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02 Part 1 - What Pragmatism Means - Pragmatism - William James · Logic Library

• Lecture two what pragmatism means. Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find every one engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel, A live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree trunk, while over against the other trees opposite side. A human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree. But no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel knows as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this, does the man go round the squirrel or not? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree. But does he go round the squirrel? In the unlimited leisure of the wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare. Every one had taken signs and was obstinate, and the numbers on both signs were even each side when I appeared. Therefore, appealed to me to make it a majority. Mindful of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction, you must make a distinction, I immediately sought and found one. As follows. Which party is right, I said, depends on what you practically mean by going round the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if, on the contrary, you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any further dispute. You are both right and both wrong, according as you conceive the verb to go round in one practical fashion or the other. Although one or two of the Hotter disputants called my speech a shuffling evasion, saying they wanted no quibbling or scholastic hair splitting, but meant just plain honest English round The majority seemed to think that the distinction had assuaged the dispute. I tell this trivial anecdote because it is a peculiarly simple example of what I wish now to speak of as the pragmatic method. The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical dispute that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many? Fated or free? Material or spiritual? Here are notions, either of which may or may not hold good of the world, and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true. If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the others being right. A glance at the history of the idea will show you still better what pragmatism means. The term is derived from the same Greek word pi row alpha gammamu alpha, meaning action, from which our words practice and practical come. It was first introduced into philosophy by mister Charles Perce in eighteen hundred and seventy eight in an article entitled how to make our Ideas Clear in the Popular Science Monthly for January of that year. Footnote translated in the Review Philosophy for January eighteen hundred seventy nine, volume seven. Mister Piers, after pointing out that our beliefs are really rules for action, said that to develop a thought's meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce. That conduct is for us its soul significant, and the tangible fact at the root of all our thought distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve, What sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, whether immediate or remote, is then for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all. This is the principle of purse, the principle of pragmatism. It lay entirely unnoticed by anyone for twenty years until I, in an address before Professor Howinson's Philosophy Union at the University of California, brought it forward again and made a special application of it to religion. By that date eighteen hundred and ninety eight, the time seemed ripe for its reception. The word pragmatism spread, and at present it fairly spots the pages of philosophic journals. On all hands. We find the pragmatic movement spoken of, sometimes with respect, sometimes with contumely, seldom with clear understanding. It is evident that the term applies itself conveniently to a number of tendencies that hitherto have lacked a collective name, and that it has come to stay. To take in the importance of Percy's principle, one must get accustomed to applying it to concrete cases. I found a few years ago that Ostwald, the illustrious Leipzig chemist, had been making perfectly distinct use of the principle of pragmaty in his lectures on the philosophy of science, though he had not called it by that name. All realities influence our practice, he wrote me, and that influence is their meaning for us. I am accustomed to put questions to my classes in this way, in what respects would the world be different if this alternative or that were true. If I can find nothing that would become different, then the alternative has no sense. That is, their rival views mean practically the same thing, and meaning other than practical, there is for us none. Ostwald, in a published lecture, gives this example of what he means. Chemists have long wrangled over the inner constitution of certain bodies called toutomeros. Their properties seemed equally consistent with the notion that an instable hydrogen atom of us inside of them, or that they are instable mixtures of two bodies. Controversy raged, but never was decided. It would never have begun, says Ostwald, if the combatants had asked themselves what particular experimental fact could have been made different by one or the other view being correct, for it would then have appeared that no difference of fact could possibly ensue, and the quarrel was as unreal as if theorizing in primitive times about the raising of dough by yeast, one party should have invoked a brownie, while another insisted in elf as the true cause of the phenomenon footnote theory und praxis, zeit shift dis uster reichichan echeneur on the Architect and Foreighness, nineteen hundred and five, Number four, Volume six. I find a still more radical pragmatism than Ostwald's in an address by Professor W. S. Franklin. I think that the sicklest notion of physics, even if a student gets it, is that it is the science of masses, molecules, and the ether. And I think that the healthiest notion, even if a student does not wholly get it, is that physics is the science of the ways of taking hold of bodies and pushing them science January Tewod, nineteen hundred and three. It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject him to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence. There can be no difference anywhere that doesn't