Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/399

Rh comparison with experience. Pragmatism consists in the assertion that all propositions should he tested as the hypotheses of science are tested.

These two points of view are, of course, very closely connected. Students of the physical sciences often take little account of the psychology of their own processes. But the processes of science obviously have their psychology, and this psychology conforms in its types to those laws of mental activity which have interested psychologists ever since the apperceptive process was formulated by Herbart,—yes, ever since the doctrine of association was so widely applied by the English psychologists, and still more since the modern so-called "functional" psychology has connected the apperceptive processes and the associative linkages with the physical processes whereby an organism is adjusted to its environment. The psychology of the apperceptive process, and the work of the scientific finding and testing of hypotheses, have a close relation, and since common sense also is interested in successful verifications, although this interest is less precise than is the interest of the student of the more exact sciences of observation in the criteria to which they submit their more careful tests,—common sense and science and psychology join in contributing their various shares to the modern general theory of truth.

But now to come to the matter to which I wish especially to attract your attention. Since pragmatism is thus especially interested in the psychology of the thinking process, it has emphasized this psychological problem in recent literature. A general psychology of thought, on a pragmatic basis, has been worked out by Professor Pillsbury, The psychological text-books of the Chicago school, and in particular the contributions of Professor Dewey, have familiarized us with other accounts of the psychology of thought. The psychological problems to which attention is thus especially attracted may be, of course, studied apart from their relations to the theory of truth. These problems are threefold. (1) There are the problems regarding the processes whereby hypotheses are invented, or, in common-sense terms, the processes whereby people get their ideas; (2) there are problems regarding the processes whereby ideas, once in hand, are made sufficiently clear to be a proper subject for testing; and (3) a psychological problem arises as to what happens when an idea is tested. To all these problems the pragmatists as psychologists have contributed. I wish to illustrate 'in the course of my discussion a certain dissatisfaction which I feel with the present state of some of their contributions to these purely psychological issues, when viewed apart from the other issues of the pragmatist philosophy.

Yet I admit that when you hear me you will say that my psychological dissatisfactions are due to certain philosophical dissatisfactions, and that the pragmatist psychology appears to me inadequate partly