 Lecture 5 Part 1 of Pragmatism. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Fredrik Karlsson. Pragmatism by William James. Lecture 5 Pragmatism and Common Sense. In the last lecture we turned ourselves from the usual way of talking of the universe's oneness as a principle sublime in all its blankness towards a study of the special kinds of union which the universe enfolds. We found many of these to coexist with kinds of separation equally real. How far am I verified is the question which each kind of union and each kind of separation asks us here, so as good pragmatists we have to turn our face toward experience, towards facts. Absolute oneness remains but only as a hypothesis and that hypothesis is reduced nowadays to that of an omniscient knower who sees all things without exception as forming one single systematic fact. But the knower in question may still be conceived either as an absolute or as an ultimate, and over against the hypothesis of him in either form the counter hypothesis that the widest field of knowledge that ever was or will be still contains some ignorance may be legitimately held. Some bits of information always may escape. This is the hypothesis of noetic pluralism which monists consider so absurd. Since we are bound to treat it as respectfully as noetic monism until the facts shall have tipped the beam we find that our pragmatism though originally nothing but a method has forced us to be friendly to the pluralistic view. It may be that some parts of the world are connected so loosely with some other parts as to be strung along by nothing but the copula and. They might even come and go without those other parts suffering any internal change. This pluralistic view of a world of additive constitution is one that pragmatism is unable to rule out from serious consideration. But this view leads one to the father hypothesis that the actual world instead of being complete eternally as the monists assure us may be eternally incomplete and at all times subject to addition or liable to loss. It is at any rate incomplete in one respect and flagrantly so. The very fact that we debate this question shows that our knowledge is incomplete at present and subject to addition. In respect of the knowledge it contains the world does generally change and grow. Some general remarks on the way in which our knowledge completes itself when it does complete itself will lead us very conveniently into our subject for this lecture which is common sense. To begin with our knowledge grows in spots. The spots may be large or small but the knowledge never grows all over. Some old knowledge always remains what it was. Your knowledge of pragmatism let us suppose is growing now. Later its growth may involve considerable modification of opinions which you previously held to be true but such modifications are apt to be gradual. To take the nearest possible example consider these lectures of mine what you first gain from them is probably a small amount of new information, a few new definitions or distinctions or points of view. But while these special ideas are being added the rest of your knowledge stands still and only gradually will you line up your previous opinions with the novelties I am trying to instill and modify to some slight degree their mass. You listen to me now I suppose with certain prepossessions as to my competency and these affect your reception of what I say but were I suddenly to break off lecturing and to begin to sing We won't go home till morning in a rich baritone voice, not only would that new fact be added to your stock but it would oblige you to define me differently and that might alter your opinion of the pragmatic philosophy and in general bring about a rearrangement of a number of your ideas. Your mind in such processes is strained and sometimes painfully so between its older beliefs and the novelties which experience brings along. Our minds thus grow in spots and like grease spots the spots spread but we let them spread as little as possible. We keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge as many of our old prejudices and beliefs as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in, it stains the ancient mass but it is also tinked but what absorbs it. Our past are perceived and cooperates and in the new equilibrium in which each step forward in the process of learning terminates it happens relatively seldom that the new fact is added raw. More usually it is embedded cooked as one might say or stewed down in the source of the old. New truths thus are resultants of new experiences and of old truths combined and mutually modifying one another and since this is the case in the changes of opinion of today there is no reason to assume that it has not been so at all times. It follows that very ancient modes of thought may have survived through all the later changes in men's opinions. The most primitive ways of thinking may not yet be wholly expunged. Like our five fingers, our ear bones, our rudimentary chordal appendage or our other vestigial peculiarities they may remain as indelible tokens of events in our race history. Our ancestors may at certain moments have struck into ways of thinking which they might conceivably not have found but once they did so and after the fact the inheritance continues. When you begin a piece of music in a certain key you must keep the key to the end. You may alter your house ad libitum but the ground plan of the first architect persists. You can make great changes but you cannot change a Gothic church into a Doric temple. You may rinse and rinse the bottle but you can't get the taste of the medicine or whiskey that first filled it wholly out. My thesis now is this. That our fundamental ways of thinking about things are discoveries of exceedingly remote ancestors which have been able to preserve themselves throughout the experience of all subsequent time. They form one great stage of equilibrium in the human mind's development, this stage of common sense. Other stages have grafted themselves upon this stage but have never succeeded in displacing it. Let us consider this common sense stage first as if it might be final. In practical talk a man's common sense means his good judgment, his freedom from eccentricity, his gumption to use the vernacular word. In philosophy it means something entirely different. It means his use of certain intellectual forms or categories of thought. Where we lobsters or bees it might be that our organization would have led to our using quite different modes from these of apprehending our experiences. It might be too, we cannot dogmatically deny this, that such categories unimaginable by us today would have proved on the whole as serviceable for handling our experiences mentally as those which we actually use. If this sounds paradoxical to anyone let him think of analytical geometry. The identical figures which Euclid defined by intrinsic relations were defined by Descartes by the relations of their points to adventitious coordinates, the result being an absolutely different and vastly more potent way of handling curves. All our conceptions of what the Germans call Denkmittel means by which we handle facts by thinking them. Experience merely as such doesn't come ticketed and labeled, we have first to discover what it is. Kant speaks of it as being in its first intention a Gevyl der Erscheinungen, a Rhapsody der Warnemungen, a mere motley which we have to unify by our wits. What we usually do is first to frame some system of concepts mentally classified, serialized or connected in some intellectual way and then to use this as a tally by which we keep tap on the impressions that present themselves. When each is referred to some possible place in the conceptual system it is thereby understood. This notion of parallel manifolds with their elements standing reciprocally in one-to-one relations is proving so convenient nowadays in mathematics and logic as to supersede more and more the older classificatory conceptions. There are many conceptual systems of this sort and the sense manifold is also such a system. Find a one-to-one relation for our sense impressions anywhere among the concepts and in so far forth you rationalize the impressions. Obviously you can rationalize them by using various conceptual systems. The old common sense way of rationalizing them is by a set of concepts of which the most important are these. Thing, the same or different, kinds, minds, bodies, one time, one space, subjects and attributes, causal influences, the fancied, the real. We are now so familiar with the order that these notions have woven for us out of the everlasting weather of our perceptions that we find it hard to realize how little of a fixed routine the perceptions follow when taken by themselves. The word weather is a good one to use here. In Boston for example the weather has almost no routine, the only law being that if you have had any weather for two days you will probably but not certainly have another weather on the third. Weather experience as it does comes to Boston is discontinuous and chaotic. In point of temperature of wind, rain or sunshine it may change three times a day. But the Washington Weather Bureau intellectualizes this disorder by making each successive bit of Boston weather episodic. It refers it to its place and moment in a continental cyclone on the history of which the local changes everywhere are strung as beads are strung upon a cord. Now it seems almost certain that young children and the inferior animals take all their experiences very much as uninstructed Bostonians take their weather. They know no more of time or space as world receptacles or of permanent subjects and changing predicates or of courses or kinds or thoughts or things than our common people know of continental cyclones. A baby's rattle drops out of his hand but the baby looks not for it. It has gun out for him as a candle flame goes out and it comes back when you replace it in his hand as the flame comes back when relit. The idea of it's being a thing whose permanent existence by itself he might interpolate between its successive apparitions has evidently not occurred to him. It is the same with dogs, out of sight, out of mind with them. It is pretty evident that they have no general tendency to interpolate things. Let me quote here a passage from my colleague G. Santayana's book. If a dog while sniffing about contentedly sees afar off his master arriving after long absence the poor brute asks for no reason why his master went, why he has come again, why he should be loved or why presently while lying at his feet you forget him and begin to grunt and dream of the chase. All that is an utter mystery, utterly unconsidered. Such experience has variety, scenery and a certain vital rhythm. That story might be told in ditherambic verse. It moves wholly by inspiration. Every event is providential. Every act unpremeditated. Absolute freedom and absolute helplessness