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
If this sounds paradoxical to anyone, let him think of analytical
geometry. The identical figures which Euclid defined by intrinsic
relations were defined by Descartes by the relations of their points to
adventitious co-ordinates, the result being an absolutely different and
vastly more potent way of handling curves. All our conceptions are what
the Germans call denkmittel, means by which we handle facts by thinking
them. Experience merely as such doesn't come ticketed and labeled, we
have first to discover what it is. Kant speaks of it as being in
its first intention a gewuehl der erscheinungen, a rhapsodie der
wahrnehmungen, a mere motley which we have to unify by our wits. What
we usually do is first to frame some system of concepts mentally
classified, serialized, or connected in some intellectual way, and then
to use this as a tally by which we 'keep tab' on the impressions that
present themselves. When each is referred to some possible place in the
conceptual system, it is thereby 'understood.' This notion of parallel
'manifolds' with their elements standing reciprocally in 'one-to-one
relations,' is proving so convenient nowadays in mathematics and logic
as to supersede more and more the older classificatory conceptions.
There are many conceptual systems of this sort; and the sense
manifold is also such a system. Find a one-to-one relation for your
sense-impressions ANYWHERE among the concepts, and in so far forth you
rationalize the impressions. But obviously you can rationalize them by
using various conceptual systems.
The old common-sense way of rationalizing them is by a set of concepts
of which the most important are these:
Thing;
The same or different;
Kinds;
Minds;
Bodies;
One Time;
One Space;
Subjects and attributes;
Causal influences;
The fancied;
The real.
We are now so familiar with the order that these notions have woven for
us out of the everlasting weather of our perceptions that we find it
hard to realize how little of a fixed routine the perceptions follow
when taken by themselves. The word weather is a good one to use here.
In Boston, for example, the weather has almost no routine, the only law
being that if you have had any weather for two days, you will probably
but not certainly have another weather on the third. Weather-experience
as it thus comes to Boston, is discontinuous and chaotic. In point of
temperature, of wind, rain or sunshine, it MAY change three times a
day. But the Washington weather-bureau intellectualizes this disorder by
making each successive bit of Boston weather EPISODIC. It refers it to
its place and moment in a continental cyclone, on the history of which
the local changes everywhere are strung as beads are strung upon a cord.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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