August 16, 2013 <Back to Index>
PAGE SPONSOR |
Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller (August 16, 1864 - August 9, 1937) was a German - British philosopher. Born in Altona, Holstein (at that time member of the German Confederation, but under Danish administration), Schiller studied at the University of Oxford, and later was a professor there, after being invited back after a brief time at Cornell University. Later in his life he taught at the University of Southern California. In his lifetime he was well known as a philosopher; after his death his work was largely forgotten. Schiller's philosophy was very similar to and often aligned with the pragmatism of William James, although Schiller referred to it as "humanism". He argued vigorously against both logical positivism and associated philosophers (for example, Bertrand Russell) as well as absolute idealism (such as F.H. Bradley). Schiller was an early supporter of evolution and a founding member of the English Eugenics Society. Born
in 1864, one of three brothers and the son of Ferdinand Schiller (a
Calcutta merchant), Schiller's family home was in Switzerland. Schiller
was educated at Rugby and Balliol, and graduated in the first class of
Literae Humaniores, winning later the Taylorian scholarship for German
in 1887. Schiller's first book, Riddles of the Sphinx (1891),
was an immediate success despite his use of a pseudonym because of his
fears concerning how the book would be received. Between the years 1893
and 1897 he was an instructor in philosophy at Cornell University. In
1897 he returned to Oxford and became fellow and tutor of Corpus for
more than thirty years. Schiller was president of the Aristotelian
Society in 1921, and was for many years treasurer of the Mind
Association. In 1926 he was elected a fellow of the British Academy. In
1929 he was appointed visiting professor in the University of Southern
California, and spent half of each year in the United States and half
in England. Schiller died in Los Angeles either on August 7 or 9th of
1937 after a long and lingering illness. Schiller was a founding member of the English Eugenics Society and published three books on the subject; Tantalus or the Future of Man (1924), Eugenics and Politics (1926), and Social Decay and Eugenic Reform (1932).
In 1891, F.C.S. Schiller made his first contribution to philosophy anonymously. Schiller feared that in his time of high
naturalism, the metaphysical speculations of his Riddles of the Sphinx were likely to hurt his professional prospects. However, Schiller's fear of reprisal from his anti - metaphysical colleagues should not suggest that Schiller was a friend of metaphysics.
Like his fellow pragmatists across the ocean, Schiller was attempting
to stake out an intermediate position between both the spartan
landscape of naturalism and the speculative excesses of the metaphysics
of his time. In Riddles Schiller both, The result, Schiller contends, is that naturalism cannot make sense of the "higher" aspects of our world (free will, consciousness, God, purpose, universals),
while abstract metaphysics cannot make sense of the "lower" aspects of
our world (the imperfect, change, physicality). In each case we are
unable to guide our moral and epistemological "lower" lives to the achievement of life's "higher" ends, ultimately leading to skepticism on both fronts. For knowledge and
morality to be possible, both the world's lower and higher elements
must be real; e.g. we need universals (a higher) to make knowledge of particulars (a
lower) possible. This would lead Schiller to argue for what he at the
time called a "concrete metaphysics", but would later call "humanism". Shortly
after publishing Riddles of the Sphinx, Schiller became acquainted with
the work of pragmatist philosopher William James and this changed the
course of his career. For a time, Schiller's work became focused on
extending and developing James' pragmatism (under Schiller's preferred
title, "humanism"). Schiller even revised his earlier work Riddles of the Sphinx to
make the nascent pragmatism implicit in that work more explicit. In one
of Schiller's most prominent works during this phase of his career,
“Axioms as Postulates” (1903), Schiller extended James' will to believe
doctrine to show how it could be used to justify not only an acceptance
of God, but also our acceptance of causality, of the uniformity of
nature, of our concept of identity, of contradiction, of the law of
excluded middle, of space and time, of the goodness of God, and more. Towards
the end of his career, Schiller's pragmatism began to take on a
character more unique from the pragmatism of William James. Schiller's
focus became his opposition to formal logic. To understand Shiller's
opposition to formal logic, consider the following inference: From
the formal characteristics of this inference alone (All As are Bs; c is
not a B; Therefore, c is not an A), formal logic would judge this to be
