VII

PROFESSOR PRATT ON TRUTH

I

[Footnote:  Reprinted from the Journal of Philosophy, etc., August 15, 1907 (vol. iv, p. 464).]

Professor J. B. Pratt’s paper in the Journal of Philosophy for June 6, 1907, is so brilliantly written that its misconception of the pragmatist position seems doubly to call for a reply.

He asserts that, for a pragmatist, truth cannot be a relation between an idea and a reality outside and transcendent of the idea, but must lie ‘altogether within experience,’ where it will need ’no reference to anything else to justify it’—­no reference to the object, apparently.  The pragmatist must ’reduce everything to psychology,’ aye, and to the psychology of the immediate moment.  He is consequently debarred from saying that an idea that eventually gets psychologically verified was already true before the process of verifying was complete; and he is equally debarred from treating an idea as true provisionally so long as he only believes that he can verify it whenever he will.

Whether such a pragmatist as this exists, I know not, never having myself met with the beast.  We can define terms as we like; and if that be my friend Pratt’s definition of a pragmatist, I can only concur with his anti-pragmatism.  But, in setting up the weird type, he quotes words from me; so, in order to escape being classed by some reader along with so asinine a being, I will reassert my own view of truth once more.

Truth is essentially a relation between two things, an idea, on the one hand, and a reality outside of the idea, on the other.  This relation, like all relations, has its fundamentum, namely, the matrix of experiential circumstance, psychological as well as physical, in which the correlated terms are found embedded.  In the case of the relation between ‘heir’ and ‘legacy’ the fundamentum is a world in which there was a testator, and in which there is now a will and an executor; in the case of that between idea and object, it is a world with circumstances of a sort to make a satisfactory verification process, lying around and between the two terms.  But just as a man may be called an heir and treated as one before the executor has divided the estate, so an idea may practically be credited with truth before the verification process has been exhaustively carried out—­the existence of the mass of verifying circumstance is enough.  Where potentiality counts for actuality in so many other cases, one does not see why it may not so count here.  We call a man benevolent not only for his kind acts paid in, but for his readiness to perform others; we treat an idea as ‘luminous’ not only for the light it has shed, but for that we expect it will shed on dark problems.  Why should we not equally trust the truth of our ideas?  We live on credits everywhere; and we use our ideas far oftener for calling up things connected with their immediate objects, than for calling up those objects themselves.  Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the only use we should make of the object itself, if we were led up to it by our idea, would be to pass on to those connected things by its means.  So we continually curtail verification-processes, letting our belief that they are possible suffice.