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Problem of Truth

<h3> CHAPTER V PRAGMATISM </h3> The theory of the Absolute is only one form of Idealism, but it illustrates the nature and general direction of the development of philosophy along the line of speculation that began with Kant. There have been, of course, other directions. In particular many attempts have been made to make philosophy an adjunct of physical science, but the theory I have sketched is characteristic of the prevailing movement in philosophy during the last period of the Nineteenth Century, and until the movement known as Pragmatism directed criticism upon it. The form the pragmatical criticism of the theory of the Absolute took was to direct attention to the logical or intellectual principle on which it rests—in fact to raise the problem of the nature of truth. Pragmatism is a theory of the meaning of truth. It is the denial of a purely logical criterion of truth, and the insistence that truth is always dependent on psychological conditions. Pragmatism therefore rejects both the views that we have examined—the theory that truth is a correspondence of the idea with its object, and the theory that it is the logical coherence and consistency of the idea itself. It proposes instead the theory that truth is always founded on a practical postulate, and consists in the verification of that postulate; the verification not being the discovery of something that was waiting to be discovered, but the discovery that the postulate that claims to be true is useful, in that it works. Truth is what works. The Absolute is reality and truth. The idealist argument which we have followed was an attempt to {43} determine the nature of reality, and not an attempt to explain what we mean when we say that an idea agrees with its object. What is true about reality? was the starting point, and not, What is truth? nor even, What is true about truth? The search for reality failed to discover any object that agreed with its idea, but at last there was found an idea that must agree with its object, an idea whose object cannot not be. This idea, the Absolute, reveals the nature of reality. The pragmatist when he asks, What is truth? seems to dig beneath the argument, seems indeed even to reach the bedrock, but it is only in appearance that this is so. How, indeed, could he hope to be able to answer the question he has himself asked, if there is no way of distinguishing the true answer from the false? We must already know what truth is even to be able to ask what it is—a point which many pragmatist writers appear to me to have overlooked. In challenging the idea of truth, the pragmatist raises the no less important question of the nature of error. A theory of truth must not only show in what truth consists, but must distinguish false from true and show the nature of error. The pragmatist claims for his theory that it alone can give a consistent account of illusion and error. Now, as we saw in our account of the idealist argument, it is the fact of illusion and error that compels us to seek reality behind the appearances that are the sense data of our conscious experience. The whole force of the pragmatist movement in philosophy is directed to proving that truth is a prior consideration to reality. If we understand the nature of truth, we shall see reality in the making. Reality can in fact be left to look after itself; our business is with our conceptions alone, which are either true or false. The distinction of appearance and reality does {44} not explain illusion and error because it does not distinguish between true and false appearance. There is no principle in idealism by which the Absolute rejects the false appearance and reconciles the true. Before I examine the pragmatist argument, I ought first to explain the meaning and origin of the word. The term pragmatism, that has in the last few years entered so widely into all philosophical discussion, was used first by Mr. C. S. Peirce, an American philosopher, in a magazine article written as long ago as 1878, but it attracted no attention for nearly twenty years, when it was recalled by William James in the criticism of the current philosophy in his Will to Believe, a book which marks the beginning of the new movement. Pragmatism was first put forward as the principle that the whole meaning of any conception expresses itself in practical consequences. The conception of the practical effects of a conception is the whole conception of the object. The pragmatist maxim is—would you know what any idea or conception means, then consider what practical consequences are involved by its acceptance or rejection. Dr. Schiller, the leading exponent of the principle in England, prefers to call the philosophy "Humanism" in order still more to emphasize the psychological and personal character of knowledge. The name is suggested by the maxim of Protagoras, "Man is the measure of all things." The term Intellectualism is used by pragmatist writers to include all theories of knowledge that do not agree with their own, very much as the Greeks called all who were not Greeks, Barbarians. It must not be taken to mean, as its etymology would imply, a philosophy like that of Plato, which held that only universals, the ideas, are real, or like that of Hegel, who said that "the actual is the rational and the rational is the actual." The {45} pragmatists apply the term intellectualist to all philosophers who recognise an objective character in the logical ideal of truth, whether or not they also recognise non-logical elements in reality, and whether or not these non-logical elements are physical, such as matter and energy, or purely psychical, such as will, desire, emotion, pleasure, and pain. Pragmatism is a criticism and a theory. If reality in its full meaning is the Absolute, and if all seeming reality is only a degree of or approximation to this full reality, if the knowledge of this reality only is truth, must it not seem to us that truth is useless knowledge? Useless, not in the sense that it is without value to the mind that cares to contemplate it, but useless in so far as the hard everyday working world in which we have to spend our lives is concerned. We who have to win our existence in the struggle of life, need truth. We need truth in order to act. Truth that transcends our temporal needs, truth that is eternal, truth that reconciles illusion and error, that accepts them as