a valid inference. Schiller, however, refused to evaluate the validity
of this inference merely on its formal characteristics. Schiller argued
that unless we look to the contextual fact regarding what specific
problem first prompted this inference to actually occur, we can not
determine whether the inference was successful (i.e. pragmatically
successful). In the case of this inference, since “Cerebos is 'salt'
for culinary, but not for chemical purposes”, without
knowing whether the purpose for this piece of reasoning was culinary or
chemical we cannot determine whether this is valid or not. In another
example, Schiller discusses the truth of formal mathematics "1+1=2" and
points out that this equation does
not hold if one is discussing drops of water. Shiller's attack on
formal logic and formal mathematics never gained much attention from
philosophers, however it does share some weak similarities to the contextualist view in contemporary epistemology as well as the views of ordinary language philosophers. In Riddles, Schiller gives historical examples of the dangers of abstract metaphysics in the philosophies of Plato, Zeno, and Hegel, portraying Hegel as the worst offender: "Hegelianism never anywhere
gets within sight of a fact, or within touch of reality. And the reason
is simple: you cannot, without paying the penalty, substitute
abstractions for realities; the thought - symbol cannot do duty for the
thing symbolized". Schiller
argued that the flaw in Hegel's system, as with all systems of abstract
metaphysics, is that the world it constructs always proves to be
unhelpful in guiding our imperfect, changing, particular, and physical
lives to the achievement of the "higher" universal Ideals and Ends. For
example, Schiller argues that the reality of time and change is intrinsically opposed to the very modus operandi of
all systems of abstract metaphysics. He says that the possibility to
change is a precondition of any moral action (or action generally), and
so any system of abstract metaphysics is bound to lead us into a moral skepticism.
The problem lies in the aim of abstract metaphysics for "interpreting
the world in terms of conceptions, which should be true not here and now, but “eternally”
and independently of Time and Change." The result is that metaphysics
must use conceptions that have the "time - aspect of Reality" abstracted
away. Of course, “[o]nce abstracted from, the
reference to Time could not, of course, be recovered, any more than the
individuality of Reality can be deduced, when once ignored. The
assumption is made that, in order to express the ‘truth’ about Reality,
its ‘thisness,’
individuality, change and its immersion in a certain temporal and
spatial environment may be neglected, and the timeless validity of a
conception is thus substituted for the living, changing and perishing
existence we contemplate. […] What I wish here to point out is merely
that it is unreasonable to expect from such premises to arrive at a deductive justification
of the very characteristics of Reality that have been excluded. The
true reason, then, why Hegelism can give no reason for the
Time - process, i.e. for the fact that the world is ‘in time,’ and
changes continuously, is that it was constructed to give an account of
the world irrespective of time and change. If you insist on having a
system of eternal and immutable ‘truth,’
you can get it only by abstracting from those characteristics of
reality, which we try to express by the terms individuality, time, and
change. But you must pay the price for a formula that will enable you
to make assertions that hold good far beyond the limits of your
experience. And it is part of the price that you will in the end be
unable to give a rational explanation of those very characteristics,
which you dismissed at the outset as irrelevant to a rational
explanation. While abstract metaphysics provides us with a world of beauty and purpose and
various other “highers”, it condemns other key aspects of the world we
live in as imaginary. The world of abstract metaphysics has no place
for imperfect moral agents who (1) strive to learn about the world and
then (2) act upon the world to change it for the better. Consequently,
abstract metaphysics condemns us as illusionary, and declares our place
in the world as unimportant and purposeless. Where abstractions take
priority, our concrete lives collapse into skepticism and pessimism. In
making the case that the naturalist method also results in an
epistemological and moral skepticism, Schiller looks to show this
method’s inadequacy at moving from the cold, lifeless lower world of
atoms to the higher world of ethics, meanings, and minds. As with
abstract metaphysics, Schiller attacks naturalism on many fronts: (1)
the naturalist method is unable to reduce universals to particulars,
(2) the naturalist method is unable to reduce free will to determinist
movements, (3) the naturalist method is unable to reduce emergent properties like consciousness to brain activity, (4) the naturalist method is unable to reduce God into a pantheism,