have met together. You depend wholly on divine favor. Yet that unfathomable agency is not distinguishable from our own life. But the figures even of that disordered trauma have their exits and their entrances. And the accused can be gradually discovered by a being capable of fixing his attention and retaining the order of events. In proportion as such understanding advances each moment of experience becomes consequential and prophetic of the rest. The calm places in life are filled with power and its bosoms with resource. No emotion can overwhelm the mind, for of none is the basis or issue wholly hidden. No event can disconcert it altogether because it sees beyond. Means can be looked for to escape from the worst predicament. And whereas each moment had been formally filled with nothing by its own adventure and surprised emotion, each now makes room for the lesson of what went before and surmises what may be the plot of the whole. Footnote the life of reason. Reason in common sense 1905 page 59. Even today science and philosophy are still laboriously trying to part fancies from realities in our experience. And in primitive times they made only the most incipient distinctions in this line. Men believed whatever they thought with any liveliness and they mixed their dreams with realities inextricably. The categories of thought and things are indispensable here. Instead of being realities we now call certain experiences only thoughts. There is not a category among those enumerated of which we may not imagine the use to have thus originated historically and only gradually spread. That one time which we believe in each event has its definite date, that one space in which each thing has its position these abstract notions unify the world incomparably. But in their finished shape as concepts how different they are from the loose unordered time and space experiences of natural men. Everything that happens to us brings its own duration and extension and both are vaguely surrounded by a marginal more that runs into the duration and extension of the next thing that comes. But we soon lose all our definite bearings and not only do our children make no distinction between yesterday and the day before yesterday, the whole past being churned up together but we adults still do so whenever the times are large. It is the same with spaces. On a map I can distinctly see the relation of London, Constantinople and Peking to the place where I am. In reality I utterly fail to feel the facts which the map symbolizes. The directions and distances are vague, confused and mixed. Cosmic space and cosmic time so far from being the intuitions that can't said they were, are constructions as patently artificial as any that science can show. The great majority of the human race never use these notions but live in plural times and spaces, interpenetrant and dodge einander. Permanent things again, the same thing and its various appearances and alterations, the different kinds of thing with the kind used finally as a predicate of which the thing remains the subject, what a straightening of the tango of our experiences immediate flux and sensible variety does this list of terms suggest and it is only the smallest part of its experiences flux that anyone actually does straighten out by applying to it these conceptual instruments. Out of them all our lowest ancestors probably used only and then most vaguely and inaccurately the notion of the same again. But even if you had asked them whether the same were a thing that had endured throughout the unseen interval they would probably have been at a loss and would have said that they had never asked that question or considered matters in that light. End of lecture 5 part 1. Lecture 5 part 2 of Pragmatism This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Fredrik Karlsson, Pragmatism by William James. Kinds and the sameness of kind what colossally useful think-middle for finding our way among the many. The many-ness might conceivably have been absolute experiences might have all been singular no one of them occurring twice in such a world logic would have had no application for kind and sameness of kind are logic's only instruments. Once we know that whatever is of a kind is also of that kind's kind we can travel through the universe as if with seven league boots. Brutes surely never used these abstractions and civilized men used them in most various amounts. Cautial influence again. This, if anything, seems to have been an antediluvian conception for we find primitive men thinking that almost everything is significant and can exert influence of some sort. The search for the more definite influences seems to have started in the question who or what is to blame for any illness namely or disaster or untoward thing. From this center the search for causal influences has spread. You and science together have tried to eliminate the whole notion of influence substituting the entirely different think-middle of law. But law is a comparatively recent invention and influence reigns supreme in the older realm of the common sense. The possible as something less than the actual and more than the wholly unreal is another of these magisterial notions of common sense. Criticize them as you may, they persist and we fly back to them the moment critical pressure is relaxed. Self, body, in the substantial or metaphysical sense no one escapes subjection to those forms of thought. In practice the common sense think-middle are uniformly victorious. Everyone, however instructed, still thinks of a thing in the common sense way as a permanent unit subject that supports its attributes interchangeably. No one stably or sincerely uses the more critical notion of a group of sense qualities united by a law. With these categories in our hand we make our plans and plot together and connect all the reboter parts of experience with what lies before our eyes. Our later and more critical philosophies are mere fads and fancies compared with this natural mother tongue of thought. Common sense appears thus as a perfectly definite stage in our understanding of things, a stage that satisfies in an extraordinarily successful way the purposes for which we think. Things do exist even when we do not see them. Their kinds also exist, their qualities are what they act by and are what we act on and these also exist. These lamps shed their quality of light on every object in this room. We intercept it on its way whenever we hold up an opaque screen. It is the very sound that my lips emit that travels into your ears. It is the sensible heat of the fire that migrates into the water in which we boil an egg and we can change the heat into coolness by dropping in a lump of ice. At this stage of philosophy all non-European men without exception have remained. It suffices for all the necessary practical ends of life and among our own race even it is only the highly sophisticated specimens the minds debauched by learning as Berkeley calls them who have ever even suspected common sense of not being absolutely true. When we look back and speculate as to how the common sense categories may have achieved their wonderful supremacy no reason appears why it may not have been by a process just like that by which the conceptions due to democracies, Berkeley or Darwin achieved their similar triumphs in more recent times. In other words they may have been successfully discovered by prehistoric geniuses whose names the night of antiquity has covered up. They may have been verified by the immediate facts of experience which they have first fitted and then from fact to fact and from man to man they may have spread until all language rested on them and we are now incapable of thinking naturally in any other terms. Such a view would only follow the rule that has proved elsewhere so fertile of assuming the vast and remote to conform to the laws of formation that we can observe at work in the small and near. For all utilitarian practical purposes these conceptions amplifies but that they began at special points of discovery and only gradually spread from one thing to another seems proved by the exceedingly dubious limits of their application today. We assume for certain purposes one objective time that aqua-beleter flute but we don't livingly believe in or realize any such equally flowing time. Space is a less vague notion but things, what are they? Is a constellation properly a thing or an army or is an ens racionis such as space or justice a thing? Is a knife whose handle and blade are changed the same? Is the changeling whom Locke so seriously discusses of the human kind? Is telepathy a fancy or a fact? The moment you pass beyond the practical use of these categories use usually suggested sufficiently by the circumstances of the special case to a merely curious or speculative way of thinking you find it impossible to say within just what limits of fact any one of them shall apply. The peripatetic philosophy obeying rationalist propensities has tried to eternalize the commonsense categories by treating them very technically and articulately. A thing, for instance, is a being or ens and ens is a subject in which qualities in here. A subject is a substance. Substances are of kinds and kinds are definite in number and discreet. These distinctions are fundamental and eternal. As terms of discourse they are indeed magnificently useful but what they mean apart from their use in steering our discourse to profitable issues does not appear. If you ask a scholastic philosopher what a substance may be in itself apart from its being the support of attributes it simply says that your intellect knows perfectly what the word means. But what the intellect knows clearly is only the word itself and its steering function. So it comes about that intellect's cibi permissi intellect's only curious and idle have forsaken the commonsense level for what in general terms may be called the critical level of thought. Not merely such intellects either your Eumes and Berklis and Heagles but practical observers of facts your Galileo's, Dalton's, Faraday's have found it impossible to treat the naive sense-termini of commonsense as ultimately real. As commonsense interpolates her constant things between our intermittent sensations so science extrapolates her world of primary qualities her atoms, her ether, her magnetic fields and the like beyond the commonsense world. The things are now invisible impalpable things and the old visible commonsense things are supposed to result from the mixture of these invisibles or else the whole naive conception of things gets superseded and a things name is interpreted as denoting only the law or regl de forbindung by which certain of our sensations habitually succeed or co-exist. Science and critical philosophy thus burst the bounds of commonsense with science naive realism ceases secondary qualities become unreal primary ones alone remain with critical philosophy Havoc is made of everything the