02 Part 1 - What Pragmatism Means - Pragmatism - William James

Lecture 2.

What pragmatism means.

Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary

ramble to find everyone engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute.

The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel.

A live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree trunk, while over against

the other tree's opposite side, a human being was imagined to stand.

This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly around the tree,

but no matter how fast it goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction and

always keeps the tree between himself and the man so that never a glimpse of him is caught.

The resultant metaphysical problem now is this.

Once the man go round the squirrel or not.

He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree.

But does he go round the squirrel?

In the unlimited leisure of the wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare.

Everyone had taken signs and was obstinate, and the numbers on both sides were even.

Each side, when I appeared, therefore appealed to me to make it a majority.

And full of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction, you must make a distinction,

I immediately sought and found one, as follows.

Which party is right, as said?

Depends on what you practically mean by going round the squirrel.

If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west,

and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him.

Or he occupies the successive positions.

But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him,

then behind him, then on his left and finally front again, it is quite as obvious that the

man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his

belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away.

Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any further dispute.

You are both right, and both wrong, according as you conceive the verb to go round, in one

practical fashion or the other.

Although one or two of the hotter disputants called my speech a shuffling evasion, saying

they wanted no quibbling or scholastic hair splitting, but meant just plain honest English

round, the majority seemed to think that the distinction had swaged the dispute.

I tell this trivial anecdote because it is a peculiarly simple example of what I wish

now to speak of as the pragmatic method.

The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical dispute that otherwise

might be interminable.

Is the world one or many, faded or free, material or spiritual?

Here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world and disputes

over such notions are unending.

The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its

respective practical consequences.

What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that

notion were true?

If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically

the same thing, and all dispute is idle.

Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference

that must follow from one side or the others being right.

A glance at the history of the idea will show you still better what pragmatism means.

The term is derived from the same Greek word pi-row-alpha-gamma-mu-alpha, meaning action

from which our words practice and practical come.

It was first introduced into philosophy by Mr. Charles Perse in 1878.

In an article entitled How to Make Our Ideas Clear in the Popular Science Monthly for

January of that year, Footnote translated in the Review Philosophic for January 1879.

Mr. Pierce, after pointing out that our beliefs are really rules for action, said that to

develop a thought's meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce.

That conduct is for us its sole significance.

And the tangible fact at the root of all our thought distinctions, however subtle, is that

there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice.

To attain perfect cleanness in our thoughts of an object then, we need only consider what

conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve.

What sensations we are to expect from it and what reactions we must prepare?

Our conception of these effects, whether immediate or remote, is then for us the whole of

our conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all.

This is the principle of Perse, the principle of pragmatism.

It lay entirely unnoticed by anyone for 20 years, until I, in an address before Professor

Howinson's Philosophical Union at the University of California, brought it forward again and

made a special application of it to religion.

By that date, 898, the times seemed ripe for its reception.

The word pragmatism spread, and at present it fairly spots the pages of philosophic journals.

On all hands we find the pragmatic movement spoken of, sometimes with respect, sometimes

with consummally, seldom with clear understanding.

It is evident that the term applies itself conveniently to a number of tendencies that

hitherto have lacked a collective name, and that it has come to stay.

To take in the importance of Perse's principle, one must get accustomed to applying it to

concrete cases.

I found a few years ago that Ostwald, the illustrious Leipzig chemist, had been making perfectly

distinct use of the principle of pragmatism in his lectures on the philosophy of science,

though he had not called it by that name.

Old realities influence our practice, he wrote me, and that influence is their meaning

for us.

I am accustomed to put questions to my classes in this way.

In what respects would the world be different if this alternative or that were true?

If I can find nothing that would become different, then the alternative has no sense.

That is, the rival views mean practically the same thing, and meaning, other than practical,

there is for us none.

Ostwald, in a published lecture, gives this example of what he means.

Chemists have long wrangled over the inner constitution of certain bodies called Totomeros.

Their properties seemed equally consistent with the notion that an unstable hydrogen atom

oscillates inside of them, or that they are unstable mixtures of two bodies.

Controversy raged, but never was decided.

It would never have begun, says Ostwald, if the combatants had asked themselves what

particular experimental fact could have been made different by one or the other view

being correct.

For it would then have appeared that no difference of fact could possibly ensue, and the quarrel

was as unreal as if theorizing in primitive times about the racing of dough by yeast, one

party should have invoked a brownie while another insisted in elf as the true cause of

the phenomenon.

Footnote.

Theorie und Praxis.

Zeitschrift des Öster-Rachischen Ingenieur und Architekten-Vireines.

1905-Number-4-Volume VI.

I find a still more radical pragmatism than Ostwald's in an address by Professor W. S. Franklin.

I think that the cyclist notion of physics, even if a student gets it, is that it is the

science of masses, molecules, and the either.

And I think that the healthiest notion, even if a student does not wholly get it, is that

physics is the science of the ways of taking hold of bodies and pushing them.