and so on. Just as the abstract method cannot find a place for the
lower elements of our world inside the higher, the naturalist method
cannot find a place for the higher elements of our world inside the
lower. In a reversal of abstract metaphysics, naturalism denies the
reality of the higher elements to save the lower. Schiller uses the
term “pseudo - metaphysical” here instead of naturalism — as he sometimes
does — because he is accusing these naturalist philosophers of trying to
solve metaphysical problems while sticking to the non-metaphysical
“lower” aspects of the world (i.e. without engaging in real
metaphysics): The
pseudo - metaphysical method puts forward the method of science as the
method of philosophy. But it is doomed to perpetual failure. […] [T]he
data supplied by the physical sciences are intractable, because they
are data of a lower sort than the facts they are to explain. The
objects of the physical sciences form the lower orders in the hierarchy of
existence, more extensive but less significant. Thus the atoms of the
physicist may indeed be found in the organization of conscious beings,
but they are subordinate: a living organism exhibits actions which
cannot be formulated by the laws of physics alone; man is material, but
he is also a great deal more. To
show that the world’s higher elements do not reduce to the lower is not
yet to show that naturalism must condemn the world’s higher elements as
illusionary. A second component to Schiller’s attack is showing that
naturalism cannot escape its inability to reduce the higher to the
lower by asserting that these higher elements evolve from the lower.
However, Schiller does not see naturalism as anymore capable of
explaining the evolution of the higher from the lower than it is
capable of reducing the higher to the lower. While evolution does begin
with something lower that in turn evolves into something higher, the
problem for naturalism is that whatever the starting point for
evolution is, it must first be something with the potential to evolve
into a higher. For example, the world cannot come into existence from
nothing because the potential or “germ” of the world is not “in”
nothing (nothing has no potential, it has nothing; after all, it is
nothing). Likewise, biological evolution cannot begin from inanimate
matter, because the potential for life is not “in” inanimate matter.
The following passage shows Schiller applying the same sort of
reasoning to the evolution of consciousness: Taken
as the type of the pseudo - metaphysical method, which explains the
higher by the lower […] it does not explain the genesis of
consciousness out of unconscious matter, because we cannot, or do not,
attribute potential consciousness to matter. [….] the theory of
Evolution derives the [end result] from its germ, i.e., from that which
was, what it became, potentially. Unable
to either reduce or explain the evolution of the higher elements of our
world, naturalism is left to explain away the higher elements as mere
illusions. In doing this, naturalism condemns us to a skepticism in
both epistemology and ethics. It is worth noting, that while Schiller's
work has been largely neglected since his death, Schiller's arguments
against a naturalistic account of evolution have been recently cited by
advocates of intelligent design to establish the existence of a longer history for the view due to legal concerns in the United States (See: Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District). Schiller
argued that both abstract metaphysics and naturalism portray man as
holding an intolerable position in the world. He proposed a method that
not only recognizes the lower world we interact with, but takes into
account the higher world of purposes, ideals and abstractions. Schiller: We
require, then, a method which combines the excellencies of both the
pseudo - metaphysical and the abstract metaphysical, if philosophy is to
be possible at all. Schiller
was demanding a course correction in the field of metaphysics, putting it
at the service of science. For example, to explain the creation of the
world out of nothing, or to explain the emergence or evolution of the
“higher” parts of the world, Schiller introduces a divine being who
might generate the end (i.e. Final Cause) which gives nothingness, lifelessness, and unconscious matter the purpose (and thus potential) of evolving into higher forms: And thus, so far from dispensing with the need for a Divine First Cause, the theory of evolution,
if only we have the faith in science to carry it to its conclusion, and
the courage to interpret it, proves irrefragably that no evolution was
possible without a pre-existent Deity, and a Deity, moreover,
transcendent, non-material and non-phenomenal. […] [T]he world process
is the working out of an anterior purpose or idea in the divine
consciousness. This re-introduction of teleology (which
