Preface to World Hypotheses (1942)

The first sentence in the preface to World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (1942), Stephen C. Pepper is: > The origin of this to book know goes 'way back to a consuming personal desire to know the truth [p. vii]

Pepper traces his journey in reading philosophy, from (i) materialism, to (ii) idealism, and then (iii) pragmatism. > It was also pretty clear that materialism and idealism would not consistently go together. For a time I tried to find an adjustment of the evidences of both of these theories in a third, pragmatism. But I soon came to the conclusion that pragmatism was just one more theory, probably no better nor any worse than the other two. I began to wonder if there were not still more theories, not sufficiently worked over, containing grounds of evidence as convincing as these. [p. viii]

Pepper turned towards towards the study of evidence, and hypotheses. > By now my old drive for the truth was directed toward the study of evidence and hypothesis -- toward a reliable method rather than a reliable creed. [p. viii]

While Pepper came up in the tradition of American [pragmatism](https://www.britannica.com/topic/pragmatism-philosophy), it's not clear that he categorizes himself that way. He does write about the rise of [positivism](https://www.britannica.com/topic/positivism), and more specificially about the challenge with [logical positivism](https://www.britannica.com/topic/positivism/Logical-positivism-and-logical-empiricism). > And at this moment the logical positivists appeared on the scene with a nostrum made to order just along these lines. My immediate reaction to them was suspicious and hostile. I felt from their attitude and the tone of their statements, even before critically studying them, that they were not meeting the problem that needed to be met. I doubted if many of them had ever fully felt the problem. This was a question of truth and of the justification of human values. To think that this question could be met in the manner of a puzzle and in terms of correlations, statistics, mathematics, and language struck me as fantastic. Here was method running away with issues, evidence, and value itself. It was, as Loewenberg once remarked, methodolatry. [pp. viii-ix] > But the attack of the positivists on world theories did bring out the fact that there was more in physics which stood on its own feet without support of theory than I had previously been willing to allow. [p. ix]

In 1980, [Elmer Duncan](https://www.whbfamily.com/obituaries/obituary-listings?obId=899750) wrote that Pepper was not well-recognized in philosophy, in a period when American pragmatism was on the decline, and British analystic philosophy was on the rise. > "How great a philosopher was Stephen C. Pepper?" If we try to "look up" the answer to this one, we find conflicting opinions. Some of us are convinced that [Paul Arthur Schilpp](https://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/brs-obit-schilpp.html) should have devoted a volume to Pepper and his work, as he did to Dewey, Russell, Whitehead, C. I. Lewis, etc. By contrast (to cite only one example), John Passmore devoted only half a footnote to Pepper in his [A Hundred Years of Philosophy](https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.135724). What accounts for this difference? > In one sense, it is rather amazing that Pepper is highly regarded by anyone. He lived at a time (1891-1972) in America when Dewey's Pragmatism was popular. But then this was superseded, in most U. S. colleges, by British analytic philosophy -- with its emphasis on "what we mean when we say," and its positive hatred of "Weltanschauung" philosophy.

Ties between American pragmatism and the Vienna Circle play in the Weltanschauung Rejection in British Analytic Philosophy

Pepper was 51 years old when this book was reeleased in 1942. He wasn't convinced that _World Hypotheses_ would be the last word, and would continue to publish for another 30 years. > Now all this material seems to have come to a sort of stability in the book that follows. Here I believe is the truth about these things, as near as we can get at it in our times. Or rather, here is the attitude and here are some of the instruments that can bring it to us. > At the very least, here is the solution that seems best to one man, living in the first half of the twentieth century, who has passed through most of the cognitive experiences we have been subject to: religious creed, philosophical dogma, science, art, and social revaluation. > Possibly here is also a present crystallization of some twenty-five centuries' struggle and experience with the problem of how men can get at the truth in matters of importance to them. [p. ix]

A fifth world hypothesis of selectivism would be published with Concept and Quality (1966).

## References Duncan, Elmer H. 1980. “The Philosophy of Stephen C. Pepper: An Appraisal.” _Paunch_ 53: 63. https://web.archive.org/web/20070523221046/http://people.sunyit.edu/~harrell/Pepper/pep_duncan.htm. Pepper, Stephen C. 1942. “Preface.” In _World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence_, vii–ix. Berkeley: University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520341869.