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The Pragmatist Theory of Truth
Cheryl Misak, University of Toronto
1. Introduction
Pragmatism originated in Cambridge Massachusetts in the 1860s in The Metaphysical
Club a short-lived reading group whose members included William James and Charles
Sanders Peirce. John Dewey, who was a graduate student of Peirces at John Hopkins two
decades later, became the third pillar of what gets recognized as classical pragmatism.
At the heart of pragmatism is an account of what it is to properly understand a concept.
The pragmatic maxim requires our concepts to be linked to experience and practice. All
pragmatists, that is, want their philosophical explanations down-to-earth - natural as
opposed to supernatural. As Peirce put it, we must look to the upshot of our concepts in
order to understand them (CP 5. 4; 1901). Pragmatism is committed to taking a look, as
Ian Hacking has said to keeping philosophy connected to first order inquiry, to real
examples, to action, and to real-life expertise (2007: 36).
The pragmatist accounts of truth must be understood as arising from this pragmatic
motivation. All pragmatists want to extract the concept of truth from our practices of
inquiry, reason-giving, and deliberation. They also all want to be holists - they take their
view of truth to encompass the whole of science, art, religion, ethics, and politics. No realm
of inquiry is fenced off from the principles that pragmatism sets out.
It should be clear that pragmatism, of any stripe, will be set against versions of the
correspondence theory of truth, on which a statement is true if it gets right or mirrors the
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human-independent world. For that concept of truth introduces an element that is
unknowable by human inquirers and believers. That may be where the similarities bewteen
the varieties of pragmatism end. There is an ongoing debate within pragmatism about the
nature of its heart and soul. As Robert Westbrook says, pragmatism has always been less a
coherent philosophical school than a contentious family of thinkers holding distinct but
related positions on the workmanlike nature of knowledge, meaning, and truth (2005: 1).
Pragmatism was an intensely debated view in the early 1900s. James Pragmatism: A
New Name for some Old Ways of Thinking appeared in 1907, cometlike on our intellectual
horizon (Carus 2001a [1911]: 44). The view shone brightly right through to John
Deweys death in 1959, but then it seemed to burn out. In the 1970s, Richard Rorty
brought it back under a spotlight, with an account of based on the thought of James and
Dewey.
Philosophy, James said, is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human
pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest vistas (1907 [1949]:
6). He was more a vista man than a crannies man. Peirce was the most careful and analytic
of the early pragmatists, perfectly happy working in the crannies as well as opening out the
vistas. But he never found stable employment in academia and was hardly known as he
toiled in poverty on his philosophy. His account of truth survived in the hands of C.I.
Lewis, and, surprisingly, Frank Ramsey. Lewis's great advance on Peirce was to show that
his view of truth was especially well-suited to ethical belief. It is beyond the scope of this
paper to explore that complex topic. But I will speak briefly to Ramsey's advance on Peirce.
For a more sustained discussion, see Misak (forthcoming).
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2. Peirce: Truth and the End of Inquiry
The pragmatic maxim, in Peirces hands, is designed to just capture one, albeit very
important, aspect of what it is to understand something. Not only does one have to know
how to give an analytic definition of a concept and how to pick out instances of it, but one
has to know what to expect of beliefs containing the concept. If a belief has no
consequences then it lacks a dimension we would have had to get right were we to fully
understand it. The maxim cashes out in a prescription for philosophy: we must not begin
by talking of pure ideas, -- vagabond thoughts that tramp the public roads without any
human habitation, -- but must begin with men and their conversation (CP 8.112; 1900).
We must connect our philosophical theories to that with which we have dealings (CP
5.416).
When Peirce turns this maxim on the concept of truth, the upshot is an aversion to
transcendental accounts, such as the correspondence theory, on which a true belief is one
that gets right or mirrors the believer-independent world. (CP 5.572) Such accounts of truth
are examples of those vagabond thoughts. They make truth the subject of metaphysics
exclusively. For the very idea of the believer-independent world, and the items within it to
which beliefs or sentences might correspond, seem graspable only if we could somehow
step outside of our corpus of belief, our practices, or that with which we have dealings.
Peirce thinks that the correspondence concept of truth is missing a connection with
our practices. But he is perfectly happy with it as a nominal definition, useful only to
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those who have never encountered the word before. (CP 8.100*) If we want a more robust
or a full account of truth, we need to provide a pragmatic elucidation - an account of the role
the concept plays in practical endeavours. David Wiggins nicely recaps the insight at the
heart of Peirces pragmatism as follows. When a concept is already fundamental to human
thought and long since possessed of an autonomous interest, it is pointless to try to define
it. Rather, we ought to attempt to get leverage on the concept, or a fix on it, by exploring its
connections with practice. (2002: 316)
The concepts of belief and truth are examples of those concepts, fundamental to human
thought, in which we have a long-standing autonomous interest. The application of the
pragmatic maxim to belief leads Peirce to adopt a dispositional account on which beliefs are
in part that upon which a man is prepared to act; or habits of mind, which are good or
otherwise, or safe or otherwise (CP 5.12, 1902; W 3: 245; 1877). And with respect to
truth, Peirce argues that if we are to bring the concept down to earth from metaphysical
flights of fancy, we must see how it engages with our practices of assertion, inquiry,
reasons, evidence, and belief. For those are the dealings connected to truth. When we
assert, believe, or inquire, we take ourselves to be aiming at truth. We want to know, for
instance, what methods might get us true belief; whether it is worth our time and energy to
inquire into certain kinds of questions; whether a discourse such as moral discourse aims at
truth or whether it is a radically subjective matter, not at all suited for truth-value.
