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WHAT PRAGMATISM IS
Charles Sanders Peirce
[411]
The writer of this article has been led
by much experience to believe that every physicist, and every chemist,
and, in short, every master in any department of experimental science,
has had his mind molded by his life in the laboratory to a degree that
is little suspected. The experimentalist himself can hardly be fully
aware of it, for the reason that the men whose intellects he really
knows about are much like himself in this respect. With intellects of
widely different training from his own, whose education has largely been
a thing learned out of books, he will never become inwardly intimate,
be he on ever so familiar terms with them; for he and they are as oil
and water, and though they be shaken up together, it is remarkable how
quickly they will go their several mental ways, without having gained
more than a faint flavor from the association. Were those other men only
to take skillful soundings of the experimentalist’s mind—which is just
what they are unqualified to do, for the most part—they would soon
discover that, excepting perhaps upon topics where his mind is trammeled
by personal feeling or by his bringing up, his disposition is to think
of everything just as everything is thought of in the laboratory, that
is, as a question of experimentation. Of course, no living man possesses
in their fullness all the attributes characteristic of his type: it is
not the typical doctor whom you will see every day driven in buggy or
coupé, nor is it the typical pedagogue that will be met with in the
first school-room you enter. But when you have found, or ideally
constructed upon a basis of observation, the typical experimentalist,
you will find that whatever assertion you may make to him, he will
either understand as meaning that if a given prescription for an
experiment ever can be and ever is carried out in act, an experience of a
given description will result, or else he will see no sense at all in
what you say. If you talk to him as Mr. Balfour talked not long ago to
the British Association, saying that "the physicist seeks for something
deeper than the laws connecting plausible objects of experience," that
"his object is physical reality" unrevealed in experiments, and that the
existence of such non-experiential reality "is the unalterable faith of
science," to all such ontological meaning you will find the
experimentalist mind to be color-blind. What adds to that confidence in
this which the writer owes to his conversations with experimentalists is
that he himself may almost be said to have inhabited a laboratory from
the age of six until long past maturity; and having all his life
associated mostly with experimentalists, it has always been with a
confident sense of understanding them and of being understood by them.
[412]
That laboratory life did not prevent the writer (who here and in what
follows simply exemplifies the experimentalist type) from becoming
interested in methods of thinking; and when he came to read metaphysics,
although much of it seemed to him loosely reasoned and determined by
accidental prepossessions, yet in the writings of some philosophers,
especially Kant, Berkeley, and Spinoza, he sometimes came upon strains
of thought that recalled the ways of thinking of the laboratory, so that
he felt he might trust to them; all of which has been true of other
laboratory-men.
Endeavoring, as a man of that type naturally would, to formulate what he so approved, he framed the theory that a conception, that is, the rational purport of a word or other expression, lies exclusively in its conceivable bearing upon the conduct of life; so that, since obviously nothing that might not result from experiment can have any direct bearing upon conduct, if one can define accurately all the conceivable experimental phenomena which the affirmation or denial of a concept could imply, one will have therein a complete definition of the concept, and there is absolutely nothing more in it. For this doctrine he invented the name pragmatism. Some of his friends wished him to call it practicism or practicalism (perhaps on the ground that praktikos is better Greek than pragmatikos). But for one who had learned philosophy out of Kant, as the writer, along with nineteen out of every twenty experimentalists who have turned to philosophy, had done, and who still thought in Kantian terms most readily, praktisch and pragmatisch were as far apart as the two poles, the former belonging in a region of thought where no mind of the experimentalist type can ever make sure of solid ground under his feet, the latter expressing relation to some definite human purpose. Now quite the most striking feature of the new theory was its recognition of an inseparable connection between rational cognition and rational purpose; and that consideration it was which determined the preference for the name pragmatism. [413]
Concerning the matter of philosophical nomenclature, there are a few
plain considerations, which the writer has for many years longed to
submit to the deliberate judgment of those few fellow-students of
philosophy, who deplore the present state of that study, and who are
intent upon rescuing it therefrom and bringing it to a condition like
that of the natural sciences, where investigators, instead of condemning
each the work of most of the others as misdirected from beginning to
end, co-operate, stand upon one another’s shoulders, and multiply
incontestable results; where every observation is repeated, and isolated
observations go for little; where every hypothesis that merits
attention is subjected to severe but fair examination, and only after
the predictions to which it leads have been remarkably borne out by
experience is trusted at all, and even then only provisionally; where a
radically false step is rarely taken, even the most faulty of those
theories which gain wide credence being true in their main experiential
predictions. To those students, it is submitted that no study can become
scientific in the sense described, until it provides itself with a
suitable technical nomenclature, whose every term has a single definite
meaning universally accepted among students of the subject, and whose
vocables have no such sweetness or charms as might tempt loose writers
to abuse them,—which is a virtue of scientific nomenclature too little
appreciated. It is submitted that the experience of those sciences which
