* This is the second installment in a new series of short essays called “Problematica.” It is written by Max Dresow…
In 1871, the superintendent of the U.S. Coast Survey wrote to America’s foremost paleontologist, Louis Agassiz, with “a very serious proposition.” The first iron-hulled steamship operated by the Survey, the Hassler, had been outfitted with state-of-the-art dredging equipment for deep-sea exploration. It was soon to depart Boston on its way to South America, and thence to San Francisco via the Strait of Magellan. “Would [Agassiz] go in her, and do deep-sea dredging all the way around?” It was an opportunity Agassiz could not pass up, in part because it offered the possibility of refuting Darwinian theory on a symbolically important proving ground: South America, including a stop at the Galapagos archipelago.
Louis Agassiz, seated, and Benjamin Peirce (1871). Rumor has it that Peirce is pointing to that privileged spot on the globe where Harvard University resides
The superintendent of the Coast Survey was a Harvard professor by the name of Benjamin Peirce (pronounced “Purse”). A major scientist in his own right, Peirce is best remembered as the father of Charles Sanders Peirce, earth scientist and temperamental enigma of American philosophy. The younger Peirce was a polymath with a penchant for logic and had a checkered career as a professional philosopher. When teaching, he liked to illustrate the unreliability of traditional logic with the following syllogism:
All men are equal in their rights
Negroes are men
Therefore, Negroes are equal in political rights to whites.
Sadly, this is not what made him unemployable. He also took up with a woman who wasn’t his wife, leading to his dismissal from Johns Hopkins University in 1884. For the remainder of his life, Pierce was unable to secure stable academic employment. Still, his influence continued to radiate, even as his enemies closed ranks and he slid further into poverty. It only grew after his death when Bertrand Russell acclaimed him “certainly the greatest American thinker ever”: a depressing statement if true, given the gross miscarriage of logic and decency I have just reproduced.
Peirce’s writings were little known during his lifetime, and yet his influence on philosophical thought was enormous. How? Curiously, the solution to this paradox took a hiatus from his medical studies in 1865 to travel to Brazil with Louis Agassiz. He did not last long in Brazil, contracting smallpox and eventually relocating to Germany, where he was struck again, this time by unrequited love. He had barely emerged from his depression when Agassiz steamed into San Francisco harbor in 1872. And as Agassiz lay dying a year later, he took up a position at Harvard, where he would spend the remainder of his career moving between philosophy and psychology. I am speaking of William James—“that adorable genius,” as Alfred North Whitehead called him—who promulgated, and in the process altered, Peirce’s pragmatism in a series of publications, including his book Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907).
Despite his association with Agassiz, James was not a paleontologist. Writing to his father from Brazil, James bemoaned that the expedition, ostensibly a search for evidence of past glacial activity, had been “so much a waste of life.” As to Agassiz himself, “never did a man utter a greater amount of humbug.” Probably this referred to Agassiz’s campaign against evolutionary theory, which supplied the true reason for the Brazil expedition. In Agassiz’s own words, “[the] conviction that draws me irresistibly, is that the combination of animals on this continent, where the faunae are so characteristic and so distinct from all others, will give me the means of showing that the transmutation theory is wholly without foundation in facts.” (James may also have been put off by Agassiz’s belief in the separate creation of human races, although James’s own views on race were by no means free of hierarchical ideas.)
A twenty-three year old William James in Brazil, shortly after contracting smallpox (1865)
James, I have said, was not a paleontologist, and there is no reason to think he was especially interested in paleontology. However, an allusion to paleontology does occur in his book, Pragmatism—and here, at last, we come to the subject of this essay. The allusion appears at the very crux of the book, when James is laying out his controversial theory of truth. Before unpacking this, however, it will be useful to pause for a moment to examine why the whole thing was more than Peirce could stomach.
Peirce had earlier argued that the meaning of an idea is the entire set of practical consequences associated with that idea: in James’s words, “what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare” (James 1907, 47). So the idea of hardness consists (partly) in the expectation that hard things will not be scratched by many other things, and every practical corollary of this expectation in action. Once we have these expectations and their corollaries, there is nothing left to say about the meaning of an idea. Ideas that lack practical consequences are not for this reason untrue: they are meaningless. A meaningless idea lacks positive content. A false idea is one that will not hold up to sustained scrutiny, here imagined as a process that could be carried through to its ideal limit.
For James, by contrast, it is not the meaning but the truth of an idea that depends on its consequences. Truth is not a static relationship between an idea and the world. Instead, truth happens to an idea: “ideas… become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relations with other parts of our experience” (James 1907, 58). James calls this conception “instrumental” because it treats ideas as tools for coping with “life’s practical struggles.” As he writes in a much-quoted passage:
Any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor; is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true instrumentally. (James 1907, 58)
Elsewhere he puts the matter more straightforwardly: “True ideas are those we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those we cannot” (James 1907, 77).
