5

PRAGMATISM

On August 26, 1898, before the Philosophical Union of the University of California in Berkeley, William James delivered the lecture, “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results.” Published shortly thereafter in The University [of California] Chronicle (1898), this address published the term pragmatism as the name of a philosophical movement for the first time. In the perspective of history the far western setting, though undesigned, heightens the significance of the event. For James’s lecture launched the only philosophical movement indigenous to America—pragmatism. But intellectual currents do not run swiftly, nor do they immediately flood and sweep everything else away. Certainly pragmatism moved slowly. Yet within a decade pragmatism was the most lively philosophical movement in the world, much as existentialism and linguistic philosophy are today. And by 1906 and 1907, when James delivered his lecture series at the Lowell Institute in Boston and at Columbia University in New York City, published in 1908 as Pragmatism, he could count as adherents to the movement John Dewey in the United States, F. S. C. Schiller in England, Giovanni Papini in Italy, and Maurice Blondel in France.

The context in which James introduced the pragmatic principle was overlaid with religious concerns. The main problem to which he applied the pragmatist method in his 1898 address was the issue between materialism and theism, and the concept in behalf of which he employed his dialectical and rhetorical powers was the idea of God. This context was continuous with his earlier lecture on The Will to Believe, delivered at Yale in 1896, and a few years later with his Gifford Lectures on The Varieties of Religious Experience. No doubt, the religious concerns imparted momentum to the movement. Particularly on the European continent religious pragmatism, allied with modernism, caught on.

The original context in which the pragmatic principle emerged was scientific rather than religious. In his 1898 address as well as in subsequent lectures James acknowledged Charles Peirce (1839-1914), to whom, indeed, he had dedicated his Will to Believe, as the founder of pragmatism, and he cited Peirce’s article, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” which appeared in the Popular Science Monthly in 1878, as the first publication of the pragmatic principle.

Peirce himself ranks as the foremost, and perhaps the sole, scientific philosopher in the history of American thought. The son of the Harvard mathematician, Benjamin Peirce, he befriended James during their college years. Graduated from Harvard in 1859, where he earned an M.A. in 1862 and an Sc.B. in chemistry, summa cum laude, in 1863, Peirce joined the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1861 and served it in various capacities until 1891. He was also an assistant at the Harvard Observatory from 1869 to 1872 and again from 1872 to 1874. The only book Peirce ever published, Photometric Researches (1878), presents a series of astronomical observations he made at Harvard. In 1875 Peirce went to Paris as the first American delegate to the International Geodetic Conference, and there read a paper that was hailed as an important contribution to the determination of the gravitational constant. Although Peirce sought an academic position, he never secured a permanent appointment. Conjointly with his work for the Coast Survey, he lectured at Harvard on the philosophy of science in 1864-65, gave university lectures in philosophy and logic there in 1869-70 and again in 1870-71, and was a lecturer in logic at the newly founded Johns Hopkins University from 1879 to 1884. Despite the high regard in Which his work was held by the American thinkers, James, Royce and Dewey, it was not until the õóÚúþï« when Harvard University undertook the publication of his multivolume Collected Papers, that the founder of pragmatism became known to a wide audience.

In the early 1870’s a group, which Peirce called “The Metaphysical Club,” met regularly in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It included among its members James, Peirce, Chauncey Wright, Francis E. Abbott, John Fiske, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Presumably it was at the meetings of this Club that, in order to designate a specific and original philosophic method, Peirce introduced the term pragmatism. At a time when the teaching of philosophy in American academies and colleges was in the service of religion, Peirce as a practicing scientist was preoccupied with the problems of logic and methodology. Openly hostile to what he castigated as the “seminary habit of mind,” Peirce defined beliefs as rules for conduct and criticized as unacceptable all ways of fixing beliefs except the scientific method. For philosophy he proposed the adoption of the empirical, experimental attitude—what he called the “laboratory habit of mind.” As Peirce grew older, his thinking became more speculative, readily undertaking metaphysical and cosmological ventures, but when he published his papers on the logic of science in 1877 and 1878, papers which furnish the earliest formulations of pragmatism, he was a toughminded scientist. Drawing his examples from the history and logic of science, Peirce in “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” repudiated the traditional methods for obtaining clear and distinct ideas, and in explicit opposition to Descartes and Leibniz, he established a rule for the clarification of ideas on the basis of the experimental method: “Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”¹ This rule is the original statement of the pragmatic principle.