commonsense categories can all cease to represent anything in the way of being there but sublime tricks of human thought our ways of escaping bewilderment in the midst of sensations irremediable flow but the scientific tendency in critical thought though inspired at first by purely intellectual motives has opened an entirely unexpected range of practical utilities to our astonished view Galileo gave us accurate clocks and accurate artillery practice the chemists flew us with new medicines and die-stuffs Ampere and Faraday have endowed us with the New York subway and with Marconi telegrams the hypothetical things that such men have invented defined as they have defined them are showing an extraordinary fertility and consequences verifiable by sense our logic can deduce from them a consequence due under certain conditions we can then bring about the conditions and presto the consequences there before our eyes the scope of the practical control of nature newly put into our hand by scientific ways of thinking vastly exceeds the scope of the old control grounded on common sense its rate of increase accelerates so that no one can trace the limit one may even fear that the being of man may be crushed by his own powers that his fixed nature as an organism may not prove adequate to stand the strain of the ever increasingly tremendous functions almost divine creative functions which his intellect will more and more enable him to wield he may drown in his wealth like a child in a bathtub who has turned on the water and who cannot turn it off the philosophic stage of criticism much more thorough in its negations than the scientific stage so far gives us no new range of practical power Locke, Jume, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel have all been utterly sterile so far as shedding any light on the details of nature goes and I can think of no invention or discovery that can be directly traced to anything in their peculiar thought for neither with Berkeley's tarwater nor with Kant's nebular hypothesis had their respective philosophic tenets anything to do the satisfactions they yield to their disciples are intellectual not practical and even then we have to confess that there is a large minus sign to the account there are thus at least three well characterized levels stages or types of thought about the world we live in and the notions of one stage have one kind of merit those of another stage another kind it is impossible however that any stage as yet inside is absolutely more true than any other common sense is the more consolidated stage because it got its innings first and made all language into its alley whether it or science be the more august stage may be left to private judgment but neither consolidation nor augustness has decisive marks of truth if common sense were true why should science have had to brand the secondary qualities to which our world owes all its living interest as false and to invent an invisible world of points and curves and mathematical equations instead why should it have needed to transform courses and activities into laws of functional variation vainly did scholasticism common sense's college trained younger sister seek to stereotypes the forms the human family had always talked with to make them definite and fix them for eternity substantial forms in other words our secondary qualities hardly outlasted the year of our lord sixteen hundred people were already tired of them then and Galileo and Descartes with his new philosophy gave them only a little later their cup the grass but now if the new kinds of scientific thing the corpuscular and atheric world were essentially more true why should they have excited so much criticism within the body of science itself scientific logicians are saying on every hand that these entities and their determinations however definitely conceived should not be held for literally real it is as if they existed but in reality they are like coordinates or logarithms only artificial shortcuts for taking us from one part to another of experiences flux we can cipher fruitfully with them they service wonderfully but we must not be their dupes there is no ring and conclusion possible when we compare these types of thinking with a view to telling which is the more absolutely true their naturalness their intellectual economy their fruitfulness for practice all start up as distinct tests of their veracity and as a result we get confused common sense is better for one sphere of life science for another philosophic criticism for a third but whether either be true or absolutely heaven only knows just now if I understand the matter rightly we are witnessing a curious reversion to the common sense way of looking at physical nature in the philosophy of science favored by such men as Marge Oswald and Juham according to these teachers no hypothesis is truer than any other in the sense of being a more literal copy of reality they are all but ways of talking on our part to be compared solely from the point of view of their use the only literally true thing is reality and the only reality we know is for these logicians sensible reality the flux of our sensations and emotions as they pass energy is the collective name according to Oswald for the sensations just as they present themselves the movement, heat, magnetic pull or light or whatever it may be when they are measured in certain ways so measuring them we are enabled to describe the correlated changes which they show us in formulas matchless for their simplicity and fruitfulness for human use they are sovereign triumphs of economy in thought no one can fail to admire the energetic philosophy but the hypersensible entities their corpuscles and vibrations hold their own with most physicists and chemists in spite of its appeal it seems too economical to be all sufficient profusion, not economy may after all be reality's keynote I am dealing here with highly technical matters hardly suitable for popular lecturing and in which my own competence is small all the better for my conclusion however which at this point is this the whole notion of truth which naturally and without reflection we assume to mean the simple duplication by the mind of a ready-made and given reality proves hard to understand clearly there is no simple test available for adjudicating offhand between the diverse types of thought that claim to possess it common sense, common science or corpuscular philosophy ultra-critical science or energetics and critical or idealistic philosophy all seem insufficiently true in some regard and leave some dissatisfaction it is evident that the conflict of these so widely differing systems obliges us to overhaul the very idea of truth for at present we have no definite notion of what the word may mean I shall face that task in my next lecture and will add but a few words in finishing the present one there are only two points that I wish to retain from the present lecture the first one relates to common sense we have seen reason to suspect it to suspect that in spite of their being so venerable of their being so universally used and built into the very structure of language its categories may after all be only a collection of extraordinarily successful hypothesis historically discovered or invented by single men by gradually communicated and used by everybody by which our forefathers have from time immemorial unified and straightened the discontinuity of their immediate experiences and put themselves into an equilibrium with the surface of nature so satisfactory for ordinary practical purposes that it certainly would have lasted forever but for the excessive intellectual vivacity of democracies Archimedes, Galileo, Berkeley and other eccentric geniuses whom the example of such men inflamed retain, I pray you, this suspicion about common sense the other point is this ought not the existence of the various types of thinking which we have reviewed each so splendid certain purposes yet all conflicting still and neither one of them able to support a claim of absolute veracity to awaken a presumption favourable to the pragmatic view that all our theories are instrumental, are mental modes of adaptation to reality rather than revelations or agnostic answers to some divinely instituted world enigma I express this view as clearly as I could in the second of these lectures certainly the restlessness of the actual theoretic situation the value for some purposes of each thought level and the inability of either to expel the others decisively suggest this pragmatistic view which I hope that the next lectures may soon make entirely convincing may there not after all be a possible ambiguity in truth End of lecture five Lecture six part one of pragmatism this LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Fredrik Carlson Pragmatism by William James Lecture six When clerk Maxwell was a child it is written that he had a mania for having everything explained to him and that when people put him off with vague verbal accounts of any phenomenon he would interrupt them impatiently by saying yes but I want you to tell me the particular go of it Had his question been about truth only a pragmatist could have told him the particular go of it I believe that our contemporary pragmatists especially Mr. Schiller and Dewey have given the only tenable account of this subject it is a very ticklish subject sending subtle rootlets into all kinds of crannies and hard to treat in the sketchy way that alone befits a public lecture but the Schiller-Dewey view of truth has been so ferociously attacked by rationalistic philosophers and so abominably misunderstood that here, if anywhere, is the point where a clear and simple statement should be made I fully expect to see the pragmatist view of truth run through the classic stages of a theory's career first, you know, our new theory is attacked as absurd then it is admitted to be true but obvious and insignificant finally, it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it our doctrine of truth is at present in the first of these three stages with symptoms of the second stage having begun in certain quarters I wish that this lecture might help it beyond the first stage in the eyes of many of you truth, as any dictionary will tell you is a property of certain of our ideas it means their agreement as falsity means their disagreement with reality pragmatists and intellectuals both accept this definition as a matter of course they begin to quarrel only after the question is raised as to what may precisely be meant by the term agreement and what by the term reality when reality is taken as something for our ideas to agree with in answering these questions the pragmatists are more analytic and painstaking the intellectuals more offhand and irreflective the popular notion is that a true idea must copy its reality like other popular views this one follows the analogy of the most usual experience our true ideas of sensible