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05 Part 1 - Pragmatism and Common Sense - Pragmatism - William James · Logic Library

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  Lecture five, Pragmatism and common Sense. In the last lecture, we turned
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  ourselves from the usual way of talking of the universe's oneness as a principle,
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  sublime in all its blankness, towards a study of the special kinds of union
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  which the universe enfolds. We found many of these to coexist with kinds of
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  separation equally real. How far am I verified? Is the question which each
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  kind of union in each kind of separation asks us. Here, So,
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  as good pragmatists, we have to turn our face toward experience, towards facts.
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  Absolute oneness remains, but only as a hypothesis, and that hypothesis is
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  reduced nowadays to that of an omniscient knower who sees all things without exception,
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  as forming one single systematic fact. But the knower in question may still be
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  conceived either as an absolute or as an ultimate, and over against the hypothesis
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  of him in either form. The counter hypothesis that the widest field of knowledge
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  that ever was or will be, still contains some ignorance may be legitimately held,
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  some bits of information always may escape. This is the hypothesis of noetic
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  pluralism, which monists consider so absurd, since we are bound to treat it
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  as respectfully as pnuetic monism until the facts shall have tipped the beam. We
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  find that our pragmatism, though originally nothing but a method, has forced us
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  to be friendly to the pluralistic view. It may be that some parts of
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  the world are connected so loosely with some other parts as to be strung along
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  by nothing but the copula, and they might even come and go without those
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  other parts suffering any internal change. This pluralistic view of a world of additive
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  constitution is one that pragmatism is unable to rule out from serious consideration. But
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  this view leads one to the father hypothesis that the actual world, instead of
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  being complete eternally as the monists assure us, may be eternally incomplete and at
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  all times subject to addition or liable to lass, it is at any rate
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  incomplete in one respect, and flagrantly so. The very fact that we debate
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  this question shows that our knowledge is incomplete at present and subject to addition.
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  In respect of the knowledge it contains, the world does generally change and grow.
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  Some general remarks on the way in which our knowledge completes itself when it
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  does complete itself, will lead us very conveniently into our subject for this lecture,
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  which is common sense to begin with. Our knowledge grows in spots.
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  The spots may be large or small, but the knowledge never grows all over.
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  Some old knowledge always remains what it was. Your knowledge of pragmatism,
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  let us suppose, is growing now. Later. Its growth may involve considerable
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  modification of opinions which you previously held to be true. But such modifications are
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  apt to be gradual. To take the nearest possible example, consider these lectures
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  of mine. What you first gain from them is probably a small amount of
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  new information, a few new definitions or distinctions or points of view. But
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  while these special ideas are being added, the rest of your knowledge stands still.
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  And only gradually will you line up your previous opinions with the novelties I
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  am trying to instill and modify to some slight degree. You listen to me,
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  now, I suppose with certain prepossessions as to my competency, and these
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  affect your reception of what I say. But were I suddenly to break off
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  lecturing and to begin to sing, we won't go home till morning in a
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  rich baritone voice, Not only would that new fact be added to your stock,
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  but it would oblige you to define me differently, and that might alter
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  your opinion of the pragmatic philosophy, and in general bring about a re arrangement
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  of a number of your ideas. Your mind in such processes, is strained,
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  and sometimes painfully so, between its older beliefs and the novelties which experience
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  brings along. Our minds thus grow in spots, and like grease spots,
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  the spots spread, but we let them spread as little as possible. We
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  keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge as many of our old prejudices and
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  beliefs as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The
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  novelty soaks in. It stains the ancient moss, but it is also tinged.
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  But what absorbs it, our past that perceives, incorporates, And in
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  the new equilibrium in which each step forward in the process of learning terminates,
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  it happens relatively seldom that the new fact is added raw. More usually,
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  it is embedded, cooked, as one might say, or stewed down in
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  the source of the old. New truths thus are resultants of new experiences and
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  of old truths combined and mutually modifying one another. And since this is the
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  case in the changes of opinion of to day, there is no reason to
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  assume that it has not been so at all times. It follows that very
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  ancient modes of thought may have survived through all the later changes in men's opinions.