a necessary condition of appearance in time, is useless in practice, however it may inspire the poet and philosopher. Truth to serve us must reject error and not reconcile it, must be a working criterion and not only a rational one. Whatever truth is, it is not useless; it is a necessity of life, not a luxury of speculation. Pragmatism therefore rejects the logical criterion of truth because it is purely formal and therefore useless. It demands for us a practical criterion, one that will serve our continual needs. Whether our working ideas—cause, time, space, movement, things and their qualities, terms and their relations, and the like—are consistent or inconsistent in themselves, they more or less work; and in so far as they work they are useful and serve us, and because they work, and just in so far as they work, they are true. {46} The pragmatist therefore declares that utility, not logical consistency, is the criterion of truth. Ideas are true in so far as they work. The discovery that they serve us is their verification. If we discover ideas that will serve us better, the old ideas that were true become untrue, and the new ideas that we adopt become true because they are found to work. This doctrine of the verification or making true of ideas leads to a theory of the origin of the ideas themselves. Each idea has arisen or been called forth by a human need. It has been formed by human nature to meet a need of human nature. It is a practical postulate claiming truth. Even the axioms that now seem to us self-evident—such, for example, as the very law of contradiction itself, from which, as we have seen, the logical criterion of consistency is deduced—were in their origin practical postulates, called forth by a need, and, because found to work, true. The inconsistencies and contradictions in our ideas do not condemn them as appearance, and compel us to construct a reality in which they disappear or are reconciled, but are evidence of their origin in practical need and of their provisional character. Truth is not eternal, it is changing. New conditions are ever calling forth new ideas, and truths become untrue. Each new idea comes forward with a claim to truth, and its claim is tested by its practicability. Truth is not something we discover, and which was there to be discovered. We verify ideas. To verify is not to find true but to make true. The pragmatist theory therefore is that truth is made. In all other theories truth is found. But if we make truth we must make reality, for it is clear that if reality is there already, the agreement with it of man-made truth would be nothing short of a miracle. The pragmatist, or at all events the pragmatist who is also a {47} humanist, finds no difficulty in accepting this consequence of the theory, although at the same time insisting that the whole problem, of being as well as of knowing is concerned with truth. We shall see, however, that it offers a serious difficulty to the acceptance of the theory—a theory which in very many respects agrees with ordinary practice and with scientific method. Take, for example, scientific method. Is not all progress in science made by suggesting a hypothesis, and testing it by experiment to see if it works? Do we not judge its claim to truth by the practical consequences involved in accepting or rejecting it? Is there any other verification? This is the simple pragmatist test,—does the laboratory worker add to it or find it in any respect insufficient? If truth can be considered alone, then we must admit that it is the attribute of knowledge which is comprised under the term useful, the term being used in its most comprehensive meaning to include every kind of practical consequence. It is the question of reality that raises the difficulty for the scientific worker. We cannot believe, or perhaps we should say, the ordinary man and the scientific man would find it very difficult to believe, that reality changes correspondingly with our success or failure in the verification of our hypothesis. When the scientific worker verifies his hypothesis, he feels not that he has made something true which before was not true, but that he has discovered what always was true, although until the discovery he did not know it. To this the pragmatist reply is, that this very belief is a practical consequence involved in the verification of the hypothesis, involved in the discovery that it works. What he denies is that truth reveals, or ever can reveal, a reality entirely irrelevant to any human purpose. It is also very important to add that in declaring that truth is verification, the {48} pragmatist does not set up a purely practical or utilitarian standard. The "working" of truth means theoretical as well as practical working. Much of the current criticism of pragmatism has failed to take notice of this intention or meaning of its principle, and hence the common misapprehension that the maxim "truth is what works" must mean that whatever a man believes is for him truth. The pragmatist doctrine and attitude will perhaps be easier to understand if we take it in regard to a particular instance of truth and error in regard to fundamental notions. In the last four or five years a new principle has been formulated in Physics, named the Principle of Relativity. It revolutionises the current conceptions of space and time. It is so recent that probably some of my readers now hear of it for the first time, and therefore before I refer to its formulation by mathematicians I will give a simple illustration to explain what it is. Suppose that you are walking up and down the deck of a steamer, and let us suppose that the steamer is proceeding at the speed of four miles an hour, the space that you cover and the interval of time that you occupy are exactly the same for you whether you are moving up the deck in the direction the steamer is going or down the deck in the direction which is the reverse of the steamer's movement. But suppose some one on the shore could observe you moving while the ship was invisible to him, your movement would appear to him entirely different to what it is to you. When you were walking up the deck you would seem to be going at twice the speed you would be going, and when you were going down the deck you would seem not to be moving at all. The time measurement would also seem different to the observer on the shore, for while to you each moment would be measured by an equal {49} space