Essays in Experimental Logic. Джон Дьюи
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insisting upon the distinction. The object of knowledge is, so to speak, a more dignified, a more complete, sufficient, and self-sufficing thing than any datum can be. To transfer the traits of the object as known to the datum of reaching it, is a material, not a merely verbal, affair. It is precisely this shift which leads the presentative realist to substitute for irreducibility and unambiguity of logical function (use in inference) physical and metaphysical isolation and elementariness. It is this shift which generates the need of reconciling the deliverances of science with the structure and qualities of the world in which we directly live, since it sets up a rivalry between the claims of the data, of common-sense objects, and of scientific objects (the results of adequate inquiry). Above all it commits us to a view that change is in some sense unreal, since ultimate and primary entities, being simple, do not permit of change. No; whatever is to be said about the validity of the distinction contended for, it cannot be said to be insignificant. A theory which commits us to the conception of a world of Eleatic fixities as primary and which regards alteration and organization as secondary has such profound consequences for thought and conduct that a detection of its motivating fallacy makes a substantial difference. No more fundamental question can be raised than the range and force of the applicability to nature, life, and society of the whole-and-part conception. And if we confuse our premises by taking the existential instrumentalities of knowledge for its real objects, all distinctions and relations in nature, life, and society are thereby requisitioned to be really only cases of the whole-and-part nature of things.
VI
The instrumental theory acknowledges the objectivity of meanings as well as of data. They are referred to and employed in reflective inquiry with the confidence attached to the hard facts of sense. Pragmatic, as distinct from sensational, empiricism may claim to have antedated neo-realism in criticism of resolution of meanings into states or acts of consciousness. As previously noted, meanings are indispensable instrumentalities of reflection, strictly coincident with and correlative to what is analytically detected to be given, or irremovably there. Data in their fragmentary character pose a problem; they also define it. They suggest possible meanings. Whether they indicate them as well as suggest them is a question to be resolved. But the meanings suggested are genuinely and existentially suggested, and the problem described by the data cannot be solved without their acknowledgment and use. That this instrumental necessity has led to a metaphysical hypostatizing of meanings into essences or subsistences having some sort of mysterious being apart from qualitative things and changes is a source of regret; it is hardly an occasion for surprise.
To be sure of our footing, let us return to empirical ground. It is as certain an empirical fact that one thing suggests another as that fire alters the thing burned. The suggesting thing has to be there or given; something has to be there to do the suggesting. The suggested thing is obviously not "there" in the same way as that which suggests; if it were, it would not have to be suggested. A suggestion tends, in the natural man, to excite action, to operate as a stimulus. I may respond more readily and energetically to a suggested fire than to the thing from which the suggestion sprang: that is, the thing by itself may leave me cold, the thing as suggesting something else may move me vigorously. The response if effected has all the force of a belief or conviction. It is as if we believed, on intellectual grounds, that the thing is a fire. But it is discovered that not all suggestions are indications, or signifiers. The whale suggested by the cloud form does not stand on the same level as the fire suggested by smoke, and the suggested fire does not always turn out fire in fact. We are led to examine the original point of departure and we find out that it was not really smoke. In a world where skim-milk and cream suggestions, acted upon, have respectively different consequences, and where a thing suggests one as readily as the other (or skim-milk masquerades as cream), the importance of examination of the thing exercising the suggestive force prior to acting upon what it suggests is obvious. Hence the act of response naturally stimulated is turned into channels of inspection and experimental (physical) analysis. We move our body to get a better hold on it, and we pick it to pieces to see what it is.
This is the operation which we have been discussing in the last section. But experience also testifies that the thing suggested is worth attention on its own account. Perhaps we cannot get very readily at the thing which, suggesting flame, suggests fire. It may be that reflection upon the meaning (or conception), "fire," will help us. Fire—here, there, or anywhere, the "essence" fire—means thus and so; if this thing really means fire, it will have certain traits, certain attributes. Are they there? There are "flames" on the stage as part of the scenery. Do they really indicate fire? Fire would mean danger; but it is not possible that such a risk would be taken with an audience (other meanings, risk, audience, danger, being brought in). It must be something else. Well, it is probably colored tissue-paper in strips rapidly blown about. This meaning leads us to closer inspection; it directs our observations to hunt for corroborations or negations. If conditions permitted, it would lead us to walk up and get at the thing in close quarters. In short, devotion to a suggestion, prior to accepting it as stimulus, leads first to other suggestions which may be more applicable; and, secondly, it affords the standpoint and the procedure of a physical experimentation to detect those elements which are the more reliable signs, indicators (evidence). Suggestions thus treated are precisely what constitute meanings, subsistences, essences, etc. Without such development and handling of what is suggested, the process of analyzing the situation to get at its hard facts, and especially to get at just those which have a right to determine inference, is haphazard—ineffectively done. In the actual stress of any such needed determination it is of the greatest importance to have a large stock of possible meanings to draw on, and to have them ordered in such a way that we can develop each promptly and accurately, and move quickly from one to another. It is not to be wondered at then that we not only conserve such suggestions as have been previously converted successfully into meanings, but also that we (or some men at least) turn professional inquirers and thinkers; that meanings are elaborated and ordered in related systems quite apart from any immediately urgent situation; or that a realm of "essences" is built up apart from that of existences.
That suggestion occurs is doubtless a mystery, but so is it a mystery that hydrogen and oxygen make water. It is one of the hard, brute facts that we have to take account of. We can investigate the conditions under which the happening takes place, we can trace the consequences which flow from the happening. By these means we can so control the happening that it will take place in a more secure and fruitful manner. But all this depends upon the hearty acceptance of the happening as fact. Suggestion does not of itself yield meanings; it yields only suggested things. But the moment we take a suggested thing and develop it in connection with other meanings and employ it as a guide of investigation (a method of inquiry), that moment we have a full-fledged meaning on our hands, possessing all the verifiable features which have been imported at any time to ideas, forms, species, essences, subsistences. This empirical identification of meaning by means of the specific fact of suggestion cuts deep—if Occam's razor still cuts.
A suggestion lies between adequate stimulation and logical indication. A cry of fire may start us running without reflection; we may have learned, as children are taught in school, to react without questioning. There is overt stimulation, but no suggesting. But if the response is held off or postponed, it may persist as suggestion: the cry suggests fire and suggests the advisability of flight. We may, in a sense we must, call suggestion "mental." But it is important to note what is meant by this term. Fire, running, getting burned, are not mental; they are physical. But in their status of being suggested they may be called mental when we recognize this distinctive status. This means no more than that they are implicated in a specific way in a reflective situation, in virtue of which they are susceptible of certain modes of treatment. Their status as suggested by certain features of the actual situation (and possibly meant or indicated as well as suggested) may be definitely fixed; then we get meanings, logical terms—determinations.[7]
Words are of course the agencies of fixation chiefly employed, though any kind of physical existence—a gesture, a muscular contraction in the finger or leg or chest—under ready command may be used. What is essential is that there be a specific physical