The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, and other essays in contemporary thought

by John Dewey

It is perhaps dangerous to attempt to follow the inner workings of the processes by which truth is first identified with some superior type of Reality, and then this Truth is taken as the criterion of the truth of ideas; while all the time it is held that truth is something already possessed by ideas as purely intellectual. But there seems to be some ground for believing that this identification is due to a twofold confusion, one having to do with ideas, and the other with things. As to the first point: After an idea is made true, we naturally say, in retrospect, “it was true all the time.” Now this truism is quite innocuous as a truism, being just a restatement of the fact that the idea has, as matter of fact, worked successfully. But it may be regarded not as a truism but as furnishing some additional knowledge; as if it were, indeed, the dawning of a revelation regarding truth. Then it is said that the idea worked or was verified because it was already inherently, just as idea, the truth; the pragmatist, so it is said, making the error of supposing that it is true because it works. If one remembers that what the experimentalist means is that the effective working of an idea and its truth are one and the same thing—this working being neither the cause nor the evidence of truth but its nature—it is hard to see the point of this statement. A man under peculiarly precarious circumstances has been rescued from drowning. A by-stander remarks that now he is a saved man. “Yes,” replies some one, “but he was a saved man all the time, and the process of rescuing, while it gives evidence of that fact, does not constitute it.” Now even such a statement as pure tautology, as characterizing the entire process in terms of its issue, is objectionable only in the fact that, like all tautology, it seems to say something but does not. But if it be regarded as revealing the earlier condition of affairs, apart from the active process by which it was carried to a happy conclusion, such a statement would be monstrously false; and would declare its falsity in the fact that, if acted upon, the man would have been left to drown. In like fashion, to say, after the event, that a given idea was true all the time, is to lose sight of what makes an idea an idea, its hypothetical character; and thereby deliberately to transform it into brute dogma—something to which no canon of verification can ever be applied. The intellectualist almost always treats the pragmatic account as if it were, from the standpoint of the pragmatist as well as from his own, a denial of the existence of truth, while it is nothing but a statement of its nature. When the intellectualist realizes this, he will, I hope, ask himself: What, then, on the pragmatic basis is meant by the proposition that an idea is true all the time? If the statement that an idea was true all the time has no meaning except that the idea was one which as matter of fact succeeded through action in achieving its intent, mere reiteration that the idea was true all the time or it could not have succeeded, does not take us far.[24]

On the side of things, reality is identified with truth; then on the principle that two things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other, truth as idea and truth as reality are taken to be one and the same thing. Wherever there is an improved or tested idea, an idea which has made good, there is a concrete existence in the way of a completed or harmonized situation. The same activity which proves the idea constructs an inherently satisfied situation out of an inherently dissentient one,—for it is precisely the capacity of the idea as an aim and method of action to determine such transformation that is the criterion of its truth. Now unless all the elements in the situation are held steadily in view, the specific way in which the harmonized reality affords the criterion of truth (namely, through its function of being the last term of a process of active determination) is lost from sight; and the achieved existence in its merely existent character, apart from its practical or fulfilment character, is treated as The Truth. But when the reality is thus separated from the process by which it is achieved, when it is taken just as given, it is neither truth nor a criterion of truth. It is a state of facts like any other. The achieved telephone is a criterion of the validity of a certain prior idea in so far as it is the fulfilment of activities that embody the nature of that idea, but just as telephone, as a machine actually in existence, it is no more truth nor criterion of truth than is a crack in the wall or a cobble-stone on the street.

The intervening term that mediates and completes the confusion of truth with ideas on one hand and “reality” on the other, is, I think, the fact that ideas after they have been tested in action are employed in the development and grounding of further beliefs. There are cases in which an idea ceases to exist as idea as soon as it is made true; this is so as matter of fact and it is impossible to conceive any reason why it should not be so in point of theory. Such is the case, I take it, with a large part—possibly the major portion—of the ideas that mediate the smaller and transient crises of daily practice. I cannot imagine the situation in which the truth to which I have referred above—the verification of a certain idea about a certain noise—would ever function again as truth—save as I have given it a function in this paper by using it as a corroboration of a certain theory. Such ideas mostly cease, giving way to a matter-of-fact status: say, the perception of the noisy street-car. One at the time may say “My idea regarding that noise was a true idea”; or one may not even go so far as that, he may just stop with the eventual perception. But the tested idea need not ever recur as a factor of proof in any other problem. Such, however, is conspicuously not the case with our scientific ideas. In its first value, the idea or hypothesis of gravitation entertained by Newton, stood, when verified, on exactly the same level as the hypothesis regarding the noise in the street. Theoretically, that truth might have been so isolated that its truth character would disappear from thought as soon as a certain factual condition was ascertained. But practically quite the opposite has happened. The idea operates in many other inquiries, and operates no longer as mere idea, but as proved idea. Such truths get an “eternal” status;—one irrespective of application just now and here, because there are so many nows and heres in which they are useful. Just as to say an idea was true all the time is a way of saying in retrospect that it has come out in a certain fashion, so to say that an idea is “eternally true” is to indicate prospective modes of application which are indefinitely anticipated. Its meaning, therefore, is strictly pragmatic. It does not indicate a property inherent in the idea as intellectualized existence, but denotes a property of use and employment. Always at hand when needed is a good enough eternal for reasonably minded persons.