How does paleontology enter this picture? The instrumental view of truth did not originate with James, or even with Charles Sanders Peirce. Instead it was independently formulated by John Dewey and F.C.S. Schiller, who “in reaching this [conception]… followed the example of geologists, biologists and philologists” (James 1907, 58–9). In all these sciences, “the successful stroke was [to] take some simple process actually observable in operation—denudation by weather, say… —and then generalize it, making it apply to all times, and produce great results by summating its effects through all ages.” This was the procedure of Charles Lyell, who argued that “no [geological] causes whatever have… ever acted, but those now acting [at observable intensities].” So the way to explain geological features like mountains and valleys is to extrapolate known causes over large spans of time. Geologists are never warranted in adducing unknown causes or causes operating at extraordinary intensities to explain refractory geological evidence. Present causes operating at observable intensities are fully sufficient to explain the whole of the geological record. This was the controversial position for which the philosopher William Whewell coined the name “uniformitarianism.”
The title page of Lyell’s most influential work, Principles of Geology, along with its frontispiece showing the “Temple of Serapis” (now known as the Serapeum of Alexandria). The frontispiece pictures three pillars standing amid the ruins, each bearing boreholes from marine invertebrates: a powerful visual argument for several key planks of Lyell’s “uniformitarianism”
What Dewey and Schiller did, according to James, is apply uniformitarian logic to the problem of human knowledge. First, they observed the process of belief formation in action and found it to consist in a marrying of “previous parts of experience with newer parts” (James 1907, 64). So, “[a] new opinion counts as ‘true’ just in proportion as it gratifies the individual’s desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock.” Then, they “generalize[d] this observation and [applied] it to the most ancient parts of truth.” These “also were called true for human reasons. They also mediated between still earlier truths and what in those days were novel observations.” If some of our ideas seem detached from human needs and desires, it is only because time has hardened these once-vital germs into fossils. Still, the connection remains. “The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything,” James concludes:
Truth independent; truth that we find merely; truth no longer malleable to human need; truth incorrigible… [is] only the dead heart of the living tree, and its being there means only that truth also has its paleontology, and its ‘prescription,’* and may grow stiff with years of veteran service and petrified in men’s regard by sheer antiquity. (James 1907, 64–65, emphasis added)
[*The sense of “prescription” here is the legal one: namely, the establishment of a claim on the basis of a long period of uninterrupted use.]
So James offers the instrumental theory of truth as resting on a uniformitarian analysis. But what does this really establish? Not that truth has always been plastic, for that is an assumption of the analysis, not a finding. The same goes for its denial of “objective truth,” although perhaps the plausibility of the account adds credence to the suggestion that the trail of the human serpent really is over everything. The analysis also fails to establish that the theory captures what we mean, or ought to mean, when we speak of something being “true.” No matter how well the theory performs as an account of why we care about truth, this is separate from what makes an idea true, or even what most people have in mind when they talk about “truth.” But maybe it shows that there is less space between these things than we tend to suppose. James argues that the reason “we call things true is the reason why they are true,” insofar as truth has any positive (which is to say, pragmatic) meaning at all (James 1907, 64). This is a reasonable thing for a pragmatist to say, and amounts to a denial that there can be a meaningful concept of truth that is not rooted in a psychologically plausible account of why we care about truth.
As I have indicated, Peirce was no fan of James’s instrumentalism. It was too psychological for him, too wooly, too subjective. To say that something is true because it is useful is to open the door to all kinds of fluff counting as true. Truth for Peirce was something scientific. “If truth consists in satisfaction,” he wrote in 1908, “it cannot be any actual satisfaction, but must be the satisfaction that would ultimately be found if the inquiry were pushed to its ultimate and indefeasible issue” (1908/1935, 6.485). True ideas are useful, yes, but more importantly they are durable, and the satisfaction they give is not the homely satisfaction that James tended to emphasize. It is rather the satisfaction of a community of inquirers in repose, having pushed their inquiries to the ultimate limit and found their ideas up to the task.
