If a scientific man be asked what is truth, he will reply--if he frame
his reply in terms of his practice and not of some convention--that
which is accepted upon adequate evidence. And if he is asked for a
description of adequacy of evidence, he certainly will refer to
matters of observation and experiment. It is not the self-inclosed
character of the terms and propositions nor their systematic ordering
which settles the case for him; it is the way they were obtained and
what he can do with them in getting other things. And when a
mathematician or logician asks philosophy to abandon this method, then
is just the time to be most vigorous in insisting upon the necessity
of reference to "experience" in order to fix the import of
mathematical and logical pretensions. When students influenced by the
symmetry and system of mathematics cease building up their
philosophies in terms of traits of mathematical subject-matter in
isolation, then empirical philosophers will have less call to mention
experience. Meantime, I know of no way of fixing the scope and claims
of mathematics in philosophy save to try to point out just at what
juncture it enters experience and what work it does after it has got
entrance. I have made such an attempt in my account of the fixation
and handling of suggestions as meanings. It is defective enough, but
the defects are to be remedied by a better empirical account and not
by setting up against experience the claims of a logic aloof from
experience.
The objection then to a logic which rules out knowledge getting, and
which bases logic exclusively upon the traits of known objects, is
that it is self-contradictory. There is no way to know what are the
traits of known objects, as distinct from imaginary objects, or
objects of opinion, or objects of unanalytic common-sense, save by
referring to the operations of getting, using, and testing
evidence--the processes of knowledge getting. I am making no appeal
for skepticism at large; I am not questioning the right of the
physicist, the mathematician, or the symbolic logicist to go ahead
with accepted objects and do what he can with them. I am pointing out
that anyone who professes to be concerned with finding out what
knowledge _is_, has for his primary work the job of finding out why it
is so much safer to proceed with just these objects, than with those,
say, of Aristotelian science. Aristotle was not lacking in acuteness
nor in learning. To him it was clear that objects of knowledge are the
things of ordinary perception, so far as they are referred to a form
which comparison of perceived things, in the light of a final cause,
makes evident. If this view of the objects of knowledge has gone into
the discard, if quite other objects of knowledge are now received and
employed, it is because the methods of _getting_ knowledge have been
transformed, till, for the working scientist, "objects of knowledge"
mean precisely the objects which have been obtained by approved
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