things do indeed copy them shut our eyes and think of yonder clock on the wall and you get just such a true picture or copy of its dial but your idea of its works unless you are a clockmaker is much less of a copy yet it passes muster for it in no way clashes with reality even though it should shrink to the mere word works that word still serves you truly and when you speak of the timekeeping function of the clock or of its springs elasticity it is hard to see exactly what our ideas can copy you perceive that there is a problem here where our ideas cannot copy definitely their object what does agreement with that object mean some idealists seem to say that they are true whenever they are what God means that we ought to think about that object others hold the copy view all through and speak as if our ideas possessed truth just in proportion as they approach to being copies of the absolute's eternal way of thinking these views you see invite pragmatistic discussion but the great assumption of the intellectualists that truth means essentially an inert static relation when you've got our true idea of anything there's an end of the matter you're in possession you know you have fulfilled your thinking destiny you are where you ought to be mentally you have obeyed your categorical imperative and nothing more need follow on that climax of our rational destiny epistemologically you are in stable equilibrium pragmatism on the other hand asks its usual question grant an idea or belief to be true it says what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life how will the truth be realized what experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false what in short is the truth's cash value in experiential terms the moment pragmatism asks this question it sees the answer true ideas are those that we can assimilate validate corroborate and verify false ideas are those that we cannot that is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas that therefore is the meaning of truth for it is all that truth is known as this thesis is what I have to defend the truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it truth happens to an idea it becomes true is made true by events its verity is in fact an event a process the process namely of its verifying itself its verification its validity is the process of its validation but what do the words verification and validation themselves pragmatically mean they again signify certain practical consequences of the verified and validated idea it is hard to find any one phrase that characterizes these consequences better than the ordinary agreement formula just such consequences being what we have in mind whenever we say that our ideas agree with reality they lead us namely through the acts and other ideas which they instigate into or up to or towards other parts of experience with which we feel all the while such feeling being among our potentialities that the original ideas remain in agreement the connections and transitions come to us from point to point as being progressive, harmonious, satisfactory this function of agreeable leading is what we mean by an idea's verification such an account is vague and it sounds at first quite trivial but it has results which it will take the rest of my hour to explain let me begin by reminding you of the fact that the possession of true thoughts means everywhere the possession of invaluable instruments of action and that our duty to gain truth so far from being a blank command from out of the blue or a stunt self imposed by our intellect can account for itself by excellent practical reasons the importance to human life of having true beliefs about matters of fact is a thing too notorious we live in a world of realities that can be infinitely useful or infinitely harmful ideas that tell us which of them to expect count as the true ideas in all this primary sphere of verification and the pursuit of such ideas is a primary human duty the possession of truth so far from being here and end in itself is only a preliminary means towards other vital satisfactions if I am lost in the woods and starved and find what looks like a cow path it is of the utmost importance that I should think of a human habitation at the end of it for if I do so and follow it I save myself the true thought is useful here because the house which is its object is useful the practical value of true ideas is thus primarily derived from the practical importance of their objects to us their objects are indeed not important at all times I may on other occasions have no use for the house and then my idea of it however verifiable will be practically irrelevant and had better remain latent yet since almost any object may someday become temporarily important the advantage of having a general stock of extra truths of ideas that shall be true of merely possible situations is obvious we store such extra truths away in our memories and with the overflow we fill our books of reference whenever such an extra truth becomes practically relevant to one of our emergencies it passes from cold storage to do work in the world and our belief in it grows active you can say of it then either that it is useful because it is true or that it is true because it is useful both these phrases mean exactly the same thing namely that there is an idea that gets fulfilled and can be verified true is the name for whatever idea starts the verification process useful is the name for its completed function in experience true ideas would never have been singled out as such would never have acquired a class name least of all a name suggesting value unless they had been useful from the outset in this way from this simple cue pragmatism gets a general notion of truth as something essentially bound up with the way in which one moment in our experience may lead us towards other moments which it will be worthwhile to have been led to primarily and on the common sense level the truth of a state of mind means this function of a leading that is worthwhile when a moment in our experience of any kind whatever inspires us with a thought that is true that means that sooner or later we dip by that thought guidance into the particulars of experience again and make advantageous connection with them this is a vague enough statement but I beg you to retain it for it is essential our experience meanwhile is all shut through with regularities one bit of it can warn us to get ready for another bit can intend or be significant of that remote or object the object's advent is the significance verification truth in these cases meaning nothing but eventual verification is manifestly incompatible with waywardness on our part woe to him whose beliefs play fast and lose with the order which realities follow in his experience they will lead him nowhere or else make false connections by realities or objects here we mean either things of common sense sensibly present or else common sense relations such as dates, places, distances, kinds, activities following our mental image of a house along the cow path we actually come to see the house we get the images full verification such simply and fully verified leadings are certainly the originals and prototypes of the truth process experience offers indeed other forms of truth process but they are all conceivable as being primary verifications arrested, multiplied or substituted one for another take for instance yonder object on the wall you and I consider it to be a clock although no one of us has seen the hidden works that make it one we let our notion pass for true without attempting to verify if truths mean verification process essentially ought we then to call such unverified truths as this aborted? no for they form the overwhelmingly large number of the truths we live by indirect as well as direct verifications pass master where circumstantial evidence is sufficient we can go without our witnessing just as we here assume Japan to exist without ever having been there because it works to do so everything we know conspiring with the belief and nothing interfering so we assume that thing to be a clock we use it as a clock regulating the length of our lecture by it the verification of the assumption here means it's leading to no frustration or contradiction verifiability of wheels and weights and pendulum is as good as verification for one truth process completed there are a million in our lives that function in this state of nasancy they turn us towards direct verification lead us into the surroundings of the objects they envisage and then if everything runs on harmoniously we are so sure that verification is possible that we omit it and are usually justified by all that happens truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system our thoughts and beliefs pass so long as nothing challenges them just as banknotes pass so long as nobody refuses them but this all points to direct face-to-face verification somewhere without which the fabric of truth collapses like a financial system with no cash basis, whatever you accept my verification of one thing, I yours of another we trade on each other's truth but beliefs verified concretely by somebody are the posts of the whole superstructure another great reason, beside economy of time for waiving complete verification in the usual business of life is that all things exist in kinds and not singly our world is found once for all to have that peculiarity so that when we have once directly verified our ideas about one specimen of a kind we consider ourselves free to apply them to other specimens without verification a mind that habitually discerns the kind of thing before it and acts by the law of the kind immediately without pausing to verify will be a true mind in 99 out of 100 emergencies proved so by its conduct fitting everything it meets and getting no refutation indirectly or only potentially verifying processes may thus be true as well as full verification processes they work as true processes would work give us the same advantages and claim our recognition for the same reasons all this on the commonsense level of matters of fact which we are alone considering but matters of fact are not our only stock in trade relations among purely mental ideas form another sphere where true and false beliefs obtain and here the beliefs are absolute or unconditional when they are true they bear the name either of definitions or of principles it is either a principle or a definition that one and one make two that two and two make three and so on that white differs less from gray than it does from black that when the cause begins to act the effect also commences such propositions hold of all possible ones of all conceivable whites and grays and causes the objects here are mental objects their relations are perceptually obvious at a glance and no sense verification is necessary moreover once true always true of those same mental objects truth here is an eternal character if you