Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of ThinkingJames, William
Philosophy
Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking
James, William
Pragmatism
You will probably be surprised to learn, then, that Messrs. Schiller's
and Dewey's theories have suffered a hailstorm of contempt and ridicule.
All rationalism has risen against them. In influential quarters Mr.
Schiller, in particular, has been treated like an impudent schoolboy who
deserves a spanking. I should not mention this, but for the fact that it
throws so much sidelight upon that rationalistic temper to which I have
opposed the temper of pragmatism. Pragmatism is uncomfortable away from
facts. Rationalism is comfortable only in the presence of abstractions.
This pragmatist talk about truths in the plural, about their utility
and satisfactoriness, about the success with which they 'work,' etc.,
suggests to the typical intellectualist mind a sort of coarse lame
second-rate makeshift article of truth. Such truths are not real truth.
Such tests are merely subjective. As against this, objective truth must
be something non-utilitarian, haughty, refined, remote, august, exalted.
It must be an absolute correspondence of our thoughts with an equally
absolute reality. It must be what we OUGHT to think, unconditionally.
The conditioned ways in which we DO think are so much irrelevance and
matter for psychology. Down with psychology, up with logic, in all this
question!
See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings
to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular
cases, and generalizes. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all
sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it
remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer.
When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just WHY we must defer,
the rationalist is unable to recognize the concretes from which his own
abstraction is taken. He accuses us of DENYING truth; whereas we have
only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought
to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractionist fairly shudders at
concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and
spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the
skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much
purer, clearer, nobler.
I hope that as these lectures go on, the concreteness and closeness to
facts of the pragmatism which they advocate may be what approves itself
to you as its most satisfactory peculiarity. It only follows here the
example of the sister-sciences, interpreting the unobserved by the
observed. It brings old and new harmoniously together. It converts the
absolutely empty notion of a static relation of 'correspondence' (what
that may mean we must ask later) between our minds and reality, into
that of a rich and active commerce (that anyone may follow in detail and
understand) between particular thoughts of ours, and the great universe
of other experiences in which they play their parts and have their uses.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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