have conquered the greatest difficulties of terminology, which are
unquestionably the taxonomic sciences, chemistry, mineralogy, botany,
zoölogy, has conclusively shown that the one [and] only way in which the
requisite unanimity and requisite ruptures with individual habits and
preferences can be brought about is so to shape the canons of
terminology that they shall gain the support of moral principle
and of every man’s sense of decency; and that, in particular (under
defined restrictions), the general feeling shall be that he who
introduces a new conception into philosophy is under an obligation to
invent acceptable terms to express it, and that when he has done so, the
duty of his fellow-students is to accept those terms, and to resent any
wresting of them from their original meanings, as not only a gross
discourtesy to him to whom philosophy was indebted for each conception,
but also as an injury to philosophy itself; and furthermore, that once a
conception has been supplied with suitable and sufficient words for its
expression, no other technical terms denoting the same things,
considered in the same relations, should be countenanced. Should this
suggestion find favor, it might be deemed needful that the philosophians
in congress assembled should adopt, after due deliberation, convenient
canons to limit the application of the principle. Thus, just as is done
in chemistry, it might be wise to assign fixed meanings to certain
prefixes and suffixes. For example, it might be agreed, perhaps, that
the prefix prope- should mark a broad and rather indefinite
extension of the meaning of the term to which it was prefixed; the name
of a doctrine would naturally end in -ism, while -icism
might mark a more strictly defined acception of that doctrine, etc. Then
again, just as in biology no account is taken of terms antedating
Linnaeus, so in philosophy it might be found best not to go back of the
scholastic terminology. To illustrate another sort of limitation, it has
probably never happened that any philosopher has attempted to give a
general name to his own doctrine without that name’s soon acquiring in
common philosophical usage, a signification much broader than was
originally intended. Thus, special systems go by the names Kantianism,
Benthamism, Comteanism, Spencerianism, etc., while transcendentalism,
utilitarianism, positivism, evolutionism, synthetic philosophy, etc.
have irrevocably and very conveniently been elevated to broader
governments.
[414]
After awaiting in vain, for a good many years, some particularly
opportune conjuncture of circumstances that might serve to recommend his
notions of the ethics of terminology, the writer has now, at last,
dragged them in over head and shoulders, on an occasion when he has no
specific proposal to offer nor any feeling but satisfaction at the
course usage has run without any canons or resolutions of a congress.
His word "pragmatism" has gained general recognition in a generalized
sense that seems to argue power of growth and vitality. The famed
psychologist, James, first took it up, seeing that his "radical
empiricism" substantially answered to the writer’s definition of
pragmatism, albeit with a certain difference in the point of view. Next,
the admirably clear and brilliant thinker, Mr. Ferdinand C. S.
Schiller, casting about for a more attractive name for the
"anthropomorphism" of his Riddle of the Sphinx, lit, in that most remarkable paper of his on Axioms as Postulates,
upon the same designation "pragmatism," which in its original sense was
in generic agreement with his own doctrine, for which he has since
found the more appropriate specification "humanism," while he still
retains "pragmatism" in a somewhat wider sense. So far all went happily,
But at present, the word begins to be met with occasionally in the
literary journals, where it gets abused in the merciless way that words
have to expect when they fall into literary clutches. Sometimes the
manners of the British have effloresced in scolding at the word as
ill-chosen—ill-chosen, that is, to express some meaning that it was
rather designed to exclude. So then, the writer, finding his bantling
"pragmatism" so promoted, feels that it is time to kiss his child
good-by and relinquish it to its higher destiny; while to serve the
precise purpose of expressing the original definition, he begs to
announce the birth of the word "pragmaticism," which is ugly enough to
be safe from kidnappers.<1>
[415]
Much as the writer has gained from the perusal of what other pragmatists
have written, he still thinks there is a decisive advantage in his
original conception of the doctrine. From this original form every truth
that follows from any of the other forms can be deduced, while some
errors can be avoided into which other pragmatists have fallen. The
original view appears, too, to be a more compact and unitary conception
than the others. But its capital merit, in the writer’s eyes, is that it
more readily connects itself with a critical proof of its truth. Quite
in accord with the logical order of investigation, it usually happens
that one first forms an hypothesis that seems more and more reasonable
the further one examines into it, but that only a good deal later gets
crowned with an adequate proof. The present writer having had the
pragmatist theory under consideration for many years longer than most of
its adherents, would naturally have given more attention to the proof
of it. At any rate, in endeavoring to explain pragmatism, he may be
excused for confining himself to that form of it that he knows best. In
the present article there will be space only to explain just what this
doctrine, (which, in such hands as it has now fallen into, may probably
play a pretty prominent part in the philosophical discussions of the
next coming years), really consists in. Should the exposition be found
to interest readers of The Monist, they would certainly be much
more interested in a second article which would give some samples of the
manifold applications of pragmaticism (assuming it to be true) to the
solution of problems of different kinds. After that, readers might be
prepared to take an interest in a proof that the doctrine is true,—a
proof which seems to the writer to leave no reasonable doubt on the
subject, and to be the one contribution of value that he has to make to
philosophy. For it would essentially involve the establishment of the
truth of synechism.
