Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR SPIVACK I couldn't agree more with Robert G. Spivack on the need for a little verbal self-discipline among the perpetual Eisenhower critics ("Better Late Than Never," NL, October 7)....
...If pragmatism means that an idea has truth as long as it has agreeable consequences in some individual, anywhere, there would hardly be such a thing as a false idea, since the most ridiculous nonsense can make somebody happy...
...Josiah Royce justly mocked this when he said that James would put a witness on the stand and ask him to swear "to tell the expedient, the whole expedient, and nothing but the expedient, so help him future experience...
...Eastman shows more clearly and neatly than I have ever seen it done, how fatally wrong Dewey was...
...Harry Gideonse, Senator Jacob Javits and the other leaders of Freedom House who praised the President for his "decisive action...
...Well, "happy" is a tricky word and one can be slap-happy about it...
...He is not alone...
...The number of times I have seen Khrushchev referred to as a "pragmatist" recently, in some cases even by people who regarded him as a "true believer," has made me wince...
...As one who studied under Dewey 30 years ago at Columbia, and who had numerous contacts with him in the years that followed, I can join Eastman on the ramparts in his battle to keep clear Dewey's pragmatic definition of truth, which, as he says, was the dominant motive in all Dewey's philosophizing...
...He gave a technical answer to a technical question in the theory of knowledge, which he saw abused by those who thought that an idea, even a crackpot idea, "worked" if it made someone happy...
...The events at Little Rock could have a long-range impact on American politics...
...The definition of a word leads the investigator to the object denoted by the word...
...it is 'the general description of all the experimental phenomena which the assertion of the proposition virtually predicts.'" James, unfortunately, emphasized unduly the alteration in individual experience as the hallmark of the "verification" process, even speaking of "the truth's cash-value in experimental terms...
...Washington, D. C. Sidney Koretz...
...Incidentally, I think congratulations are in order for Leo Cherne, Dr...
...The American philosopher who introduced the term "pragmatism," Charles Peirce, objected so much to James's crude interpretation that he disowned it and introduced the term "pragmaticism" to represent what he had meant...
...Dewey by his philosophy, so much in contrast with his modest personality, unwittingly contributed to the growth of power intoxication which plagues our world...
...But Eastman himself, I am sure, believes that "science, the life of reason, and, in the high sense, truth" is in some sense "happy outcome" of what he calls "practical thinking...
...But I also have to wince at Eastman's attempt to clear up the matter...
...Theirs is a powerful voice, even when they don't know they are being listened to...
...But I don't agree with Spivack's tendency to underestimate himself...
...According to Eastman, Dewey agreed in this instance with James...
...His main point was that the truth of an idea could only be determined in terms of what it does rather than what it is, that its operational consequences are what makes it true or false...
...In fact, what he says applies only to certain weak moments of William James—when the latter implied that ail idea was "true" merely if it confronted people...
...As Joseph L. Blau of Columbia University (in Men and Movements in American Philosophy) puts it: "Peirce's pragmatism involves a theory of meaning which is operational...
...The rational import of a word or other expression lies exclusively in its conceivable bearing upon the conduct of life.' Similarly, the association of the meaningfulness of « statement with the possibility of proving it true or false experimentally is equivalent to saying that a statement means that 'if a given prescription for an experiment ever can be and ever is carried out in an act, an experience of a given description will result.' The meaning thus given will always be a general statement, conditional in its form...
...Washington, D. C. L. C. O'Brien DEWEY Thanks for printing Max Eastman's cogent and lively critique of Sidney Hook and John Dewey ("Lincoln Was No Pragmatist," NL, September 23...
...his definitions are, as he puts it, precepts...
...Dewey's mistake," he says, "was to identify truth with the happy outcome of the whole process...
...He purports to criticize John Dewey's account of pragmatism...
...Philadelphia Robert Heckert Max Eastman says it will be sad for him "to mount the ramparts all alone" in the "battle" against a prevailing misuse of the term "pragmatism...
...It's because he and other liberal commentators have spoken up at those White House press conferences that Eisenhower and some Republicans have shifted their position...
...This criticism does not apply to Peirce, who, as Blau says, restricted "truth only to those ideas which would be agreed upon by an infinite community of laboratory scientists," and avoided James's "large, loose way" of interpreting agreement as agreeableness...
Vol. 40 • October 1957 • No. 43