In the 1906-07 lectures on pragmatism James, as the popularizer of a theory which he attributed to Peirce, placed the pragmatic method in the middle ground between the partisans of religion and the partisans of science. His opening lecture on “the present dilemma in philosophy” delineated a conflict between tender-minded and tough-minded thinkers. The tender-minded, as we have already noted, incline toward a rationalism which protects the values of religion; the tough-minded adhere to an empiricism which safeguards the facts of science at the expense of religion. According to James, neither tender-minded rationalism nor tough-minded empiricism can do justice to both religion and science. Pragmatism alone “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.”²

The scope of pragmatism, James held, embraces: “first, a method; and second, a genetic theory of what is meant by truth.”³

The pragmatic method “is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable.”⁴ If a dispute over whether the world is one or many, fated or free, material or spiritual occurs, the pragmatic method proposes

... to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to any one 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.⁵

If, however, practical meanings tip the scale in favor of one metaphysical alternative over another, then the favored metaphysical alternative should be adopted.

James allied pragmatism with empiricism, positivism, nominalism—in his word, anti-intellectualism. For this deed he was rewarded with the denunciations of an irate Peirce, who went so far as to disown his own child and to invent a new term pragmaticism for his theory of method, a term ugly enough he hoped to be safe from kidnappers.⁶

However incorrect James may have been to impose a nominalistic interpretation on pragmatism, the reference to positivism is illuminating. Positivism, like empiricism, distinguishes between knowledge by means of concepts (savoir) and knowledge by direct acquaintance (connaître), and like empiricism, it insists that conceptual knowledge is reducible to the immediate knowledge of direct acquaintance. Unlike traditional empiricism, however, positivism assigns an anticipatory role to ideas. For the positivist, the idea (or concept) is a planned operation that anticipates the reactions of experience. Whereas traditional empiricism seeks the meaning of an idea in the sense experience from which it is derived, positivism locates its meaning in that future experience which is pertinent to its verification. Traditional empiricism is regressive; positivism is progressive. Thus positivism is regarded as the epistemology of experimental seience. James’s pragmatism, like positivism, also generalizes the experimental method of science into an epistemology. It demands that every theory and every concept be submitted to sensory events, to given experience, for their final verification or truth.

Another side of James’s pragmatism makes it more than any mere positivism and experimentalism. For experience is not only given; it also reveals. Besides providing the tests for the verification or rejection of ideas and beliefs, experience furnishes previews of the actual world in which our expectations are realized or disappointed. The meaning of an idea is, therefore, the conduct which it dictates or inspires, and it inspires specific “conduct because it first foretells some particular turn to our experience which shall call for just that conduct from us.”⁷

James’s concern with inspiring conduct by foretelling experience is manifest in his choice of metaphysical problems on which to apply the pragmatic method. Take the dispute between theism and materialism. Suppose this dispute were construed in the usual way. Then the question is: whence does the world come—from Matter or God? Viewed retrospectively it is indifferent whether this question is answered by reference to Matter or to God. Examined prospectively, however, the dispute is filled with meaning, since it then has practical bearings on man’s future in the world. As James interpreted materialism, it is tied to the biological law of evolution and the physical law of entropy, laws which, “though they are certainly to thank for all the good hours which our organisms have ever yielded us and for all the ideals which our minds now frame, are yet fatally certain to undo their work again, and to redissolve everything that they have once dissolved.”⁸ Here the superior practical meaning of theism over materialism comes into focus. Where materialism closes on despair, which discourages action, theism opens on promise.

The notion of God ... guarantees an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. A world with a God in it to say the last word, may indeed burn up or freeze, but we then think of him as still mindful of the old ideals and sure to bring them elsewhere to fruition; so that, where he is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the absolutely final things.⁹

Pragmatically, theism lets hope loose in the world, and in effect, it inspires action.

James’s pragmatism involved a radical theory of truth. Though exultant over the revolution pragmatism would bring to philosophy, he never appreciated how or why his theory of truth should have stirred up so much controversy. To many critics pragmatism was summed up in the rough slogans that the true is what works, that the true is the useful, that the true is the expedient. Had not James described theoretical truth as a credit system that periodically must be exchanged for the hard cash of experience? Harsh to academic ears, such crude formulations seemed to betray the shallow materialistic values of America’s business civilization. Worse still, the bustling style of James’s popular lectures slurred over the niceties of thought and sacrificed logical precision for rhetorical effect. He spoke indifferently of the truth of an idea or the truth of a belief, although strictly only the latter may be said to be true. Further, in estimating the truth of a belief by its consequences, he tended to confuse the logical consequences of the belief with the practical consequences of holding it. And finally, he failed to distinguish the nature of truth from the test of truth. Because of this carelessness, James was too often put to disadvantage in the ensuing philosophical argumentation.

