The Meaning of Truth
Chapter 12: M. Hébert on Pragmatism[1]
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PROFESSOR MARCEL HÉBERT is a singularly erudite and liberal thinker (a seceder, I believe, from the Catholic priesthood) and an uncommonly direct and clear writer. His book Le Divin is one of the ablest reviews of the general subject of religious philosophy which recent years have produced; and in the small volume the title of which is copied above he has, perhaps, taken more pains not to do injustice to pragmatism than any of its numerous critics. Yet the usual fatal misapprehension of its purposes vitiates his exposition and his critique. His pamphlet seems to me to form a worthy hook, as it were, on which to hang one more attempt to tell the reader what the pragmatist account of truth really means.
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M. Hébert takes it to mean what most people take it to mean, the doctrine, namely, that whatever proves subjectively expedient in the way of our thinking is 'true' in the absolute and unrestricted sense of the word, whether it corresponds to any objective state of things outside of our thought or not. Assuming this to be the pragmatist thesis, M. Hébert opposes it at length. Thought that proves itself to be thus expedient may, indeed, have every other kind of value for the thinker, he says, but cognitive value, representative value, valeur de connaissance proprement dite, it has not; and when it does have a high degree of general utility value, this is in every case derived from its previous value in the way of correctly representing independent objects that have an important influence on our lives. Only by thus representing things truly do we reap the useful fruits. But the fruits follow on the truth, they do not constitute it; so M. Hébert accuses pragmatism of telling us everything about truth except what it essentially is. He admits, indeed, that the world is so framed that when
(232) men have true ideas of realities, consequential utilities ensue in abundance; and no one of our critics, I think, has shown as concrete a sense of the variety of these utilities as he has; but he reiterates that, whereas such utilities are secondary, we insist on treating them as primary, and that the connaissance objective from which they draw all their being is something which we neglect, exclude, and destroy. The utilitarian value and the strictly cognitive value of our ideas may perfectly well harmonize, he says -- and in the main he allows that they do harmonize -- but they are not logically identical for that. He admits that subjective interests, desires, impulses may even have the active 'primacy' in our intellectual life. Cognition awakens only at their spur, and follows their cues and aims; yet, when it is awakened, it is objective cognition proper and not merely another name for the impulsive tendencies themselves in the state of satisfaction. The owner of a picture ascribed to Corot gets uneasy when its authenticity is doubted. He looks up its origin and is reassured. But his
(233) uneasiness does not make the proposition false, any more than his relief
makes the proposition true, that the actual Corot was the painter. Pragmatism,
which, according to M. Hébart, claims that our sentiments make truth
and falsehood, would oblige us to conclude that our minds exert no genuinely
cognitive function whatever.
This subjectivist interpretation of our position seems to follow from my having happened. to write (without supposing it necessary to explain that I was treating of cognition solely on its subjective side) that in the long run the true is the expedient in the way of our thinking, much as the good is the expedient in the way of our behavior! Having previously written that truth means 'agreement with reality,' and insisted that the chief part of the expediency of any one opinion is its agreement with the rest of acknowledged truth, I apprehended no exclusively subjectivistic reading of my mean ing. My mind was so filled with the notion of objective reference that I never dreamed that my hearers would let go of it; and the very last
(234) accusation I expected was that in speaking of ideas and their satisfactions, I was denying realities outside. My only wonder now is that critics should have found so silly a personage as I must have seemed in their eyes, worthy of explicit refutation.
The object, for me, is just as much one part of reality as the idea is another part. The truth of the idea is one relation of it to the reality, just as its date and its place are other relations. All three relations consist of intervening parts of the universe which can in every particular case be assigned and catalogued, and which differ in every instance of truth, just as they differ with every date and place.
The pragmatist thesis, as Dr. Schiller and I hold it, -I prefer to let Professor Dewey speak for himself, -is that the relation called 'truth' is thus concretely definable. Ours is the only articulate attempt in the field to say positively what truth actually consists of. Our denouncers have literally nothing to oppose to it as an alternative. For them, when an idea is true, it is true, and there the matter terminates,
(235) the word 'true' being indefinable. The relation of the true idea to its
object, being, as they think, unique, it can be expressed in terms of nothing
else, and needs only to be named for any one to recognize and understand it.
Moreover it is invariable and universal, the same in every single instance of
truth, however diverse the ideas, the realities, and the other relations between
them may be.