The Fixation of Belief is one of the few papers Peirce managed to publish during his
lifetime. In it, he sets out an account of inquiry and truth in a very provocative way.
Inquiry, he says, is the struggle to rid ourselves of doubt and achieve a state of belief. He
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tells us that the sole aim of inquiry is to settle belief and that a belief which would be
permanently settled is a true belief. Much of the rest of the paper is taken up with
addressing the objection which wants to leap off the page: what if a belief was settled by
the fagot and the rack or by a totalitarian regime? Would such beliefs be true? Peirce is
setting out here the most pressing problem for anyone who thinks that the concept of truth
must be linked to our practices of inquiry. It is very hard to see how we can get a normative
concept from a mere description of our practices. In a nutshell, here is Peirces solution to
the problem.
Our body of background beliefs is susceptible to doubt on a piecemeal basis, if that
doubt is prompted by surprising or recalcitrant experience by some positive reason (CP
5. 51; 1903). Cartesian doubts are paper or tin doubts - they cannot motivate inquiry. He
says:
.. there is but one state of mind from which you can 'set out', namely, the
very state of mind in which you actually find yourself at the time you do 'set
out' a state in which you are laden with an immense mass of cognition
already formed, of which you cannot divest yourself if you would ... Do
you call it doubting to write down on a piece of paper that you doubt? If so,
doubt has nothing to do with any serious business... (CP 5. 416; 1905)
The most obvious kind of positive reason for igniting doubt is a surprising
experience an experience that runs counter to what our settled beliefs leads us to expect.
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We must regard our background beliefs as true, until experience throws one or some group
of them into doubt. The inquirer is under a compulsion to believe just what he does
believe ... as time goes on, the mans belief usually changes in a manner which he cannot
resist ... this force which changes a mans belief in spite of any effort of his may be, in all
cases, called a gain of experience (MS 1342, p.2).
Peirce links the scientific method to this epistemology. It is the method which pays
close attention to the fact that beliefs fall to the surprise of recalcitrant experience. Inquiry
is not standing upon the bedrock of fact. It is walking upon a bog, and can only say, this
ground seems to hold for the present. Here I will stay till it begins to give way (CP 5. 589;
1898). Only science or the method that pays attention to the force of experience will
provide us with stable ground on which to proceed. The specious methods (the faggot and
the rack, totalitarian regimes, etc) wont fix belief that will really be settled they will
eventually be assailed by doubt. The a priori method, for instance, is a failure, because it
makes of inquiry something similar to the development of taste; but taste, unfortunately,
is always more or less a matter of fashion [And] I cannot help seeing that
sentiments in their development will be very greatly determined by accidental causes.
Now, there are some people, among whom I must suppose that my reader is to be
found, who, when they see that any belief of theirs is determined by any circumstance
extraneous to the facts, will from that moment not merely admit in words that that
belief is doubtful, but will experience a real doubt of it, so that it ceases to be a belief.
(W3: 253; 1877 emphasis added)
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Peirces argument is that a belief that would be permanently settled is indeed true. But it
is very hard to really settle beliefs. For beliefs are such that they resign in the face of
recalcitrant experience or in the knowledge that they were put in place by a method that did
not take experience seriously. They resign in the fact of knowledge that they were
determined by something accidental or extraneous to the facts. Another way of putting the
point is that it is a constitutive norm of belief that a belief is responsive to the evidence and
argument for or against it.
Hence, for Peirce, the inquirer is not merely after any old settled belief. He is after
beliefs that are settled in a way that is connected with reasons and evidence for and against
them. He is after beliefs that will serve him well in the future beliefs that will not
disappoint; that will guide action on a safe course; that will continue to fit with the
experience, evidence and argument. It is not so easy to end the irritation of doubt. It is not
so easy to really fix belief. As Wiggins (2004) puts it, hard on the heels of the thought that
truth is internally related to assertion or belief comes the thought that truth is also internally
related to inquiry, reasons, evidence, and standards of good belief. If we unpack the
commitments we incur when we assert and believe, we find that we have imported all these
notions.
Peirce argues that when we think of how truth engages with our practices, we shall
see that we need to think of a true belief as the very best that inquiry could do - a belief that
would forever settle the doubts we have; would be 'indefeasible'; would not be improved
upon; would never lead to disappointment; would forever meet the challenges of reasons,
argument, and evidence. A true belief is a belief we would come to, were we to inquire as
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far as we could on a matter. He sometimes put this idea in the following unhelpful way: a
true belief would be agreed upon at the hypothetical or fated end of inquiry. (See W3:273)
But his considered and much better formulations are the ones above. A true belief would
withstand doubt, were we to inquire as far as we fruitfully could into the matter. On the
whole, he tries to stay away from unhelpful ideas such as the final end of inquiry, perfect
evidence, and the like.
This is not to say that truth has now been identified as that which satisfies our aims
in assertion and inquiry. We must be careful to not take these elucidations of truth to be
attempts at analytic definition. Nothing could be clearer than Peirces intention to avoid that.