[416]
The bare definition of pragmaticism could convey no satisfactory
comprehension of it to the most apprehensive of minds, but requires the
commentary to be given below. Moreover, this definition takes no notice
of one or two other doctrines without the previous acceptance (or
virtual acceptance) of which pragmaticism itself would be a nullity.
They are included as a part of the pragmatism of Schiller, but the
present writer prefers not to mingle different propositions. The
preliminary propositions had better be stated forthwith.
The difficulty in doing this is that no formal list of them has ever been made. They might all be included under the vague maxim, "Dismiss make-believes." Philosophers of very diverse stripes propose that philosophy shall take its start from one or another state of mind in which no man, least of all a beginner in philosophy, actually is. One proposes that you shall begin by doubting everything, and says that there is only one thing that you cannot doubt, as if doubting were "as easy as lying." Another proposes that we should begin by observing "the first impressions of sense," forgetting that our very percepts are the results of cognitive elaboration. But in truth, there is but one state of mind from which you can "set out," namely, the very state of mind in which you actually find yourself at the time you do "set out"—a state in which you are laden with an immense mass of cognition already formed, of which you cannot divest yourself if you would; and who knows whether, if you could, you would not have made all knowledge impossible to yourself? Do you call it doubting to write down on a piece of paper that you doubt? If so, doubt has nothing to do with any serious business. But do not make believe; if pedantry has not eaten all the reality out of you, recognize, as you must, that there is much that you do not doubt, in the least. Now that which you do not at all doubt, you must and do regard as infallible, absolute truth. Here breaks in Mr. Make Believe: "What! Do you mean to say that one is to believe what is not true, or that what a man does not doubt is ipso facto true?" No, but unless he can make a thing white and black at once, he has to regard what he does not doubt as absolutely true. Now you, per hypothesiu, are that man, "But you tell me there are scores of things I do not doubt. I really cannot persuade myself that there is not some one of them about which I am mistaken." You are adducing one of your make-believe facts, which, even if it were established, would only go to show that doubt has a limen, that is, is only called into being by a certain finite stimulus. You only puzzle yourself by talking of this metaphysical "truth" and metaphysical "falsity," that you know nothing about. All you have any dealings with are your doubts and beliefs,<2> with the course of life that forces new beliefs upon you and gives you power to doubt old beliefs. If your terms "truth" and "falsity" are taken in such senses as to be definable in terms of doubt and belief and the course of experience (as for example they would be, if you were to define the "truth" as that to a belief in which belief would tend if it were to tend indefinitely toward absolute fixity), well and good: in that case, you are only talking about doubt and belief. But if by truth and falsity you mean something not definable in terms of doubt and belief in any way, then you are talking of entities of whose existence you can know nothing, and which Ockham’s razor would clean shave off. Your problems would he greatly simplified, if, instead of saying that you want to know the "Truth," you were simply to say that you want to attain a state of belief unassailable by doubt. [417]
Belief is not a momentary mode of consciousness; it is a habit of mind
essentially enduring for some time, and mostly (at least) unconscious;
and like other habits, it is, (until it meets with some surprise that
begins its dissolution), perfectly self-satisfied. Doubt is of an
altogether contrary genus. It is not a habit, but the privation of a
habit. Now a privation of a habit, in order to be anything at all, must
be a condition of erratic activity that in some way must get superseded
by a habit.
