No one of the disputants,
moreover, tries to show what pragmatic consequences
his own view would carry, or what
assignable particular differences in any one's
experience it would make if his adversary's
were triumphant.
It seems to me that if radical empiricism be
good for anything, it ought, with its pragmatic
method and its principle of pure experience,
to be able to avoid such tangles, or at least
to simplify them somewhat. The pragmatic
method starts from the postulate that there is
no difference of truth that does n't make a
difference of fact somewhere; and it seeks to
determine the meaning of all differences of
160
opinion by making the discussion hinge as soon
as possible upon some practical or particular
issue. The principle of pure experience is also
a methodological postulate. Nothing shall be admitted
as fact, it says, except what can be
experienced at some definite time by some experient;
and for every feature of fact ever so
experienced, a definite place must be found
somewhere in the final system of reality. In
other words: Everything real must be experiencable
somewhere, and every kind of thing
experienced must be somewhere real.
Armed with these rules of method let us see
what face the problems of activity present to us.
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