Schiller sometimes calls a re-anthropomorphizing of the world) is what
Schiller says the naturalist has become afraid to do. Schiller’s method
of concrete metaphysics (i.e. his humanism) allows for an appeal to
metaphysics when science demands it. However: [T]he
new teleology would not be capricious or random in its application, but
firmly rooted in the conclusions of the sciences [….] The process which
the theory of Evolution divined the history of the world to be, must
have content and meaning determined from the basis of the scientific
data; it is only by a careful study of the history of a thing that we
can determine the direction of its development, [and only then] that we
can be said to have made the first approximation to the knowledge of
the End of the world process. [This]
is teleology of a totally different kind to that which is so
vehemently, and on the whole so justly dreaded by the modern exponents
of natural science. It does not attempt to explain things
anthropocentrically, or regard all creation as existing for the use and
benefit of man; it is as far as the scientist from supposing that
cork - trees grow in order to supply us with champagne corks. The end to
which it supposes all things to subserve is […] the universal End of
the world - process, to which all things tend[.] Schiller finally reveals what this “End” is which “all things tend”: If
our speculations have not entirely missed their mark, the world - process
will come to an end when all the spirits whom it is designed to
harmonize [by its Divine Creator] have been united in a perfect society. Now,
while by today’s philosophic standards Schiller’s speculations would be
considered wildly metaphysical and disconnected from the sciences,
compared with the metaphysicians of his day (Hegel, McTaggart, etc.),
Schiller saw himself as radically scientific. Schiller gave his
philosophy a number of labels during his career. Early on he used the
names "Concrete Metaphysics" and "Anthropomorphism", while later in
life tending towards "Pragmatism" and particularly "Humanism". Schiller
also developed a method of philosophy intended to mix elements of both
naturalism and abstract metaphysics in a way that allows us to avoid
the twin scepticisms each method collapses into when followed on its
own. However, Schiller does not assume that this is enough to justify
his humanism over the other two methods. He accepts the possibility
that both scepticism and pessimism are true. In
order to justify his attempt to occupy the middle ground between
naturalism and abstract metaphysics, Schiller makes a move that anticipates James' The Will to Believe: And
in action especially we are often forced to act upon slight
possibilities. Hence, if it can be shown that our solution is a
possible answer, and the only possible alternative to pessimism, to a
complete despair of life, it would deserve acceptance, even though it
were but a bare possibility. Schiller
contends that in light of the other methods’ failure to provide humans
with a role and place in the universe, we ought avoid the adoption of
these methods. By the end of Riddles,
Schiller offers his method of humanism as the only possible method that
results in a world where we can navigate our lower existence to the
achievement of our higher purpose. He asserts that it is the method we
ought to adopt regardless of the evidence against it (“even though it
were but a bare possibility”). While Schiller’s will to believe is a central theme of Riddle of the Sphinx (appearing
mainly in the introduction and conclusion of his text), in 1891 the
doctrine held a limited role in Schiller's philosophy. In Riddles,
Schiller only employs his version of the will to believe doctrine when
he is faced with overcoming skeptic and pessimistic methods of
philosophy. In 1897, William James published his essay “The Will to
Believe” and this influenced Schiller to drastically expand his
application of the doctrine. For a 1903 volume titled Personal Idealism, Schiller contributed a widely read essay titled “Axioms as Postulates” in which he sets out to justify the “axioms of
logic” as postulates adopted on the basis of the will to believe
doctrine. In this essay Schiller extends the will to believe doctrine
to be the basis of our acceptance of causality, of the uniformity of nature, of our concept of identity, of contradiction, of the law of excluded middle, of space and time, of the goodness of God, and more. He notes that we postulate that nature is uniform because we need nature to be uniform: [O]ut
of the hurly-burly of events in time and space [we] extract[ ]
changeless formulas whose chaste abstraction soars above all reference
to any ‘where’ or ‘when,’ and thereby renders them blank cheques to be
filled up at our pleasure with any figures of the sort. The only
question is — Will Nature honour the cheque? Audentes Natura juvat — let us
take our life in our hands and try! If we fail, our blood will be on
