This completes the account, preliminary to a consideration of other
matters. But the account suggests another and independent question
with respect to which I shall make an excursus. How far is it possible
and legitimate to extend or generalize the results reached to apply to
all propositions of facts? That is to say, is it possible and
legitimate to treat all scientific or descriptive statements of
matters of fact as implying indirectly if not directly, something to
be done, future possibilities to be realized in action? The question
as to legitimacy is too complicated to be discussed in an incidental
way. But it cannot be denied that there is a possibility of such
application, nor that the possibility is worth careful examination. We
may frame at least a hypothesis that all judgments of fact have
reference to a determination of courses of action to be tried and to
the discovery of means for their realization. In the sense already
explained all propositions which state discoveries or ascertainments,
all categorical propositions, would be hypothetical, and their truth
would coincide with their tested consequences effected by intelligent
action.
This theory may be called pragmatism. But it is a type of pragmatism
quite free from dependence upon a voluntaristic psychology. It is not
complicated by reference to emotional satisfactions or the play of
desires.
I am not arguing the point. But possibly critics of pragmatism would
get a new light upon its meaning were they to set out with an
analysis of ordinary practical judgments and then proceed to consider
the bearing of its result upon judgments of facts and essences. Mr.
Bertrand Russell has remarked[81] that pragmatism originated as a
theory about the truth of theories, but ignored the "truths of fact"
upon which theories rest and by which they are tested. I am not
concerned to question this so far as the origin of pragmatism is
concerned. Philosophy, at least, has been mainly a matter of theories;
and Mr. James was conscientious enough to be troubled about the way in
which the meaning of such theories is to be settled and the way in
which they are to be tested. His pragmatism was in effect (as Mr.
Russell recognizes) a statement of the need of applying to philosophic
theories the same kinds of test as are used in the theories of the
inductive sciences. But this does not preclude the application of a
like method to dealing with so-called "truths of fact." Facts may be
facts, and yet not be the facts _of_ the inquiry in hand. In all
scientific inquiry, however, to call them facts or data or truths of
fact signifies that they are taken as the _relevant_ facts of the
inference to be made. _If_ (as this would seem to indicate) they are
then implicated however indirectly in a proposition about what is to
be done, they are themselves theoretical in logical quality. Accuracy
of statement and correctness of reasoning would then be factors in
truth, but so also would be verification.
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