فصل 28

chapter 28

So What?

C.S. Peirce and William James

A squirrel is clinging tightly to the trunk of a large tree. On the other side of the tree, close up against the trunk is a hunter. Every time the hunter moves to his left, the squirrel moves quickly to its left too, scurrying further round the trunk, hanging on with its claws. The hunter keeps trying to find the squirrel, but it manages to keep just out of his sight. This goes on for hours, and the hunter never gets a glimpse of the squirrel. Would it be true to say that the hunter is circling the squirrel? Think about it. Does the hunter actually circle his prey?

It’s possible that your answer will be ‘Why do you want to know?’ The American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842–1910) came across a group of friends arguing about this same example. He would have had some sympathy with your response. His friends couldn’t agree on the answer but were discussing the question as if there were an absolute truth to the matter that they could uncover. Some said yes, the hunter was circling the squirrel; others said no, he certainly wasn’t. They thought James might be able to help them answer the question one way or the other. His response was based on his pragmatist philosophy.

This is what he said. If you mean by circling that the man is first north, then east, then south, then west of the squirrel, which is one meaning of ‘circling’, then the answer is that it is true that the hunter circles the squirrel. He does go round the squirrel in this sense. But if you mean that the hunter is first of all in front of the squirrel, then to the squirrel’s right, then behind the squirrel and then to its left, another meaning of ‘circling’, then the answer is no. Because the squirrel’s belly is always facing the hunter, the hunter doesn’t go round the squirrel in that sense. They are always face to face with each other with the tree in between them as they dance round out of each other’s sight.

The point of this example is to show that pragmatism is concerned with practical consequences – the ‘cash value’ of thought. If nothing hangs on the answer, it doesn’t really matter what you decide. It all depends why you want to know and what difference it will actually make. Here, there is no truth beyond particular human concerns with the question, and the precise ways we use the verb ‘to circle’ in different contexts. If there is no practical difference, then there is no truth of the matter. It’s not that truth is somehow ‘out there’ waiting for us to find it. Truth for James was simply what works, what has a beneficial impact on our lives.

Pragmatism is a philosophical approach that became popular in the United States in the late nineteenth century. It started with the American philosopher and scientist C.S. Peirce (pronounced ‘purse’), who wanted to make philosophy more scientific than it had been. Peirce (1839–1914) believed that for a statement to be true there had to be some possible experiment or observation to support it. If you say ‘Glass is brittle’ what this means is that if you hit it with a hammer it will break into tiny fragments. That’s what makes the statement ‘Glass is brittle’ true. There isn’t some invisible property of ‘brittleness’ the glass has apart from this fact about what happens if you hit it. ‘Glass is brittle’ is a true statement because of these practical consequences. ‘Glass is transparent’ is true because you can see through glass, not because of some mysterious property in the glass. Peirce hated abstract theories that didn’t make any difference in practice. He thought they were nonsense. Truth for him is what we would end up with if we could run all the experiments and investigations we would ideally like to. This is very close to A.J. Ayer’s logical positivism which is the subject of Chapter 32.

Peirce’s work was not widely read. But William James’ was. He was an excellent writer – as good as or better than his famous brother, the novelist and short story writer Henry James. William had spent many hours discussing pragmatism with Peirce when they had both been lecturers at Harvard University. James developed his own version of it that he popularized in essays and lectures. For him, pragmatism boils down to this: truth is what works. He was, though, a bit vague about what ‘what works’ meant. Although he was an early psychologist, he wasn’t interested just in science, but also in questions about right and wrong, and religion too. In fact his most controversial writing was about religion.

James’ approach is very different from the traditional view of truth. On that view truth means correspondence to the facts. What makes a sentence true on the correspondence theory of truth is that it accurately describes how the world is. ‘The cat is on the mat’ is true when the cat is actually sitting on the mat, and false when it isn’t; when, for example, it is out in the garden looking for mice. According to James’ pragmatic theory of truth, what makes the sentence ‘The cat is on the mat’ true is that believing it produces useful practical results for us. It works for us. So, for example, believing ‘the cat is on the mat’ gives the result that we know not to play with our pet hamster on that mat until the cat has gone somewhere else.

Now, when using an example like ‘The cat is on the mat’, the results of this pragmatic theory of truth don’t seem particularly disconcerting or important. But try it with the sentence ‘God exists.’ What would you expect James to say about that?