[418]
Among the things which the reader, as a rational person, does not doubt,
is that he not merely has habits, but also can exert a measure of
self-control over his future actions; which means, however, not
that he can impart to them any arbitrarily assignable character, but, on
the contrary, that a process of self-preparation will tend to impart to
action, (when the occasion for it shall arise), one fixed character,
which is indicated and perhaps roughly measured by the absence (or
slightness) of the feeling of self-reproach, which subsequent reflection
will induce. Now, this subsequent reflection is part of the
self-preparation for action on the next occasion. Consequently, there is
a tendency, as action is repeated again and again, for the action to
approximate indefinitely toward the perfection of that fixed character,
which would be marked by entire absence of self-reproach. The more
closely this is approached, the less room for self-control there will
be; and where no self-control is possible there will be no
self-reproach.
[419]
These phenomena seem to be the fundamental characteristics which
distinguish a rational being. Blame, in every case, appears to be a
modification, often accomplished by a transference, or "projection," of
the primary feeling of self-reproach. Accordingly, we never blame
anybody for what had been beyond his power of previous self-control.
Now, thinking is a species of conduct which is largely subject to
self-control. In all their features (which there is no room to describe
here), logical self-control is a perfect mirror of ethical
self-control,—unless it be rather a species under that genus. In
accordance with this, what you cannot in the least help believing is
not, justly speaking, wrong belief. In other words, for you it is the
absolute truth. True, it is conceivable that what you cannot help
believing today, you might find you thoroughly disbelieve tomorrow. But
then there is a certain distinction between things you "cannot" do,
merely in the sense that nothing stimulates you to the great effort and
endeavors that would be required, and things you cannot do because in
their own nature they are insusceptible of being put into practice. In
every stage of your excogitations, there is something of which you can
only say, "I cannot think otherwise," and your experientially based
hypothesis is that the impossibility is of the second kind.
[420]
There is no reason why "thought," in what has just been said, should be
taken in that narrow sense in which silence and darkness are favorable
to thought. It should rather be understood as covering all rational
life, so that an experiment shall be an operation of thought. Of course,
that ultimate state of habit to which the action of self-control
ultimately tends, where no room is left for further self-control, is, in
the case of thought, the state of fixed belief, or perfect knowledge.
[421]
Two things here are all-important to assure oneself of and to remember.
The first is that a person is not absolutely an individual. His thoughts
are what he is "saying to himself," that is, is saying to that other
self that is just coming into life in the flow of time. When one
reasons, it is that critical self that one is trying to persuade; and
all thought whatsoever is a sign, and is mostly of the nature of
language. The second thing to remember is that the man’s circle of
society, (however widely or narrowly this phrase may be understood), is a
sort of loosely compacted person, in some respects of higher rank than
the person of an individual organism. It is these two things alone that
render it possible for you—but only in the abstract, and in a
Pickwickian sense,—to distinguish between absolute truth and what you do
not doubt.
[422]
Let us now hasten to the exposition of pragmaticism itself. Here it will
be convenient to imagine that somebody to whom the doctrine is new, but
of rather preternatural perspicacity, asks questions of a pragmaticist.
Everything that might give a dramatic illusion must be stripped off, so
that the result will be a sort of cross between a dialogue and a
catechism, but a good deal more like the latter,—something rather
painfully reminiscent of Mangnall’s Historical Questions.
Questioner: I am astounded at your definition of your pragmatism, because only last year I was assured by a person above all suspicion of warping the truth—himself a pragmatist—that your doctrine precisely was "that a conception is to be tested by its practical effects." You must surely, then, have entirely changed your definition very recently. Pragmatist: If you will turn to Vols. VI and VII of the Revue Philosophique, or to the Popular Science Monthly for November 1877 and January 1878, you will be able to judge for yourself whether the interpretation you mention was not then clearly excluded. The exact wording of the English enunciation, (changing only the first person into the second), was: "Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive the object of your conception to have. Then your conception of those effects is the WHOLE of your conception of the object." Questioner: Well, what reason have you for asserting this is so? Pragmatist: That is what I specially desire to tell you. But the question had better be postponed until you clearly understand what those reasons profess to prove. [423]
Questioner: What, then, is the raison d’être of the doctrine? What advantage is expected from it?