Science January 2nd, 1903.

It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment

you subject him to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence.

There can be no difference anywhere that doesn't make a difference elsewhere.

No difference in abstract truth that doesn't express itself in a difference in concrete

fact, and in conduct consequence upon that fact imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere,

and somewhere.

The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will

make to you and me at definite instance of our life if this world formula or that world

formula be the true one.

There is absolutely nothing new in the pragmatic method.

Socrates wasn't adept at it, Aristotle used it methodically.

Locke, Berkeley, and Yume made momentous contributions to truth by its means.

Shadworth Hodson keeps insisting that realities are only what they are known as.

But these four runners of pragmatism used it in fragments, they were polluters only.

Not until in our time has it generalized itself, become conscious of a universal mission,

pretended to a conquering destiny.

I believe in that destiny, and I hope I may end by inspiring you with my belief.

Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude.

But it represents it, as it seems to me, both in a more radical and in a less objectionable

form than it has ever yet assumed.

A pragmatist turns his back, resolutely and once for all, upon a lot of invertebrate

habits, dare to professional philosophers.

He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad apriory

reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins.

He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.

That means the empiricist temper, regnant, and the rationalist temper sincerely given

up.

It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and the

pretense of finality in truth.

At the same time, it does not stand for any special results.

It is a method only.

But the general triumph of that method would mean an enormous change in what I have called

in my last lecture, the temperament of philosophy.

Studies of the ultra-rationalistic type would be frozen out, much as the quartier type

is frozen out in republics, as the ultra-mountain type of priest is frozen out in Protestant

lands.

Science and metaphysics would come much nearer together, would in fact work absolutely

hand in hand.

Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest.

You know how men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and you know what a great

part in magic words have always played.

If you have his name or the formula of incantation that binds him, you can control the spirit,

genie, affright, or whatever the power may be.

Solomon knew the names of all the spirits, and having their names, he held them subject

to his will.

Although the universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, which

the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power-bringing word or name.

That word names the universe's principle, and to possess it is, after a fashion, to

possess the universe itself.

God, matter, reason, the absolute, energy, are so many solving names.

You can rest when you have them, you are at the end of your metaphysical quest.

But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing

your quest.

You must bring out of each word its practical cash value.

Edit at work within the stream of your experience.

It appears less as a solution than, than as a program for more work, and more particularly

as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed.

Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas in which we can rest.

We don't lie back upon them.

We move forward, and on occasion make nature over again by their aid.

Pragmatism un-stiffens all our theories, limbers them up, and sets each one at work.

Being nothing essentially new, it harmonizes with many ancient philosophic tendencies.

It agrees with nominalism, for instance, in always appealing to particulars, with utilitarianism

in emphasizing practical aspects, with positivism in its disdain for verbal solutions, useless

questions and metaphysical abstractions.

All these, you see, are anti-intellectualist tendencies.

This rationalism, as a pretension and a method, pragmatism is fully armed and militant.

But at the outset, at least, it stands for no particular results.

It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method.

As the young Italian pragmatist Papine, as well said, it lies in the midst of our theories

like a corridor in a hotel, innumerable chambers open out of it.

In one, you may find a man writing on an atheistic volume, in the next, someone on his knees

praying for faith and strength, in a third, a chemist investigating a body's properties,

in a fourth, a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated.

In a fifth, the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown, but they all own the corridor,

and all must pause through it if they want a practical way of getting into or out of

their respective rooms.

No particular result then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation is what the pragmatic

method means.

The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, categories, supposed necessities,

and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.

So much for the pragmatic method.

You may say that I have been praising it rather than explaining it to you, but I shall presently

explain it abundantly enough by showing how it works on some familiar problems.

Meanwhile, the word pragmatism has come to be used in a still wider sense, as meaning

also a certain theory of truth.

I mean to give a whole lecture to the statement of that theory of the first paving the way,

so I can be very brief now.

But brevity is hard to follow, so I ask for your redoubled attention for a quarter of

an hour.

If much remains obscure, I hope to make it clear in the later lectures.

One of the most successfully cultivated branches of philosophy in our time is what is called

inductive logic, the study of the condition under which our sciences have evolved.

Writers on this subject have begun to show a singular unanimity as to what the laws of

nature and elements of fact mean when formulated by mathematicians, physicists, and chemists.

When the first mathematical, logical, and natural uniformities, the first laws were discovered,

and were so carried away by the clearness, beauty, and simplification that resulted that

they believed themselves to have deciphered, authentically, the eternal thoughts of

the Almighty.

His mind also thundered and reverberated in syllogisms.

He also thought in conic sections, squares, and roots, and rages, and geometries like

Euclid.

He made velocity increase proportionally to the time in folding bodies.

He made the law of the science for light to obey when refracted.

He established the classes, orders, families, and general of plants and animals, and fixed

the distances between them.

