Pragmatism — Lecture 5: Pragmatism and Common Sense, part 2

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.

Common sense appears thus as a perfectly definite stage in our understanding of things, a stage that satisfies in an extraordinarily successful way the purposes for which we think.

'Things' do exist, even when we do not see them.

Their 'kinds' also exist.

Their 'qualities' are what they act by, and are what we act on; and these also exist.

These lamps shed their quality of light on every object in this room.

We intercept IT on its way whenever we hold up an opaque screen.

It is the very sound that my lips emit that travels into your ears.

It is the sensible heat of the fire that migrates into the water in which we boil an egg; and we can change the heat into coolness by dropping in a lump of ice.

At this stage of philosophy all non-European men without exception have remained.

It suffices for all the necessary practical ends of life; and, among our own race even, it is only the highly sophisticated specimens, the minds debauched by learning, as Berkeley calls them, who have ever even suspected common sense of not being absolutely true.

But when we look back, and speculate as to how the common-sense categories may have achieved their wonderful supremacy, no reason appears why it may not have been by a process just like that by which the conceptions due to Democritus, Berkeley, or Darwin, achieved their similar triumphs in more recent times.

In other words, they may have been successfully DISCOVERED by prehistoric geniuses whose names the night of antiquity has covered up; they may have been verified by the immediate facts of experience which they first fitted; and then from fact to fact and from man to man they may have SPREAD, until all language rested on them and we are now incapable of thinking naturally in any other terms.

Such a view would only follow the rule that has proved elsewhere so fertile, of assuming the vast and remote to conform to the laws of formation that we can observe at work in the small and near.

For all utilitarian practical purposes these conceptions amply suffice;

but that they began at special points of discovery and only gradually spread from one thing to another, seems proved by the exceedingly dubious limits of their application to-day.

We assume for certain purposes one 'objective' Time that AEQUABILITER FLUIT, but we don't livingly believe in or realize any such equally-flowing time.

'Space' is a less vague notion; but 'things,' what are they?

Is a constellation properly a thing?

or an army?

or is an ENS RATIONIS such as space or justice a thing?

Is a knife whose handle and blade are changed the 'same'?

Is the 'changeling,' whom Locke so seriously discusses, of the human 'kind'?

Is 'telepathy' a 'fancy' or a 'fact'?

The moment you pass beyond the practical use of these categories (a use usually suggested sufficiently by the circumstances of the special case) to a merely curious or speculative way of thinking, you find it impossible to say within just what limits of fact any one of them shall apply.

The peripatetic philosophy, obeying rationalist propensities, has tried to eternalize the common-sense categories by treating them very technically and articulately.

A 'thing' for instance is a being, or ENS.

An ENS is a subject in which qualities 'inhere.'

A subject is a substance.

Substances are of kinds, and kinds are definite in number, and discrete.

These distinctions are fundamental and eternal.

As terms of DISCOURSE they are indeed magnificently useful, but what they mean, apart from their use in steering our discourse to profitable issues, does not appear.

If you ask a scholastic philosopher what a substance may be in itself, apart from its being the support of attributes, he simply says that your intellect knows perfectly what the word means.

But what the intellect knows clearly is only the word itself and its steering function.

So it comes about that intellects SIBI PERMISSI, intellects only curious and idle, have forsaken the common-sense level for what in general terms may be called the 'critical' level of thought.

Not merely SUCH intellects either--your Humes and Berkeleys and Hegels;

but practical observers of facts, your Galileos, Daltons, Faradays, have found it impossible to treat the NAIFS sense-termini of common sense as ultimately real.

As common sense interpolates her constant 'things' between our intermittent sensations, so science EXTRApolates her world of 'primary' qualities, her atoms, her ether, her magnetic fields, and the like, beyond the common-sense world.

The 'things' are now invisible impalpable things; and the old visible common-sense things are supposed to result from the mixture of these invisibles.

Or else the whole NAIF conception of thing gets superseded, and a thing's name is interpreted as denoting only the law or REGEL DER VERBINDUNG by which certain of our sensations habitually succeed or coexist.

Science and critical philosophy thus burst the bounds of common sense.

With science NAIF realism ceases: 'Secondary' qualities become unreal;

primary ones alone remain.

With critical philosophy, havoc is made of everything.

The common-sense categories one and all cease to represent anything in the way of BEING; they are but sublime tricks of human thought, our ways of escaping bewilderment in the midst of sensation's irremediable flow.

But the scientific tendency in critical thought, tho inspired at first by purely intellectual motives, has opened an entirely unexpected range of practical utilities to our astonished view.

Galileo gave us accurate clocks and accurate artillery-practice; the chemists flood us with new medicines and dye-stuffs; Ampere and Faraday have endowed us with the New York subway and with Marconi telegrams.

The hypothetical things that such men have invented, defined as they have defined them, are showing an extraordinary fertility in consequences verifiable by sense.

Our logic can deduce from them a consequence due under certain conditions, we can then bring about the conditions, and presto, the consequence is there before our eyes.

The scope of the practical control of nature newly put into our hand by scientific ways of thinking vastly exceeds the scope of the old control grounded on common sense.

Its rate of increase accelerates so that no one can trace the limit; one may even fear that the BEING of man may be crushed by his own powers, that his fixed nature as an organism may not prove adequate to stand the strain of the ever increasingly tremendous functions, almost divine creative functions, which his intellect will more and more enable him to wield.

He may drown in his wealth like a child in a bath-tub, who has turned on the water and who cannot turn it off.

The philosophic stage of criticism, much more thorough in its negations than the scientific stage, so far gives us no new range of practical power.

Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, have all been utterly sterile, so far as shedding any light on the details of nature goes, and I can think of no invention or discovery that can be directly traced to anything in their peculiar thought, for neither with Berkeley's tar-water nor with Kant's nebular hypothesis had their respective philosophic tenets anything to do.

The satisfactions they yield to their disciples are intellectual, not practical; and even then we have to confess that there is a large minus-side to the account.

There are thus at least three well-characterized levels, stages or types of thought about the world we live in, and the notions of one stage have one kind of merit, those of another stage another kind.

It is impossible, however, to say that any stage as yet in sight is absolutely more TRUE than any other.

Common sense is the more CONSOLIDATED stage, because it got its innings first, and made all language into its ally.

Whether it or science be the more AUGUST stage may be left to private judgment.

But neither consolidation nor augustness are decisive marks of truth.

If common sense were true, why should science have had to brand the secondary qualities, to which our world owes all its living interest, as false, and to invent an invisible world of points and curves and mathematical equations instead?

Why should it have needed to transform causes and activities into laws of 'functional variation'?

Vainly did scholasticism, common sense's college-trained younger sister, seek to stereotype the forms the human family had always talked with, to make them definite and fix them for eternity.

Substantial forms (in other words our secondary qualities) hardly outlasted the year of our Lord 1600. People were already tired of them then; and Galileo, and Descartes, with his 'new philosophy,' gave them only a little later their coup de grace.

But now if the new kinds of scientific 'thing,' the corpuscular and etheric world, were essentially more 'true,' why should they have excited so much criticism within the body of science itself?

Scientific logicians are saying on every hand that these entities and their determinations, however definitely conceived, should not be held for literally real.

It is AS IF they existed; but in reality they are like co-ordinates or logarithms, only artificial short-cuts for taking us from one part to another of experience's flux.

We can cipher fruitfully with them; they serve us wonderfully; but we must not be their dupes.

There is no RINGING conclusion possible when we compare these types of thinking, with a view to telling which is the more absolutely true.

Their naturalness, their intellectual economy, their fruitfulness for practice, all start up as distinct tests of their veracity, and as a result we get confused.

Common sense is BETTER for one sphere of life, science for another, philosophic criticism for a third; but whether either be TRUER absolutely, Heaven only knows.

Just now, if I understand the matter rightly, we are witnessing a curious reversion to the common-sense way of looking at physical nature, in the philosophy of science favored by such men as Mach, Ostwald and Duhem.

According to these teachers no hypothesis is truer than any other in the sense of being a more literal copy of reality.

They are all but ways of talking on our part, to be compared solely from the point of view of their USE.

The only literally true thing is REALITY; and the only reality we know is, for these logicians, sensible reality, the flux of our sensations and emotions as they pass.

'Energy' is the collective name (according to Ostwald) for the sensations just as they present themselves (the movement, heat, magnetic pull, or light, or whatever it may be) when they are measured in certain ways.

So measuring them, we are enabled to describe the correlated changes which they show us, in formulas matchless for their simplicity and fruitfulness for human use.

They are sovereign triumphs of economy in thought.

No one can fail to admire the 'energetic' philosophy.

But the hypersensible entities, the corpuscles and vibrations, hold their own with most physicists and chemists, in spite of its appeal.

It seems too economical to be all-sufficient.

Profusion, not economy, may after all be reality's key-note.

I am dealing here with highly technical matters, hardly suitable for popular lecturing, and in which my own competence is small.

All the better for my conclusion, however, which at this point is this.

The whole notion of truth, which naturally and without reflexion we assume to mean the simple duplication by the mind of a ready-made and given reality, proves hard to understand clearly.

There is no simple test available for adjudicating offhand between the divers types of thought that claim to possess it.

Common sense, common science or corpuscular philosophy, ultra-critical science, or energetics, and critical or idealistic philosophy, all seem insufficiently true in some regard and leave some dissatisfaction.

It is evident that the conflict of these so widely differing systems obliges us to overhaul the very idea of truth, for at present we have no definite notion of what the word may mean.

I

shall face that task in my next lecture, and will add but a few words, in finishing the present one.

There are only two points that I wish you to retain from the present lecture.

The first one relates to common sense.

We have seen reason to suspect it, to suspect that in spite of their being so venerable, of their being so universally used and built into the very structure of language, its categories may after all be only a collection of extraordinarily successful hypotheses (historically discovered or invented by single men, but gradually communicated, and used by everybody) by which our forefathers have from time immemorial unified and straightened the discontinuity of their immediate experiences, and put themselves into an equilibrium with the surface of nature so satisfactory for ordinary practical purposes that it certainly would have lasted forever, but for the excessive intellectual vivacity of Democritus, Archimedes, Galileo, Berkeley, and other excentric geniuses whom the example of such men inflamed.

Retain, I pray you, this suspicion about common sense.

The other point is this.

Ought not the existence of the various types of thinking which we have reviewed, each so splendid for certain purposes, yet all conflicting still, and neither one of them able to support a claim of absolute veracity, to awaken a presumption favorable to the pragmatistic view that all our theories are INSTRUMENTAL, are mental modes of ADAPTATION to reality, rather than revelations or gnostic answers to some divinely instituted world-enigma?

I expressed this view as clearly as I could in the second of these lectures.

Certainly the restlessness of the actual theoretic situation, the value for some purposes of each thought-level, and the inability of either to expel the others decisively, suggest this pragmatistic view, which I hope that the next lectures may soon make entirely convincing.

May there not after all be a possible ambiguity in truth?

Lecture VI