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  The most primitive ways of thinking may not yet be wholly expunged. Like
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  our five fingers, our earbones are a rudimentary cordal appendage, or our other
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  vestigial peculiarities, they may remain as indelible tokens of events in our race history.
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  Our ancestors may, at certain moments have struck into ways of thinking which
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  they might conceivably not have found. But once they did so, and after
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  the fact, the inheritance continues. When you begin a piece of music in
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  a certain key, you must keep the key to the end. You may
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  alter your house ad libitum, but the ground plan of the first architect persists.
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  You can make great changes, but you cannot change a Gothic church into
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  a Doric temple. You may rinse and rinse the bottle, but you can't
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  get the taste of the medicine or whiskey that first filled it wholly out.
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  My thesis now is this that our fundamental ways of thinking about things are discoveries
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  of exceedingly remote ancestors, which have been able to preserve themselves throughout the experience
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  of all subsequent time. They form one great stage of equilibrium in the human
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  mind's development, this stage of common sense. Other stages have grafted themselves upon
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  this stage, but have never succeeded in displacing it. Let us consider this
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  common sense stage first, as if it might be final. In practical talk,
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  a man's common sense means his good judgment, his freedom from eccentricity,
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  his gumpchen, to use the vernacular word. In philosophy, it means something
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  entirely different. It means his use of certain intellectual forms or categories of thought.
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  Where we lobsters or bees. It might be that our organization would have
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  led to our using quite different modes from these of apprehending our experiences. It
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  might be, too, we cannot dogmatically deny this, that such categoris unimaginable
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  by us today, would have proved on the whole as serviceable for handling our
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  experiences mentally as those which we actually use. If This sounds paradoxical to anyone.
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  Let him think of analytical geometry. The identical figures which Euclid defined by
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  intrinsic relations, were defined by Discard by their relations of their points to adventitious
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  coordinates, the result being an absolutely different and vastly more potent way of handling
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  curves. All our conceptions are what the Germans call Denkmittel, means by which
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  we handle facts by thinking them. Experience merely as such doesn't come ticketed and
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  labeled. We have first to discover what it is. Kant speaks of it
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  as being in its first intention a gueville der Erscheinungen, a rhapsody de revarnemongen,
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  a mere motley, which we have to unify by our wits. What
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  we usually do is first to frame some system of concepts mentally classified, serialized,
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  or connected in some intellectual way, and then to use this as a
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  tally by which we keep tab on the impressions that present themselves when each is
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  referred to some possible place in the conceptual system. It is thereby understood.
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  This notion of parallel manifolds, with their elements standing reciprocally in one to one
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  relations is proving so convenient nowadays in mathematics and logic as to supersede more and
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  more the older classificatory conceptions. There are many conceptual systems of this sort,
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  and the sense manifold is also such a system. Find our one to one
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  relation for our sense impressions anywhere among the concepts, and in so far forward
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  you rationalize the impressions. But obviously you can rationalize them by using various conceptual
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  systems. The old common sense way of rationalizing them is by a set of
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  concepts, of which the most important are these thing the same or different kinds,
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  minds, bodies, one time, one space, subjects, and attributes,
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  causial influences, the fancied the real. We are now so familiar with
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  the order that these notions have woven for us out of the everlasting weather of
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  our perceptions, that we find it hard to realize how little of a fixed
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  routine the perceptions follow when taken by themselves. The word weather is a good
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  one to use here. In Boston, for example, the weather has almost
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  no routine, the only law being that if you have had any weather for
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  two two days, she will probably, but not certainly, have another weather
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  on the third, whether experience as it thus comes to Boston is discontinuous and
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  chaotic in point of temperature of wind, rain, or sunshine, it may
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  change three times a day. But the Washington Weather Bureau intellectualizes this disorder by
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  making each successive bit of Boston weather episodic. It refers it to its place
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  and moment in a continental cyclone, on the history of which the local changes
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  everywhere are strung as beads are strung upon ac cord. Now it seems almost
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  certain that young children and the inferior animals take all their experiences very much as
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  uninstructed Bostonians take their weather. They know no more of time or space,
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  as world receptacles, or of permanent subjects in changing predicates, or of courses
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  or kinds or thoughts or things, than our common people know of continental cyclones.