A dispute about definition, he says, is usually a 'profitless discussion'. (CP 8.100) Again,
Wiggins sees the point clearly: To elucidate truth in its relations with the notion of inquiry,
for instance, as the pragmatist does, need not ... represent any concession at all to the idea
that truth is itself an epistemic notion. (2002:318) Once we see that the concepts of
assertion, inquiry, and truth live in the same conceptual neighbourhood, we can get a grip
on the concept of truth by exploring the connections between it and its neighbours. This
will not be an analysis of the essence of truth, but a way of getting clearer about what truth
is.
One way of describing this project is to say that Peirce deflates the idea of truth by
linking it to belief, assertion, experience, and inquiry. What we do when we offer a
justification of p is true is to offer a justification for the claim that p. There is an
unseverable connection between making an assertion and claiming that it is true. If we want
to know whether it is true that Toronto is north of Buffalo, there is nothing additional to
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check on (a fact, a state of affairs) -- nothing over and above our consulting maps,
driving or walking north from Buffalo to see whether we get to Toronto, etc. The question
of the truth of the statement does not involve anything more than investigating the matter in
our usual ways. For a claim's fitting and continuing to fit with all the evidence and
argument is all we can be interested in. Our attention must be on first-order inquiry into the
claim itself, not on philosophical inquiry into the nature of truth. For the best kind of
philosophical inquiry into the nature of truth draws out the connection between truth and
the satisfaction of our aims in first-order assertion and inquiry.
The most significant challenge to Peirces account of truth is as follows: if a true
belief is one that would be permanently resistant to doubt, what about those beliefs that are
settled because no one cares to question them or because they are no longer accessible?
Peirce calls these buried secrets and he spent considerable time trying to meet the
challenge.
His response is that it is a regulative assumption of inquiry that, for any matter into
which we are inquiring, we would find an answer to the question that is pressing on us.
Otherwise, it would be pointless to inquire into the issue: 'the only assumption upon which
[we] can act rationally is the hope of success' (W2. 272; 1869). Thus the principle of
bivalence - for any p, p is either true or false - rather than being a law of logic, is a
regulative assumption of inquiry. It is something that we have to assume if we are to
inquire into a matter. It is taken by logicians to be a law of logic by a saltus by an
unjustified leap. Peirce distinguishes his approach from that of the transcendentalist:
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when we discuss a vexed question, we hope that there is some ascertainable truth
about it, and that the discussion is not to go on forever and to no purpose. A
transcendentalist would claim that it is an indispensible 'presupposition' that there is
an ascertainable true answer to every intelligible question. I used to talk like that,
myself; for when I was a babe in philosophy my bottle was filled from the udders
of Kant. But by this time I have come to want something more substantial. (CP
2.113)
Not only does the fact that an assumption is indispensable to our practice of inquiry not
entail that it is a necessary truth, it does not even entail that it is true or even that it ought to
be believed. Peirce says: I do not admit that indispensibility is any ground of belief. It may
be indispensible that I should have $500 in the bank - because I have given checks to that
amount. But I have never found that the indispensibility directly affected my balance, in the
least' (CP 2. 113) We must make these assumptions 'for the same reason that a general who
has to capture a position or see his country ruined, must go on the hypothesis that there is
some way in which he can and shall capture it' (CP 7. 219).
Thus Peirce's argument is that if we are to inquire rationally about some particular issue,
then we must assume that there is at least a chance of there being an upshot to our inquiry.
We must also assume that there is a reality independent of our beliefs about it, whose
character we can discover. We must also assume that there is an explanation for what we
observe. Refusing to make these assumptions is to block the path of inquiry and, in Peirce's
books, that is the cardinal philosophical sin. Our reason for making the assumptions is
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driven, Peirce says, by 'desperation'. If we do not make them, we will 'be quite unable to
know anything of positive fact' (CP 5. 603; 1903). Faced with an assumption without
which we cannot continue in a practice of utmost importance, we must embrace it, 'however
destitute of evidentiary support it may be' (CP 7. 219; 1901).
Note that this means that Peirce is not merely silent on issues outside of practical
inquiry - issues that may never be inquired into. Nor does he want to argue for the stronger
claim that there is nothing to say, nor for the even stronger one that there is somehow no
nature of truth beyond the upshots of particular inquiries. He assumes that there is a truth in
matters that currently, for one reason or another, are beyond the reach of our investigations.
Peirce, like all the early pragmatists, is a holist in that he thinks that every area of
inquiry falls under the scope of truth and knowledge. (He is not a Quinean holist - he does
not think that the whole of inquiry or a whole theory is the bearer of truth.) His treatment of
mathematical and logical beliefs is the most interesting example of what he was trying to
achieve. The history of empiricism is littered with attempts to show how these statements,
although not obviously connected to experience, are nonetheless legitimate. Most of those
attempts (think of Hume and the logical empiricists) trade on the idea that mathematics and
logic are somehow exempt from the rigors of the empiricist criterion. But Peirce treats
mathematics and logic as a whole with the rest of genuine inquiry.
He argued that mathematical and logical hypotheses are indeed connected to
experience in the requisite way. They meet the requirement set out in the pragmatic maxim:
we expect certain things to be the case if they are true. Not only might we have practical or
applied or bridge-building expectations about mathematics, but even hypotheses in pure
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mathematics have consequences. They have consequences, Peirce argued, in diagrammatic
contexts. Diagrams provide us with a forum for matters to impinge upon us.