make a difference elsewhere, no difference in abstract truth that doesn't express itself in a difference in concrete fact, and in conduct consequence upon that fact imposed on somebody, some how, somewhere and some when. The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me a definite instance of our life, if this world formula or that world formula be the true one. There is absolutely nothing new in the pragmatic method. Socrates was an adept at it, Aristotle used it methodically. Locke, Berkeley, and Hume made momentous contributions to truth by its means. Shadworth Hodgen keeps insisting that realities are only what they are known as. But these forerunners of pragmatism used it in fragments. They were preluders. Only not until in our time has it generalized itself, become conscious of our universal mission, pretended to a conquering destiny. I believe in that destiny, and I hope I may aim by inspiring you with my belief pragmatism represent a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude. But it represents it as it seems to me, both in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed. A pragmatist turns it back resolutely and once for all, upon a lot of invertate habits. Dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature as against dogma, artificiality, and the pretense of finality in truth. At the same time, it does not stand for any special results. It is a method only, but the general triumph of that method would mean an enormous change in what I have called in my last lecture the temperament of philosophy. Teachers of the ultra rationalistic type would be frozen out, much as the quartier type is frozen out in republics, as the ultramontane type of priest is frozen out in Protestant lands. Science and metaphysics would come much nearer together, would in fact work absolutely hand in hand. Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest. You know how men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and you know what a great part in magic words have always played. If you have his name or the formula of incantation that binds him, you can control the spirit, genie, afrite, or whatever the power may be. Solomon knew the names of all the spirits, and having their names, he held them subject to his will. So the universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power bringing word or name. That word names the universe's principle, And to possess it is, after a fashion, to possess the universe itself, God, matter, reason, the absolute energy. Are so many solving names you can rest when you have them. You are at the end of your metaphysical quest. But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical cache value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed. Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas in which we can rest. We don't lie back upon them. We move forward, and on occasion make nature over again by their aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up, and sets each one at work. Being not thing essentially new, It hormonizes with many ancient philosophic tendencies. It agrees with nominalism, for instance in always appealing to particulars, with utilitarianism in emphasizing practical aspects, with positivism in its disdain for verbal solutions, useless questions, and metaphysical abstractions. All these, you see, are anti intellectualist tendencies against rationalism as a pretension and a method. Pragmatism is fully armed and militant, but at the outset at least it stands for no particular results. It has no dogmas and no doctrines save its method. As the young Italian pragmatist Papinas well said, it lies in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing on an atheistic volume. In the next, someone on his knees praying for faith and strength. In a third, a chemist investigating our body's properties. In a fourth, a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated. In a fifth, the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown. But they all own the corridor, and all must pause through it if they want a practical way of getting into or out of their respective rooms. No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation is what the pragmatic method means, the attitude of looking away from first things principles, categories, supposed necessities, and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts. So much for the pragmatic method. You may say that I have been praising it rather than explaining it to you, But I shall presently explain it abundantly enough by showing how it works on some familiar problems. Meanwhile, the word pragmatism has come to be used in a still wider sense, as meaning also a certain theory of truth. I mean to give a whole lecture to the statement of that theory, after first paving the way. So I can be very brief now, But brevity is hard to follow. So I ask for your redoubled attention for a quarter of an hour. If much remains obscure, I hope to make it clearer in the later lectures. One of the most successfully cultivated branches of philosophy in our time is what is called inductive logic, the study of the condition under which our sciences have evolved. Writers on this subject have begun to show a singular unanimity as to what the laws of nature and elements of fact mean when formulated by mathematicians, physicists, and chemists. When the first mathematical, logical and natural uniformities the first laws were discovered, men were so carried away by the clearness, beauty, and simplification that resulted that they believed themselves to have deciphered authentically the eternal thoughts of the Almighty his mind. Also thundered and reverberated in syllogisms. He also thought in conic sections, squares and roots and rages, and geometrized like Euclid. He made velocity increase proportionally to the time in falling bodies. He made the law of the science for light to obey when refracted. He established the classes orders, families and genera, or plants and animals, and fixed the distances between them, thought the archetypes of all things, and devised their variations. And when we rediscover any one of these his wondrous institutions, we seize his mind in its very literal intention. But as the sciences have developed further, the notion has gained ground that most, perhaps all, of our laws are only approximations. The laws themselves, moreover, have grown so numerous that there is no counting