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  A baby's rattle drops out of his hand, but the baby looks not
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  for it. It has gone out for him, as a candle flame goes
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  out, and it comes back when you replace it in his hand, as
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  the flame comes back when re lit. The idea of its being a thing
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  whose permanent existence by itself, he might interpolate between its successive apparitions has evidently
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  not occurred to him. It is the same with dogs, out of sight,
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  out of mind. With them, it is pretty evident that they have
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  no general tendency to interpolate things. Let me quote here a passage for my
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  colleague G. Santayana's book. If a dog, while sniffing about, contentedly
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  sees afar off his master, arriving after long absence, the poor brute asks
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  for no reason why his master went, why he has come again, why
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  he should be loved, or why Presently, while lying at his feet,
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  you forget him and begin to grunt and dream of the chase. All that
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  is in utter mystery, utterly unconsidered. Such experience has variety, scenery,
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  and a certain vital rhythm. Its story might be told in dithyrambic verse.
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  It moves wholly by inspiration. Every event is providential, every act unpremeditated.
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  Absolute freedom and absolute helplessness have met together. You depend wholly on divine favor.
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  Yet that unfathomable agency is not distinguishable from our own life. But the
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  figures, even of that disordered trauma, have their exits and their entrances,
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  And the accused can be gradually discovered by a being capable of fixing his attention
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  and retaining the order of events in proportion. As such, understanding advances,
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  each moment of experience becomes consequential and prophetic of the rest. The calm places
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  in life are filled with power and its sposoms with resource. No emotion can
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  overwhelm the mind, for of none is the basis or issue wholly hidden.
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  No event can disconcert it altogether, because it sees beyond means can be looked
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  for to escape from the worst predicament. And whereas each moment had been formally
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  filled with nothing by its own adventure and surprised emotion, each now makes room
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  for the lesson of what went before, and surmises what may be the plot
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  of the whole footnote The Life of Reason, Reason and Common Sense, nineteen
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  hundred five, page fifty nine. Even today, science and philosophy are still
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  laboriously trying to part fancies from realities in our experience, and in primitive times
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  they made only the most incipient distinctions. In this line, men believed whatever
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  they thought with any liveliness, and they mixed their dreams with realities inextricably.
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  The crateogories of thought and things are indispensable here, instead of being realities,
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  we now call certain experiences only thoughts. There is not a category among those
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  enumerated of which we may not imagine the use to have thus originated historically,
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  and only gradually spread that one time which we believe in, and in which
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  each event has its definite date, that one space in which each thing has
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  its position. These abstract notions unify the world incomparably, but in their finished
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  shape as concepts, how different they are from the loose, unordered time and
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  space experiences of natural men. Everything that happened to us brings its own duration
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  and extension, and both are vaguely surrounded by a marginal more that runs into
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  the duration and extension of the next thing that comes. But we soon lose
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  all our definite bearings. And not only do our children make no distinction between
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  yesterday and the day before yesterday, the whole past being churned up together,
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  but we adults still do so whenever the times are large. It is the
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  same with spaces on a map. I can distinctly see the relation of London
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  Constantinople, and peek in to the place where I am. In reality,
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  I utterly fail to feel the facts which the map symbolizes. The directions and
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  distances are vague, confused, and mixed, cosmic space and cosmic time,
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  so far from being the intuitions that kan't said, They were our constructions,
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  as patently artificial as any that science can show. The great majority of the
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  human race never use these notions, but live in plural times and spaces,
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  interpenetrant and dood shine under permanent things again, the same thing and its various
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  appearances and alterations, the different kinds of thing, with the kind used finally
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  as a predicate of which the thing remains the subject. What a straightening of
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  the tangle of our experiences, immediate flux and sensible variety does this list of
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  terms suggest? And it is only the smallest part of its experiences flux that
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  anyone actually does straighten out by applying to it these conceptual instruments. Out of
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  them all our lowest ancestors probably used only in then, most vaguely and inaccurately,
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  the notion of the same again. But even if you had asked them
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  whether the same were a thing that had endured throughout the unseen interval, they
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  would probably have been at a loss and would have said that they had never
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  asked that question or considered matters in that light. End of Lecture five,
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  Part one,