But in closing, let me put in a word for James. It is often assumed that James’s theory of truth slips on a logical banana-peal. Whatever its uniformitarian credentials, a theory of truth must do more than tell us how we come to regard ideas as true. It must also say what truth really amounts to. That is, it must avoid running together the logic of truth with its psychology. In his more careful moments, James addresses this concern head on:
A favorite way of opposing the [pragmatic theory of truth] is to accuse those who favor [it] of “confounding psychology with logic.” Our critics say that when we are asked what truth means, we reply by telling them only how it is arrived at… (James 1911, 152)
But this, James argues, confounds the issue. For the pragmatist, the meaning of truth is its “workableness.” That is the value of having true ideas, and in the last analysis, why we call these ideas true. It follows, James thinks, that carefully describing how we arrive at true ideas is not different than describing what truth really amounts to. In his words: “the logical relation stands to the psychological relation… only as saltatory abstractness stands to ambulatory concreteness… the ‘logical’ one is simply the psychological one disemboweled of its fulness, and reduced to a bare abstractional scheme” (James 1909, 153). This is what I was driving at when I suggested that a pragmatic theory of truth will tend to resemble a psychologically plausible account of why we care about true ideas.
Still, is it not the case that the instrumental theory is an unhappy one? That in denying any difference between why we call things true and why they are true, a mischievous pluralism beckons? This is the most common objection urged against the theory, and while I am not going to oppose it here, I do wish to enter a plea for understanding. James was a pluralist about truth in the sense that he denied the existence of any complete and determinate Truth to which our ideas must correspond on pain of falsity. But he also believed us to be wedged tightly “between the whole body of funded truths squeezed from the past and the coercions of the world of sense” (James 1907, 211). This means that, as a matter of fact, most people will agree about most things on pain of frustration and intellectual isolation. As James writes, “True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters… They lead us to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse,” and away from “foiled and barren thinking” (215). Elsewhere he speaks of truth as “something opposed to waywardness or license,” which “inevitably grows up solipsistically [= on its own] inside of every human life” (James 1909, 70). Struggle as we might, truth exercises a certain compulsion over us.
Now, all this might be hugely off-base. Perhaps we are not “wedged” as tightly as James believed, and probably we are not as interested in consistency, stability, and “flowing human intercourse” outside of our narrow social groups. But James thought that we were, and that “the obligation to seek truth is part of our general obligation to do what pays” (James 1907, 230). We will not understand him if we forget this, even if we regard these key planks of his argument as ultimately unstable.
* * *
The U.S.C.S.S. Hassler at sea
The Hassler slipped her moorings on December 4, 1871 and steamed south, although poor weather forced Agassiz and company to lay anchor for several days in Martha’s Vineyard. Soon after the short-lived “Metaphysical Club” began to meet in Agassiz’s adopted hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The ironically named club was the incubator of American pragmatism, and counted among its members James, C.S. Peirce, and the Darwinian philosopher Chauncey Wright. It had already begun to dissolve by the summer, when Agassiz first set eyes on the Galapagos Islands. But before it vanished, Peirce would introduce the name “pragmatism” and expound several of the ideas that would later ripen into the mature pragmatic philosophy.
The old paleontologist’s year would be less memorable. While the Hassler’s dredges performed tolerably, Agassiz had little success gathering ammunition against the “development hypothesis.” In less than two years he would be dead. His final paper, published in 1874, found his philosophy basically intact. Species are God’s individual thoughts instituted by the Divine Intelligence as categories of His mode of thinking. It was the kind of view James would later characterize as “a queer sort of petrified sphinx… a perfect idol of the rationalistic mind” (James 1907, 239). Agassiz had once been the major figure in American science, and his notion that scientific ideas copy transcendental reality was widely credited. But it would not prove durable. The seeds of a thoroughgoing naturalism had been planted, and soon Darwinism and pragmatism would commence their assault on the citadel.
References
James, W. 1907. Pragmatism: A New New for Some Old Ways of Thinking. New York: Longmans, Green & Co.
James, W. 1909. The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to “Pragmatism”. New York: Longmans, Green & Co.
Lyell, C. 1881. Life, Letters, and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell. Edited by Sister-in-Law, Mrs. Lyell. London: John Murray.
Peirce, C.S. 1908/1935. A Neglected Argument for the Existence of God. Hibbert Journal, 7:90–112. Reprinted in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Volumes V and VI), C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (eds.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (1935), pp. 311–339.
For more information on Agassiz AND THE HASSLER EXPEDITION, see:
Gould, S.J. 1983. Agassiz in the Galapagos. In Hen’s Feet and Horse’s Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Irmscher, C. 2012. Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
And this, on the Hassler Expedition.
FOR MORE INfORMATION ON JAMES AND PEIRCE, SEE:
Kuklick, B. 2001. A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–2000. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Menand, L. 2001. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.
Pearce, T. 2020. Pragmatism’s Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
And see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the pragmatic theory of truth.
and For MORE ON UNIFORMITARIANISM, SEE:
Dresow, M. Forthcoming. Uniformitarianism re-examined, or the present is the key to the past, except when it isn’t (and even then it kind of is). Perspectives on Science. https://doi.org/10.1162/posc_a_00573.