Hi all,
Sorry for not responding yesterday. I've come down with something flu-ey, but with enough peppermint tea I hope I'll be able to write something intelligible. In lieu of an organized essay, I'll just respond to some specific issues that were raised.
I'll start with Ruth's question about the quotation from Peirce: "...consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object."
This is the first formulation of the pragmatists' theory of meaning -- i.e., what it means to say that something "means" something. Peirce, James, and Dewey have slightly different takes on the theory of meaning, which I'll gloss over here for simplicity's sake, and talk instead about a general pragmatist theory of meaning. (I'll use the language developed by Dewey, who -- in this as in many other areas -- brings James's more poetic and elliptical ideas down to the level of prose and system.)
There are two kinds of meaning in pragmatism, the instrumental and the consummatory. (Peirce is only talking about instrumental meaning.) At the instrumental level, the meaning of a thing is equivalent to all the ways in which it can be used to get us something that we want: the instrumental meaning of my coffee machine is that (in combination with other things such as water and coffee beans) it produces a cup of coffee. One corollary of this conception is that meaning is relative to context. What is the meaning of a bucket full of water? That depends. If I'm thirsty it has one obvious meaning, but if my stove is on fire it has a very different meaning. And there are surely contexts in which buckets of water will be used in the future that I can't even imagine right now. So, instrumental meaning is always somewhat open-ended. I might even use my coffee machine in some unforeseen way.
Ideas also have instrumental meanings. The meanings of, say, Newton's laws of motion, cover all of the uses to which they've been put, from putting a man on the moon to calculating a shot in billiards. (Of course, most people play billiards without thinking about Newton's laws, and for them the laws don't have this billiard-related meaning.)
There is another facet to the instrumental meaning of ideas that brings us to Beth's question about "philosophical reasonableness." The pragmatists reject the idea of capital-R Reason as some objectively existing thing in the universe. Rather, they see reason as a set of mental habits that have proven themselves effective over time for a wide range of instrumental purposes. The rules of logic and mathematics just seem to work, although we can never guarantee that we have come up with the best formulations of them. If we were to accept an idea that required us to suspend these rules, we would forfeit their advantages in the future, when it might be very useful to maintain the idea that math and logic can be applied in a consistent way. So, if an idea maintains or violates our canons of reasonableness, that is also one of its instrumental meanings. That is, instrumental meanings can ripple through the world of ideas and reach their "practical" fruits only indirectly. (For Peirce and Dewey, science is the practice of streamlining these ripples.)
If instrumental meanings were all there were, then pragmatism would be a bloodless system. Everything would be significant only so far as it gets us to something else, which would be significant only so far as it gets us to something else, and so on. We would always be going somewhere and never arriving. With consummatory meaning, on the other hand, we arrive at the full-blooded moment of present experience. Something's consummatory meaning is the effect it has on our immediate, qualitative state of mind -- that is, how it makes us feel. My cup of coffee has various instrumental meanings -- it fits into various plans I might make, such as how to consume enough water to survive, or enough caffeine to concentrate -- but it also has a consummatory meaning, which is captured in the "aaahh" (or "blech") reaction I have when I take a sip. In the case of an idea, aside from its instrumental meanings we may also simply find it beautiful, elegant, ugly, etc. -- this is what James means when he talks about an idea's "immediate luminousness."
Beth also asks what James has to say about how to tell whether something's fruits are good or bad. The simple answer, but one that may not fully satisfy, is that we do this in the same way we evaluate actual fruits -- by their "taste." If we find the "fruit of the Spirit" -- love, joy, peace, and the rest -- delicious, then that's all we need to know. A more complex answer involves evaluating these fruits in terms of a larger project of self-realization: we find things good, according to this more complex answer, to the extent that they help us become more self-possessed, and this self-possession may involve a certain spiritual reconciliation with the cosmos that involves both ethics and aesthetics, two notoriously thorny areas of pragmatism. Philosophers today are still trying to work out the details of this more complex answer. (Victor Kestenbaum is doing the best work in this area, for my money.)
OK, that's all I can manage for now ... stay tuned for this week's thinksheet!
- Jesse