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The Meaning of Truth

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The prior causal conditions, altho there could be no knowing of any
kind, true or false, without them, are but preliminary to the
question of what makes the ideas true or false when once their
tendencies have been obeyed. The tendencies must exist in some shape
anyhow, but their fruits are truth, falsity, or
irrelevancy, according to what they concretely turn out to be. They
are not 'saltatory' at any rate, for they evoke their consequences
contiguously, from next to next only; and not until the final result
of the whole associative sequence, actual or potential, is in our
mental sight, can we feel sure what its epistemological
significance, if it have any, may be. True knowing is, in fine, not
substantially, in itself, or 'as such,' inside of the idea from the
first, any more than mortality AS SUCH is inside of the man,
or nourishment AS SUCH inside of the bread. Something else is there
first, that practically MAKES FOR knowing, dying or nourishing, as
the case may be. That something is the 'nature' namely of the first
term, be it idea, man, or bread, that operates to start the causal
chain of processes which, when completed, is the complex fact to
which we give whatever functional name best fits the case. Another
nature, another chain of cognitive workings; and then either another
object known or the same object known differently, will ensue.

Dr. Pratt perplexes me again by seeming to charge Dewey and Schiller
[Footnote: Page 200] (I am not sure that he charges me) with an
account of truth which would allow the object believed in not
to exist, even if the belief in it were true. 'Since the truth of an
idea,' he writes, 'means merely the fact that the idea works, that
fact is all that you mean when you say the idea is true' (p. 206).
'WHEN YOU SAY THE IDEA IS TRUE'--does that mean true for YOU, the
critic, or true for the believer whom you are describing? 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.

One other trouble of Dr. Pratt's must be noticed. It concerns the
'transcendence' of the object. When our ideas have worked so as
to bring us flat up against the object, NEXT to it, 'is our relation
to it then ambulatory or saltatory?' Dr. Pratt asks. If YOUR
headache be my object, 'MY experiences break off where yours begin,'
Dr. Pratt writes, and 'this fact is of great importance, for it bars
out the sense of transition and fulfilment which forms so important
an element in the pragmatist description of knowledge--the sense of
fulfilment due to a continuous passage from the original idea to the
known object. If this comes at all when I know your headache, it
comes not with the object, but quite on my side of
the "epistemological gulf." The gulf is still there to be
transcended.' (p. 158).

Some day of course, or even now somewhere in the larger life of the
universe, different men's headaches may become confluent or be 'co-
conscious.' Here and now, however, headaches do transcend each other
and, when not felt, can be known only conceptually. My idea is that
you really have a headache; it works well with what I see of your
expression, and with what I hear you say; but it doesn't put me in
possession of the headache itself. I am still at one remove, and the
headache 'transcends' me, even tho it be in nowise transcendent of
human experience generally. Bit the 'gulf' here is that which the
pragmatist epistemology itself fixes in the very first words it
uses, by saying there must be an object and an idea. The idea
however doesn't immediately leap the gulf, it only works from next
to next so as to bridge it, fully or approximately. If it bridges
it, in the pragmatist's vision of his hypothetical universe, it can
be called a 'true' idea. If it only MIGHT bridge it, but doesn't, or
if it throws a bridge distinctly AT it, it still has, in the
onlooking pragmatist's eyes, what Professor Pratt calls
'trueness.' But to ask the pragmatist thereupon whether, when it
thus fails to coalesce bodily with the object, it is REALLY true or
has REAL trueness,--in other words whether the headache he
supposes, and supposes the thinker he supposes, to believe in, be a
real headache or not,--is to step from his hypothetical universe
of discourse into the altogether different world of natural fact.



VIII

THE PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OF TRUTH AND ITS MISUNDERSTANDERS
[Footnote: Reprint from the Philosophical Review, January, 1908
(vol. xvii, p. 1).]

