LITMIR.BIZ

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It is defective enough, but the defects are to be remedied by a better empirical account and not by setting up against experience the claims of a logic aloof from experience.

      The objection then to a logic which rules out knowledge getting, and which bases logic exclusively upon the traits of known objects, is that it is self-contradictory. There is no way to know what are the traits of known objects, as distinct from imaginary objects, or objects of opinion, or objects of unanalytic common-sense, save by referring to the operations of getting, using, and testing evidence—the processes of knowledge getting. I am making no appeal for skepticism at large; I am not questioning the right of the physicist, the mathematician, or the symbolic logicist to go ahead with accepted objects and do what he can with them. I am pointing out that anyone who professes to be concerned with finding out what knowledge is, has for his primary work the job of finding out why it is so much safer to proceed with just these objects, than with those, say, of Aristotelian science. Aristotle was not lacking in acuteness nor in learning. To him it was clear that objects of knowledge are the things of ordinary perception, so far as they are referred to a form which comparison of perceived things, in the light of a final cause, makes evident. If this view of the objects of knowledge has gone into the discard, if quite other objects of knowledge are now received and employed, it is because the methods of getting knowledge have been transformed, till, for the working scientist, "objects of knowledge" mean precisely the objects which have been obtained by approved processes of inquiry. To exclude consideration of these processes is thus to throw away the key to understanding knowledge and its objects. There is a certain ironical humor in taking advantage of all the improved methods of experimental inquiry with respect to all objects of knowledge—save one, knowledge itself; in denying their relevancy to knowing knowledge, and falling back upon the method everywhere else disavowed—the method of relying upon isolated, self-contained properties of subject-matter.

      One of the points which gave much offense in the essays was the reference to genetic method—to a natural history of knowledge. I hope what has now been said makes clearer the nature of that reference. I was to blame for not making the point more explicit; but I cannot altogether blame myself for my naïveté in supposing that others understood by a natural history of knowledge what I understood by it. It had not occurred to me that anyone would think that the history by which human ignorance, error, dogma, and superstition had been transformed, even in its present degree of transformation, into knowledge was something which had gone on exclusively inside of men's heads, or in an inner consciousness. I thought of it as something going on in the world, in the observatory and the laboratory, and in the application of laboratory results to the control of human health, well-being, and progress. When a biologist says that the way to understand an organ, or the sociologist that the way to know an institution, resides in its genesis and history, he is understood to mean its history. I took the same liberty for knowledge, that is, for science. The accusation of "subjectivisim" taken in this light appears as a depressing revelation of what the current opinion about the processes of knowledge is. To stumble on a stone need not be a process of knowledge; to hit it with a hammer, to pour acid upon it, to put pieces in the crucible, to subject things to heat and pressure to see if one can make a similar stone, are processes of knowledge. So is fixing suggestions by attaching names, and so is devising ways of putting these terms together so that new suggestions will arise, or so that suggestions may be transferred from one situation to another. But not one of these processes is "subjective" in any sense which puts subjectivity in opposition to the public out-of-doors world of nature and human companionship. To set genesis in opposition to analysis is merely to overlook the fact that the sciences of existence have found that considerations of genesis afford their most effective methods of analysis.[10]

      The same kind of consideration applies to the favorable view taken of psychology. If reference to modes and ways of experience—to experiencing—is important for understanding the things with which philosophy deals, then psychology is useful as a matter of course. For what is meant by psychology is precisely a discrimination of the acts and attitudes of the organism which have a bearing upon respective subject-matters and which have accordingly to be taken account of before the subject-matters can be properly discriminated. The matter was especially striking in the case of Lotze. He protested constantly against the use of psychology, and yet his own data and procedures were infected at every turn by psychology, and, if I am at all correct, by a false psychology. The particular separation which he made between psychology and logic rested indeed upon a particular psychological assumption. The question is worth asking: Is not the marked aversion on the part of some philosophers to any reference to psychology a Freudian symptom?

      A word more upon the place assigned by the essays to need and purpose and the humanistic factor generally. To save time I may quote a sentence from an early review which attributes to the essays the following doctrine: "If the plan turns out to be useful for our need, it is correct—the judgment is true. The real-ideal distinction is that between stimulus of environment and plan of action or tentative response. Both real and ideal are equally experiences of the individual man." These words can be interpreted either so as to convey the position fairly, or so as radically to misconceive it; the latter course is a little easier, as the words stand. That "real and ideal" are experiences of the individual man in the sense that they actually present themselves as specifications which can be studied by any man who desires to study them is true enough. That such a study is as much required for determining their characters as it is for determining those of carbon dioxide or of the constitution of Great Britain is also the contention of the paper. But if the words quoted suggest to anyone that the real or even the ideal are somehow possessions of an individual man, things secreted somewhere about him and then ejected, I can only say that I cannot understand the doctrine. I know of no ready-made and antecedent conception of "the individual man." Instead of telling about the nature of experience by means of a prior conception of individual man, I find it necessary to go to experience to find out what is meant by "individual" and by "man"; and also by "the." Consequently even in such an expression as "my experience," I should wish not to contradict this idea of method by using the term "my" to swallow up the term "experience," any more than if I said "my house," or "my country." On the contrary, I should expect that any intelligible and definite use of such phrases would throw much more light upon "me" than upon "house" or "country"—or "experience."

      The possible misunderstanding is, I think, actual in the reference to "our needs" as a criterion of the correctness of truth of an idea or plan. According to the essays, it is the needs of a situation which are determinative. They evoke thought and the need of knowing, and it is only within the situation that the identification of the needs with a self occurs; and it is only by reflection upon the place of the agent in the encompassing situation that the nature of his needs can be determined. In fact, the actual occurrence of a disturbed, incomplete, and needy situation indicates that my present need is precisely to investigate, to explore, to hunt, to pull apart things now tied together, to project, to plan, to invent, and then to test the outcome by seeing how it works as a method of dealing with hard facts. One source of the demand, in short, for reference to experience as the encompassing universe of discourse is to keep us from taking such terms as "self," "my," "need," "satisfaction," etc., as terms whose meanings can be accepted and proved either by themselves or by even the most extensive dialectic reference to other terms.

      Terms like "real" and "ideal," "individual," "man," "my," certainly allow of profitable dialectic (or purely prepositional) clarification and elaboration. But nothing is settled until these discursive findings have been applied, through action, to things, and an experience has been effected, which either meets or evades the specification conceptually laid down. To suppose, for example, that the import of the term "ideal" can be settled apart from exhibiting in experience some specific affair, is to maintain in philosophy that belief in the occult essence and hidden cause which science had to get rid of before it got on the right track. The idealistic misconception of experience is no reason for throwing away its significant point of contact with modern science and for having recourse then to objects distinguished from old-fashioned Dinge an Sich only because they involve just that reference to those experiences by which they were established and to which they are applied that propositional or analytic realism professedly and elaborately ignores. In revenge, this ignoring leaves on our hands the "me," or knowing self, as a separate

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