can find a concrete thing anywhere that is one or white or gray or an effect then our principles will everlastingly apply to it it is but a case of ascertaining the kind and then applying the law of its kind to the particular object you are sure to get truth if you can but name the kind rightly for your mental relations hold good of everything of that kind without exception if you then nevertheless fail to get truth concretely you would say that you had classed your real objects wrongly in this realm of mental relations truth again is an affair of leading we relate one abstract idea with another framing in the end great systems of logical and mathematical truth under the respective terms of which the sensible facts of experience eventually arranges themselves so that our eternal truths hold good of realities also this marriage of fact and theory is endlessly fertile what we say here is already true in advance of special verification if we have subsumed our objects rightly our ready-made ideal framework for all sorts of possible objects follows from the very structure of our thinking we can no more play fast and loose with these abstract relations than we can do so with our sense experiences they coerce us we must treat them consistently whether or not we like the results the rules of addition apply to our depths as rigorously as to our assets the hundredth decimal of Pi the ratio of this circumference to its diameter is predetermined ideally now though no one may have computed it if we should ever need the figure in our dealings with an actual circle we should need to have it given rightly calculated by the usual rules for it is the same kind of truth that those rules elsewhere calculate between the coercions of the sensible order and those of the ideal order our mind is thus wedged tightly our ideas must agree with realities be such realities concrete or abstract be they facts or be they principles under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration so far intellectuals can raise no protest they can only say that we have barely touched the skin of the matter realities mean then either concrete facts or abstract kinds of things and relations perceived intuitively between them they furthermore and thirdly mean as things that new ideas of ours must no less take account of the whole body of other truths already in our possession but what now does agreement with such threefold realities mean to use again the definition that is current here it is that pragmatism and intellectualism begin to part company primarily no doubt to agree means to copy but we saw that the mere word clock would do instead of a mental picture of its works and that of many realities our ideas can only be symbols and not copies past time, power, spontaneity how can our mind copy such realities to agree in the widest sense with a reality can only mean to be guided either straight up to it or into its surroundings or to be put into such workings touch with it as to handle either it or something connected with it better than if we disagreed better either intellectually or practically and often agreement will only mean the negative fact that nothing contradictory from the quarter of that reality comes to interfere with the way in which our ideas guide us elsewhere to copy a reality is indeed one very important way of agreeing with it but it is far from being essential the essential thing is the process of being guided any idea that helps us to deal with the practically or intellectually with either the reality or its belongings that doesn't entangle our progress in frustrations that fits in fact and adapts our life to the reality's whole setting will agree sufficiently to meet the requirement it will hold true of that reality thus names are just as true or false as definite mental pictures are they set up similar verification processes and lead to fully equivalent practical results all human thinking gets discursified we exchange ideas we lend and borrow verifications get them from one another by means of social intercourse all truth thus gets verbally built out stored up and made available for everyone hence we must talk consistently just as we must think consistently for both in talk and thought we deal with kinds names are arbitrary but once understood they must be kept to we must now call able, kind or kind, able if we do we anger ourselves from the whole book of Genesis and from all its connections with the universe of speech in fact down to the present time we throw ourselves out of whatever truth that entire system of speech in fact may embody the overwhelming majority of our true ideas admit of no direct or face-to-face verification those of past history for example as of kind and able the stream of time can be remounted only verbally or verified indirectly by the present prolongations or effects of what the past harbored yet if they agree with these verbalities and effects we can know that our ideas of the past are true as true as past time itself was so true was Julius Caesar so true were antediluvian monsters all in their proper dates and settings that past time itself was is guaranteed by its coherence with everything that's present true as the present is the past was also agreement thus turns out to be essentially an affair of leading leading that is useful because it is into quarters that contain objects that are important true ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini they lead to consistencies, stability and flowing human intercourse they lead away from eccentricity and isolation from foiled and barren thinking the untrammeled flowing of the leading process its general freedom from clash and contradiction passes for its indirect verification but all roads lead to Rome and in the end and eventually all true processes must lead to the face of directly verifying sensible experiences somewhere which somebody's ideas have copied such is the large loose way in which the pragmatist interprets the word agreement he treats it altogether practically he lets it cover any process of conduction from a present idea to a future terminus provided only it run prosperously it is only thus that scientific ideas flying as they do beyond common sense can be said to agree with the realities it is as I have already said as if reality were made of ether, atoms or electrons but we mustn't think so literally the term energy doesn't even pretend to stand for anything objective it is only a way of measuring the surface of phenomena so as to string their changes on a simple formula End of Lecture 6 Part 1 Lecture 6 Part 2 of Pragmatism this LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Fredrik Carlson Pragmatism by William James yet in the choice of these man-made formulas we cannot be capricious with impunity any more than we can be capricious on the common sense practical level we must find a theory that will work and that means something extremely difficult for our theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences it must derange common sense and previous belief as little as possible and it must lead to some sensible terminus or other that can be verified exactly to work means both these things and the squeeze is so tight that there is little loose play for any hypothesis our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is yet sometimes alternative theoretic formulas are equally compatible with all the truths we know and then we choose between them for subjective reasons we choose the kind of theory to which we are already partial we follow elegance or economy clerk Maxwell somewhere says it would be poor scientific taste to choose the more complicated of two equally well evidenced conceptions and you will all agree with him truth in science is what gives us the maximum possible sum of satisfactions taste included but consistency both with previous truth and with novel facts is always the most imperious claimant I have led you through a very sandy desert but now if I may be allowed so vulgar an expression we begin to taste the milk in the coconut our rationalist critics here discharged their batteries upon us and replied to them will take us out from all this dryness into full sight of a momentous philosophical alternative our account of truth is an account of truths in the plural of processes of leading realized in rebus and have only this quality in common that they pay they pay by guiding us into or towards some part of the system that dips at numerous points into sense percepts which we may copy mentally or not but with which at any rate we are now in the kind of commerce vaguely designated as verification truth for us is simply a collective name for verification processes just as health wealth strength etc our names for other processes connected with life and also pursued because it pays to pursue them truth is made just as health wealth and strength are made in the course of experience here rationalism is instantaneously up in arms against us I can imagine a rationalist to talk as follows truth is not made he will say it absolutely obtains being a unique relation that does not wait upon any process but shoots straight over the head of experience and hits its reality every time our belief that young thing on the wall is a clock is true already although no one in the whole history of the world should verify it the bare quality of standing in that transcendent relation is what makes any thought true that possesses it whether or not there be verification you pragmatists put the cart before the horse in making truths being reside in verification processes these are merely signs of its being merely our lame ways of ascertaining after the fact which of our ideas already has possessed the wondrous quality the quality itself is timeless like all essences and natures thoughts partake of it directly as they partake of falsity or of irrelevancy it can't be analyzed away into pragmatic consequences the whole possibility of this rationalist to raid is due to the fact to which we have already paid so much attention in our world, namely abounding as it does in things of similar kinds and similarly associated one verification service for others of its kind and one great use of knowing things is to be led not so much to them as to their associates especially to human talk about them the quality of truth obtaining anterim pragmatically means then the fact that in such a world innumerable ideas work better by their indirect or possible than by their direct and actual verification truth anterim means only verifiability then or else it is a case of the stock rationalist trick of treating the name of a concrete phenomenal reality as an independent prior entity and placing it behind the reality as its explanation Prof. Mark quotes somewhere an epigram of blessings Sagt Hanschen Schlau so Vetter Fritz Wie kommt es Vetter Fritzern das Grat der reichten in der Welt das meiste Geld besitzen? Hanschen Schlau, here treats the principle wealth as