The account of truth given in my volume entitled Pragmatism,
continues to meet with such persistent misunderstanding that I
am tempted to make a final brief reply. My ideas may well deserve
refutation, but they can get none till they are conceived of in
their proper shape. The fantastic character of the
current misconceptions shows how unfamiliar is the concrete point of
view which pragmatism assumes. Persons who are familiar with a
conception move about so easily in it that they understand each
other at a hint, and can converse without anxiously attending to
their P's and Q's. I have to admit, in view of the results, that we
have assumed too ready an intelligence, and consequently in many
places used a language too slipshod. We should never have spoken
elliptically. The critics have boggled at every word they could
boggle at, and refused to take the spirit rather than the letter of
our discourse. This seems to show a genuine unfamiliarity in the
whole point of view. It also shows, I think, that the second stage
of opposition, which has already begun to express itself in the
stock phrase that 'what is new is not true, and what is true not
new,' in pragmatism, is insincere. If we said nothing in any degree
new, why was our meaning so desperately hard to catch? The
blame cannot be laid wholly upon our obscurity of speech, for in
other subjects we have attained to making ourselves understood. But
recriminations are tasteless; and, as far as I personally am
concerned, I am sure that some of the misconception I complain of is
due to my doctrine of truth being surrounded in that volume
of popular lectures by a lot of other opinions not necessarily
implicated with it, so that a reader may very naturally have grown
confused. For this I am to blame,--likewise for omitting certain
explicit cautions, which the pages that follow will now in part
supply.

FIRST MISUNDERSTANDING: PRAGMATISM IS ONLY A RE-EDITING OF
POSITIVISM.

This seems the commonest mistake. Scepticism, positivism, and
agnosticism agree with ordinary dogmatic rationalism in
presupposing that everybody knows what the word 'truth' means,
without further explanation. But the former doctrines then either
suggest or declare that real truth, absolute truth, is inaccessible
to us, and that we must fain put up with relative or phenomenal
truth as its next best substitute. By scepticism this is treated as
an unsatisfactory state of affairs, while positivism and agnosticism
are cheerful about it, call real truth sour grapes, and consider
phenomenal truth quite sufficient for all our 'practical' purposes.

In point of fact, nothing could be farther from all this than what
pragmatism has to say of truth. Its thesis is an altogether
previous one. It leaves off where these other theories begin, having
contented itself with the word truth's DEFINITION. 'No matter
whether any mind extant in the universe possess truth or not,' it
asks, 'what does the notion of truth signify IDEALLY?' 'What kind of
things would true judgments be IN CASE they existed?' The answer
which pragmatism offers is intended to cover the most complete truth
that can be conceived of, 'absolute' truth if you like, as well
as truth of the most relative and imperfect description. This
question of what truth would be like if it did exist, belongs
obviously to a purely speculative field of inquiry. It is not a
theory about any sort of reality, or about what kind of knowledge is
actually possible; it abstracts from particular terms altogether,
and defines the nature of a possible relation between two of them.

As Kant's question about synthetic judgments had escaped previous
philosophers, so the pragmatist question is not only so subtile as
to have escaped attention hitherto, but even so subtile, it would
seem, that when openly broached now, dogmatists and sceptics
alike fail to apprehend it, and deem the pragmatist to be treating
of something wholly different. He insists, they say (I quote an
actual critic), 'that the greater problems are insoluble by human
intelligence, that our need of knowing truly is artificial and
illusory, and that our reason, incapable of reaching the
foundations of reality, must turn itself exclusively
towards ACTION.' There could not be a worse misapprehension.

SECOND MISUNDERSTANDING: PRAGMATISM IS PRIMARILY AN APPEAL TO
ACTION.

The name 'pragmatism,' with its suggestions of action, has been an
unfortunate choice, I have to admit, and has played into the
hands of this mistake. But no word could protect the doctrine from
critics so blind to the nature of the inquiry that, when Dr.
Schiller speaks of ideas 'working' well, the only thing they think
of is their immediate workings in the physical environment, their
enabling us to make money, or gain some similar
'practical' advantage. Ideas do work thus, of course, immediately or
remotely; but they work indefinitely inside of the mental world
also. Not crediting us with this rudimentary insight, our critics
treat our view as offering itself exclusively to engineers, doctors,
financiers, and men of action generally, who need some sort of
a rough and ready weltanschauung, but have no time or wit to study
genuine philosophy. It is usually described as a characteristically
American movement, a sort of bobtailed scheme of thought,
excellently fitted for the man on the street, who naturally hates
theory and wants cash returns immediately.