Peirce put considerable effort into trying to get this thought right. (Indeed, he
developed as first order quantified logic based with a diagrammatic proof system just as
Frege was developing his logic.) In 1905, he suggests that there are two kinds of
experience: ideal and real. The latter is sensory experience and the former is experience in
which operations on diagrams, whether external or imaginary, take the place of the
experiments upon real things that one performs in chemical and physical research. (CP
4.530) But already in 1872, this idea had a central place in his thought. Mathematical and
logical inquiry
involves an element of observation; namely, [it] consists in constructing an icon or
diagram the relation of whose parts shall present a complete analogy with those of
the parts of the object of reasoning, of experimenting upon this image in the
imagination, and of observing the result so as to discover unnoticed and hidden
relations among the parts. (W3, 41)
The mathematicians hypotheses are creatures of his own imagination; but he discovers in
them relations which surprise him sometimes. (CP 5.567, 1901) This surprise is the force
of experience.
Sometimes he distinguishes the two kinds of experience by saying that everyone
inhabits two worlds: the inner (or the ideal) and the outer (or the real). We react with the
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outer world through a clash between it and our senses. We react with the inner world by
performing thought experiments. Inquiry, he says, has
two branches; one is inquiry into Outward Fact by experimentation and
observation, and is called Inductive Investigation; the other is inquiry into Inner
Truth by inward experimentation and observation and is called Mathematical or
Deductive Reasoning. (MS 408, p.150)
The distinction between these two kinds of experience and two kinds of inquiry is not,
however, hard and fast. External facts are simply those which are ordinarily regarded as
external while others are regarded as internal. (W2 205, 1868) The inner world exerts a
comparatively slight compulsion upon us, whereas the outer world is full of irresistible
compulsions. Nonetheless, the inner world can also be unreasonably compulsory and
have its surprises for us. (CP 7.438, 1893)
It may seem that Peirce's assumption that there is a reality independent of beliefs
invites the claim that Peirce really holds some kind of correspondence theory. But this
would be a mistake, for the assumption is one made within inquiry. It is not being offered
as the beginnings of a theory of truth per se.
One thing that needs attention is the matter of saying just which kinds of inner
experiences count and which do not. Peirce struggled with this problem and it would be
silly to say that he got it right. But we shall see that one thing is clear. He thought that
James got it wrong.
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2. William James: Truth and Satisfaction
William James, like the logical empiricists after him, has his pragmatic maxim
making short work of many long-standing and seemingly intractable metaphysical
problems: If no practical difference whatsoever can be traced, then the alternatives mean
practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. ([1907](1949):45) But he parts company
from the logical empiricists in a dramatic way when he tells us that the kind of difference he
is talking about is any kind of difference to you or to me:
There can be no difference anywhere that doesnt make a difference elsewhere no
difference in abstract truth that doesnt express itself in a difference in concrete fact
and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow,
somewhere, and somewhen. The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find
out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our
life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one.*
Whereas the logical empiricists have all hypotheses requiring empirical consequences,
James has all hypotheses requiring consequences for my conduct or for your conduct. One
wonders whether any hypothesis will make the grade.
When James turns his maxim on the concept of truth, it is unsurprising that the
result is rather radical. He sets out his view on truth and objectivity thus: Any idea upon
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which we can ride any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our
experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying,
saving labor, is true instrumentally (1907 [1975]: 34). Satisfactorily, for James,
means more satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will emphasize their points of
satisfaction differently. To a certain degree, therefore, everything here is plastic (1907
[1975]: 35). The individuality or subjectivity built into James version of the pragmatic
maxim is clearly manifested in his account of truth.
James rather infamously argued in The Will to Believe that if the belief in God made a
positive or a happy impact on someones life, then it could reasonably be taken as true by
that person. Truth is what works for this or that person. Religious hypotheses, like all
hypotheses, need to be verified. But verification can involve finding out whether the
hypothesis has effects on the believers life. Similarly, the matter of the truth of the
hypothesis involves finding out whether the hypothesis works nicely for the believer:
If religious hypotheses about the universe be in order at all, then the active faiths of
individuals in them, freely expressing themselves in life, are the experimental tests
by which they are verified, and the only means by which their truth or falsehood
can be wrought out. The truest scientific hypothesis is that which, as we say,
works best; and it can be no otherwise with religious hypotheses. ((1897)[1979):
8)
The objection to this line of thought is that such evidence may be relevant to the
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question of whether or not religion is good for human beings, but not relevant to the
question of whether God exists. This is the very objection that Peirce put to James. The
Will to Believe is dedicated To My Old Friend, Charles Sanders Peirce, To whose
philosophic comradeship in old times and to whose writings in more recent years I owe
more incitement and help than I can express or repay. Peirce was touched, but nonetheless,
he doesnt have much good to say about James essay. He tells James in a 1909 letter: I
thought your Will to Believe was a very exaggerated utterance, such as injures a serious
man very much (CL 12: 171) He thinks that James view amounts to: Oh, I could not
believe so-and-so, because I should be wretched if I did. (5.377*)
James account of truth has inspired much vitriol and can be seen as responsible for
much of pragmatisms bad reputation. But a few words of caution are required. First, a
careful reading of James shows first that when James argues against the idea that truth is
static and asserts, rather, that it is plastic and that truth happens to an idea (1907 [1975]:
97)., what he is quite clearly talking about is not truth, but what we take to be true. In
Pragmatism he says that the great assumption of the intellectualists is that truth means
essentially an inert static relation. When youve got your true idea of anything, theres an
end of the matter. Youre in possession; you know; you have fulfilled your thinking
destiny (1907 [1975]: 96). James, with Peirce, wants to correct this mistaken assumption.