our own hands (or, more probably, in some one else’s stomach), but
though we fail, we are in no worse case than those who dared not
postulate […] Our assumption, therefore, is at least a methodological
necessity; it may turn out to be (or be near) a fundamental fact in
nature [an axiom]. Schiller
stresses that doctrines like the uniformity of nature must first be
postulated on the basis of need (not evidence) and only then “justified
by the evidence of their practical working.” He attacks both
empiricists like John Stuart Mill, who try to conclude that nature is uniform from previous experience, as well as Kantians who
conclude that nature is uniform from the preconditions on our
understanding. Schiller argues that preconditions are not conclusions,
but demands made on our experience that may or may not work. On this
success hinges our continued acceptance of the postulate and its
eventual promotion to axiom status. In “Axioms and Postulates” Schiller vindicates the postulation by its success in practice, marking an important shift from Riddles of a Sphinx. In Riddles,
Schiller is concerned with the vague aim of connecting the “higher” to
the “lower” so he can avoid skepticism, but by 1903 he has clarified
the connection he sees between these two elements. The “higher”
abstract elements are connected to the lower because they are our
inventions for dealing with the lower; their truth depends on their
success as tools. Schiller dates the entry of this element into his
thinking in his 1892 essay “Reality and ‘Idealism’” (a mere year after
his 1891 Riddles). The
plain man’s ‘things,’ the physicist’s ‘atoms,’ and Mr. Ritchie’s
‘Absolute,’ are all of them more or less preserving and well considered
schemes to interpret the primary reality of phenomena, and in this
sense Mr. Ritchie is entitled to call the ‘sunrise’ a theory. But the
chaos of presentations, out of which we have (by criteria ultimately
practical) isolated the phenomena we subsequently call sunrise, is not
a theory, but the fact which has called all theories into being. In
addition to generating hypothetical objects to explain phenomena, the
interpretation of reality by our thought also bestows a derivative
reality on the abstractions with which thought works. If they are the
instruments wherewith thought accomplishes such effects upon reality,
they must surely be themselves real. The shift in Schiller's thinking continues in his next published work, The Metaphysics of the Time - Process (1895):
The abstractions of metaphysics, then, exist as explanations of the
concrete facts of life, and not the latter as illustrations of the
former […] Science [along with humanism] does not refuse to interpret
the symbols with which it operates; on the contrary, it is only their
applicability to the concrete facts originally abstracted from that is
held to justify their use and to establish their ‘truth.’ Schiller's accusations against the metaphysician in Riddles now
appear in a more pragmatic light. His objection is similar to one we
might make against a worker who constructs a flat - head screwdriver to
help him build a home, and who then accuses a screw of unreality when
he comes upon a Phillips - screw that his flat - head screwdriver won’t
fit. In his works after Riddles,
Schiller’s attack takes the form of reminding the abstract
metaphysician that abstractions are meant as tools for dealing with the
“lower” world of particulars and physicality, and that after
constructing abstractions we cannot simply drop the un-abstracted world
out of our account. The un-abstracted world is the entire reason for
making abstractions in the first place. We did not abstract to reach
the unchanging and eternal truths; we abstract to construct an
imperfect and rough tool for dealing with life in our particular and
concrete world. It is the working of the higher in “making predictions
about the future behavior of things for the purpose of shaping the
future behavior of things for the purpose of shaping our own conduct
accordingly” that justifies the higher. To
assert this methodological character of eternal truths is not, of
course, to deny their validity [….] To say that we assume the truth of
abstraction because we wish to attain certain ends, is to subordinate
theoretic ‘truth’ to a teleological implication; to say that, the
assumption once made, its truth is ‘proved’ by its practical working
[….] For the question of the ‘practical’ working of a truth will always
ultimately be found to resolve itself into the question whether we can
live by it. A
few lines down from this passage Schiller adds the following footnote
in a 1903 reprint of the essay: “All this seems a very fairly definite
anticipation of modern pragmatism.” Indeed, it resembles the pragmatist
theory of truth. However, Schiller’s pragmatism was still very
different from both that of William James and that of Charles Sanders Peirce. As early as 1891 Schiller had independently reached a doctrine very similar to William James’ Will to Believe.
