Pragmatism and idealism

by William Caldwell

The main result of pragmatist considerations in the case of Professor Dewey is perhaps that reconsideration of the problems of logic and knowledge in the light of the facts of genetic and functional psychology which has now become fairly general on the part of English and American students of philosophy. It is through his influence generally that pragmatists seem always to be talking about the way in which we “arrive at” our beliefs, about ideas as “instruments” for the interpretation and arrangement of our experience, about the “passage” from cognitive expectation to “fulfilment,” about ideas as “plans of action” and mental habits, about the growth and the utility of the truth, about the “instrumental” character of all our thinking, about beliefs as more fundamental than knowledge, and so on.

Professor Dewey has also written many more or less popular, but none the less highly valuable, short studies upon the application of an instrumentalist conception of philosophy to education and to social questions. One of his last pieces of service in this connection is a volume in which he associates Pragmatism with the general revolution effected in the entire range of the mental and moral sciences by Darwinism, with the present tendency in philosophy to turn away from ultimate questions to specific problems, and with the reform which, in his opinion, is necessary in our educational ideals[27] generally.

These three leading exponents of Pragmatism may be regarded as meeting the objections to philosophy urged respectively by the “man of affairs,” by the “mystical, religious” man, and by the “man of science.”[28] By this it is meant that the man of affairs will find in James an exposition of philosophy as the study of different ways of looking at the world; the mystical, religious man will find in Schiller a treatment of philosophy as the justification of an essentially spiritual philosophy of life; and that the scientific man will find in the writings of Dewey and his associates a treatment of philosophy as nothing else than an extension into the higher regions of thought of the same experimental and hypothetical method with which he is already familiar in the physical sciences.

In this version of the work of the three leading pragmatists it is assumed, of course, that the pragmatist philosophy is the only philosophy that can show to the average man that philosophy can really do something useful—can “bake bread,” if you will, can give to a man the food of a man. It is assumed, too, that it is the only philosophy which proceeds scientifically, that is to say, by means of observation and of hypotheses that “work,” and by subsequent deduction and by “verification.” And again, that it is the only philosophy that gives to man the realities upon which he can base his aspirations or his faith in distinction, that is to say, from the mere abstractions of Rationalism in any form.

By way of a few quotations illustrative of the fundamental contentions of the pragmatists, we may select the following: “Ideas become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience, to summarise them and get about among them by conceptional 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 any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labour—is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true instrumentally.”[29] “The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good for definite and assignable reasons.”[30] From Professor Dewey: “Thinking is a kind of activity which we perform at specific need, just as at other times we engage in other sorts of activity, as converse with a friend, draw a plan for a house, take a walk, eat a dinner, purchase a suit of clothes, etc. etc. The measure of its success, the standard of its validity is precisely the degree in which thinking disposes of the difficulty and allows us to proceed with the more direct modes of experiencing, that are henceforth possessed of more assured and deepened value.”[31] From Dr. Schiller’s book, Studies in Humanism: “Pragmatism is the doctrine that when an assertion claims truth, its consequences are always used to test its claims; that (2) the truth of an assertion depends on its application; that (3) the meaning of a rule lies in its application; that (4) all meaning depends on purpose; that (5) all mental life is purposive. It [Pragmatism] must constitute itself into (6) a systematic protest against all ignoring of the purposiveness of actual knowing, alike whether it is abstracted from for the sake of the imaginary, pure, or absolute reason of the rationalists, or eliminated for the sake of an equally imaginary or pure mechanism of the naturalists. So conceived, we may describe it as (7) a conscious application to logic of a teleological psychology which implies ultimately a voluntaristic metaphysics.”

From these citations, and from the descriptive remarks of the preceding two paragraphs, we may perhaps be enabled to infer that our Anglo-American Pragmatism has progressed from the stage of (1) a mere method of discussing truth and thinking in relation to the problem of philosophy as a whole, (2) that of a more or less definite and detailed criticism of the rationalism that overlooks the practical, or purposive, character of most of our knowledge, to that of (3) a humanistic or “voluntaristic” or “personalistic” philosophy, with its many different associations and affiliations.[32] One of the last developments, for example, of this pragmatist humanism is Dr. Schiller’s association of philosophy with the metaphysics of evolution, with the attempt to find the goal of the world-process and of human history in a changeless society of perfected individuals.

We shall immediately see, however, that this summary description of the growth of Pragmatism has to be supplemented by a recognition of (1) some of the different phases Pragmatism has assumed on the continent of Europe, (2) the different phases that may be detected in the reception or criticism accorded to it in different countries, and (3) some of the results of the pragmatist movement upon contemporary philosophy. All these things have to do with the making of the complex thing that we think of as Pragmatism and the pragmatist movement.

A NOTE ON THE MEANING OF “PRAGMATISM”

(1) “The opinion that metaphysics is to be largely cleared up by the application of the following maxim for obtaining clearness of apprehension: ‘Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object’” (Baldwin’s Philosophical Dictionary, vol. ii. p. 321). [We can see from this citation that the application of its formulæ about “consequences” to metaphysics, or philosophy generally, must be considered as a part, or aspect, of the pragmatist philosophy.]

(2) “The doctrine that the whole meaning of a conception expresses itself in practical consequences; consequences either in the shape of conduct to be recommended, or in that of experiences to be expected, if the conception be true; which consequences would be different, if it were untrue, and must be different from the consequences by which the meaning of other conceptions is in turn expressed. If a second conception should not appear to have other consequence, then it must be really only the first conception under a different name. In methodology, it is certain that to trace and compare their respective consequences is an admirable way of establishing the different meanings of different conceptions” (ibid., from Professor James).