Is it true that God exists? What do you think? The main answers are ‘Yes, it’s true that God exists’, ‘No it’s not true that God exists’, and ‘I don’t know.’ Presumably you gave one of those answers if you bothered to answer my question before reading this. These positions have names: theism, atheism and agnosticism. Those who say ‘Yes, it’s true that God exists’ usually mean that there is a Supreme Being somewhere and that the statement ‘God exists’ would be true even if there were no human beings alive and even if no human beings had ever existed. ‘God exists’ and ‘God doesn’t exist’ are statements that are either true or false. But it’s not what we think about them that makes them true or false. They are true or false whatever we think about them. We just hope we get it right when we think about them.

James gave a rather different analysis of ‘God exists.’ He thought that the statement was true. What made it true was that it was in his opinion a useful belief to have. In coming to that conclusion he focused on the benefits of believing that God exists. This was an important issue for him and he wrote a book, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), which examined a wide range of effects that religious belief can have. For James, to say that ‘God exists’ is a true statement is simply to say that it is somehow good for the believer to believe it. This is quite a surprising position to take. It’s a bit like Pascal’s argument that we looked at in Chapter 12: that agnostics stood to benefit from believing that God existed. Pascal, though, believed that ‘God exists’ was made true by the real existence of God, not by human beings feeling better when they believe in God, or becoming better people because they have this belief. His Wager was just a way of getting agnostics to believe what he thought was true. For James, it is the supposed fact that belief in God ‘works satisfactorily’ that makes ‘God exists’ true.

To get clear about this, take the sentence ‘Santa Claus exists.’ Is that true? Does a large, jolly red-faced man come down your chimney every Christmas Eve with a sack of presents? Don’t read the rest of this paragraph if you believe that this does actually happen. I’m guessing, though, that you don’t think Santa Claus exists even if you think that it would be nice if he did. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell (see Chapter 31) made fun of William James’ pragmatic theory of truth by saying it meant that James had to believe ‘Santa Claus exists’ is true. His reason for saying this was that James thinks that all that makes a sentence true is the effect on the believer of believing it. And for most children, at least, believing in Santa Claus is great. It makes Christmas a very special day for them; it makes them behave well; it gives them a focus in the days coming up to Christmas. It works for them. So because believing it works in some sense, that seems to make it true according to James’ theory. The trouble is there is a difference between what would be nice if it were true and what is actually true. James could have pointed out that while believing in Santa Claus works for young children, it doesn’t work for everyone. If parents believed that Santa was going to deliver presents on Christmas Eve then they wouldn’t go out and buy presents for their children. It would only take until Christmas morning to realize that something wasn’t working with the belief ‘Santa Claus exists’. But does that mean it’s true for small children that Santa Claus exists, but false for most adults? And doesn’t that make truth subjective, a matter of how we feel about things rather than the way the world is?

Take another example. How do I know that other people have minds at all? I know from my own experience that I’m not just some kind of a zombie with no internal life. I have my own thoughts, intentions and so forth. But how can I tell whether people around me have thoughts at all? Perhaps they aren’t conscious. Couldn’t they just be zombies acting automatically with no minds of their own? This is the Problem of Other Minds that philosophers have worried about for a long time. It is a difficult puzzle to solve. James’ answer was that it must be true that other people have minds, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to satisfy our desire to be recognized and admired by other people. This is an odd sort of argument. It makes his pragmatism sound very much like wishful thinking – believing what you’d like to be true whether or not it is actually true. But just because it feels good to believe that when someone praises you they are a conscious being and not a robot doesn’t make them a conscious being. They could still lack any internal life.

In the twentieth century the American philosopher Richard Rorty (1931–2007) carried on this style of pragmatic thinking. Like James, he thought of words as tools that we do things with, rather than symbols that somehow mirror the way the world is. Words allow us to cope with the world, not copy it. He declared that ‘truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with’ and that no period of history gets reality more nearly right than any other. When people describe the world, Rorty believed, they are like literary critics giving an interpretation of a Shakespeare play: there’s no single ‘correct’ way of reading it that we should all agree on. Different people at different times interpret the text differently. Rorty simply rejected the idea that any one view is correct for all time. Or at least that’s my interpretation of his work. Rorty presumably believed that there was no correct interpretation of it in the same way that there’s no ‘right’ answer about whether the hunter was circling the squirrel as it scrambled round the tree.

Whether or not there is a correct interpretation of the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche is also an interesting question.