When you have a settled, well grounded belief, you dont know; you dont have an end to
the matter. For inquiry might well overturn your belief. That is, sometimes Jamess
thoughts about the plasticity of truth are merely sensible statements of fallibilism about
belief.
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Second, James sometimes makes it clear that he was concerned to characterize truth as
something that was of human value, without making a true belief what this or that human
finds valuable at this or that time. He sometimes tries to correct a misunderstanding of his
position by arguing that, contrary to his critics, he holds that the true is the expedient, but
the expedient in the long run and on the whole, of course (1909 [1975]: 4). That is,
James, with Perice, wants to argue that true beliefs are beliefs which survive because they
deserve to survive, not because they happen to survive for this or that person. We start with
our background beliefs and revise in light of good reasons and the force of experience.
In Pragmatism, he offers us a clutch of metaphors for the growth of knowledge. One
of them likens the change in belief to house renovations: You may alter your house ad
libitum, but the ground plan of the first architect persists you can make great changes, but
you cannot change a Gothic church into a Doric temple (1907 [1975]: 83). Another ties the
growth of knowledge to a different kind of contingent residue: You may rinse and rinse
the bottle, but you cant get the taste of the medicine or whisky that first filled it wholly
out (1907 [1975]: 83). All of his metaphors have the pragmatist theme that we patch and
tinker (1907 [1975]: 83). They all cohere with Peirces metaphor that the inquirer is
standing on a bog and only moves forward when the ground underneath him begins to give
way. We start from where we find ourselves in inquiry and move forward from there, laden
with beliefs and frameworks that were put in place by previous generations of inquirers.
But fair or unfair, the vitriol set the tone for how pragmatism was viewed for
decades to come. James critics latched on to the most simple and clear statements of his
view - that we make truth and that a true belief is one that is useful or works. Bertrand
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Russell and G. E. Moore, led the charge.
Russell turns James account of truth on itself, as it were, and notes that if it itself is
to be useful, there must be a way of telling when the consequences of a belief are useful or
good (1992 [1966]: 201):
We must suppose that this means that the consequences of entertaining the belief
are better than those of rejecting it. In order to know this, we must know what are
the consequences of entertaining it, and what are the consequences of rejecting it;
we must know also what consequences are good, what bad, what consequences are
better, and what worse.
This, of course, is a very tall order, which Russell immediately illustrates with two
examples. First, the consequences of believing the doctrine of the Catholic faith might make
one happy at the expense of a certain amount of stupidity and priestly domination (1992
[1966]: 201). It is unclear how we are to weigh these benefits and burdens against each
other. Second, the effects of Rousseaus doctrines were far-reachingEurope is a different
place from what it would have been without them. But how do we disentangle what the
effects have been? And even if we could do that, whether we take them to be good or bad
depends on our political views. The question of whether the consequences of believing
something are on the whole good or bad is an extraordinarily difficult question.
In a related objection, Russell points that one can take works or pays in two very
different ways. In science, a hypothesis works if we can deduce a number of verifiable
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hypotheses from it. But for James, a hypothesis works if the effects of believing it are
good, including among the effects . . . the emotions entailed by it or its perceived
consequences, and the actions to which we are prompted by it or its perceived
consequences. This is a totally different conception of working, and one for which the
authority of scientific procedure cannot be invoked. (1992 [1966]: 210)
Moore angrily reviewed Jamess Pragmatism in the 1907 Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society. Here is a catalogue of his objections. First, he points to a problem that
dogs all pragmatist views of truth. If truth is tightly connected to what we can verify, how
do we think of statements for which the evidence has been destroyed; or statements that are
so trivial that no one has bothered to collect any evidence for them; or statements the
evidence for which lies buried deep in the past? (1992 [1907]: 165, 179). We have seen that
Peirce offered a solution to this problem, unbeknownst to the rest of the philosophical
world. James does not tackle it.
Second, with Russell, Moore interrogates the linkage between the true and
the useful. If usefulness is a property that may come and go (in Jamess own words), then
Moore says that a belief, which occurs at several different times, may be true at some of
the times at which it occurs, and yet untrue at others (1992 [1907]:183). The truth of a
belief, that is, seems to vary from time to time and from culture to culture. Truth is not a
stable property of beliefs. That is an anathema, in Moores view.
Third, Moore takes on Jamess claim that we make the truth: I think that
he certainly means to suggest that we not only make our true beliefs, but also that we make
them true (1992 [1907]: 191). Moore thinks that it is crazy to suggest that my belief that p
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makes it true that p. My (correct) belief that it rained today did not make it rain today.
One can see that under a barrage of well-formed criticism such as this,
pragmatisms reputation across the Atlantic was bound to suffer. But it came under similar
stress in America. Paul Carus in his 1911 Truth on Trial argues that Jamesian pragmatism
replaces the belief in the stability of truth, in its persistence and eternality with a more
elastic kind of truth which can change with the fashions and makes it possible that we need
no longer trouble about inconsistencies; for what is true to one need
no longer be true to others, and the truth of to-day may the real now, and yet it may become
the error of the to-morrow (2001a [1911]: 110). Hence, he thinks that pragmatism has put
truth on trial, with James as the hapless prosecutor.
