Peirce was very impressed by such thinking. If even physical events, the smallest and in a sense the most fundamental occurrences, are uncertain, and if even the perception of simple things, like the location of stars, is fallible, how can any single mind ‘mirror’ reality? The awkward truth was: ‘reality doesn’t stand still long enough to be accurately mirrored’. Peirce therefore agreed with Wendell Holmes and William James: experience was what counted and even in science juries were needed. Knowledge was social.55
All this may be regarded as ‘deep background’ to pragmatism (a word that, for some strange reason, Peirce hardly ever used; he said it was ‘ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers’).56 This was, and remains, far more important than it seems at first sight, and more substantial than the everyday use of the word ‘pragmatic’ makes it appear. It was partly the natural corollary of the thinking that had helped create America in the first place, and is discussed in Chapter 28 above. It was partly the effect of the beginnings of indeterminacy in science, which was to be such a feature of twentieth-century thought, and it was partly – even mainly – a further evolution of thought, yet another twist, on the road to individualism.
Here is a classic pragmatic problem, familiar to Holmes, made much use of by James, and highlighted by Menand. Assume that a friend tells you something but in the strictest confidence. Later, in discussions with a second friend, you discover two things. One, that he or she isn’t aware of the confidence that has been shared with you; and second, that he is, in your opinion, about to make a bad mistake which could be avoided if he knew what you know. What do you do? Do you stay loyal to your first friend and keep the confidence? Or do you break the confidence to help out the second friend, so that he avoids injury or embarrassment? James said that the outcome might well depend on which friend you actually preferred, and that was part of his point. The romantics had said that the ‘true’ self was to be found within, but James was saying that, even in a simple situation like this, there were several selves within – or none at all. In fact, he preferred to say that, until one chose a particular course of action, until one behaved, one didn’t know which self one was. ‘In the end, you will do what you believe is right but “rightness” will be, in effect, the compliment you give to the outcome of your deliberations.’57 We can only really understand thinking, said James, if we understand its relationship to behaviour. ‘Deciding to order lobster in a restaurant helps us determine that we have a taste for lobster; deciding that the defendant is guilty helps us establish the standard of justice that applies in this case; choosing to keep a confidence helps us make honesty a principle and choosing to betray it helps confirm the value we put on friendship.’58 Self grows out of behaviour, not the other way round. This directly contradicts romanticism.
James was eager to say that this approach didn’t make life arbitrary or that someone’s motivation was always self-serving. ‘Most of us don’t feel that we are always being selfish in our decisions regarding, say, our moral life.’ He thought that what we do carry within us is an imperfect set of assumptions about ourselves and our behaviour in the past, and about others and their behaviour, which informs every judgement we make.59 According to James, truth is circular: ‘There is no noncircular set of criteria for knowing whether a particular belief is true, no appeal to some standard outside the process of coming to the belief itself. For thinking just is a circular process, in which some end, some imagined outcome, is already present at the start of any train of thought . . . Truth happens to an idea, it becomes true, is made true by events.’60
At about the time James was having these ideas, there was a remarkable development in the so-called New [Experimental] Psychology. Edward Thorndike, at Berkeley, had placed chickens in a box which had a door that could be opened if the animals pecked at a lever. In this way, the chickens were given access to a supply of food pellets, out through the door. Thorndike observed ‘that although at first many actions were tried, apparently unsystematically (i.e., at random), only successful actions performed by chickens who were hungry were learned’.61 James wasn’t exactly surprised by this, but it confirmed his view, albeit in a mundane way. The chickens had learned that if they pecked at the lever the door would open, leading to food, a reward. James went one step further. To all intents and purposes, he said, the chickens believed that if they pecked at the lever the door would open. As he put it, ‘Their beliefs were rules for action.’ And he thought that such rules applied more generally. ‘If behaving as though we have free will, or as if God exists, gets us the results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true . . . “The truth” is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.’62 In other words, and most subversively, truth is not ‘out there’, it has nothing to do with ‘the way things really are’. This is not why we have minds, James said. Minds are adaptive in a Darwinian sense: they help us to get by, which involves being consistent, between thinking and behaviour.
Most controversially of all, James applied his reasoning to intuition, to innate ideas. Whereas Locke had said that all our ideas stem from sensory experience, Kant had insisted that some fundamental notions – the idea of causation being one – could not arise from sensory experience, since we never ‘see’ causation, but only infer it. Therefore, he concluded, such ideas ‘must be innate, wired in from birth’.63 James took Kant’s line (for the most part), that many ideas are innate, but he didn’t think that there was anything mysterious or divine about this.64 In Darwinian terms, it was clear that ‘innate’ ideas are simply variations that have arisen and been naturally selected. ‘Minds that possessed them were preferred over minds that did not.’ But this wasn’t because those ideas were more ‘true’ in an abstract or theological sense; instead, it was because they helped organisms to adapt.65 The reason that we believed in God (when we did believe in God) was because experience showed that it paid to believe in God. When people stopped believing in God (as they did in large numbers in the nineteenth century – see next chapter), it was because such belief no longer paid.
America’s third pragmatic philosopher, after Peirce and James, was John Dewey. A professor in Chicago, Dewey boasted a Vermont drawl, rimless eyeglasses and a complete lack of fashion sense. In some ways he was the most successful pragmatist of all. Like James he believed that everyone has his own philosophy, their own set of beliefs, and that such philosophy should help people to lead happier and more productive lives. His own life was particularly productive. Through newspaper articles, popular books, and a number of debates conducted with other philosophers, such as Bertrand Russell or Arthur Lovejoy, author of The Great Chain of Being, Dewey became known to the general public in a way that few philosophers are.66 Like James, Dewey was a convinced Darwinist, someone who believed that science and the scientific approach needed to be incorporated into other areas of life. In particular, he believed that the discoveries of science should be adapted to the education of children. For Dewey, the start of the twentieth century was an age of ‘democracy, science and industrialism’ and this, he argued, had profound consequences for education. At that time, attitudes to children were changing fast. In 1909 the Swedish feminist Ellen Key published her book The Century of the Child, which reflected the general view that the child had been rediscovered – rediscovered in the sense that there was a new joy in the possibilities of childhood and in the realisation that children were different from adults and from one another.67 This seems no more than common sense to us, but in the nineteenth century, before the victory over a heavy rate of child mortality, when families were much larger and many children died, there was not – there could not be – the same investment in children, in time, in education, in emotion, as there was later. Dewey saw that this had significant consequences for teaching. Hitherto, schooling, even in America, which was in general more indulgent to children than in Europe, had been dominated by the rigid authority of the teacher, who had a concept of what an educated person should be and whose main aim was to convey to his or her pupils the idea that knowledge was the ‘contemplation of fixed verities’.68 Dewey was one of the leaders of a movement which changed such thinking, and in two directions. The traditional idea of education, he saw, stemmed from a leisured and aristocratic society, the type of society that was disappearing fast in European societies and had never existed in America. Education now had to meet the needs of democracy. Second, and no less important, education had to reflect the fact that children were very different from one another in abilities and interests. In order for children to make the best contribution to society that they were capable of, education should be less about ‘drumming in’ hard facts which the teacher thought necessary, and more about drawing out what the individual child was capable of. In other words, pragmatism applied to education.