Pragmatics

“ I have all along been offering it expressly as a mediator between tough-mindedness and tender-mindedness. If the notion of a world ante rem, whether taken abstractly like the word winter, or concretely as the hypothesis of an Absolute, can be shown to have any consequences whatever for our life, it has a meaning. If the meaning works, it will have SOME truth that ought to be held to through all possible reformulations, for pragmatism. ”

“ Of course as human beings we can be healthy minds on one day and sick souls on the next; and as amateur dabblers in philosophy we may perhaps be allowed to call ourselves monistic pluralists, or free-will determinists, or whatever else may occur to us of a reconciling kind. But as philosophers aiming at clearness and consistency, and feeling the pragmatistic need of squaring truth with truth, the question is forced upon us of frankly adopting either the tender or the robustious type of thought. ”

“ Design, free-will, the absolute mind, spirit instead of matter, have for their sole meaning a better promise as to this world's outcome. Be they false or be they true, the meaning of them is this meliorism. I have sometimes thought of the phenomenon called 'total reflexion' in optics as a good symbol of the relation between abstract ideas and concrete realities, as pragmatism conceives it. ”

“ The thesis of pragmatism as to the active nature {152} and the practical meaning of all opinions may be illustrated by a simile that, as I think, well brings out the sense in which, as I hold, pragmatism itself is a true doctrine. Any sincere opinion announces a plan of action whereby we are, in some way, to adjust ourselves for some purpose to a real object. ”

“ This pragmatist doctrine, exhibiting our ideas as complemental factors of reality, throws open (since our ideas are instigators of our action) a wide window upon human action, as well as a wide license to originality in thought. But few things could be sillier than to ignore the prior epistemological edifice in which the window is built, or to talk as if pragmatism began and ended at the window. This, nevertheless, is what our critics do almost without exception. They ignore our primary step and its motive, and make the relation to action, which is our secondary achievement, primary. ”

“ I foresee that certain things will follow, or that I shall do certain things.
Now apply this maxim to the definition of pragmatism itself, and ask me: What actions or beliefs may be expected from a thinker who is a confessed pragmatist?
That is soon said. These expectations relate almost wholly to his choices in the world of thought. That is, we can foresee what things he will love and what things he will hate; what problems he will consider important, and what ones he will reject as useless; what will be his sympathies and antipathies in the world of ideas and of men. ”

“ Down with psychology, up with logic, in all this question!
See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalizes. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just WHY we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognize the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. ”

“ I wish now to add a word in further explanation of the claim I made at our last meeting, that pragmatism may be a happy harmonizer of empiricist ways of thinking, with the more religious demands of human beings.
Men who are strongly of the fact-loving temperament, you may remember me to have said, are liable to be kept at a distance by the small sympathy with facts which that philosophy from the present-day fashion of idealism offers them. It is far too intellectualistic. ”

“ But there are, in particular, two classes of minds that seem to me destined to form the bulk of the pragmatist army. I mean practical men and Utopians. The first, because they find in pragmatism the theoretical explanation of their scorn for questions that have no sense or practical import, and of their sympathy with all that is clear, potent and unencumbered. The second, because they find in pragmatism suggestive points of view that encourage them to imagine and to hope extraordinary things. ”

“ In respect of the knowledge it contains the world does genuinely 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. ”

“ If it were at all desirable to recapitulate to any extent those phenomena connected with Pragmatism that seem to indicate its rediscovery of the fact of action, and of the fact of its meaning for philosophy, as its one outstanding characteristic, we may point to such considerations as the following: (1) The fact of its having sought to advance from the stage of a mere “instrumentalist” view of human thought to that of an outspoken “humanism” or a socialized utilitarianism. ”

“ Even an acute American thinker, after first criticizing pragmatism as a kind of idealistic epistemology, goes on to treat it as a doctrine which regards intelligence as a lubricating oil facilitating the workings of the body. ”

“ The ordinary text-books of formal logic do not seem to meet the special aim which I am now trying to impress as desirable—namely, the habit of valuing, not merely speculative nor scientific truth, but the truth of practical life; a practising of the intellect in forming and expressing the opinions and judgments that form the staple of our daily discourse. ”

“ I had come by my pragmatism honestly enough, for I had got my training as a journalist through the study of chemistry, and in science the pragmatic mode of thinking is universal and unquestioned. So when I went to writing about other things,—politics, law, ethics, history, religion, and the like,—I naturally used my brains in the same way as in science, that is, I persisted in the valuation of all acts by their consequences instead of their causes and in the validation of all truths by practicality instead of precedent. ”

“ There may well be, however, for Pragmatism, or for any philosophy that can work it out satisfactorily, in the free, creative, activity of man, in the duty that lies upon us all of carrying on our lives to the highest expression, a reason and a truth that must be estimated at their logical worth along with the many other reasons and truths of which we are pleased to think as the truth of things. ”

“ In answering these questions the pragmatists are more analytic and painstaking, the intellectualists 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. ”