It is quite true that, when the refined theoretic question that
pragmatism begins with is once answered, secondary corollaries of a
practical sort follow. Investigation shows that, in the function
called truth, previous realities are not the only independent
variables. To a certain extent our ideas, being realities, are
also independent variables, and, just as they follow other reality
and fit it, so, in a measure, does other reality follow and fit
them. When they add themselves to being, they partly redetermine the
existent, so that reality as a whole appears incompletely definable
unless ideas also are kept account of. 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.

THIRD MISUNDERSTANDING: PRAGMATISTS CUT THEMSELVES OFF FROM THE
RIGHT TO BELIEVE IN EJECTIVE REALITIES.

They do so, according to the critics, by making the truth of our
beliefs consist in their verifiability, and their verifiability in
the way in which they do work for us. Professor Stout, in his
otherwise admirable and hopeful review of Schiller in Mind for
October, 1897, considers that this ought to lead Schiller (could he
sincerely realize the effects of his own doctrine) to the absurd
consequence of being unable to believe genuinely in another
man's headache, even were the headache there. He can only
'postulate' it for the sake of the working value of the postulate to
himself. The postulate guides certain of his acts and leads
to advantageous consequences; but the moment he understands fully
that the postulate is true ONLY (!) in this sense, it ceases (or
should cease) to be true for him that the other man really HAS a
headache. All that makes the postulate most precious then
evaporates: his interest in his fellow-man 'becomes a veiled form
of self-interest, and his world grows cold, dull, and heartless.'

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. But how (especially if the
postulator were himself a thoroughgoing pragmatist) could it ever be
satisfactory to him NOT to believe in that feeling, so long as, in
Professor Stout's words, disbelief 'made the world seem to him cold,
dull, and heartless'? Disbelief would seem, on pragmatist
principles, quite out of the question under such conditions,
unless the heartlessness of the world were made probable already on
other grounds. And since the belief in the headache, true for the
subject assumed in the pragmatist's universe of discourse, is also
true for the pragmatist who for his epitemologizing purposes has
assumed that entire universe, why is it not true in that
universe absolutely? The headache believed in is a reality there,
and no extant mind disbelieves it, neither the critic's mind nor his
subject's! Have our opponents any better brand of truth in this real
universe of ours that they can show us? [Footnote: I see here a
chance to forestall a criticism which some one may make on Lecture
III of my Pragmatism, where, on pp. 96-100, I said that 'God' and
'Matter' might be regarded as synonymous terms, so long as no
differing future consequences were deducible from the two
conceptions. The passage was transcribed from my address at the
California Philosophical Union, reprinted in the Journal of
Philosophy, vol. i, p. 673. I had no sooner given the address than I
perceived a flaw in that part of it; but I have left the passage
unaltered ever since, because the flaw did not spoil its
illustrative value. The flaw was evident when, as a case analogous
to that of a godless universe, I thought of what I called an
'automatic sweetheart,' meaning a soulless body which should be
absolutely indistinguishable from a spiritually animated maiden,
laughing, talking, blushing, nursing us, and performing all feminine
offices as tactfully and sweetly as if a soul were in her. Would
any one regard her as a full equivalent? Certainly not, and
why? Because, framed as we are, our egoism craves above all
things inward sympathy and recognition, love and admiration.
The outward treatment is valued mainly as an expression, as
a manifestation of the accompanying consciousness believed
in. Pragmatically, then, belief in the automatic sweetheart
would not work, and is point of fact no one treats it as a
serious hypothesis. The godless universe would be exactly
similar. Even if matter could do every outward thing that God does,
the idea of it would not work as satisfactorily, because the
chief call for a God on modern men's part is for a being who will
inwardly recognize them and judge them sympathetically. Matter
disappoints this craving of our ego, so God remains for most men the
truer hypothesis, and indeed remains so for definite pragmatic
reasons.]

So much for the third misunderstanding, which is but one
specification of the following still wider one.