them, and so many rival formulations are proposed in all the branches of science that investigators have become accustomed to the notion that no theory is absolutely a transcript of reality, but that any one of them may, from some point of view, be useful. Their great use is to summarize old facts and to lead to new ones. They are only a man made language are conceptual shorthand, as someone calls them, in which we write our reports of nature, and languages, as is well known, tolerate much choice of expression and many dialects. Thus, human arbitrariness has driven divine necessity from scientific logic. If I mention the names of Sigwart, mach Ostwald, Pearson, Milhard, poincreduham Raisin, those of you who are students will easily identify the tendency I speak of, and will think of additional names. Writing now on the front of this wave of scientific logic, misters Schiller and Dewey appear with their pragmatistic account of what truth everywhere signifies. Everywhere these teachers say, truth in our ideas and believes means the same thing that it means in science, it means. They say nothing but this that idea, which themselves are but parts of our experience, become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience, to summarize them and get about among them by conceptual shortcuts, instead of following the interminable succession of particular phenomena, Any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part or our experience, to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor is true for just so much, true in so far forth true instrumentally. This is the instrumental view of truth taught so successfully at Chicago, the view that truth in our ideas means their power to work, promulgated so brilliantly at Oxford. Mister Dewey, Schiller and their allies in reaching this general conception of all truths have only followed the example of geologists, biologists, and philologists. In the establishment of these other sciences. The successful stroke was always to take some simple process, actually observable in operation as denudation by weather, say, or variation from parental type, or change of dialect by incorporation of new words and pronunciations, and then to generalize it, making it apply to all times and produce great results by summating its effects through the ages. The observable process which Schiller and Dewey particularly singled out for generalization is the familiar one by which any individual settles into new opinions. The process here is always the same. The individual has a stock of old opinions already, but it meets a new experience that puts them to strain. Somebody contradicts them, or in a reflective moment, he discovers that they contradict each other, or he hears of facts with which they are incompatible, or desires arise in him which they cease to satisfy. The result is an inward trouble, to which his mind till then had been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief, we are all extreme conservatives. So he tries to change first this opinion and then that, for they receeast change very variously, until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter, idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience and runs them into one another, most felicitously and expediently. This new idea is then adopted as the true one. It preserves the older stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them just enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as familiar as the case leaves possible an outry explanation violating all our preconceptions. Would never pause for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch around industriously till we found something less eccentric. The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave the most of its old orders standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's owned biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go between a smoother over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new facts, so as ever to show a minimum of jolt a maximum of continuity. We hold the theory true just in proportion to its success in solving this problem of maxima and minima. But success in solving this problem is eminently a matter of approximation. We say this theory solves it on the whole more satisfactorily than that theory, but that means more satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will emphasize their points of satisfaction differently to a certain degree. Therefore, everything here is plastic. The point I now urge you to observe particularly is the part played by the older truths. Failure to take account of it is the source of much of the unjust criticism level against pragmatism. Their influence is absolutely controlling. Loyalty to them is the first principle. In most cases, it is the only principle, for by far, the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them. You doubtless wish examples of this process of truth's growth, and the only trouble is their superabundance. The simplest case of new truth is, of course, the mere numerical addition of new kinds of facts, or a new single facts of all kinds to our experience, an addition that involves no alteration in the old beliefs. Day follows day and its content are simply added. The new contents themselves are not true. They simply come, and are is what we say about them. And when we say that they have come, truth is satisfied by the plain additive formula. But often the day's contents oblige a rearrangement. If I should now utter piercing shrieks and act like a maniac on this platform. It would make many of you revise your ideas as to the probable worth of my philosophy. Radium came the other day as part of the day's content and seemed for a moment to contradict our ideas of the whole order of nature, that order having come to be identified with what is called the conservation of energy. The mere sight of radium paying heat away indefinitely out of its own pocket seemed to violate that conservation. What to think if the radiations from it were nothing but an escape of unsuspected potential energy pre existent inside of the atoms, the principle of conservation would be saved the discovery of helium as the radiation's outcome opened away. To this belief, so Ramsay's view is generally held to be true because although it extends our old ideas of energy, it causes a minimum of alteration in their nature. End of Lecture two, Part one