The Meaning of Truth | Page 4

merits. The truth of an idea will then mean only its workings, or that in
it which by ordinary psychological laws sets up those workings; it will
mean neither the idea's object, nor anything 'saltatory' inside the idea,
that terms drawn from experience cannot describe.
One word more, ere I end this preface. A distinction is sometimes made
between Dewey, Schiller and myself, as if I, in supposing the object's
existence, made a concession to popular prejudice which they, as more
radical pragmatists, refuse to make. As I myself understand these
authors, we all three absolutely agree in admitting the transcendency of
the object (provided it be an experienceable object) to the subject, in
the truth-relation. Dewey in particular has insisted almost ad nauseam
that the whole meaning of our cognitive states and processes lies in the
way they intervene in the control and revaluation of independent
existences or facts. His account of knowledge is not only absurd, but
meaningless, unless independent existences be there of which our ideas
take account, and for the transformation of which they work. But
because he and Schiller refuse to discuss objects and relations
'transcendent' in the sense of being ALTOGETHER
TRANS-EXPERIENTIAL, their critics pounce on sentences in their
writings to that effect to show that they deny the existence WITHIN
THE REALM OF EXPERIENCE of objects external to the ideas that
declare their presence there. [Footnote: It gives me pleasure to welcome
Professor Carveth Read into the pragmatistic church, so far as his
epistemology goes. See his vigorous book, The Metaphysics of Nature,
2d Edition, Appendix A. (London, Black, 1908.) The work What is
Reality? by Francis Howe Johnson (Boston, 1891), of which I make the

acquaintance only while correcting these proofs, contains some striking
anticipations of the later pragmatist view. The Psychology of Thinking,
by Irving E. Miller (New York, Macmillan Co., 1909), which has just
appeared, is one of the most convincing pragmatist document yet
published, tho it does not use the word 'pragmatism' at all. While I am
making references, I cannot refrain from inserting one to the
extraordinarily acute article by H. V. Knox. in the Quarterly Review for
April, 1909.]
It seems incredible that educated and apparently sincere critics should
so fail to catch their adversary's point of view.
What misleads so many of them is possibly also the fact that the
universes of discourse of Schiller, Dewey, and myself are panoramas of
different extent, and that what the one postulates explicitly the other
provisionally leaves only in a state of implication, while the reader
thereupon considers it to be denied. Schiller's universe is the smallest,
being essentially a psychological one. He starts with but one sort of
thing, truth-claims, but is led ultimately to the independent objective
facts which they assert, inasmuch as the most successfully validated of
all claims is that such facts are there. My universe is more essentially
epistemological. I start with two things, the objective facts and the
claims, and indicate which claims, the facts being there, will work
successfully as the latter's substitutes and which will not. I call the
former claims true. Dewey's panorama, if I understand this colleague, is
the widest of the three, but I refrain from giving my own account of its
complexity. Suffice it that he holds as firmly as I do to objects
independent of our judgments. If I am wrong in saying this, he must
correct me. I decline in this matter to be corrected at second hand.
I have not pretended in the following pages to consider all the critics of
my account of truth, such as Messrs. Taylor, Lovejoy, Gardiner,
Bakewell, Creighton, Hibben, Parodi, Salter, Carus, Lalande, Mentre,
McTaggart, G. E. Moore, Ladd and others, especially not Professor
Schinz, who has published under the title of Anti-pragmatisme an
amusing sociological romance. Some of these critics seem to me to
labor under an inability almost pathetic, to understand the thesis which

they seek to refute. I imagine that most of their difficulties have been
answered by anticipation elsewhere in this volume, and I am sure that
my readers will thank me for not adding more repetition to the fearful
amount that is already there.
95 IRVING ST., CAMBRIDGE (MASS.), August, 1909.

CONTENTS
I THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION
II THE TIGERS IN INDIA
III HUMANISM AND TRUTH
IV THE RELATION BETWEEN KNOWER AND KNOWN
V THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM
VI A WORD MORE ABOUT TRUTH
VII PROFESSOR PRATT ON TRUTH
VIII THE PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OF TRUTH AND ITS
MIS-UNDERSTANDERS
X THE EXISTENCE OF JULIUS CAESAR
XI THE ABSOLUTE AND THE STRENUOUS LIFE
XII PROFESSOR HEBERT ON PRAGMATISM
XIII ABSTRACTIONISM AND 'RELATIVISMUS'
XIV TWO ENGLISH CRITICS
XV A DIALOGUE

THE MEANING OF TRUTH

I
THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION [Footnote: Read before the
Aristotelian Society, December 1, 1884,