FOURTH MISUNDERSTANDING: NO PRAGMATIST CAN BE A REALIST IN HIS
EPISTEMOLOGY.

This is supposed to follow from his statement that the truth of our
beliefs consists in general in their giving satisfaction. Of
course satisfaction per se is a subjective condition; so the
conclusion is drawn that truth falls wholly inside of the subject,
who then may manufacture it at his pleasure. True beliefs become
thus wayward affections, severed from all responsibility to other
parts of experience.

It is difficult to excuse such a parody of the pragmatist's opinion,
ignoring as it does every element but one of his universe of
discourse. The terms of which that universe consists
positively forbid any non-realistic interpretation of the function
of knowledge defined there. The pragmatizing epistemologist posits
there a reality and a mind with ideas. What, now, he asks, can make
those ideas true of that reality? Ordinary epistemology contents
itself with the vague statement that the ideas must 'correspond' or
'agree'; the pragmatist insists on being more concrete, and asks
what such 'agreement' may mean in detail. He finds first that the
ideas must point to or lead towards THAT reality and no other, and
then that the pointings and leadings must yield satisfaction as
their result. So far the pragmatist is hardly less abstract than the
ordinary slouchy epistemologist; but as he defines himself
farther, he grows more concrete. The entire quarrel of the
intellectualist with him is over his concreteness, intellectualism
contending that the vaguer and more abstract account is here the
more profound. The concrete pointing and leading are conceived by
the pragmatist to be the work of other portions of the same
universe to which the reality and the mind belong,
intermediary verifying bits of experience with which the mind at one
end, and the reality at the other, are joined. The 'satisfaction,'
in turn, is no abstract satisfaction ueberhaupt, felt by an
unspecified being, but is assumed to consist of such satisfactions
(in the plural) as concretely existing men actually do find in
their beliefs. As we humans are constituted in point of fact, we
find that to believe in other men's minds, in independent physical
realities, in past events, in eternal logical relations,
is satisfactory. We find hope satisfactory. We often find it
satisfactory to cease to doubt. Above all we find CONSISTENCY
satisfactory, consistency between the present idea and the entire
rest of our mental equipment, including the whole order of our
sensations, and that of our intuitions of likeness and difference,
and our whole stock of previously acquired truths.

The pragmatist, being himself a man, and imagining in general no
contrary lines of truer belief than ours about the 'reality' which
he has laid at the base of his epistemological discussion, is
willing to treat our satisfactions as possibly really true guides to
it, not as guides true solely for US. It would seem here to be
the duty of his critics to show with some explicitness why, being
our subjective feelings, these satisfactions can not yield
'objective' truth. The beliefs which they accompany 'posit'
the assumed reality, 'correspond' and 'agree' with it, and 'fit' it
in perfectly definite and assignable ways, through the sequent
trains of thought and action which form their verification, so
merely to insist on using these words abstractly instead of
concretely is no way of driving the pragmatist from the field,--
his more concrete account virtually includes his critic's. If our
critics have any definite idea of a truth more objectively grounded
than the kind we propose, why do they not show it more articulately?
As they stand, they remind one of Hegel's man who wanted
'fruit,' but rejected cherries, pears, and grapes, because they were
not fruit in the abstract. We offer them the full quart-pot, and
they cry for the empty quart-capacity.

But here I think I hear some critic retort as follows: 'If
satisfactions are all that is needed to make truth, how about the
notorious fact that errors are so often satisfactory? And how about
the equally notorious fact that certain true beliefs may cause the
bitterest dissatisfaction? Isn't it clear that not the
satisfaction which it gives, but the relation of the belief TO THE
REALITY is all that makes it true? Suppose there were no such
reality, and that the satisfactions yet remained: would they not
then effectively work falsehood? Can they consequently be treated
distinctively as the truth-builders? It is the INHERENT RELATION TO
REALITY of a belief that gives us that specific TRUTH-satisfaction,
compared with which all other satisfactions are the hollowest
humbug. The satisfaction of KNOWING TRULY is thus the only one which
the pragmatist ought to have considered. As a PSYCHOLOGICAL
SENTIMENT, the anti-pragmatist gladly concedes it to him, but then
only as a concomitant of truth, not as a constituent. What
CONSTITUTES truth is not the sentiment, but the purely logical or
objective function of rightly cognizing the reality, and the
pragmatist's failure to reduce this function to lower values is
patent.'

