One word more, ere I end this preface. A distinction is sometimes made
between Dewey, Schiller and myself, as if I, in supposing the object's
existence, made a concession to popular prejudice which they, as more
radical pragmatists, refuse to make. As I myself understand these
authors, we all three absolutely agree in admitting the transcendency of
the object (provided it be an experienceable object) to the subject, in
the truth-relation. Dewey in particular has insisted almost ad nauseam
that the whole meaning of our cognitive states and processes lies in
the way they intervene in the control and revaluation of independent
existences or facts. His account of knowledge is not only absurd, but
meaningless, unless independent existences be there of which our ideas
take account, and for the transformation of which they work. But because
he and Schiller refuse to discuss objects and relations 'transcendent'
in the sense of being ALTOGETHER TRANS-EXPERIENTIAL, their critics
pounce on sentences in their writings to that effect to show that they
deny the existence WITHIN THE REALM OF EXPERIENCE of objects external
to the ideas that declare their presence there. [Footnote: It gives me
pleasure to welcome Professor Carveth Read into the pragmatistic church,
so far as his epistemology goes. See his vigorous book, The Metaphysics
of Nature, 2d Edition, Appendix A. (London, Black, 1908.) The work What
is Reality? by Francis Howe Johnson (Boston, 1891), of which I make the
acquaintance only while correcting these proofs, contains some striking
anticipations of the later pragmatist view. The Psychology of Thinking,
by Irving E. Miller (New York, Macmillan Co., 1909), which has just
appeared, is one of the most convincing pragmatist document yet
published, tho it does not use the word 'pragmatism' at all. While I
am making references, I cannot refrain from inserting one to the
extraordinarily acute article by H. V. Knox in the Quarterly Review for
April, 1909.]
It seems incredible that educated and apparently sincere critics should
so fail to catch their adversary's point of view.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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