covered, to him one moment you would be moving rapidly, the next at rest. This is simple and easy to understand. Now suppose that both you and the observer were each observing a natural phenomenon, say a thunder-storm, it would seem that each of you ought to observe it with a difference—a difference strictly calculable from the system of movement, the ship, in which you were placed in relation to him. The propagation of the sound and of the light would have to undergo a correction if each of you described your experience to the other. If you were moving in the direction of the light waves they would be slower for you than for him, and if against their direction they would be faster for you than for him. Of course the immense velocity of the light waves, about 200,000 miles a second, would make the difference in a movement of four miles an hour so infinitesimal as to be altogether inappreciable, but it would not be nothing, and you would feel quite confident that if it could be measured the infinitesimal quantity would appear in the result. Now suppose that we could measure it with absolute accuracy, and that the result was the discovery that the supposed difference did not exist at all—and of course, we suppose that there is no doubt whatever about the measurement—what, then, should we be obliged to think? We should be forced to believe that as the velocity of light was the same for the two observers, one moving, one at rest, therefore the space and the time must be different for each. Now, however strange it may seem, such a measurement has been made, and with this surprising result. In consequence there has been formulated a new principle in Physics named the Principle of Relativity. I take this Principle of Relativity for my illustration because it is based on reasoning that practically admits of no doubt, and because {50} it requires us to form new conceptions of space and time which seem to alter fundamentally what we have hitherto considered as the evident and unmistakable nature of those realities. It has always seemed that the distance separating two points, and the interval of time separating two events, were each independent of the other and each absolute. However different the distance and the interval may appear to observers in movement or to observers in different systems of movement in relation to ourselves and to one another, in themselves they are the same distance and the same interval for all. They are the same for the man in the express train as for the man standing on the station platform. The Principle of Relativity requires us to think that this is not so, but that, contrary to all our settled notions, the actual space and time vary—really undergo an alteration, a contraction or expansion—with each different system of movement of translation to which the observer is bound. Events that for an observer belonging to one system of movement happen in the same place, for another observer in a different system of movement happen in different places. Events that for one observer happen simultaneously, for other observers are separated by a time interval according to the movement of translation of the system to which they belong. So that space, which Newton described as rigid, and time which he described as flowing at a constant rate, and which for him was absolute, are for the new theory relative, different for an observer in every different system of movement of translation. Or we may state it in the opposite way, and say that the Principle of Relativity shows us that the reason why natural phenomena, such as the rate of propagation of light, undergo no alteration when we pass from one system of movement of translation to another, as we {51} are constantly doing in the changing velocity of the earth's movement round the sun, is that space and time alter with the velocity. I cannot here give the argument or describe the experiments which have given this result—I am simply taking it as an illustration.[1] It seems to me admirably suited to compare the pragmatist method and the pragmatist attitude with that of scientific realism and of absolute idealism. [1] The Principle of Relativity is mainly the result of the recent mathematical work of H. A. Lorentz, Einstein, and the late Professor Minkowski. A very interesting and not excessively difficult, account of it is contained in Dernières Pensées, by the late Henri Poincaré; Paris, Alcan. Here, then, is a question in which the truth of our accepted notions is called in question, and new notions claim to be true. The sole question involved, pragmatism insists, is the truth of conceptions, not the reality of things, and there is but one way of testing the truth of conceptions—and that is by comparing the rival conceptions in respect of the practical consequences that follow from them and adopting those that will work. If the old conceptions of space and time fail to conform to a new need, then what was true before the need was revealed is no longer true, the new conception has become true. By verifying the new conception, we make it true. But, objects the realist, an idea cannot become true; what is now true always was true, and what is no longer true never was true, though we may have worked with the false notion ignorant that it was false. Behind truth there is reality. The earth was spherical even when all mankind believed it flat and found the belief work. To this the pragmatist reply is that reality is only our objectification of truth; it possesses no meaning divorced from human purposes. Had anyone announced that the earth was a sphere {52} when it was generally held to be flat, unless his announcement had some relevance to a defect in the flat earth notion, or a claim to revise that notion, his announcement would have been neither a truth nor a falsehood in any intelligible meaning of the term—he would have been making an irrelevant remark. The notions of space and time that Newton held worked, and were therefore true; if a new need requires us to replace them with other notions, and these other notions will work and are therefore true, they have become true and Newton's notions have become false. If it is still objected that the new notions were also true for Newton, although he was ignorant of them, the need for them not having arisen, the only reply is that truth, or reality, in complete detachment from human purposes, cannot be either affirmed or denied. With this view the idealist will be in