3. John Dewey: Truth and the Resolution of Problematic Situations
John Dewey, in good pragmatist form, also links truth with inquiry. His 1938
Logic: The Theory of Inquiry is the culmination of decades of thinking about the
relationship. He starts off by accepting Peirces doubt-belief model of inquiry, duly
acknowledged:
Doubt is uneasy; it is tension that finds expression and outlet in the processes of
inquiry. Inquiry terminates in reaching that which is settled. This settled condition is
a demarcating characteristic of genuine belief. In so far, belief is an appropriate
name for the end of inquiry. (LW 12:15)
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Inquiry is the resolving of a problematic situation. No one investigating a particular
problem aims for certainty or absolute truth. Rather, they aim at belief or security or a
reliable solution to the problem at hand.
With Peirce and James, Dewey argues that we are always immersed in a context of
inquiry, where the decision to be made is a decision about what to believe from here, not
what to believe were we able to start from scratch from certain infallible foundations.
Although Dewey sometimes says that truth is the end and standard of thinking (MW 4:
64, 1907), on the whole he prefers warranted assertibility as that at which we aim or that
which closes off a particular inquiry. (LW 12:15)
Dewey tried to bring the external world into his pragmatism, but an awkward
metaphysics is the result. Experience, he thinks, is an affair of the intercourse of a living
being with its physical and social environment. (MW 10: 6) He says: When we
experience something we act upon it, we do something with it; then we suffer and undergo
the consequences. (MW 9: 146) The problematic situation that calls for inquiry is a
situation in which the human organism interacts with nature. (LW 12: 110) It is the
interaction of organic responses and environing conditions. (LW 12: 111)
As Robert Talisse (2002) has critically noted, for Dewey, it is the situation which
has the doubt, not the inquirer. Dewey himself could not be clearer: It is the situation that
has these traits. We are doubtful because the situation is inherently doubtful. (LW 12:109)
Ernst Nagel was expressed doubts about this worrying metaphysics in 1929:
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The question naturally arises how Professor Dewey comes to have a metaphysics.
How does he know that specificity, interaction, change, characterize all existence,
and that these distinctions are not merely logical, made for purposes of getting along
in this world, but characters of an independent existence? Why does he impute the
features presented in human experience to a nature embracing, but containing more
than, that experience? (1929: 455)
Even James says that Dewey and his disciples have a peculiar view of fact on which:
A fact and a theory have not different natures, as is usually supposed, the one being
objective, the other subjective. They are both made of the same material, experience-
material, namely, and their difference relates to their way of functioning solely. It
is fact when it functions steadily; it is theory when we hesitate. (The Chicago
School: 1136 Writings 1902-10*)
James, of course, will be more sympathetic than most. He is tempted to put
Deweys view in his own distinctly Jamesian terms: Truth consists in a character inclosed
within the situation. Whenever a situation has the maximum of stability, and seems most
satisfactory to its own subject-fact, it is true for him. (*) But even James sees that one of
the great gaps in Deweys system is that there is no account of the fact that different
subjects share a common object-world. (*)
Nonetheless, one can see Dewey struggling to find a position that combines the best
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of Peirce and James. He distinguishes his view from James by making it clear that he does
not go in for the problematic idea that any good which flows from the acceptance of a
belief can be treated as evidence for the truth of that belief. (MW 4: 109) He says:
Since Mr. James has referred to me as saying truth is what gives satisfaction, I
may remark that I have never identified any satisfaction with the truth of an idea,
save that satisfaction which arises when the idea as working hypothesis or tentative
method is applied to prior existences in such a way as to fulfill what it intends.
(MW 4: 109)
Dewey is alert to how James moves too easily between since true ideas are good, any idea
if good in any way is true. (MW 4: 108)
But Dewey is a careful reader of James and takes his real doctrine to be something
more like what Dewey himself is trying to establish: a belief is true when it satisfies both
personal needs and requirements of objective things. (MW 4: 112) Personal needs or
human psychology, Dewey holds, cannot be kept out of questions about truth. Better to
recognize it, control it, and accept responsibility for it, than to try to ignore it. (MW 4. 114)
With Peirce and James, Dewey is set against the intellectualist account of truth, on
which truth is antecedent to any process of verification. MW 4: 76) The problem with the
intellectualist is that he cannot make sense of truth as the internal property of an idea
hooking onto an idea-independent reality. The dualism between mind and matter or
consciousness and objects where each of these terms is supposed to refer to some fixed
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order of existence is an unbridgeable gap. (MW 4: 79) He says:
Then, of course, comes up the question of the nature of the agreement, and of the
recognition of it. What is the experience in which the survey of both idea and
existence and their agreement recognized? Is it an idea? Then what has become
of the postulate that truth is agreement of idea with existence beyond idea? Is it an
absolute which transcends and absorbs the difference? Then what is the test of
any specific judgment? What has become of the correspondence of fact and
thought? Or, more urgently, since the pressing problem of life, of practice and of
science is the discrimination of the relative, or superior, validity of this or that
theory, plan or interpretation, what is the criterion of truth ? (MW 4: 79)
Truth cannot be correspondence of a thought with how things really are. (MW 6: 34) For
we cannot get at how things really are: we seem to require a third medium in which the
original proposition and its object are surveyed together, are compared and their agreement
or disagreement seen (MW 6: 34)
None of the usual theories of truth stands up. No wonder, Dewey says, that a third
party has finally been rash enough to intervene. (MW 6: 33) That third party is the
pragmatist, who does not look for a ready-made truth, but rather, looks towards the
future. (MW 6: 38)
Dewey is the classical pragmatist who tries most carefully to work out how ethics
might come under the scope of truth and knowledge. Everything is brought under the
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umbrella of inquiry. A trial, for instance, is a problematic situation requiring inquiry. (LW
12: 123) Its formal conceptions (misdemeanor, crime, torts, contracts, etc.) arise out of
ordinary transactions they are not imposed from on high or from any external or a
priori source. (LW 12: 106) But when they are formed, they are also formative; they
regulate the proper conduct of the activities out of which they develop. (LW 12: 106)
When problems arise, the formal theory that has been developed is brought to the matter
and the theory itself may be revised in light of new insights prompted by the problem.
