The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, and other essays in contemporary thought · John Dewey
IV
I have gone from the very general considerations which occupied us in the earlier portions of this article to matters which relatively at least are specific. I conclude with a summary in the hope that it may bind together the earlier and the later parts of this paper. 1. The condition which antecedes and provokes any particular exercise of reflective knowing is always one of discrepancy, struggle, “collision.” This condition is practical, for it involves the habits and interests of the organism, an agent. This does not mean that the struggle is merely personal, or subjective, or psychological. The agent or individual is one factor in the situation--not the situation something subsisting in the individual. The individual has to be identified in the situation, before any situation can be referred--as in psychology--to the individual. But the discrepancy calls out and controls reflective knowing only as the fortunes of an agent are implicated in the crisis. Certain elements stand out as obstacles, as interferences, as deficiencies--in short as unsatisfactory and as requiring something for their completion. Other elements stand out as wanted--as required, as a satisfaction which does not exist. This clash (an accompaniment of all desire) between the given and the wanted, between the present and the absent, is at once the root and the type of that peculiar paradoxical relation between existence and meaning which Bradley insists upon as the essence of judgment. It is not irrational in the sense that we are dealing with appearance wholesale, but it is non-rational--an evidence that we are dealing with a practical affair.
2. The intellectual or reflective and logical is a _statement_ of this conflict: an attempt to describe and define it. It is, as it were, the practical clash held off at arm’s length for inspection and investigation. In this way brute blind reaction against the unsatisfactoriness of the situation is suspended. Action is turned into the channel of observing, of inferring, of reasoning, or defining means and end. It is this change in the quality of activity, from directly overt, to indirect, or inquiring with view to stating, that constitutes the _specific_ nature of reflective practice to which Mr. Bradley calls attention. The discovery of the nature of the conflict supplies materials for the fact or existence side of the judgement. The conception or projection of the object in which the conflict would be terminated furnishes material for the meaning side of the judgment. It is ideal because anticipatory, just as the fact side is existential, because reminiscent or recording. Hence the two are necessarily both distinguished from and yet referred to each other: only through location of a problem can a solution be conceived; only in reference to the intent of finding a solution can the elements of a problem be selected and interpreted. In origin and in destiny, this correlative determination of existence and meaning is tentative and experimental. The aim of the subject of the judgment is not to include all possible reality, but to select those elements of a reality that are useful in locating the source and nature of the difficulty in hand. The aim of the predicate is not to bunch all possible meaning and refer it in one final act indiscriminately to all existence, but to state the standpoint and method through which the difficulty of the particular situation may most effectively be dealt with. The selection of what is relevant to the characterization of the problem and the projection of the method of dealing with it are theoretic, hypothetic, intellectual:--that is, they are tentative ways of viewing the matter for the sake of guiding, economizing, and freeing the activities through which it may _really_ be dealt with.
3. The criterion of the worth of the idea is thus the capacity of the idea (as a definition of the end or outcome in terms of what is likely to be serviceable as a method) to operate in fulfilling the object for the sake of which it was projected. Capacity of operation in this fashion is the test, measure, or criterion of truth. Hence the criterion is practical in the most overt sense of that term. We may, if we choose, regard the object in which the idea terminates through its use in guiding action, as the criterion; but if we so choose, it is at our peril that we forget that this object serves as criterion in its capacity of fulfilment and not as sheer objective existence.
4. Difficulties overlap; problems recur which resemble each other in the kind of treatment they demand for solution. Various modes of activity with their respective ends, going on at some time more or less independently, get organized into single comprehensive systems of behavior. The solution of one problem is found to create difficulties elsewhere; or the truth that is made in the solution of one problem is found to afford an effective method of dealing with questions arising apparently from unallied sources. Thus certain tested ideas in performing a constant or recurrent function secure a certain permanent status. The prospective use of such truths, the satisfaction that we anticipate in their employ, the assurance of control that we feel in their possession, becomes relatively much more important than the circumstances under which they were first made true. In becoming permanent resources, such tested ideas get a generalized energy of position. They are truths in general, truths “in themselves” or in the abstract, truths to which positive value is assigned on their own account. Such truths are the “eternal truths” of current discussion. They naturally and properly add to their intellectual and to their practical worth a certain esthetic quality. They are interesting to contemplate, and their contemplation arouses emotions of admiration and reverence. To make these emotions the basis of assigning peculiar inherent sanctity to them apart from their warrant in use, is simply to give way to that mood which in primitive man is the cause of attributing magical efficacy to physical things. Esthetically such truths are more than instrumentalities. But to ignore both the instrumental and the esthetic aspect, and to ascribe values due to an instrumental and esthetic character to some interior and _a priori_ constitution of truth is to make fetishes of them.
We may not exaggerate the permanence and stability of such truths with respect to their recurring and prospective use. It is only relatively that they are unchanging. When applied to new cases, used as resources for coping with new difficulties, the oldest of truths are to some extent remade. Indeed it is only through such application and such remaking that truths retain their freshness and vitality. Otherwise they are relegated to faint reminiscences of an antique tradition. Even the truth that two and two make four has gained a new meaning, has had its truth in some degree remade, in the development of the modern theory of number. If we put ourselves in the attitude of a scientific inquirer in asking what is the meaning of truth _per se_, there spring up before us those ideas which are actively employed in the mastery of new fields, in the organization of new materials. This is the essential difference between truth and dogma; between the living and the dead and decaying. Above all, it is in the region of moral truth that this perception stands out. Moral truths that are not recreated in application to the urgencies of the passing hour, no matter how true in the place and time of their origin, are pernicious and misleading, _i.e._, false. And it is perhaps through emphasizing this fact, embodied in one form or another in every system of morals and in every religion of moral import, that one most readily realizes the character of truth.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.