something distinct from the facts denoted by the man's being rich it antidates them the facts become only a sort of secondary coincidence with the rich man's essential nature in the case of wealth we all see the fallacy we know that wealth is but a name for concrete processes that certain man's lives play a part in and not a natural excellence found in Mr. Rockefeller and Carnegie but not in the rest of us like wealth health also lives in rebus it is a name for processes as digestion, circulation, sleep etc that go on happily though in this instance we are more inclined to think of it as a principle and to say the man digests and sleeps so well because he's so healthy with strength we are I think more rationalistic still and decidedly inclined to treat it as an excellence pre-existing in the man and explanatory as the herculean performances of his muscles with truth most people go over the border entirely and treat the rationalistic account as self-evident but really all these words in TH are exactly similar truth exists ante rim just as much and as little as the other things do the scholastics following Aristotle made much of the distinction between habit and act health in actu means, among other things good sleeping and digesting but a healthy man need not always be sleeping or always digesting any more than a wealthy man need be always handling money or a strong man always lifting weights all such qualities sink to the status of habits between their times of exercise and similarly truth becomes a habit of certain of our ideas and beliefs in their intervals of rest from their verifying activities but those activities are the root of the whole matter and the condition of there being any habit to exist in the intervals the true to put it very briefly is only the expedient in the way of our thinking just as the right is only the expedient in the way of our behaving expedient in almost any fashion and expedient in the long run and on the whole of course for what meets expediently all the experience inside won't necessarily meet all father experiences equally satisfactorily experience as we know has ways of boiling over and making us correct our present formulas the absolutely true meaning what no father experience will ever alter is that ideal vanishing point towards we imagine that all our temporary truths will someday converge it runs on all fours with the perfectly wise man and with the absolutely complete experience and if these ideals are ever realized they will all be realized together meanwhile we have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood Potolomaiic astronomy Euclidean space Aristotelian logic scholastic metaphysics were expedient for centuries but human experience has boiled over those limits and we now call these things only relatively true or true within those borders of experience absolutely they are false for we know that those limits were causal and might have been transcended by past theories just as they are by present thinkers when new experiences lead to retrospective judgments using the past sense what these judgments utter was true even though no past thinker had been led there we live forwards a Danish thinker has said but we understand backwards the present sheds a backward light on the world's previous processes they may have been truth processes for the actors in them they are not so for one who knows the later revelations of the story this regulative notion of a potential better truth to be established later possibly to be established someday absolutely and having powers of retroactive legislation turns its face like all pragmatist notions towards concreteness of fact and towards the future like the half truths the absolute truth will have to be made made as a relation incidental to the growth of a mass of verification experience to which the half true ideas are all along contributing their quota I have already insisted on the fact that truth is made largely out of previous truths men's beliefs at any time are so much experience funded but the beliefs are themselves parts of the sum total of the world's experience and become matter therefore for the next day's funding operations so far as reality means experienceable reality both it and the truths men gain about it are everlastingly in process of mutation mutation towards definite goal it may be but still mutation mathematicians can solve problems with two variables on the Newtonian theory for instance acceleration varies with distance but distance also varies with acceleration in the realm of truth processes facts come independently and determine our beliefs provisionally but these beliefs make us act and as fast as they do so they bring into sight or into existence new facts which redetermine the beliefs accordingly so the whole coil and ball of truth as it rolls up is the product of a double influence truths emerge from facts but they dip forward into facts again and add to them which facts again create reveal new truth the word is indifferent and so on indefinitely the facts themselves meanwhile are not true they simply are truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them the case is like a snowball's growth due as it is to the distribution of the snow on the one hand and to the successive pushes of the boys on the other with these factors co-determining each other insistently the most fateful point of the difference between being a rationalist and being a pragmatist is now fully in sight experience is in mutation and our psychological ascertainments of truth are in mutation so much rationalism will allow but never that either reality itself or truth itself is mutable reality stands complete and ready made from all eternity rationalism insists and the agreement of our ideas with it is that unique unanalyzable virtue in them of which she has already told us as that intrinsic excellence their truth has nothing to do with our experiences it adds nothing to the content of experience it makes no difference to reality itself it is supervenient inert static a reflection merely it doesn't exist it holds or obtains it belongs to another dimension from that of either facts or fact relations belongs in short to the epistemological dimension and with that big word rationalism closes the discussion thus just as pragmatism faces forward to the future so does rationalism here again face backward to a past eternity true to her inverted habit rationalism reverts to principles and thinks that when an abstraction once is named we own an irracular solution the tremendous pregnancy in the way of consequences for life of this radical difference of outlook will only become apparent in my later lectures I wish meanwhile to close this lecture by showing that rationalism sublimity does not save it from inanity when namely you ask rationalists instead of accusing pragmatists of desecrating the notion of truth to define it themselves by saying exactly what they understand by it the only positive attempts I can think of are these two one truth is just a system of propositions which have an unconditional claim to be recognized as valid footnote A. E. Taylor philosophical review volume 14 page 288 two truth is a name for all those judgments which we find ourselves under obligation to make by a kind of imperative duty footnote H. Rickert der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis chapter on die Ortailnotwendigkeit the first thing that strikes one in such definitions is their unutterable triviality they are absolutely true of course but absolutely insignificant until you handle them pragmatically what do you mean by claim here and what do you mean by duty as summary names for the concrete reasons why thinking in true ways is overwhelmingly expedient and good for mortal men it is all right to talk of claims on reality's part to be agreed with and of obligations on our part to agree we feel both the claims and the obligations and we feel them for just those reasons but the rationalist to talk of claim and obligation expressly say that they have nothing to do with our practical interests or personal reasons our reasons for agreeing are psychological facts they say relative to each thinker and to the accidents of his life they are his evidence merely they are no part of the life of truth itself that life transacts itself in a purely logical or epistemological as distinguished from a psychological dimension and it's claims antedate and exceed all personal motivations whatsoever though neither man nor God should ever ascertain truth the word would still have to be defined as that which ought to be ascertained and recognized there never was a more exquisite example of an idea abstracted from the concretes of experience and then used to oppose and negate what it was abstracted from philosophy and common life abound in similar instances the sentimentalist fallacy is to shed tears over abstract justice and generosity, beauty, etc and never to know these qualities when you meet them in the street because there the circumstances make them vulgar thus I read in the privately printed biography of an eminently rationalistic mind it was strange that with such admiration for beauty in the abstract my brother had no enthusiasm for fine architecture for beautiful painting or for flowers and in almost the last philosophic work I have read I find such passages as the following justice is ideal, solely ideal reason conceives that it ought to exist but experience shows that it cannot truth which ought to be cannot be reason is deformed by experience as soon as reason enters experience it becomes contrary to reason the rationalist fallacy here is exactly like the sentimentalists both extract a quality from the muddy particulars of experience and find it so pure when extracted that they contrasted with each and all its muddy instances as an opposite and higher nature all the while it is their nature it is the nature of truths to be validated, verified it pays for our ideas to be validated our obligation to seek truth is part of our general obligation to do what pays the payments true ideas bring are the sole why of our duty to follow them identical whys exist in the case of wealth and health truth makes no other kind of claim and imposes no other kind of ought than health and wealth do all these claims are conditional the concrete benefits we gain are what we mean by calling the pursuit a duty in the case of truth untrue believes work as perniciously in the long run as true believes work beneficially talking abstractly the quality true may thus be said to grow absolutely precious and the quality untrue absolutely damnable the one may be called good the other bad unconditionally we ought to think the true we ought to shun the false imperatively but if you treat all this abstraction literally and oppose it to its mother soil inexperience see what a preposterous position we work ourselves into we cannot then take a step forward in our actual thinking when shall I acknowledge