As early as 1892 Schiller had independently developed his own
pragmatist theory of truth. However, Schiller's concern with meaning
was one he entirely imports from the pragmatisms of James and Peirce.
Later in life Schiller musters all of these elements of his pragmatism
to make a concerted attack on formal logic. Concerned with bringing
down the timeless, perfect worlds of abstract metaphysics early in
life, the central target of Schiller’s developed pragmatism is the
abstract rules of formal logic. Statements, Schiller contends, cannot
possess meaning or truth abstracted away from their actual use.
Therefore examining their formal features instead of their function in
an actual situation is to make the same mistake the abstract
metaphysician makes. Symbols are meaningless scratches on paper unless
they are given a life in a situation, and meant by someone to
accomplish some task. They are tools for dealing with concrete
situations, and not the proper subjects of study themselves. Both
Schiller’s theory of truth and meaning (i.e. Schiller’s pragmatism)
derive their justification from an examination of thought from what he
calls his humanist viewpoint (his new name for concrete metaphysics).
He informs us that to answer “what precisely is meant by having a
meaning” will require us to “raise the prior question of why we think
at all.”. A question Schiller of course looks to evolution to provide. Schiller
provides a detailed defense of his pragmatist theories of truth and
meaning in a chapter titled “The Biologic of Judgment” in Logic for Use (1929). The account Schiller lays out in many ways resembles some of what Peirce asserts in his "The Fixation of Belief" (1877) essay: Our
account of the function of Judgment in our mental life will, however,
have to start a long way back. For there is much thinking before there
is any judging, and much living before there is any thinking. Even in
highly developed minds judging is a relatively rare incident in
thinking, and thinking in living, an exception rather than the rule,
and a relatively recent acquisition. […] For the most part the living
organism adapts itself to it conditions of life by earlier, easier, and
quicker expedients. Its actions or reactions are mostly ‘reflex
actions’ determined by inherited habits which largely function
automatically […] It follows from this elaborate and admirable
organization of adaptive responses to stimulation that organic life
might proceed without thinking altogether. […] This is, in fact, the
way in which most living being carry on their life, and the plane on
which man also lives most of the time. Thought, therefore, is an
abnormality which springs from a disturbance. Its genesis is connected
with a peculiar deficiency in the life of habit. […] Whenever […] it
becomes biologically important to notice differences in roughly similar
situations, and to adjust action more closely to the peculiarities of a
particular case, the guidance of life by habit, instinct, and impulse
breaks down. A new expedient has somehow to be devised for effecting
such exact and delicate adjustments. This is the raison d’etre of what
is variously denominated ‘thought,’ ‘reason,’ ‘reflection,’
‘reasoning,’ and ‘judgment[.]’ […] Thinking, however, is not so much a
substitute for the earlier processes as a subsidiary addition to them.
It only pays in certain cases, and intelligence may be shown also by
discerning what they are and when it is wiser to act without thinking.
[…] Philosophers, however, have very mistaken ideas about rational
action. They tend to think that men ought to think all the time, and
about all things. But if they did this they would get nothing done, and
shorten their lives without enhancing their merriment. Also they
utterly misconceive the nature of rational action. They represent it as
consisting in the perpetual use of universal rules, whereas it consists
rather in perceiving when a general rule must be set aside in order
that conduct may be adapted to a particular case. This
passage of Schiller was worth quoting at length because of the insight
this chapter offers into Schiller’s philosophy. In the passage,
Schiller makes the claim that thought only occurs when our unthinking
habits prove themselves inadequate for handling a particular situation.