agreement; his objection is of a different kind. He rejects, as the pragmatist does, the notion of a reality independent of human nature that forces upon us the changes that our conceptions undergo. These changes, he holds, are the inner working of the conceptions themselves, the manifestation of our intellectual nature, ever striving for an ideal of logical consistency. Truth is this ideal. We do not make it; we move towards it. If we compare, then, the idealist and the pragmatist doctrine, it will seem that, while for the idealist truth is growing with advancing knowledge into an ever larger because more comprehensive system of reality, for the pragmatist it is ever narrowing, discarding failures as useless and irrelevant to present purpose. How indeed, the idealist will ask, if practical consequences be the meaning of truth, is it possible to understand that knowledge has advanced or can advance? Does not the history of science prove a continual expansion, an increasing {53} comprehension? It is within the conception that the inconsistency is revealed, not in any mere outward use of the conceptions, and the intellectual effort is to reconcile the contradiction by relating the conception to a more comprehensive whole. How, then, does the idealist meet this case which we have specially instanced, the demand for new notions of space and time made by the Principle of Relativity? He denies that the new conceptions are called forth by human needs in the narrow sense—that is to say, in the sense that working hypotheses or practical postulates are required. The need is purely logical. The inconsistency revealed in the notions that have hitherto served us can only be reconciled by apprehending a higher unity. If the older notions of space and time are inadequate to the more comprehensive view of the universe as a co-ordination of systems of movement, then this very negation of the older notions is the affirmation of the new, and from the negation by pure logic the content and meaning which are the truth of the new notions are derived. To this objection the pragmatist reply is that if this be the meaning of the truth there is no way shown by which it can be distinguished from error. There is in fact for idealism no error, no illusion, no falsehood; as real facts, there are only degrees of truth. But a theory of truth which ignores such stubborn realities as illusion, falsehood, and error is, from whatever standpoint we view it, useless. On the other hand, pragmatism offers a test by which we can discriminate between true and false—namely, the method of judging conceptions by their practical consequences. Can we or can we not make our conceptions work? That is the whole meaning of asking, Are they true or false? And now, lest the reader is alarmed at the prospect of having to revise his working ideas of space and {54} time, I will, to reassure him, quote the words with which Henri Poincaré concluded his account of the new conceptions, and which admirably express and illustrate the pragmatist's attitude: "What is to be our position in view of these new conceptions? Are we about to be forced to modify our conclusions? No, indeed: we had adopted a convention because it seemed to us convenient, and we declared that nothing could compel us to abandon it. To-day certain physicists wish to adopt a new convention. It is not because they are compelled to; they judge this new convention to be more convenient—that is all; and those who are not of this opinion can legitimately keep the old and so leave their old habits undisturbed. I think, between ourselves, that this is what they will do for a long time to come." I have so far considered pragmatism rather as a criticism than as a doctrine. I will now try and characterise it on its positive side. It declares that there is no such thing as pure thought, but that all thinking is personal and purposive; that all knowing is directed, controlled, and qualified by psychological conditions such as interest, attention, desire, emotion, and the like; and that we cannot, as formal logic does, abstract from any of these, for logic itself is part of a psychical process. Truth therefore depends upon belief; truths are matters of belief, and beliefs are rules of action. It is this doctrine that gives to pragmatism its paradoxical, some have even said its grotesque, character. It seems to say that the same proposition is both true and false—true for the man who believes it, false for the man who cannot. It seems to say that we can make anything true by believing it, and we can believe anything so long as the consequences of acting on it are not absolutely disastrous. And the proposition, All truths work, seems to involve the conclusion that all that works is true; and the proposition, The true is the useful, seems to imply that {55} whatever is useful is therefore true. No small part of the pragmatist controversy has been directed to the attempt to show that all and each of these corollaries are, or arise from, misconceptions of the doctrine. I think, and I shall endeavour to show, that there is a serious defect in the pragmatist statement, and that these misconceptions are in a great part due to it. Nevertheless, we must accept the pragmatist disavowal. And there is no difficulty in doing so, for the meaning of the theory is sufficiently clear. Truth, according to pragmatism, is a value and not a fact. Truth is thus connected with the conception of "good." In saying that truth is useful, we say that it is a means to an end, a good. It is not a moral end, but a cognitive end, just as "beauty" is an esthetic end. Truth, beauty, and goodness thus stand together as judgments of value or worth. It is only by recognising that truth is a value that we can possess an actual criterion to distinguish it from error, for if truth is a judgment of fact, if it asserts existence, so also does error. The pragmatist principle has an important bearing on religion. It justifies the Faith attitude. It shows that the good aimed at by a "truth claim" is only attainable by the exercise of the will to believe. Thus it replaces the intellectual maxim, Believe in nothing you can possibly doubt, with the practical maxim, Resolve not to quench any impulse to believe because doubts of the truth are possible. Belief may even be a condition of the success of the truth claim. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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