this truth and when that shall the acknowledgement be loud or silent if sometimes loud sometimes silent which now when may a truth go into cold storage in the encyclopedia and when shall it come out for battle must I constantly be repeating the truth twice to our for because of its eternal claim on recognition or is it sometimes irrelevant must my thoughts dwell night and day on my personal sins and blemishes because I truly have them or may I sink and ignore them in order to be a decent social unit and not a mass of morbid melancholy and apology it is quite evident that our obligation to acknowledge truth so far from being unconditional is tremendously conditioned truth with a big T and in the singular claims abstractly to be recognized of course but concrete truths in the plural needs be recognized only when the recognition is expedient a truth must always be preferred to falsehood when both relate to the situation but when neither does truth is as little of a duty as falsehood if you ask me what a clock it is and I tell you that I live at 95 Irving Street my also may indeed be true but you don't see why it is my duty to give it a false address would be as much to the purpose with this admission that there are conditions that limit the application of the abstract imperative the pragmatistic treatment of truth sweeps back upon us in its fullness our duty to agree with reality is seen to be grounded in a perfect jungle of concrete expediences when Berkeley had explained what people meant by matter people thought that he denied matters existence when Mr. Schiller and Dewey now explain what people mean by truth they are accused of denying its existence these pragmatists destroy all objective standards critics say and put foolishness and wisdom on one level a favorite formula for describing Mr. Schiller's doctrines and mine is that we are persons who think that by saying whatever you find it pleasant to say and calling it truth you fulfill every pragmatistic requirement I leave it to you to judge whether this be not an impudent slander pent in as the pragmatist more than anyone else sees himself to be between the whole body of funded truth squeezed from the past and the coercions of the world of sense about him who so well as he feels the immense pressure of objective control under which our minds perform their operations if anyone imagines that this law is lax let him keep its commandment one day says Emerson we have heard much of late of the uses of the imagination in science it is high time to urge the use of a little imagination in philosophy the unwillingness of some of our critics to read any but the silliest of possible meanings into our statements is as discreditable to their imaginations as anything I know in recent philosophic history Schiller says the true is that which works there upon he is treated as one who limits verification to the lowest material utilities Dewis says truth is what gives satisfaction he is treated as one who believes in calling everything true which if it were true would be pleasant our critics certainly need more imagination of realities I have honestly tried to stretch my own imagination and to read the best possible meaning into the rationalist conception but I have to confess that it still completely baffles me the notion of reality calling on us to agree with and that for no reason but simply because its claim is unconditional or transcendent is one that I can make neither head nor tail of I try to imagine myself as a sole reality in the world and then to imagine what more I would claim if I were allowed to if you suggest the possibility of my claiming that a mind should come into being from out of the void inane and stand and copy me I can indeed imagine what the copying might mean but I can conjure up no motive what good it would do me to be copied or what good it would do that mind to copy me if father consequences are expressly and in principle ruled out as motives for the claim as they are by our rationalist authorities I cannot fathom Irishman's admirers ran him along to the place of banquet in a sedan chair with no bottom he said faith if it wasn't for the honor of the thing I might as well have come on foot so here but for the honor of the thing I might as well have remained uncopied copying is one genuine mode of knowing which for some strange reason our contemporary transcendentalists seem to be tumbling over each other to repudiate but when we get beyond copying and fall back on unnamed forms of agreeing that are expressly denied to be either copings or leadings or fittings or any processes pragmatically definable the what of the agreement claimed becomes as unintelligible as the why of it neither content nor motive can be imagined for it it is an absolutely meaningless abstraction footnote I'm not forgetting that professor Rickard long ago gave up the whole notion of truth being founded on agreement with reality reality according to him is whatever agrees with truth and truth is founded solely on our primal duty this fantastic flight together with mr. Joachim's candid confession of failure in his book the nature of truth seems to me to mark the bankruptcy of rationalism when dealing with this subject Rickard deals with part of the pragmatistic position under the head of what he calls relativismals I cannot discuss his text here suffice it to say that his argumentation in that chapter is so feeble as to seem almost incredible in so generally able a writer surely in this field of truth it is the pragmatists and not the rationalists who are the more genuine defenders of the universe's rationality end of lecture six lecture seven part one of pragmatism this LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Fredrik Carlson pragmatism by William James lecture seven pragmatism and humanism what hardens the heart of everyone I approach with a view of truth sketched in my last lecture is that the typical idol of the tribe the notion of the truth conceived as the one answer to terminate and complete to the one fixed enigma which the world is believed to profound for popular tradition it is all the better if the answer be oracular so as itself to awaken wonder as an enigma of the second order rather than revealing what its profundities are supposed to contain all the great single word answers to the world's riddle such as God the one reason law spirit matter nature polarity the dialectic process their idea the self the over so draw the admiration that men have lavished on them from this oracular role by amateurs in philosophy and professionals alike the universe is represented as a queer sort of petrified swings whose appeal to man consists in a monotonous challenge to his divining powers the truth what a perfect idol of the rationalistic mind I read in an old letter from a gifted friend who died too young these words in everything in science art morals and religion there must be one system that is right and every other wrong how characteristic of the enthusiasm of a certain stage of youth at 21 we rise to such a challenge and expect to find the system it never occurs to most of us even later that the question what is the truth is no real question being irrelative to all conditions and that the whole notion of the truth is an abstraction from the fact of truths in the plural a mere useful summarizing phrase like the Latin language or the law common law judges sometimes talk about the law and school masters talk about the Latin tongue in a way to make their hearers think they mean entities pre-existent to the decisions or to the words and syntax determining them unequivocally and requiring them to obey but the slightest exercise of reflection makes us see that instead of being principles of this kind both law and Latin are results distinctions between the lawful and the unlawful in conduct or between the correct and incorrect in speech have grown up incidentally among the interactions of men's experiences in detail and in no other way do distinctions between the true and the false in belief ever grow up truth grafts itself on previous truth modifying it in the process just as idiom grafts itself on previous idiom and law on previous law given previous law and a novel case and the judge will twist them into fresh law previous idiom new slang or metaphor or oddity that hits the public taste and presto a new idiom is made previous truth fresh facts and our mind finds a new truth all the while however we pretend that the eternal is unrolling that the one previous justice grammar or truth is simply folgerating and not being made but imagine a youth in the courtroom trying cases with this abstract notion of the law or a censor of speech let loose among the theaters with his idea of the mother tongue or a professor setting up to lecture on the actual universe with his rationalistic notion of the truth with the big T and what progress do they make truth law and language fairly boil away from them at least the touch of novel fact these things make themselves as we go our rights wrongs prohibitions penalties words forms idioms believes are so many new creations that add themselves as fast as history proceeds far from being antecedent principles that animate the process law language truth are but abstract names for its results laws and languages at any rate are thus seen to be man-made things mr. Schiller applies the analogy to believes and proposes the same of humanism for the doctrine that to an uncertain able extent our truths are man-made products to human motives sharpen all our questions human satisfactions lurk in all our answers all our formulas have a human twist this element is so inextricable in the products that mr. Schiller sometimes seems almost to leave it an open question whether there be anything else the world he says is essentially you lambda new it is what we make of it it is fruitless to define it by what it originally was or by what it is apart from us it is what is made of it hence the world is plastic footnote personal idealism page 60 he adds that we can learn the limits of the plasticity only by trying and that we ought to start as it were holy plastic acting methodically on that assumption and stopping only when we are decisively rebuked this is mr. Schiller's but and foremost statement of the humanist position and it has exposed him to severe attack I mean to defend the humanist position in this lecture so I will insinuate a few remarks at this point mr. Schiller admits as only as anyone the presence of resisting factors in every actual experience of truth making of which the new made special truth must take account and with which it has perforce to agree all our truths are beliefs about reality and in any particular believe the reality acts as something independent as a thing found not manufactured let me hear recall a bit of my last lecture realities in general what truths have to take account of footnote mr. Taylor in his elements of metaphysics uses this excellent pragmatic