Yet the subtitle of Pragmatism proclaims, “A New Way for Some Old Ways of Thinking,” and the dedication reads: “To the memory of John Stuart Mill from whom I first learned the pragmatic openness of mind and whom my fancy likes to picture as our leader” In this light James’s intention appears to have been the application of utilitarianism to the theory of knowledge. He confessed:

I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is ‘true’ so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives. That it is good, for as much as it profits, you will gladly admit. If what we do by its aid is good, you will allow the idea itself to be good in so far forth, for we are the better for possessing it.¹⁰

And he continued:

Let me now say only this, that truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it. The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.¹¹

James not only affiliated his pragmatic conception of truth with the widely held ethical theory of utilitarianism; he also strove to allign it with the two major theories of truth, the correspondence and the coherence theories. According to the coherence theory, which idealism upholds, a belief is true if it agrees (or coheres) with all other beliefs held to be true. According to the correspondence theory, which realism maintains, a belief is true if it agrees with (corresponds to) reality. James acknowledged the plausibility of the coherence theory, in that normally our beliefs cohere, forming a system in which each supports and is supported by the others; but he also recognized that sometimes a new belief, in the wake of new experience, is formed even though it clashes with the system of old beliefs. When a conflict of this sort occurs, the pragmatic method of inquiry is invoked to reconstruct the set of old beliefs or to refashion the new belief so that all beliefs, old and new, may form a system that agrees with the initially disruptive experience of reality.

Basic to James’s theory of truth is the claim that truth consists in the agreement of ideas or beliefs with reality. Stressing the distinction between truth and reality, he warned: “It seems an abuse of language, to say the least, to transfer the word ‘truth’ from the idea to the object’s existence.”¹² “Realities are not true, they are; and beliefs are of them.”¹³ An idea, as James taught in his Psychology, is a plan of action, or an anticipation of experience. An idea is true when it agrees with reality—that is to say, when it leads to action which proves successful or to an experience which is satisfying. The verification of an idea consists in the satisfactorily-ending consequences, mental or physical, which the idea was able to set up. Different in every single instance, these workings never transcend experience, and as mental or sensible particulars, they are amenable to concrete description in every individual case. When a pragmatist calls an idea true, he means that between it as a terminus a quo in some one’s mind and some particular reality as a terminus ad quern concrete workings do or may intervene.

Their direction constitutes the idea’s reference to that reality, their satisfactoriness constitutes its adaptation thereto, and the two things together constitute the ‘truth’ of the idea for its possessor. Without such intermediating portions of concretely real experience the pragmatist sees no materials out of which the adaptive relation called truth can be built up.¹⁴

Since truth is a property of ideas or beliefs, it can be no absolute or eternal principle. Caught up in the dynamics of the cognitive process, truth changes as beliefs and ideas change.

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.¹⁵

Primarily, pragmatism is an epistemological temporalism. Interpreting “meaning” and “truth” in terms of intertemporal relations between successive phases of experience, it teaches that conception, judgment, or belief is always an act of a human being standing at a specific moment in the time-flow, facing the future, preparing for that future by means of thought, and himself moving forward into that future even while he thinks.

Since pragmatism conceives truth to be relative to man, to human needs and aspirations, it is, according to James, a version of humanism. The British philosopher, F. C. S. Schiller, was the leading advocate of humanism among the pragmatists. A polemicist who penned his arguments against idealism with acidic wit, he had urged James to abandon the term pragmatism and to adopt humanism as their banner. Appreciative of the spread of pragmatism, however, James refused to make the change. Nevertheless, he freely espoused humanism. In addition to the acknowledgment that truth itself contains an ineradicable human factor, James on occasion declared that realities, too, are the products of human purpose. From the continuous sensible flux of reality, he said, ‘we carve out everything ... to suit our human purposes.”¹⁶ “We break the flux of sensible reality into things ... at our will.”¹⁷ Hence pragmatism as humanism entails a singular metaphysics. Its basic premise was most explicit perhaps when James imputed the essential service of humanism to be the perception that “experience as a whole is self-containing and leans on nothing.”¹⁸ This metaphysics of experience is an element in what he elsewhere called radical empiricism.