Pragmatist: It will serve to show that almost every proposition of ontological metaphysics is either meaningless gibberish—one word being defined by other words, and they by still others, without any real conception ever being reached—or else is downright absurd; so that all such rubbish being swept away, what will remain of philosophy will be a series of problems capable of investigation by the observational methods of the true sciences—the truth about which can be reached without those interminable misunderstandings and disputes which have made the highest of the positive sciences a mere amusement for idle intellects, a sort of chess—idle pleasure its purpose, and reading out of a book its method. In this regard, pragmaticism is a species of prope-positivism. But what distinguishes it from other species is, first, its retention of a purified philosophy; secondly, its full acceptance of the main body of our instinctive beliefs; and thirdly, its strenuous insistence upon the truth of scholastic realism, (or a close approximation to that, well stated by the late Dr. Francis Ellingwood Abbot in the Introduction to his Scientific Theism). So, instead of merely jeering at metaphysics, like other prope-positivists, whether by long-drawn-out parodies or otherwise, the pragmaticist extracts from it a precious essence, which will serve to give life and light to cosmology and physics. At the same time, the moral applications of the doctrine are positive and potent; and there are many other uses of it not easily classed. On another occasion, instances may be given to show that it really has these effects. [424]
Questioner: I hardly need to be convinced that your doctrine
would wipe out metaphysics. Is it not as obvious that it must wipe out
every proposition of science and everything that bears on the conduct of
life? For you say that the only meaning that, for you, any assertion
bears is that a certain experiment has resulted in a certain way:
Nothing else but an experiment enters into the meaning. Tell me, then,
how can an experiment, in itself, reveal anything more than that
something once happened to an individual object and that subsequently
some other individual event occurred?
Pragmatist: That question is, indeed, to the purpose—the purpose being to correct any misapprehensions of pragmaticism. You speak of an experiment in itself, emphasizing "in itself." You evidently think of each experiment as isolated from every other. It has not, for example, occurred to you, one might venture to surmise, that every connected series of experiments constitutes a single collective experiment. What are the essential ingredients of an experiment? First, of course, an experimenter of flesh and blood. Secondly, a verifiable hypothesis. This is a proposition<3> relating to the universe environing the experimenter, or to some well-known part of it and affirming or denying of this only some experimental possibility or impossibility. The third indispensable ingredient is a sincere doubt in the experimenter’s mind as to the truth of that hypothesis. Passing over several ingredients on which we need not dwell, the purpose, the plan, and the resolve, we come to the act of choice by which the experimenter singles out certain identifiable objects to be operated upon. The next is the external (or quasi-external) act by which he modifies those objects. Next, comes the subsequent reaction of the world upon the experimenter in a perception; and finally, his recognition of the teaching of the experiment. While the two chief parts of the event itself are the action and the reaction, yet the unity of essence of the experiment lies in its purpose and plan, the ingredients passed over in the enumeration. [425]
Another thing: in representing the pragmaticist as making rational
meaning to consist in an experiment (which you speak of as an event in
the past) you strikingly fail to catch his attitude of mind. Indeed, it
is not in an experiment, but in experimental phenomena, that rational meaning is said to consist. When an experimentalist speaks of a phenomenon,
such as "Hall’s phenomenon," "Zeemann’s phenomenon" and its
modification, "Michelson’s phenomenon," or "the chess-board phenomenon,"
he does not mean any particular event that did happen to somebody in
the dead past, but what surely will happen to everybody in the
living future who shall fulfill certain conditions. The phenomenon
consists in the fact that when an experimentalist shall come to act
according to a certain scheme that he has in mind, then will something
else happen, and shatter the doubts of skeptics, like the celestial fire
upon the altar of Elijah.
[426]
And do not overlook the fact that the pragmaticist maxim says nothing of
single experiments or of single experimental phenomena, (for what is
conditionally true in futuro can hardly be singular), but only speaks of general kinds
of experimental phenomena. Its adherent does not shrink from speaking
of general objects as real, since whatever is true represents a real.
Now the laws of nature are true.
[427]
The rational meaning of every proposition lies in the future. How so?
The meaning of a proposition is itself a proposition. Indeed, it is no
other than the very proposition of which it is the meaning: it is a
translation of it. But of the myriads of forms into which a proposition
may be translated, what is that one which is to be called its very
meaning? It is, according to the pragmaticist, that form in which the
proposition becomes applicable to human conduct, not in these or those
special circumstances, nor when one entertains this or that special
design, but that form which is most directly applicable to self-control
under every situation, and to every purpose. This is why he locates the
meaning in future time; for future conduct is the only conduct that is
subject to self-control. But in order that that form of the proposition
which is to be taken as its meaning should be applicable to every
situation and to every purpose upon which the proposition has any
bearing, it must be simply the general description of all the
experimental phenomena which the assertion of the proposition virtually
predicts. For an experimental phenomenon is the fact asserted by the
proposition that action of a certain description will have a certain
kind of experimental result; and experimental results are the only
results that can affect human conduct. No doubt, some unchanging idea
may come to influence a man more than it had done; but only because some
experience equivalent to an experiment has brought its truth home to
him more intimately than before. Whenever a man acts purposively, he
acts under a belief in some experimental phenomenon. Consequently, the
sum of the experimental phenomena that a proposition implies makes up
its entire bearing upon human conduct. Your question, then, of how a
pragmaticist can attribute any meaning to any assertion other than that
of a single occurrence is substantially answered.