definition and the first part of reality from this point of view is the flux of our sensations sensations are forced upon us coming we know not whence over their nature order and quantity we have as good as no control they are neither true nor false they simply are it is only what we say about them only the names we give them our theories of their source and nature and remote relations that may be true or not the second part of reality as something that our beliefs must also obediently take account of is the relations that obtain between our sensations or between their copies in our minds this part falls into two subparts one the relations that are mutable and accidental as those of date and place and two those that are fixed and essential because they are grounded on the inner natures of their terms such as likeness and unlikeness both sorts of relation are matters of immediate perception both are facts but it is the latter kind of fact that forms the more important subpart of reality for our theories of knowledge inner relations namely are eternal are perceived whenever their sensible terms are compared and of them our thought mathematical and logical thought so-called must eternally take account the third part of reality additional to these perceptions though largely based upon them is the previous truths of which every new inquiry takes account this third part is a much less obturately resisting factor it often ends by giving way in speaking of these three portions of reality as that all times controlling our beliefs formation I'm only reminding you of what we heard in our last hour now however fixed these elements of reality may be we still have a certain freedom in our dealings with them take our sensations that they are is undoubtedly beyond our control but which we attend to note and make empathetic in our conclusions depends on our own interests and according as we lay the emphasis here and there quite different formulations of truth result we read the same facts differently Waterloo with the same fixed details spells a victory for an Englishman for a Frenchman it spells a defeat so for an optimist philosopher the universe spells victory for a pessimist defeat what we say about reality that's depends on the perspective into which we throw it the that of it is its own but the what depends on the which and the which depends on us both the sensational and relational parts of reality are dumb they say absolutely nothing about themselves we it is who have to speak for them this dumbness of sensations has led such intellectual is this th green and Edward cared to shove them almost beyond the pale of philosophic recognition but pragmatists refuse to go so far a sensation is rather like a client who has given his case to a lawyer and then has passively to listen in the courtroom to whatever account of his affairs pleasant or unpleasant the lawyer finds it most expedient to give hence even the field of sensation our minds exert a certain arbitrary choice by our inclusions and omissions we trace the fields extent by our emphasis we markets foreground and its background by our order we read it in this direction or in that we receive in short the block of marble but we carve the statue ourselves this applies to the eternal parts of reality as well we shuffle our perceptions of intrinsic relation and arrange them just as freely we read them in one serial order or another class them in this way or in that treat one or the other as more fundamental until our beliefs about them form those bodies of truth known as logics geometries or arithmetics in each and all of which the form and order in which the whole is cast is flagrantly man-made that's to say nothing of the new facts which men add to the matter of reality by the acts of their own lives they have already impressed their mental forms on that whole third of reality which I have called previous truths every hour brings its new percepts its own facts of sensation and relation to be truly taken account of but the whole of our past dealings with such facts is already funded in the previous truths it is therefore only the smallest and recentest fraction of the first two parts of reality that comes to us without the human touch and that fraction has immediately to become humanized in the sense of being squared assimilated or in some way adapted to the humanized mass already there as a matter of fact we can hardly take in an impression at all in the absence of a preconception of what impressions there may possibly be when we talk of reality independent of human thinking then it seems a thing very hard to find it reduces to the notion of what is just entering into experience and yet to be named or else to some imagined aboriginal presence in experience before any belief about the presence had arisen before any human conception had been applied it is what is absolutely dumb and evanescent the merely ideal limit of our minds we may glimpse it but we never grasp it what we grasp is always some substitute for it which previous human thinking has peptonized and cooked for our consumption if so vulgar an expression were allowed us we might say that wherever we find it it has been already faked this is what Mr. Shiller has in mind when he calls independent reality a mere unresisting you lump than you which is only to be made over by us that is Mr. Shiller's beliefs about the sensible core of reality we encounter it in Mr. Bradley's words but don't possess it superficially this sounds like Kant's view but between categories fulminated before nature began and categories gradually forming themselves in nature's presence the whole chasm between rationalism and empiricism yawns to the genuine Kant-Gener Shiller will always be to Kant as a satyr to Hyperion other pragmatists may reach more positive beliefs about the sensible core of reality they may think to get at it in its independent nature by peeling off the successive man-made wrappings they may make theories that tell us where it comes from and all about it and if these theories work satisfactorily they will be true the transcendental idealists say that there is no core the finally completed wrapping being reality and truth in one scholasticism still teaches that the core is matter Professor Berkson, Hyamon Strong and others believe in the core and bravely try to define it Mr. Jui and Shiller treat it as a limit which is the trigger of all these diverse accounts or of others comparable with them unless it be the one that finally proves the most satisfactory on the one hand there will stand reality on the other an account of it which proves impossible to better or to alter if the impossibility prove permanent the truth of the account will be absolute other content of truth than this I can find nowhere if the anti pragmatists have any other meaning let them for the heaven's sake reveal it let them grant us access to it not being reality but only our belief about reality it will contain human elements but these will know the non-human element in the only sense in which there can be knowledge of anything does the river make its banks or the banks make the river does a man walk with his right leg or with his left leg more essentially just as impossible may it be to separate the real from the human factors in the growth of our cognitive experience let this stand as a first brief indication of the humanistic position does it seem paradoxical if so I will try to make it plausible by a few illustrations which will lead to a fuller acquaintance with the subject in many familiar objects everyone will recognize the human element we conceive a given reality in this way or in that to suit our purpose and the reality passively submits to the conception you can take the number twenty seven as the cube of three or as the product of three and nine whereas twenty six plus one or one hundred minus seventy three or in countless other ways of which one will be just as true as another you can take a chessboard as black squares on a white ground whereas white squares on a black ground and neither conception is a false one you can treat the adjoined nature figure of a star of David as a star as two big triangles crossing each other as a hexagon with legs set up on its angles as six equal triangles hanging together by their tips etc all these treatments are true treatments the sensible that upon the paper resists no one of them you can say of a line that it runs east or you can say that it runs west and the line per se accepts both descriptions without rebelling at the inconsistency we carve out groups of stars in the heavens and call them constellations and the stars patiently suffer us to do so though if they knew what we were doing some of them might feel much surprised that the partners we had given them we name the same constellations diversely as Charles vane the great bear or the dipper one of the names will be false and one will be as true as another for all are applicable in all these cases we humanly make an addition to some sensible reality and that reality tolerates the addition all the additions agree with the reality they fit it while they build it out no one of them is false which may be treated as the more true depends all together on the human use of it if the 27 is a number of dollars which I find in drawer which I had left 28 it is 28 minus 1 if it is the number of inches in a shelf which I wish to insert into a cupboard 26 inches wide it is 26 plus 1 if I wish to ennoble the heavens by the constellations I see there Charles vane would be more true than dipper my friend Frederick Myers was humorously indignant that that prodigious star group should remind us Americans of nothing but a culinary utensil what shall we call a thing anyhow it seems quite arbitrary for we carve out everything just as we carve out constellations to suit our human purposes for me this whole audience is one thing which grows now restless now attentive I have no use at present for its individual units so I don't consider them so of an army of a nation but in your own eyes ladies and gentlemen to call your audience is an accidental way of taking you the permanently real thing for you are your individual persons to an anatomist again those persons are but organisms and the real things are the organs not the organs so much as their constituent cells say the histologist not the cells but their molecules say in turn the chemists we break the flux of sensible reality into things then at our will we create the subjects of our true as well as of our false propositions we create the predicates also many of the predicates of things express only the relations of the things to us and to our feelings such predicates of course are human additions Caesar crossed the Rubicon and was a menace to Rome's freedom he is also an American school room pest made into one by the reaction of our school boys on his writings the added predicate is true of him as the earlier ones end of lecture seven part one