84 A. E. TAYLOB:
When I am told that "a truth has consequences, and what has none is meaningless," I do not find my perplexity as to the real meaning of the new faith, if it has any one fixed meaning, sensibly lessened. For first of all I want to know what you mean by "consequences". Do you mean logical consequences, assertions which are implied by the 'truth' in question and ought to be recognised as following from it, whether they happen to have been actually drawn or not? Or do you mean actual effects, modifications of the stream of events which are caused by my belief in the 'truth' in question? Or do you mean both of these very different things at once? In the first sense of the word 'consequences,' clearly what has no "consequences" must be meaningless, since it cannot be a proposition at all,[1] and only propositions have a meaning. Thus once more the great revelation turns out to be an idle platitude, and we find that the latest oracle has followed the well-established tradition of oracles; it has 'paltered with us in a double sense,' has 'kept the word of promise to our ear, and broken it to our hope'. In the second, on the other hand, the oracle's utterance acquires significance, but only at the cost of a petitio principii.
And there is a more serious difficulty behind. In all these senses of "consequence," not only truths but falsehoods have consequences. A falsehood has its logical "implication" no less than a truth; in fact, in the sense of "implications" current in the calculus of statements, every falsehood implies all assertions whatsoever. Also, as history shows only too plainly, falsehood, no less than truth, often has an effect upon human action. So I am compelled to ask the philosophers who tell me that truth is all an affair of consequences, "What consequences do you mean?" How do the consequences of truths as such differ from those of error as such? And on this all-important point Mr. Schiller's latest manifesto does not seem to afford any guidance. For all that he tells us is that a significant assertion has a bearing upon some human interest, and that if its consequences forward that interest, the assertion is 'good' and pro tanto[2] "true"; if they thwart it, the assertion is 'bad' and 'false'. But surely it cannot be enough to say that assertions are good and true when their consequences forward some human interest, unless we know more definitely what human interest is meant. (So in ethics, it would at least be a paradox to say that an act is 'right' if it gratifies some human
- ↑ For all propositions 'imply' other propositions.
- ↑ Surely again it would be in place to ask, 'Pro quanta?' As the principle stands it appears to lead straight to the old sceptical view that no assertion can be false.
'truth'. Prof. James and Mr. Schiller appear to me habitually to confuse these two fundamentally different things. In fact, I believe the course of future discussion will gradually make it manifest that the whole plausibility of their doctrine results from the inveterate habit of giving psychological—and therefore irrelevant—answers to logical (or, if you prefer the ugly word, epistemological) questions. See on this point my paper in the Philosophical Review of May, 1905, pp. 265-289.
