well at this point to call attention to a distinction. It is to be noticed that in the first paper and in the latter part of the second he is talking of a method for attaining truth. But in the body of the second paper he is talking of a method for attaining clearness. These two should be kept distinct in our minds. The use of the various methods described for finding the velocity of light were endeavors to find the truth, not to make our ideas clear. Clearness and truth Peirce believes to have no invariable connection. He says in ending the article on “How To Make Our Ideas Clear”, “It is certainly important to know how to make our ideas clear, but they may be ever so clear without being true”. (p.302, italics mine.) There are, then, two methods under consideration: the scientific method for reaching truth, with its postulate that there are independent realities, and the logical method for securing clearness, which as he has just stated, has no necessary connection with truth.

Now I should like to point out, in criticism, that these two methods cannot be used together, or rather that the postulate of the ‘scientific method’ will not endure the test proposed by the ‘method for clearness’. The scientific method postulates a reality unaffected by our opinions about it. But when we apply the method for clearness to this reality it seems to vanish.

The process is this: Peirce, as we will remember, begins his discussion of the real by defining it as “that whose characters are independent of what anybody may think them to be.” Then passing on to apply his method for clearness he finds that “reality, like every other quality, consists in the peculiar sensible effects which things partaking of it produce”, and adds that “the only effects which real things have is to cause belief, for all the sensations which they excite emerge into consciousness in the form of beliefs”. Reality is the sum of its sensible effects, its sensible effects are beliefs, so reality is a sum of beliefs.

Now, reality cannot be the sum of all beliefs regarding the real, because reality is defined in another connection as the object represented by a true opinion, and a true opinion is that which is fated to be agreed to after an investigation is complete. Reality then can consist only in certain selected beliefs. But if reality is this set of ultimately-adopted beliefs, what is truth itself? For truth has been defined as the beliefs which will be ultimately adopted.

In other words, when Peirce applies his method for clearness to the concept of reality, he reduces reality to truth. He identifies the two. Then there remains no independent realty which stands as a check on truth. And this was the postulate of his method of science.

Since the application of his own method for clearness eliminates reality, it looks as though Peirce must abandon either this method or the postulate of science. He cannot use both the method for clearness and the postulate of the method of science.

We must remember that Peirce was a pioneer in this movement. And in making the transition from the older form of thought, he occasionally uses a word both in the old sense and in the new. Such would seem to be his difficulty with the word ‘reality’, which he uses both in the newer sense which the method for clearness would show it to have, and in the old orthodox sense of something absolute. When he says “reality … consists of the peculiar sensible effects which things partaking of it produce”, he seems to have the two senses of the word in one sentence. Reality consists in sensible effects, or it is that which is produced somehow by means of our senses. But, when things partake of reality, reality exists in advance and produces those effects. Reality is conceived both as the things produced and as the producer of these things.

A somewhat similar difficulty occurs, as I may point out again in criticism, in the use of the words ‘meaning’ and ‘belief’. Here the confusion is caused, not by using a word in two senses, as in the case of ‘reality’, but by using both the words ‘meaning’ and ‘belief’ in the same sense. Peirce defines both ‘meaning’ and ‘belief’ as a sum of habits, and indicates no difference between them.

Thus he says of meaning, “There is no distinction of meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference in practice”. (293) “To develop its meaning, we have, therefore, simply to determine what habits it produces, for what a thing means is simply what habits it involves”. (p. 292).