Such anti-pragmatism as this seems to me a tissue of confusion. To
begin with, when the pragmatist says 'indispensable,' it
confounds this with 'sufficient.' The pragmatist calls satisfactions
indispensable for truth-building, but I have everywhere called them
insufficient unless reality be also incidentally led to. If
the reality assumed were cancelled from the pragmatist's universe of
discourse, he would straightway give the name of falsehoods to the
beliefs remaining, in spite of all their satisfactoriness. For him,
as for his critic, there can be no truth if there is nothing to be
true about. Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless
some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a
pragmatist I have so carefully posited 'reality' AB INITIO, and
why, throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemological
realist. [Footnote: I need hardly remind the reader that both sense-
percepts and percepts of ideal relation (comparisons, etc.) should
be classed among the realities. The bulk of our mental
'stock' consists of truths concerning these terms.]

The anti-pragmatist is guilty of the further confusion of imagining
that, in undertaking to give him an account of what truth
formally means, we are assuming at the same time to provide a
warrant for it, trying to define the occasions when he can be sure
of materially possessing it. Our making it hinge on a reality so
'independent' that when it comes, truth comes, and when it goes,
truth goes with it, disappoints this naive expectation, so he
deems our description unsatisfactory. I suspect that under this
confusion lies the still deeper one of not discriminating
sufficiently between the two notions, truth and reality. Realities
are not TRUE, they ARE; and beliefs are true OF them. But I suspect
that in the anti-pragmatist mind the two notions sometimes swap
their attributes. The reality itself, I fear, is treated as if
'true' and conversely. Whoso tells us of the one, it is then
supposed, must also be telling us of the other; and a true idea must
in a manner BE, or at least YIELD without extraneous aid, the
reality it cognitively is possessed of.

To this absolute-idealistic demand pragmatism simply opposes its non
possumus. If there is to be truth, it says, both realities and
beliefs about them must conspire to make it; but whether there ever
is such a thing, or how anyone can be sure that his own beliefs
possess it, it never pretends to determine. That truth-satisfaction
par excellence which may tinge a belief unsatisfactory in other
ways, it easily explains as the feeling of consistency with
the stock of previous truths, or supposed truths, of which one's
whole past experience may have left one in possession.

But are not all pragmatists sure that their own belief is right?
their enemies will ask at this point; and this leads me to the

FIFTH MISUNDERSTANDING: WHAT PRAGMATISTS SAY IS INCONSISTENT WITH
THEIR SAYING SO.

A correspondent puts this objection as follows: 'When you say to
your audience, "pragmatism is the truth concerning truth," the
first truth is different from the second. About the first you and
they are not to be at odds; you are not giving them liberty to take
or leave it according as it works satisfactorily or not for their
private uses. Yet the second truth, which ought to describe and
include the first, affirms this liberty. Thus the INTENT of your
utterance seems to contradict the CONTENT of it.'

General scepticism has always received this same classic refutation.
'You have to dogmatize,' the rationalists say to the sceptics,'
whenever you express the sceptical position; so your lives keep
contradicting your thesis.' One would suppose that the impotence of
so hoary an argument to abate in the slightest degree the amount of
general scepticism in the world might have led some rationalists
themselves to doubt whether these instantaneous logical refutations
are such fatal ways, after all, of killing off live mental
attitudes. General scepticism is the live mental attitude
of refusing to conclude. It is a permanent torpor of the will,
renewing itself in detail towards each successive thesis that
offers, and you can no more kill it off by logic than yon can
kill off obstinacy or practical joking. This is why it is so
irritating. Your consistent sceptic never puts his scepticism into a
formal proposition,--he simply chooses it as a habit. He provokingly
hangs back when he might so easily join us in saying yes, but he is
not illogical or stupid,--on the contrary, he often impresses us by
his intellectual superiority. This is the REAL scepticism that
rationalists have to meet, and their logic does not even touch it.

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