Our pragmatist view, on the contrary, is that the truth-relation is a definitely experienceable relation, and therefore describable as well as namable; that it is not unique in kind, and neither invariable nor universal. The relation to its object that makes an idea true in any given instance, is, we say, embodied in intermediate details of reality which lead towards the object, which vary in every instance, and which in every instance can be concretely traced. The chain of workings which an opinion sets up is the opinion's truth, falsehood, or irrelevancy, as the case may be. Every idea that a man has works some consequences in him, in the shape either of bodily
(236) actions or of other ideas. Through these consequences the man's relations to surrounding realities are modified. He is carried nearer to some of them and farther from others, and gets now the feeling that the idea has worked satisfactorily, now that it has not. The idea has put him into touch with something that fulfils its intent, or it has not.
This something is the man's object, primarily. Since the only realities we can talk about are such objects-believed-in, the pragma. tist, whenever he says 'reality,' means in the first instance what may count for the man himself as a reality, what he believes at the moment to be such. Sometimes the reality is a concrete sensible -presence. The idea, for example, may be that a certain door opens into a room where a glass of beer may be bought. If opening the door leads to the actual sight and taste of the beer, the man calls the idea true. Or his idea may be that of an abstract relation, say of that between the sides and the hypothenuse of a triangle, such a relation being, of course, a reality quite as much as a glass of
(237) beer is. If the thought of such a relation leads him to draw auxiliary lines and to compare the figures they make, he may at last, perceiving one equality after another, see the relation thought of, by a vision quite as particular and direct as was the taste of the beer. If he does so, he calls that idea, also, true. His idea has, in each case, brought him into closer touch with a reality felt at the moment to just that idea. Each reality verifies and validates its own idea exclusively; and in each case the verification consists in the satisfactorily-ending consequences, mental or physical, which the idea was able to set up. These 'workings' differ in every single instance, they never transcend experience, they consist of particulars, mental or sensible, and they admit of concrete description in every individual case. Pragmatists are unable to see what you can possibly mean by calling an idea true, unless you mean that between it as a terminus a quo in some one's mind and some particular reality as a terminus ad quem, such concrete workings do or may intervene. Their direction consti-
(238)-tutes the idea's reference to that reality, their satisfactoriness constitutes its adaptation thereto, and the two things together constitute the 'truth' of the idea for its possessor. Without such intermediating portions of concretely real experience the pragmatist sees no materials out of which the adaptive relation called truth can be built up.
The anti-pragmatist view is that the workings are but evidences of the truth's previous inherent presence in the idea, and that you can wipe the very possibility of them out of existence and still leave the truth of the idea as solid as ever. But surely this is not a countertheory of truth to ours. It is the renunciation of all articulate theory. It is but a claim to the right to call certain ideas true anyhow; and this is what I meant above by saying that the anti-pragmatists offer us no real alternative, and that our account is literally the only positive theory extant. What meaning, indeed, can an idea's truth have save its power of adapting us either mentally or physically to a reality ?
How comes it, then, that our critics so uni-
(239) -formly accuse us of subjectivism, of denying the reality's existence? It
comes, I think, from the necessary predominance of subjective language in our
analysis. However independent and ejective realities may be, we can talk about
them, in framing our accounts of truth, only as so many objects believed-in. But
the process of experience leads men so continually to supersede their older
objects by newer ones which they find it more satisfactory to believe in, that
the notion of an absolute reality inevitably arises as a
grenzbegriff, equivalent to that of an object that shall never be
superseded, and belief in which shall be endgultig. Cognitively we thus
live under a sort of rule of three: as our private concepts represent the
senseobjects to which they lead us, these being public realities independent of
the individual, so these sense- realities may, in turn, represent realities of a
hypersensible order, electrons, mind-stuff, God, or what not, existing
independently of all human thinkers. The notion of such final realities,
knowledge of which would be absolute truth, is an outgrowth of our