IV

I have gone from the very general considerations which occupied us in the earlier portions of this article to matters which relatively at least are specific. I conclude with a summary in the hope that it may bind together the earlier and the later parts of this paper.

1. The condition which antecedes and provokes any particular exercise of reflective knowing is always one of discrepancy, struggle, “collision.” This condition is practical, for it involves the habits and interests of the organism, an agent. This does not mean that the struggle is merely personal, or subjective, or psychological. The agent or individual is one factor in the situation—not the situation something subsisting in the individual. The individual has to be identified in the situation, before any situation can be referred—as in psychology—to the individual. But the discrepancy calls out and controls reflective knowing only as the fortunes of an agent are implicated in the crisis. Certain elements stand out as obstacles, as interferences, as deficiencies—in short as unsatisfactory and as requiring something for their completion. Other elements stand out as wanted—as required, as a satisfaction which does not exist. This clash (an accompaniment of all desire) between the given and the wanted, between the present and the absent, is at once the root and the type of that peculiar paradoxical relation between existence and meaning which Bradley insists upon as the essence of judgment. It is not irrational in the sense that we are dealing with appearance wholesale, but it is non-rational—an evidence that we are dealing with a practical affair.

2. The intellectual or reflective and logical is a statement of this conflict: an attempt to describe and define it. It is, as it were, the practical clash held off at arm’s length for inspection and investigation. In this way brute blind reaction against the unsatisfactoriness of the situation is suspended. Action is turned into the channel of observing, of inferring, of reasoning, or defining means and end. It is this change in the quality of activity, from directly overt, to indirect, or inquiring with view to stating, that constitutes the specific nature of reflective practice to which Mr. Bradley calls attention. The discovery of the nature of the conflict supplies materials for the fact or existence side of the judgement. The conception or projection of the object in which the conflict would be terminated furnishes material for the meaning side of the judgment. It is ideal because anticipatory, just as the fact side is existential, because reminiscent or recording. Hence the two are necessarily both distinguished from and yet referred to each other: only through location of a problem can a solution be conceived; only in reference to the intent of finding a solution can the elements of a problem be selected and interpreted. In origin and in destiny, this correlative determination of existence and meaning is tentative and experimental. The aim of the subject of the judgment is not to include all possible reality, but to select those elements of a reality that are useful in locating the source and nature of the difficulty in hand. The aim of the predicate is not to bunch all possible meaning and refer it in one final act indiscriminately to all existence, but to state the standpoint and method through which the difficulty of the particular situation may most effectively be dealt with. The selection of what is relevant to the characterization of the problem and the projection of the method of dealing with it are theoretic, hypothetic, intellectual:—that is, they are tentative ways of viewing the matter for the sake of guiding, economizing, and freeing the activities through which it may really be dealt with.

3. The criterion of the worth of the idea is thus the capacity of the idea (as a definition of the end or outcome in terms of what is likely to be serviceable as a method) to operate in fulfilling the object for the sake of which it was projected. Capacity of operation in this fashion is the test, measure, or criterion of truth. Hence the criterion is practical in the most overt sense of that term. We may, if we choose, regard the object in which the idea terminates through its use in guiding action, as the criterion; but if we so choose, it is at our peril that we forget that this object serves as criterion in its capacity of fulfilment and not as sheer objective existence.

4. Difficulties overlap; problems recur which resemble each other in the kind of treatment they demand for solution. Various modes of activity with their respective ends, going on at some time more or less independently, get organized into single comprehensive systems of behavior. The solution of one problem is found to create difficulties elsewhere; or the truth that is made in the solution of one problem is found to afford an effective method of dealing with questions arising apparently from unallied sources. Thus certain tested ideas in performing a constant or recurrent function secure a certain permanent status. The prospective use of such truths, the satisfaction that we anticipate in their employ, the assurance of control that we feel in their possession, becomes relatively much more important than the circumstances under which they were first made true. In becoming permanent resources, such tested ideas get a generalized energy of position. They are truths in general, truths “in themselves” or in the abstract, truths to which positive value is assigned on their own account. Such truths are the “eternal truths” of current discussion. They naturally and properly add to their intellectual and to their practical worth a certain esthetic quality. They are interesting to contemplate, and their contemplation arouses emotions of admiration and reverence. To make these emotions the basis of assigning peculiar inherent sanctity to them apart from their warrant in use, is simply to give way to that mood which in primitive man is the cause of attributing magical efficacy to physical things. Esthetically such truths are more than instrumentalities. But to ignore both the instrumental and the esthetic aspect, and to ascribe values due to an instrumental and esthetic character to some interior and a priori constitution of truth is to make fetishes of them.