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What pragmatism contends for is that you cannot adequately DEFINE the something if you leave the notion of the statement's functional workings out of your account. Truth meaning agreement with reality, the mode of the agreeing is a practical problem which the subjective term of the relation alone can solve.
So I say, the doctrine which we are discussing is not a method of attaining to truth. What it really attempts to do is to point out to us how it is prudent for us to act when we cannot discover what the truth is. "Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology," article "Pragmatism." Published in 1897 and 1898. For references to later developments of pragmatism, see the note on page 312.
But precisely one of the things that he must think is the Absolute. This philosophy, indeed, is a kind of verbal paradox. Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist. Extreme pragmatism is just as inhuman as the determinism it so powerfully attacks.
You are where you ought to be mentally; you have obeyed your categorical imperative; and nothing more need follow on that climax of your rational destiny. Epistemologically you are in stable equilibrium. Pragmatism, on the other hand, asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life?
One misunderstanding of pragmatism is to identify it with positivistic tough-mindedness, to suppose that it scorns every rationalistic notion as so much jabber and gesticulation, that it loves intellectual anarchy as such and prefers a sort of wolf-world absolutely unpent and wild and without a master or a collar to any philosophic class-room product, whatsoever.
According to this view, pragmatism would seem to be a revised version of the transcendental logic, leaving logic still transcendental, that is, still concerned with the evolution of the categories. The revision would consist chiefly in this, that empirical verification, utility, and survival would take the place of dialectical irony as the force governing the evolution.
The result of this change of attitude is immediate. We are thus led from the narrower logical question, 'What constitutes the "truth" of a statement? to a wider outlook, from which we can survey the place of knowing in human life at large. This may be called the transition from Pragmatism to Humanism. This last word was introduced into philosophic terminology by Dr.
Between saying that Congress could keep slavery out of the territories, thereby treating the territories as property, not as subordinate sovereignties, and Congress sending slavery into the territories, because the Constitution was over them, what juster pragmatism were possible than to let the people of the territories decide the matter for themselves?
Pragmatism, therefore, by refuting 'useless' knowledge, shows that it does not admit such merely subjective 'uses. It insists that ideas must be more objectively useful viz., by showing ability to cope with the situation they were devised to meet. If they fail to harmonize with the situation they are untrue, however attractive they may be.
The absolutistic hypothesis, that perfection is eternal, aboriginal, and most real, has a perfectly definite meaning, and it works religiously. To examine how, will be the subject of my next and final lecture. Lecture VIII Pragmatism and Religion
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