Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/402

398 little account of the distinction between feeling more or less personal satisfaction in partial agreements between experience and our expectations, and precisely confirming or refuting a determinate hypothesis, in so far as that can be done by a certain group of experiences.

And finally the student of logic finds a certain difficulty in the usual statements of pragmatism regarding the sense in which empirical verifications are said to lead to a certain "belief" that the ideas which we have been trying to verify are true. In ordinary life beliefs exist in all sorts of vague degrees of intensity. But when the student of a science formulates his results, considerable stress is laid upon the assertion that, by virtue of a given group of confirmations, a hypothesis has received a somewhat determinate degree of what is called objective probability. Now into the theory of probability this is no place to go. But most of you who have dealt with statistical probabilities will admit that our subjective confidence is somewhat different in its nature from that objective or statistically estimated probability which most students of an inductive science prefer to be able to define if they can. The whole modern development of the theory of probability has been in the direction of separating the concept of objective probability from the concept of subjective belief or confidence. From the objective point of view a proposition has a certain probability $$P$$ in case it belongs to the class of propositions of which in the long run a proportion $$P$$ are true. The difficulty of defining such probability with genuine exactness is great, and the whole subject of probability is too complex to be here discussed, but the student of logic feels dissatisfied with the fact that his pragmatist brethren take little interest in defining the difference between the vague confidence which in the world of common sense confirmed expectations may arouse, and the scientific measure of probability in exact and relatively objective terms which the students of an inductive science are commonly seeking.

So much for my general statement of logical scruples concerning the adequacy of pragmatistic formulations. Into the merits of these logical scruples I have no wish to go on this occasion. I have stated them merely in order to formulate the problems of a psychological nature to which I wish to attract attention. Pragmatism has emphasized these problems, has undertaken to solve them, has contributed a great deal to their study, but in my opinion has failed to satisfy all the requirements that it might satisfy, just because it is not sufficiently interested in the very logical problems that I have just outlined. These logical problems, however, have their psychological aspects. If one does not deal with them in an exact fashion from the logical point of view, one is not likely to have one's attention attracted to their psychological