[428]
Questioner: I see that pragmaticism is a thorough-going
phenomenalism. Only why should you limit yourself to the phenomena of
experimental science rather than embrace all observational science?
Experiment, after all, is an uncommunicative informant. It never
expiates [sic: expatiates?]: it only answers "yes" or "no"; or rather it
usually snaps out ‘No!" or, at best, only utters an inarticulate grunt
for the negation of its "no." The typical experimentalist is not much of
an observer. It is the student of natural history to whom nature opens
the treasury of her confidence, while she treats the cross-examining
experimentalist with the reserve he merits. Why should your
phenomenalism sound the meagre jews-harp of experiment rather than the
glorious organ of observation?
Pragmaticist: Because pragmaticism is not definable as "thorough-going phenomenalism," although the latter doctrine may be a kind of pragmatism. The richness of phenomena lies in their sensuous quality. Pragmaticism does not intend to define the phenomenal equivalents of words and general ideas, but, on the contrary, eliminates their sential element, and endeavors to define the rational purport, and this it finds in the purposive bearing of the word or proposition in question. [429]
Questioner: Well, if you choose so to make Doing the Be-all and
the End-all of human life, why do you not make meaning to consist simply
in doing? Doing has to be done at a certain time upon a certain object.
Individual objects and single events cover all reality, as everybody
knows, and as a practicalist ought to be the first to insist. Yet, your
meaning, as you have described it, is general. Thus, it is of the
nature of a mere word and not a reality. You say yourself that your
meaning of a proposition is only the same proposition in another dress.
But a practical man’s meaning is the very thing he means. What do you
make to be the meaning of "George Washington"?
Pragmaticist: Forcibly put! A good half dozen of your points must certainly be admitted. It must be admitted, in the first place, that if pragmaticism really made Doing to be the Be-all and the End-all of life, that would be its death, For to say that we live for the mere sake of action, as action, regardless of the thought it carries out, would be to say that there is no such thing as rational purport. Secondly, it must be admitted that every proposition professes to be true of a certain real individual object, often the environing universe. Thirdly, it must be admitted that pragmaticism fails to furnish any translation or meaning of a proper name, or other designation of an individual object. Fourthly, the pragmaticistic meaning is undoubtedly general; and it is equally indisputable that the general is of the nature of a word or sign. Fifthly, it must be admitted that individuals alone exist; and sixthly, it may be admitted that the very meaning of a word or significant object ought to be the very essence of reality of what it signifies. But when, those admissions have been unreservedly made, you find the pragmaticist still constrained most earnestly to deny the force of your objection, you ought to infer that there is some consideration that has escaped you. Putting the admissions together, you will perceive that the pragmaticist grants that a proper name, (although it is not customary to say that it has a meaning), has a certain denotative function peculiar, in each case, to that name and its equivalents; and that he grants that every assertion contains such a denotative or pantomiming function. In its peculiar individuality, the pragmaticist excludes this from the rational purport of the assertion, although the like of it, being common to all assertions, and so, being general and not individual, may enter into the pragmaticistic purport. Whatever exists, ex-sists, that is, really acts upon other existents, so obtains a self-identity, and is definitely individual. As to the general, it will be a help to thought to notice that there are two ways of being general. A statue of a soldier on some village monument, in his overcoat and with his musket, is for each of a hundred families the image of its uncle, its sacrifice to the Union. That statue, then, though it is itself single, represents any one man of whom a certain predicate may be true. It is objectively general. The word "soldier," whether spoken or written, is general in the same way; while the name "George Washington" is not so. But each of these two terms remains one and the same noun, whether it be spoken or written, and whenever and wherever it be spoken or written. This noun is not an existent thing: it is a type, or form, to which objects, both those that are externally existent and those which are imagined, may conform, but which none of them can exactly be. This is subjective generality. The pragmaticistic purport is general in both ways. [430]
As to reality, one finds it defined in various ways; but if that
principle of terminological ethics that was proposed be accepted, the
equivocal language will soon disappear. For realis and realitas
are not ancient words. They were invented to be terms of philosophy in
the thirteenth century, and the meaning they were intended to express is
perfectly clear. That is real which has such and such
characters, whether anybody thinks it to have those characters or not.
At any rate, that is the sense in which the pragmaticist uses the word.