Schiller’s stressing of the genesis of limited occurrences of thought
sets Schiller up for his account of meaning and truth. Schiller
asserts that when a person utters a statement in a situation they are
doing so for a specific purpose: to solve the problem that habit could
not handle alone. The meaning of such a statement is whatever
contribution it makes to accomplishing the purpose of this particular
occurrence of thought. The truth of the statement will be if it helps
accomplishes that purpose. No utterance or thought can be given a
meaning or a truth valuation outside the context of one of these
particular occurrences of thought. This account of Schiller’s is a much
more extreme view than even James took. At
first glance, Schiller appears very similar to James. However,
Schiller’s more stringent requirement that meaningful statements have
consequences “to some one for some purpose” makes Schiller’s position
more extreme than James’. For Schiller, it is not a sufficient
condition for meaningfulness that a statement entail experiential
consequences (as it is for both Peirce and James). Schiller requires
that the consequences of a statement make the statement relevant to
some particular person’s goals at a specific moment in time if it is to
be meaningful. Therefore, it is not simply enough that the statement
“diamonds are hard” and the statement “diamonds are soft” entail
different experiential consequences, it is also required that the
experiential difference makes a difference to someone’s purposes. Only
then, and only to that person, do the two statements state something
different. If the experiential difference between hard and soft
diamonds did not connect up with my purpose for entering into thought,
the two statements would possess the same meaning. For example, if I
were to randomly blurt out “diamonds are hard” and then “diamonds are
soft” to everyone in a coffee shop one day, my words would mean
nothing. Words can only mean something if they are stated with a
specific purpose. Consequently,
Schiller rejects the idea that statements can have meaning or truth
when they are looked upon in the abstract, away from a particular
context. “Diamonds are hard” only possesses meaning when stated (or
believed) at some specific situation, by some specific person, uttered
(or believed) for some specific aim. It is the consequences the
statement holds for that person’s purposes which constitute its
meaning, and its usefulness in accomplishing that person’s purposes
that constitutes the statement’s truth or falsity. After all, when we
look at the sentence “diamonds are hard” in a particular situation we
may find it actually has nothing to say about diamonds. A speaker may
very well be using the sentence as a joke, as a codephrase, or even
simply as an example of a sentence with 15 letters. Which the sentence
really means cannot be determined without the specific purpose a person
might be using the statement for in a specific context. In an article titled “Pragmatism and Pseudo - pragmatism” Schiller defends his pragmatism against a particular counterexample in a way that sheds considerable light on his pragmatism: The
impossibility of answering truly the question whether the 100th (or
10,000th) decimal in the evaluation of Pi is or is not a 9, splendidly
illustrates how impossible it is to predicate truth in abstraction from
actual knowing and actual purpose. For the question cannot be answered
until the decimal is calculated. Until then no one knows what it is, or
rather will turn out to be. And no one will calculate it, until it
serves some purpose to do so, and some one therefore interests himself
in the calculation. And so until then the truth remains uncertain:
there is no 'true' answer, because there is no actual context in which
the question has really been raised. We have merely a number of
conflicting possibilities, not even claims to truth, and there is no
decision. Yet a decision is possible if an experiment is performed. But
his experiment presupposes a desire to know. It will only be made if
the point becomes one which it is practically important to decide.
Normally no doubt it does not become such, because for the actual
purposes of the sciences it makes no difference whether we suppose the
figure to be 9 or something else. I.e. the truth to, say, the 99th
decimal, is ' true enough ' for our purposes, and the 100th is a matter
of indifference. But let that indifference cease, and the question
become important, and the ' truth ' will at once become 'useful '.
