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Thus the pragmatist's reliance on facts does not carry him beyond the psychic sphere; his facts are only his personal experiences.
If it only MIGHT bridge it, but doesn't, or if it throws a bridge distinctly AT it, it still has, in the onlooking pragmatist's eyes, what Professor Pratt calls 'trueness. But to ask the pragmatist thereupon whether, when it thus fails to coalesce bodily with the object, it is REALLY true or has REAL trueness, in other words whether the headache he supposes, and supposes the thinker he supposes, to believe in, be a real headache or not, is to step from his hypothetical universe of discourse into the altogether different world of natural fact.
Surely to BELIEVE in the postulated object, namely, in the really existing feeling of the other man. And since the belief in the headache, true for the subject assumed in the pragmatist's universe of discourse, is also true for the pragmatist who for his epitemologizing purposes has assumed that entire universe, why is it not true in that universe absolutely?
But common sense is undismayed by the pragmatist's discovery that if the Syllogism is to have any sense its premisses must be taken as disputable; for, unlike Formal Logic, it has perceived that men do not reason about what they think they know for certain, but about matters in dispute. It is not necessary to dwell at length on the futility of the formal notion of Induction.
If the reality assumed were cancelled from the pragmatist's universe of discourse, he would straightway give the name of falsehoods to the beliefs remaining, in spite of all their satisfactoriness. For him, as for his critic, there can be no truth if there is nothing to be true about. Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre.
The ideas around which the satisfactions cluster are primarily only hypotheses that challenge or summon a belief to come and take its stand upon them. The pragmatist's idea of truth is just such a challenge. He finds it ultra-satisfactory to accept it, and takes his own stand accordingly. But, being gregarious as they are, men seek to spread their beliefs, to awaken imitation, to infect others.
True beliefs become thus wayward affections, severed from all responsibility to other parts of experience. It is difficult to excuse such a parody of the pragmatist's opinion, ignoring as it does every element but one of his universe of discourse. The terms of which that universe consists positively forbid any non-realistic interpretation of the function of knowledge defined there.
It is an external view only, which marks the place and conditions of the mind in nature, but neglects its specific essence; as if a jewel were defined as a round hole in a ring. Nevertheless, the more materialistic the pragmatist's theory of the mind is, the more vitalistic his theory of nature will have to become.
Bit the 'gulf' here is that which the pragmatist epistemology itself fixes in the very first words it uses, by saying there must be an object and an idea. The idea however doesn't immediately leap the gulf, it only works from next to next so as to bridge it, fully or approximately. If it bridges it, in the pragmatist's vision of his hypothetical universe, it can be called a 'true' idea.
No more can logic kill the pragmatist's behavior: his act of utterance, so far from contradicting, accurately exemplifies the matter which he utters. What is the matter which he utters? In part, it is this, that truth, concretely considered, is an attribute of our beliefs, and that these are attitudes that follow satisfactions.
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