Now, just as conduct controlled by ethical reason tends toward fixing
certain habits of conduct, the nature of which, (as to illustrate the
meaning, peaceable habits and not quarrelsome habits), does not depend
upon any accidental circumstances, and in that sense, may be said to be destined;
so, thought, controlled by a rational experimental logic, tends to the
fixation of certain opinions, equally destined, the nature of which will
be the same in the end, however the perversity of thought of whole
generations may cause the postponement of the ultimate fixation. If this
be so, as every man of us virtually assumes that it is, in regard to
each matter the truth of which he seriously discusses, then, according
to the adopted definition of "real," the state of things which will be
believed in that ultimate opinion is real. But, for the most part, such
opinions will be general. Consequently, some general objects are
real. (Of course, nobody ever thought that all generals were real; but
the scholastics used to assume that generals were real when they had
hardly any, or quite no, experiential evidence to support their
assumption; and their fault lay just there, and not in holding that
generals could be real.) One is struck with the inexactitude of thought
even of analysts of power, when they touch upon modes of being. One will
meet, for example, the virtual assumption that what is relative to
thought cannot be real. But why not, exactly? Red is relative to sight, but the fact that this or that is in that relation to vision that we call being red is not itself relative to sight; it is a real fact.
[431]
Not only may generals be real, but they may also be physically efficient,
not in every metaphysical sense, but in the common-sense acception in
which human purposes are physically efficient. Aside from metaphysical
nonsense, no sane man doubts that if I feel the air in my study to be
stuffy, that thought may cause the window to be opened. My thought, be
it granted, was an individual event. But what determined it to take the
particular determination it did, was in part the general fact that
stuffy air is unwholesome, and in part other Forms, concerning which Dr. Carus has caused so many men to reflect to advantage—or rather, by
which, and the general truth concerning which Dr. Carus’s mind was
determined to the forcible enunciation of so much truth. For truths, on
the average, have a greater tendency to get believed than falsities
have. Were it otherwise, considering that there are myriads of false
hypotheses to account for any given phenomenon, against one sole true
one (or if you will have it so, against every true one), the first step
toward genuine knowledge must have been next door to a miracle. So,
then, when my window was opened, because of the truth that stuffy air is
malsain, a physical effort was brought into existence by the efficiency
of a general and non-existent truth. This has a droll sound because it
is unfamiliar; but exact analysis is with it and not against it; and it
has besides, the immense advantage of not blinding us to great
facts—such as that the ideas "justice" and "truth" are, notwithstanding
the iniquity of the world, the mightiest of the forces that move it.
Generality is, indeed, an indispensable ingredient of reality; for mere
individual existence or actuality without any regularity whatever is a
nullity. Chaos is pure nothing.
[432]
That which any true proposition asserts is real, in the sense of
being as it is regardless of what you or I may think about it. Let this
proposition be a general conditional proposition as to the future, and
it is a real general such as is calculated really to influence human
conduct; and such the pragmaticist holds to be the rational purport of
every concept.
[433]
Accordingly, the pragmaticist does not make the summum bonum to
consist in action, but makes it to consist in that process of evolution
whereby the existent comes more and more to embody those generals which
were just now said to be destined, which is what we strive to express in calling them reasonable.
In its higher stages, evolution takes place more and more largely
through self-control, and this gives the pragmaticist a sort of
justification for making the rational purport to be general.
[434]
There is much more in elucidation of pragmaticism that might be said to
advantage, were it not for the dread of fatiguing the reader. It might,
for example, have been well to show clearly that the pragmaticist does
not attribute any different essential mode of being to an event in the
future from that which he would attribute to a similar event in the pst,
but only that the practical attitude of the thinker toward the two is
different. It would also have been well to show that the pragmaticist
does not make Forms to be the only realities in the world, any more than
he makes the reasonable purport of a word to be the only kind of
meaning there is. These things are, however, implicitly involved in what
has been said. There is only one remark concerning the pragmaticist’s
conception of the relation of his formula to the first principles of
logic which need detain the reader.
[435]
Aristotle’s definition of universal predication, which is usually
designated (like a papal bull or writ of court, from its opening words)
as the Dictum de omni, may be translated as follows: "We call a predication, (be it affirmative or negative), universal,
when, and only when, there is nothing among the existent individuals to
which the subject affirmatively belongs, but to which the predicate
will not likewise be referred (affirmatively or negatively, according as
the universal predication is affirmative or negative)." The Greek is: legomen
de to kata pantos katêgoreisthai otan mêden hê labein tôn tou
hupokeimenou kath' ou thateron ou lechthêsetai. Kai to kata mêdenos
hôsautôs. The important words "existent individuals" have been
introduced into the translation (which English idiom would not permit
here to be literal): but it is plain that existent individuals were what
Aristotle meant. The other departures from literalness only serve to
give modern English forms of expression. Now, it is well known that
propositions in formal logic go in pairs, the two of one pair being
convertible into another by the interchange of the ideas of antecedent
and consequent, subject and predicate, etc. The parallelism extends so
far that it is often assumed to be perfect; but it is not quite so. The
proper mate of this sort to the Dictum de omni is the following definition of affirmative predication: We call a predication affirmative,
(be it universal or particular), when, and only when, there is nothing
among the sensation affects that belong universally to the predicate
which will not be, (universally or particularly, according as the
affirmative predicate is universal or particular), said to belong to the
subject. Now, this is substantially the essential proposition of
pragmaticism. Of course, its parallelism to the dictum de omni will only be admitted by a person who admits the truth of pragmaticism.