He is offering us a unified theory of inquiry a way of thinking about how we
resolve problematic situations in science, ethics, politics, law, and art. The pragmatist,
Dewey says, has at least tried to face, and not to dodge, the question of how it is that moral
and scientific knowledge can both hold of one and the same world. (MW 4: 132) The
problems of men must be brought under the sweep of science or inquiry:
if we can discover ethical principles, these ought to give some guidance for the
unsolved problems of life which continually present themselves for decision.
Whatever may be true for other sciences it would seem that ethics at least ought to
have some practical value Man must act; and he must act well or ill, rightly or
wrongly. If he has reflected, has considered his conduct in the light of the general
principles of human order and progress, he ought to be able to act more intelligently
and freely, to achieve the satisfaction that always attends on scientific as compared
with uncritical or rule-of-thumb practice. (MW 5:10)
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The way that moral inquiry works is via intuition or thought experimentation:
It is a process of tentative action: we try on one or another of the ends, imagining
ourselves actually doing them, going, indeed, in this make-believe action just as far
as we can without actually doing them. In fact, we often find ourselves carried over
the line here; the hold which a given impulse gets upon us while we are trying it
on passes into over act without us having consciously intended it. Decision,
resolution, the definitely formed plan, is the proper outcome of consideration. (EW
4: 251)
Our lives are full of problematic situations, some of them moral. We propose potential
solutions to the problems which press on us, try to predict the consequences of the
solutions implementations, and ask whether our reactions to those consequences would be
positive or negative. We then test the solution that has withstood the challenge of testing in
thought experiment or experiment in the imagination. That is, we see what the results
actually are.
It is unsurprising that in ethics, too, Dewey has difficulties in saying how
something external impinges upon us. A moral problem or situation presents itself to the
individual as thus: Which shall he decide for and why? The appeal is to himself; what does
he really think the desirable end? What makes the supreme appeal to him? What sort of an
agent, a person, shall he be? This is the question finally at stake in any genuinely moral
situation: what shall the agent be? (MW 5:194)
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The problem for this view is that it is not clear how it can be normative. Jennifer
Welchman articulates the issue nicely:
One might object, however, that although ordinary deliberation can proceed along
the lines Dewey suggests, the reflective deliberation that issues in remorse, regret,
and the effort to reform oneself cannot. An act that is right because it is true to
myself may still be wrong because the sort of self I am is a wrong or bad self.
(1995:109)
This is a specific statement of the general problem that dogs pragmatist theory of
truth. How can the pragmatist avoid the naturalistic fallacy the fallacy of trying to derive
an ought from an is or trying to get normative conclusions from descriptive premises?
Dewey sees the problem clearly: We are face to face with the only serious question a
wisely pragmatic philosophy need fear. (MW 6: 54) It is the problem of taking what is the
case and making it normative: equating the intellectually satisfactory with the personally
agreeable, or the authentic with what happens to be authorized, the legitimate with the
legal. (MW 6: 5)
Deweys solution to the problem in The Study of Ethics is that we can tell that a
conclusion is misguided even when we are aiming at self-realization, for the result will be
internal conflict, discomfort, and compunctions. (EW 4: 297*) And we can query our
desires, aims, and conceptions of ourselves once we see how they lead to disharmony. But
this seems less than adequate. Not all evil-doers, for instance, appear to experience such
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discomfort.
Later, he offers a different solution. When we try to solve problems we
convert strife into harmony, monotony into a variegated scene, and limitation into
expansion. The converting is progress, the only progress conceivable or attainable
by man. Hence every situation has its own measure and quality of progress, and the
need for progress is recurrent, constant. (MW 14: 195)
In the 1920 Reconstruction in Philosophy he puts it thus:
the process of growth, of improvement and progress, rather than the static outcome
and result, becomes the significant thing. Not health as an end fixed once and for
all, but the needed improvement in health a continual process is the end and
good. The end is no longer a terminus or limit to be reached. It is the active process
of transforming the existent situation. Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-
enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining is the aim in living. Growth
itself is the only moral end. (MW 12, 181)
Meliorism is thus at the very heart of his position. Like Peirce, he thinks that in the
absence of certainty, we go forward, on the hope that we do better and better. But on
Peirces view, there is something that we are aiming at, despite the fact that we can never be
certain that we have it: we are aiming at a belief which would forever stand up to experience
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and deliberation. On Deweys view, we are not aiming at even that endpoint, laden as it is
with human experience and psychology. So it is not at all clear what growth or progress
can mean. We struggle to find a robust enough conception of a right answer or a better
outcome or a real solution to a problematic situation in his account of truth.