He thought the archetypes of all things and devised their variations, and when we rediscover

any one of these, his wondrous institutions, we seize his mind in its very literal intention.

But as the sciences have developed further, the notion has gained ground that most, perhaps

all of our laws are only approximations.

The laws themselves moreover have grown so numerous that there is no counting them, and

so many rebel formulations are proposed in all the branches of science that investigators

have become accustomed to the notion that no theory is absolutely a transcript of reality,

but that any one of them may, from some point of view, be useful.

Their great use is to summarize old facts and to lead to new ones.

Here only a man-made language are conceptual shorthand, as someone calls them, in which

we write our reports of nature.

And languages, as is well known, tolerate much choice of expression and many dialects.

Thus human arbitrariness has driven divine necessity from scientific logic.

If I mention the names of Sigurd, Mac, Ostwald, Person, Milhord, Poincaré, Dohem, Reisene,

those of you who are students will easily identify the tendency I speak of, and will think

of additional names.

Writing now on the front of this wave of scientific logic, Mr. Schiller and Geway appear with

their pragmatistic account of what truth everywhere signifies.

They where, these teachers say, truth in our ideas and beliefs means the same thing that

it means in science.

It means they say nothing but this.

That ideas, which themselves are but parts of our experience, become true just in so

far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience.

To summarize them and get about among them by conceptual shortcuts instead of following

the interminable succession of particular phenomena.

Any idea that will carry us, prosperously, from any one part or our experience to any

other part, linking things satisfactorily, working, securely, simplifying, saving labor?

This is true for just so much, true and so far forth, true instrumentally.

This is the instrumental view of truth, taught so successfully at Chicago.

The view that truth in our ideas means their power to work, promulgated so brilliantly

at Oxford.

Mr. Geway Schiller and their allies in reaching this general conception of all truth have

only followed the example of geologists, biologists and philologists.

In the establishment of these other sciences, the successful stroke was always to take

some simple process actually observable in operation.

As denudation by whether, say, or variation from parental type or change of dialect by

incorporation of new words and pronunciations, and then to generalize it, making it apply

to all times and produce great results by summating its effects through the ages.

The observable process which Schiller and Geway particularly singled out for generalization

is the familiar one by which any individual settles into new opinions.

The process here is always the same.

The individual has a stock of all the opinions already, but it meets a new experience that

puts them to strain.

Somebody contradicts them, or in a reflective moment he discovers that they contradict each

other, or he hears of facts with which they are incompatible, or desires arise in him

which they cease to satisfy.

The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had been a stranger, and from

which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions.

He saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives.

So he tries to change first this opinion, and then that, for they were cis-changed very

variously, until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock

with a minimum of disturbance of the latter.

Some idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience, and runs them into one

another most felicitously, and expedently.

This new idea is then adopted as the true one.

It preserves the oldest stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them

just enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as familiar as

the case leaves possible.

An outtree explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true

account of a novelty.

We should scratch around industriously till we found something less eccentric.

The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing,

calm and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's own biography remain

untouched.

New truth is always a go-between, a smoother over of transitions.

It marries all the opinion to new facts, so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum

of continuity.

We hold the theory true, just in proportion to its success in solving this problem of

maxima and minima.

But success in solving this problem is eminently a matter of approximation.

We say this theory solves it on the whole more satisfactorily than that theory.

But that means more satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will emphasize their points

of satisfaction differently.

But a certain degree, therefore, everything here is plastic.

The point I now urge you to observe particularly is the part played by the older truths.

Failure to take account of it is the source of much of the unjust criticism leveled against

pragmatism.

Their influence is absolutely controlling.

Loyalty to them is the first principle, in most cases it is the only principle.

For by far, the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for

a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them all together, or to abuse

those who bear witness for them.

You doubtless wish examples of this process of truth's growth, and the only trouble is

their superabundance.

The simplest case of new truth is of course the mere numerical addition of new kinds of

facts, or a new single facts of all kinds, to our experience, and addition that involves

no alteration in the old beliefs.

Day follows day, and its content are simply added.

The new contents themselves are not true, they simply come and are.

Truth is what we say about them, and when we say that they have come, truth is satisfied

by the plain additive formula.

But often the day's contents oblige a rearrangement.

If I should now utter piercing shrieks and act like a maniac on this platform, it would

make many of you revise your ideas as to the probable worth of my philosophy.

Radium came the other day as part of the day's content, and seemed for a moment to contradict

our ideas of the whole order of nature.

That order having come to be identified with what is called the conservation of energy.

The mere sight of radium, paying heat away indefinitely out of its own pocket, seemed

to violate that conservation.

What to think?

If the radiations from it were nothing but an escape of unsuspected potential energy pre-existent

inside of the atoms, the principle of conservation would be saved.

The discovery of helium as the radiations outcome opened away to this belief.

So Ram's view is generally held to be true, because although it extends our old ideas of

energy, it causes a minimum of alteration in their nature.

And of Lecture 2, Part 1.