“ Disclaiming right at the outset all intention of speaking as one clothed with authority, fully realizing that what I may say is binding upon no one, my mission is simply to set forth what pragmatism is, as I understand it. ”

“ 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 intellectualists 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. ”

“ PRAGMATISM AND HUMAN ACTIVITY It requires now but a slight degree of penetration to see that beneath this entire matter of an apparent opposition between our “theoretical” and our “practical” satisfaction, and beneath much of the pragmatist insistence upon the “consequences” of ideas and of systems of thought, there is the great question of the simple fact of human action and of its significance for philosophy. ”

“ If the pragmatist objects that in this argument I have throughout supposed him to be urging the narrow meaning of utility, namely, that it is usefulness in the strictly practical sense, whereas he intends it in the widest possible meaning—a meaning that includes theoretical usefulness—then the trouble is a different one; it is to know how and where the pragmatist stops short of the coherence theory of truth, and wherein his method differs from that of the idealist. ”

“ Pragmatism is perfectly justified in regarding the whole process as no mere contemplation, no merely restful or static conformity of passive idea to motionless insight, but, on the contrary, as a significant interaction of life with life and of will with will. ”

“ And yet these same critics charge pragmatism with adopting subjective and emotional standards!
As a matter of fact, the pragmatic theory of intelligence means that the function of mind is to project new and more complex ends—to free experience from routine and from caprice. Not the use of thought to accomplish purposes already given either in the mechanism of the body or in that of the existent state of society, but the use of intelligence to liberate and liberalize action, is the pragmatic lesson. Action restricted to given and fixed ends may attain great technical efficiency ”

“ Such an objection makes a curious muddle of the pragmatist's universe of discourse. Within that universe the pragmatist finds some one with a headache or other feeling, and some one else who postulates that feeling. Asking on what condition the postulate is 'true' the pragmatist replies that, for the postulator at any rate, it is true just in proportion as to believe in it works in him the fuller sum of satisfactions. What is it that is satisfactory here? Surely to BELIEVE in the postulated object, namely, in the really existing feeling of the other man. ”

“ I offer the oddly-named thing pragmatism as a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds of demand. It can remain religious like the rationalisms, but at the same time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve the richest intimacy with facts. ”

“ To connect the two with any degree of success would certainly not be to depreciate Pragmatism, but to strengthen it by relating it to a spirit that is affecting the entire life and thought of mankind. ”

“ This is further expounded in the ‘Discourse Concerning Pragmatism,’ entitled Useless Knowledge, in which the position is maintained that action is primary, and knowledge only secondary—that the Good is the Source of the True. ”

“ First, then, there are certain respects in which I fully agree with recent pragmatism. I agree that every opinion expresses an attitude of the will, a preparedness for action, a determination to guide a plan of action in accordance with an idea. Whoever asserts anything about the way out of the woods, or about the cause and possible cure of a toothache, defines a course of action in accordance with some purpose, and amongst other things predicts the {146} possible outcome of that course of action. ”

“ The critic's trouble over this seems to come from his taking the word 'true' irrelatively, whereas the pragmatist always means 'true for him who experiences the workings.' 'But is the object REALLY true or not?'—the critic then seems to ask,—as if the pragmatist were bound to throw in a whole ontology on top of his epistemology and tell us what realities indubitably exist. 'One world at a time,' would seem to be the right reply here. ”

“ It is of course legitimate to demand a reason for reasonableness; to do so is only to ask why we think -- a question to which a genetic answer would seem to be afforded by certain forms of pragmatism. ”

“ For my dissatisfaction as a student of logic, with the pragmatist theory regarding truth, will call attention to the way in which I should approach precisely those psychological problems which pragmatism has most emphasized. ”

“ If we apply the canons of the Pragmatic philosophy to these objects we will arrive at some conclusion which, although it may not justify their existence, will give a hint as to their expediency. The question to be put to any doubtful fact in nature is this—'What is your use?' and the reality of the fact is in ratio to the degree of usefulness inhering in it. ”

“ Deferring, however, the question of the success of the pragmatists in this matter of the unfolding of the true relation between philosophy and human nature, let us think of a few of the teachings70 of experience upon this truly important and inevitable relation, which no philosophy indeed can for one moment afford to neglect. Insistence upon these facts or teachings and upon the reflections and criticisms to which they naturally give rise is certainly a deeply marked characteristic of Pragmatism. ”

“ They must back the world we find ourselves born into by "another and a better" world in which the eaches form an All and the All a One that logically presupposes, co-implicates, and secures each EACH without exception.
Must we as pragmatists be radically tough-minded? or can we treat the absolute edition of the world as a legitimate hypothesis? ”

“ But when the pragmatist speaks of opinions, does he mean any such insulated and unmotived abstractions as are here supposed? Of course not, he means men's opinions in the flesh, as they have really formed themselves, opinions surrounded by their causes and the influences they obey and exert, and along with the whole environment of social communication of which they are a part and out of which they take their rise. ”