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
Kinds, and sameness of kind--what colossally useful DENKMITTEL for
finding our way among the many! The manyness might conceivably have
been absolute. Experiences might have all been singulars, no one of them
occurring twice. In such a world logic would have had no application;
for kind and sameness of kind are logic's only instruments. Once we know
that whatever is of a kind is also of that kind's kind, we can travel
through the universe as if with seven-league boots. Brutes surely never
use these abstractions, and civilized men use them in most various
amounts.
Causal influence, again! This, if anything, seems to have been an
antediluvian conception; for we find primitive men thinking that almost
everything is significant and can exert influence of some sort. The
search for the more definite influences seems to have started in the
question: "Who, or what, is to blame?"--for any illness, namely, or
disaster, or untoward thing. From this centre the search for causal
influences has spread. Hume and 'Science' together have tried to
eliminate the whole notion of influence, substituting the entirely
different DENKMITTEL of 'law.' But law is a comparatively recent
invention, and influence reigns supreme in the older realm of common
sense.
The 'possible,' as something less than the actual and more than the
wholly unreal, is another of these magisterial notions of common sense.
Criticize them as you may, they persist; and we fly back to them the
moment critical pressure is relaxed. 'Self,' 'body,' in the substantial
or metaphysical sense--no one escapes subjection to THOSE forms
of thought. In practice, the common-sense DENKMITTEL are uniformly
victorious. Everyone, however instructed, still thinks of a 'thing' in
the common-sense way, as a permanent unit-subject that 'supports' its
attributes interchangeably. No one stably or sincerely uses the more
critical notion, of a group of sense-qualities united by a law. With
these categories in our hand, we make our plans and plot together, and
connect all the remoter parts of experience with what lies before our
eyes. Our later and more critical philosophies are mere fads and fancies
compared with this natural mother-tongue of thought.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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