Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/403

PEAGMATISM AND PSEUDO-PRAGMATISM. 389 3nly antedate conclusions which seem to us so inevitable that feel we should have drawn them at any time had we had >ccasion to do so. For all that, we may often observe that reason- igs which possess for one mind the highest degree of logical cogency are voted individual fads by the rest. 1 This plainly shows that the feeling of logical necessity is as psychological as any other. In short, by calling consequences 'logical,' we do not really lean that they could exist without a psychological context. We lean that they are psychological consequences of a peculiar value /hich it is important to distinguish. ' Logical ' processes are rimarily psychological, but selected from among the merely sychological, and honoured with a special mark of distinction, far therefore from being accidental, the psychological conse- quences are essential to the constitution of 'truth,' and logical jnsequences would be no consequences at all unless they ' hap- ened to have been actually drawn'. The science of logic so far from being 'independent of,' i.e. unconnected with, psychology, liffers from it only in the difference of purpose with which it works jver the same material. 2 Prof. Taylor proceeds to find a difficulty in the obvious fact that 1 not only truths but also falsehoods have consequences ' which lould be easily dispelled by this conception of the logical as a iluable sort of psychological product. He complains that I afford 10 guidance on the " all-important point " of " how the conse- juences of truths as such differ from those of error as such". Lnd then he proceeds to quote a passage which plainly gives my iswer, to the effect that the ' true ' is what forwards and the 1 false ' what thwarts a human purpose (primarily logical). Or in Dther words ' true ' and ' false ' are the forms of logical value, Dsitive and negative. 3 The answer to Prof. Taylor's question is simply : ' In value '. I cannot put the matter more clearly or Dncisely. Of course, this answer is general, as befits a general theory of lowledge. What answers in detail are ' good ' and ' true ' as ssponses to what human interest is a question for the special lethodology of each science, and also for social conventions, until an actual case is presented, it is impossible to show low precisely certain truths forward certain interests. 4 1 In one of his empirical moods Prof. Taylor has himself made some excellent comments on this fact. See his Problem of Conduct, pp. 369-371. 2 Contrast Prof. Taylor's treatment in Phil. Rev., xiv. , 3, in ' purging logic of psychological accretions ' and asserting that " the notion of an individual thinking mind is absolutely irrelevant " to the nature of truth. How all this is compatible with the very " specific emotion " which he finally finds to be essential to the existence of logical assertion (pp. 287- 288) is of course the puzzle noted above (pp. 383-4). 3 Cp. Humanism, pp. 54-58 and MIND, N.S., 58, pp. 160-176. 4 Prof. Taylor's poser about the doctor who risks his practice by brutal veracity fails from ignoring the divergences (explained in Humanism, pp. 68-60) which arise from the fact that an individual's purpose is not always 26