(240) cognitive experience from which neither pragmatists nor anti-pragmatists escape. They form an inevitable regulative postulate in every one's thinking. Our notion of them is the most abundantly suggested and satisfied of all our beliefs, the last to suffer doubt. The difference is that our critics use this belief as their sole paradigm, and treat any one who talks of human realities as if he thought the notion of reality 'in itself 'illegitimate. Meanwhile, reality-in-itself, so far as by them talked of, is only a human object; they postulate it just as we postulate it; and if we are subjectivists they are so no less. Realities in themselves can be there for any one, whether pragmatist or anti-pragmatist, only by being believed; they are believed only by their notions appearing true; and their notions appear true only because they work satisfactorily. Satisfactorily, moreover, for the particular thinker's purpose. There is no idea which is the true idea, of anything. Whose is the true idea of the absolute? Or to take M. Hébert's example, what is the true idea of a picture which you possess? It is the idea that
(241) most satisfactorily meets your Present interest. The interest may be in the picture's place, its age, its 'tone,' its subject, its dimensions, its authorship, its price, its merit, or what not. If its authorship by Corot have been doubted, what will satisfy the interest aroused in you at that moment will be to have your claim to own a Corot confirmed; but, if you have a normal human mind, merely calling it a Corot will not satisfy other demands of your mind at the same time. For then to be satisfied, what you learn of the picture must make smooth connection with what you know of the rest of the system of reality in which the actual Corot played his part. M. Hébert accuses us of holding that the proprietary satisfactions of themselves suffice to make the belief true, and that, so far as we are concerned, no actual Corot need ever have existed. Why we should be thus cut off from the more general and intellectual satisfactions, I know not; but whatever the satisfactions may be, intellectual or proprietary, they belong to the subjective side of the truth-relation. They found our beliefs; our beliefs are in realities;
(242) if no realities are there, the beliefs are false; but if realities are there, how they can ever be known without first being believed,- or how believed except by our first having ideas of them that work satisfactorily, pragmatists find it impossible to imagine. They also find it impossible to imagine what makes the antipragmatists' dogmatic I ipse dixit' assurance of reality more credible than the pragmatists' conviction based on concrete verifications. M. Herbert will probably agree to this, when put in this way, so I do not see our inferiority to him in the matter of connaissance proprement dite.
Some readers will say that, altho I may possibly believe in realities beyond our ideas, Dr. Schiller, at any rate, does not. This is a great misunderstanding, for Schiller's doctrine and mine are identical, only our expositions follow different directions. He starts from the subjective pole of the chain, the individual with his beliefs, as the more concrete and immediately given phenomenon. 'An individual
(243) claims his belief to be true,' Schiller says, I but what does he mean by
true? and bow does he establish the claim?' With these questions we embark on a
psychological inquiry. To be true, it appears, means, for that individual,
to work satisfactorily for him; and the working and the satisfaction, since they
vary from case to case, admit of no universal description. What works is true
and represents a reality, for the individual for whom it works. If he is
infallible, the reality is 'really' there; if mistaken it is not there, or not
there as he thinks it. We all believe, when our ideas work satisfactorily; but
we don't yet know who of us is infallible; so that the problem of truth and that
of error are ebenburtig and arise out of the same situations. Schiller,
remaining with the fallible individual, and treating only of reality for- him,
seems to many of his readers to ignore reality- in-itself altogether. But that
is because he seeks only to tell us how truths are attained, not what the
content of those truths, when attained, shall be. It may be that the truest of
all beliefs shall be that in transsub
(244)-jective realities. It certainly seems the truest, for no rival belief is as voluminously satisfactory, and it is probably Dr. Schiller's own belief; but he is not required, for his immediate purpose, to profess it. Still less is he obliged to assume it in advance as the basis of his discussion.
I, however, warned by the ways of critics, adopt different tactics. I start from the objectpole of the idea-reality chain and follow it in the opposite direction from Schiller's. Anticipating the results of the general truth-processes of mankind, I begin with the abstract notion of an objective reality. I postulate it, and ask on my own account, I vouching for this reality, what would make any one else's idea of it true for me as well as for him. But I find no different answer from that which Schiller gives. If the other man's idea leads him, not only to believe that the reality is there, but to use it as the reality's temporary substitute, by letting it evoke adaptive thoughts and acts similar to those which the reality itself would provoke, then it is true in the only intelligible sense, true
(245) through its particular consequences, and true for me as well as for the man.
My account is more of a logical definition; Schiller's is more of a psychological description. Both treat an absolutely identical matter of experience, only they traverse it in opposite ways.
Possibly these explanations may satisfy M. Hébert, whose little book, apart from the false accusation of subjectivism, gives a fairly instructive account of the pragmatist epistemology.