Prof. Taylor's illustration therefore conclusively proves that in an
actual context and as an actual question there is no true answer to be
got until the truth has become useful. This point is illustrated also
by the context Prof. Taylor has himself suggested. For he has made the
question about the 100th decimal important by making the refutation of
the whole pragmatist theory of knowledge depend on it. And what nobler
use could the 100th decimal have in his eyes? If in consequence of this
interest he will set himself to work it out, he will discover this once
useless, but now most useful, truth, and — triumphantly refute his own
contention! We
might recognize this claim as the sort of absurdity many philosophers
try to read into the pragmatism of William James. James, however, would
not agree that the meaning of “the 100th decimal of Pi is
9” and “the 100th decimal of Pi is 6” mean the same thing until someone
has a reason to care about any possible difference. Schiller, in
constast, does mean to say this. James and Schiller both treat truth as
something that happens to a statement, and so James would agree that it
only becomes true that the 100th decimal of Pi is 9 when someone in
fact believes that statement and it leads them to their goals, but
nowhere does James imply that meaning is something that happens to a
statement. That is a unique element of Schiller’s pragmatism. While
Schiller felt greatly indebted to the pragmatism of William James,
Schiller was outright hostile to the pragmatism of C.S. Peirce. Both
Schiller and James struggled with what Peirce intended with his
pragmatism, and both were often baffled by Peirce’s insistent rebuffing
of what they both saw as the natural elaboration of the pragmatist
cornerstone he himself first laid down. On the basis of his
misunderstandings, Schiller complains that for Peirce to merely say
“‘truths should have practical consequences’” is to be “very vague, and
hints at no reason for the curious connexion it asserts.” Schiller goes
on to denigrate Peirce’s principle as nothing more than a simple truism
“which hardly deserves a permanent place and name in philosophic
usage”. After all, Schiller points out, “[i]t is hard […] to see why
even the extremest intellectualism should deny that the difference
between the truth and the falsehood of an assertion must show itself in
some visible way.” With
Peirce’s attempts to restrict the use of pragmatism set aside, Schiller
unpacks the term “consequences” to provide what he considers as a more
substantial restatement of Peirce’s pragmatism: For
to say that a [statement] has consequences and that what has none is
meaningless, must surely mean that it has a bearing upon some human
interest; they must be consequences to some one for some purpose. Schiller
believes his pragmatism to be more developed because of its attention
to the fact that the “consequences” which make up the meaning and truth
of a statement, must always be consequences for someone’s particular
purposes at some particular time. Continuing his condemnation of the
abstract, Schiller contends that the meaning of a concept is not the
consequences of some abstract proposition, but what consequences an
actual thinker hopes its use will bring about in an actual situation.
The meaning of a thought is what consequences one means to bring about
when they employ the thought. To Schiller, this is what a more sophisticated pragmatist understands by the term meaning. If
we are to understand the pragmatic theory of meaning in Schiller’s way,
he is right to claim that James’ theory of truth is a mere corollary of
the pragmatist theory of meaning: But
now, we may ask, how are these 'consequences' to test the 'truth'
claimed by the assertion? Only by satisfying or thwarting that purpose,
by forwarding or baffling that interest. If they do the one, the
assertion is 'good' and pro tanto 'true' ;
if they do the other, 'bad' and 'false'. Its 'consequences,' therefore,
when investigated, always turn out to involve the 'practical'
predicates 'good ' or 'bad,' and to contain a reference to ' practice'
in the sense in which we have used that term. So soon as therefore we
go beyond an abstract statement of the narrower pragmatism, and ask
what in the concrete, and in actual knowing, 'having consequences ' may
mean, we develop inevitably the full blown pragmatism in the wider sense. Given
Schiller's view that the meaning of a thought amounts to the
consequences one means to bring about by the thought, Schiller further
concluded that the truth of a thought depends on whether it actually
brings about the consequences one intended. For example, if while
following a cooking recipe that called for salt I were to think to
myself, "Cerebos is salt", my thought will be true if it consequently
leads me to add Cerebos and produce a dish with the intended taste.
However, if while working in a chemistry lab to produce a certain
mixture I were to think to myself, "Cerebos is salt", my thought would
both have a different meaning than before (since my intent now differs)
and be false (since Cerebos is only equivalent to salt for culinary
purposes). According to Schiller, the question of what a thought like
"Cerebos is salt" means or whether it is true can only be answered if
the specific circumstances with which the thought arose are taken into
consideration. While there is some similarity here between Schiller's
view of meaning and the later ordinary language philosophers,
Schiller's account ties meaning and truth more closely to individuals
and their intent with a specific use rather than whole linguistic
communities. |