§1. The Three Cotary Propositions

180. At the end of my last lecture I had just enunciated three propositions which seem to me to give to pragmatism its peculiar character. In order to be able to refer to them briefly this evening, I will call them, for the nonce, my cotary propositions. Cos, cotis, is a whetstone. They appear to me to put the edge on the maxim of pragmatism.

181. These cotary propositions are as follows:

(1) Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu. I take this in a sense somewhat different from that which Aristotle intended.²⁾ By intellectus, I understand the meaning of any representation in any kind of cognition, virtual, symbolic, or whatever it may be. Berkeley ³⁾ and nominalists of his stripe deny that we have any idea at all of a triangle in general, which is neither equilateral, isosceles, nor scalene. But he cannot deny that there are propositions about triangles in general, which propositions are either true or false; and as long as that is the case, whether we have an idea of a triangle in some psychological sense or not, I do not, as a logician, care. We have an intellectus, a meaning, of which the triangle in general is an element. As for the other term, in sensu, that I take in the sense of in a perceptual judgment, the starting point or first premiss of all critical and controlled thinking. I will state presently what I conceive to be the evidence of the truth of this first cotary proposition. But I prefer to begin by recalling to you what all three of them are.

(2) The second is that perceptual judgments contain general elements, so that universal propositions are deducible from them in the manner in which the logic of relations shows that particular propositions usually, not to say invariably, allow universal propositions to be necessarily inferred from them. This I sufficiently argued in my last lecture. This evening I shall take the truth of it for granted.

(3) The third cotary proposition is that abductive inference shades into perceptual judgment without any sharp line of demarcation between them; or, in other words, our first premisses, the perceptual judgments, are to be regarded as an extreme case of abductive inferences, from which they differ in being absolutely beyond criticism. The abductive suggestion comes to us like a flash. It is an act of insight, although of extremely fallible insight. It is true that the different elements of the hypothesis were in our minds before; but it is the idea of putting together what we had never before dreamed of putting together which flashes the new suggestion before our contemplation.

On its side, the perceptive judgment is the result of a process, although of a process not sufficiently conscious to be controlled, or, to state it more truly, not controllable and therefore not fully conscious. If we were to subject this subconscious process to logical analysis, we should find that it terminated in what that analysis would represent as an abductive inference, resting on the result of a similar process which a similar logical analysis would represent to be terminated by a similar abductive inference, and so on ad infinitum. This analysis would be precisely analogous to that which the sophism of Achilles and the Tortoise applies to the chase of the Tortoise by Achilles, and it would fail to represent the real process for the same reason. Namely, just as Achilles does not have to make the series of distinct endeavors which he is represented as making, so this process of forming the perceptual judgment, because it is sub-conscious and so not amenable to logical criticism, does not have to make separate acts of inference, but performs its act in one continuous process.