William Ernest Hocking - Negative Pragmatism

Negative Pragmatism

Perhaps Hocking's most important contribution to philosophy is "negative pragmatism," which means that what "works" pragmatically might or might not be true, but what does not work must be false. As Sahakian and Sahakian state, "... if an idea does not work, then it cannot possibly be true, for the reason that the truth always works ...". Not only is this a criterion of truth, but it is a definition. It stipulates that truth is a constant -- "truth always works". The Sahakian analysis indicates that what we may think is true might be only an illusion -- "what appears to be working may or may not be true". As an example, to say that the sun is rising or setting, though seemingly true visually, is false because the appearance is due to the motion of the earth, not the sun moving up or down in relation to the earth. This illusion caused ancients to falsely believe in a geocentric universe rather than the currently accepted heliocentric view.

Hocking's criterion was corroborated in the mid-20th century by Richard Feynman, a physicist who won the Nobel Prize. Feynman states that anything described as true "... could never be proved right, because tomorrow's experiment might succeed in proving wrong what you thought was right ..." and "... if it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong." Finally, Sahakian and Sahakian note inadequacies and limited application to all of the other criteria of truth they present, but they do not denigrate negative pragmatism. To find an inadequacy in any criterion is to invoke negative pragmatism. To denote a failure in any criterion is to show how it "disagrees with experiment" (Feynman) and/or "does not work" (Hocking). By this means, they use negative pragmatism as the de facto criterion by which all other criteria are judged.