[436]
Suffer me to add one word more on this point—for, if one cares at all to
know what the pragmaticist theory consists in, one must understand that
there is no other part of it to which the pragmaticist attaches quite
as much importance as he does to the recognition in his doctrine of the
utter inadequacy of action or volition or even of resolve or actual
purpose, as materials out of which to construct a conditional purpose or
the concept of conditional purpose. Had a purposed article concerning
the principle of continuity and synthesizing the ideas of the other
articles of a series in the early volumes of The Monist ever been
written, it would have appeared how, with thorough consistency, that
theory involved the recognition that continuity is an indispensable
element of reality, and that continuity is simply what generality
becomes in the logic of relatives, and thus, like generality, and more
than generality, is an affair of thought, and is the essence of thought.
Yet even in its truncated condition, an extra-intelligent reader might
discern that the theory of those cosmological articles made reality to
consist in something more than feeling and action could supply, inasmuch
as the primeval chaos, where those two elements were present, was
explicitly shown to be pure nothing. Now, the motive for alluding to
that theory just here is, that in this way one can put in a strong light
a position which the pragmaticist holds and must hold, whether that
cosmological theory be ultimately sustained or exploded, namely, that
the third category—the category of thought, representation, triadic
relation, mediation, genuine thirdness, thirdness as such—is an
essential ingredient of reality, yet does not by itself constitute
reality, since this category, (which in that cosmology appears as the
element of habit), can have no concrete being without action, as a
separate object on which to work its government, just as action cannot
exist without the immediate being of feeling on which to act. The truth
is that pragmaticism is closely allied to the Hegelian absolute
idealism, from which, however, it is sundered by its vigorous denial
that the third category, (which Hegel degrades to a mere stage of
thinking), suffices to make the world, or is even so much as
self-sufficient. Had Hegel, instead of regarding the first two stages
with his smile of contempt, held on to them as independent or distinct
elements of the triune Reality, pragmaticists might have looked up to
him as the great vindicator of their truth. (Of course, the external
trappings of his doctrine are only here and there of much significance.)
For pragmaticism belongs essentially to the triadic class of
philosophical doctrines, and is much more essentially so than
Hegelianism is. (Indeed, in one passage, at least, Hegel alludes to the
triadic form of his exposition as to a mere fashion of dress.)
C. S. Peirce. MILFORD, PA, September, 1904. [437] POSTSCRIPT. During the last five months, I have met with references to several objections to the above opinions, but not having been able to obtain the text of these objections, I do not think I ought to attempt to answer them. If gentlemen who attack either pragmatism in general or the variety of it which I entertain would only send me copies of what they write, more important readers they could easily find, but they could find none who would examine their arguments with a more grateful avidity for truth not yet apprehended, nor any who would be more sensible of their courtesy. C. S. P. Feb. 9, 1905.
NOTES <1> To show how recent the general use of the word "pragmatism" is, the writer may mention that, to the best of his belief, he never used it in copy for the press before today, except by particular request, in Baldwin’s Dictionary. Toward the end of 1890, when this part of the Century Dictionary appeared, he did not deem that the word had sufficient status to appear in that work. But he has used it continually in philosophical conversation since, perhaps, the mid-seventies. <2> It is necessary to say that "belief" is throughout used merely as the name of the contrary to doubt, without regard to grades of certainty nor to the nature of the proposition held for true, i. e., "believed." <3> The writer, like most English logicians, invariably uses the word proposition, not as the Germans define their equivalent, Satz, as the lnguage-expression of a judgment (Urtheil), but as that which is related to any assertion, whether mental and self-addressed or outwardly expressed, just as any possibility is related to its actualization. The difficulty of the, at best, difficult problem of the essential nature of a Proposition has been increased, for the Germans, by their Urtheil, confounding, under one designation, the mental assertion with the assertible.
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Dept of
Philosophy