4. Frank Ramsey: Truth and Success
Ramsey got his hands of Peirce's work through C.K. Ogden, who had brought out
Peirce's first volume of posthumously collected papers alongside the 1923 US edition. He
was heavily influenced by it. In the book manuscript he was working on when he died at
the age of 26 in 1930, he is clear that the Jamesian position is not the whole or the best of
pragmatism, saying: What is ludicrous, is not the general idea of pragmatism but the
way in which William James confused it especially in its application to religious
beliefs (OT 91). Ramsey thought that Peirce's dispositional account of belief was right.
This core insight of pragmatism is the spur for his best-known result. In the 1926 Truth
and Probability, he showed that we can measure partial belief by seeing how people
would act, especially in betting contexts. That is one way that Ramsey improves on Peirce's
view.
Another way he takes something straight out of Peirce and improves upon it is as
follows. In "General Propositions and Causality", Ramsey argues that generalization and
conditionals cannot be analyzed, respectively, as infinite conjunctions and in terms of truth
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values. Rather, they are rules with which we meet the future (GC: 149). If I believe that
all men are mortal, I adopt a rule or a habit of the form: if I meet a , I shall regard it as a .
(GC: 149). When I accept a conditional if p then q, I commit myself to acquiring the
disposition to judge q whenever I judge p.
Ramsey starts to work through the tricky issue of how these habits can be
cognitive attitudes: in what way can [such a habit] be right or wrong? (GC: 146-7). The
belief that all men are mortal will play out in diverse ways I will be disposed to assert and
affirm that all men are mortal in appropriate circumstances; I will drive my car carefully
around those pedestrians I wish to remain alive; I will think that every person I meet will at
some point die; I will not treat myself as an immortal exception; I may despair about the
meaning of life; and so on. And my belief or rule or habit can be evaluated in terms of
whether it manifests itself in appropriate ways (whether I adopt dispositions such as the
ones above) and whether it continues to cohere with experience.
Similarly, a conditional with an unfulfilled antecedent can be evaluated. If a man has
a cake and decides not to eat it because he thinks it will make him ill, we can judge him
mistaken even if he does not eat the cake. We have different degrees of expectation as to
the outcome, and we can introduce any fact we know, whether he did or could know
it (GC: 155). Lets say he knew that I carefully baked the cake; that Im an excellent baker;
that I know he has no food allergies or aversions; and that I bear no ill will towards him.
Then we might judge that he is irrational. If all these things hold, but he does not know
them, then we might judge him mistaken.
We can also evaluate these attitudes because, as Ramsey puts it, they form the
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system with which we meet the future. If you and I meet the future with different systems,
then we disagree. And the future might be compatible with one of our systems but not the
other, even if for some generalizations and conditionals the future in fact would agree with
both systems (GC: 149). Ramsey thinks that:
We do, however, believe that the system is uniquely determined and that long
enough investigation will lead us all to it. This is Peirces notion of truth as what
everyone will believe in the end"[GC: 161]
We have habits of belief, and those beliefs are evaluated in terms of whether they serve us
well, in a robust sense of serve. Pragmatism, for Peirce and Ramsey, is the position that
beliefs should be evaluated based on both hindsight (whether the belief-formation method
was connected to the facts) and foresight (whether the belief continues to work, fitting with
future experience, other well-grounded beliefs, and enabling successful action).
5. Quine: Holism and Deflationism
Willard Van Orman Quine arrived at Harvard in 1930 as a graduate student in
philosophy, with a BA in mathematics. Two of his courses were taught by C.I. Lewis and
it was here that he acquired his introduction to pragmatism. Quine was never terribly
interested in the history of pragmatist ideas. He told Morton White, for instance, that
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reading Josiah Royce was like going through muck. (White 1999:121-4) Rather, Quine
was one of those philosophers who took his pragmatist heritage and melded it onto his
free-standing philosophy, ushering in a new kind of analytic pragmatism.
Although Quine adopts as his theory of truth Tarskian deflationsim (there is
nothing more to p is true than p), he comes very close to putting forward a pragmatist
account of truth. Indeed, Quine initially was happy be placed in the pragmatist camp. In the
abstract of his famous Two Dogmas of Empiricism, he asserts that one upshot of the
paper is a shift towards pragmatism. (*) He talks about science as being a tool for
managing the flux of experience that could be right out of James and which could not have
failed to bring Dewey to mind:
As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool,
ultimately for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical
objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries - not by
definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable,
epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe
in physical objects and not in Homers gods But in point of epistemological footing the
physical objects and the gods enter our conceptions only as cultural posits. The myth of
physical objects is superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths
as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience. (1953: 44)
But his relationship to pragmatism is complex and soon afterwards we find him distancing
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himself from the position.
Quine is responsible for putting the term holism into philosophical vocabulary. He
argues that our entire belief system must be seen as one interconnected web. Mathematics
and logic are at the centre, gradually shading into the theoretical sentences of science, and
then to specific observation sentences at the periphery. When faced with recalcitrant
experience, we must choose where to make adjustments in our web of belief. No kind of
sentence in that web of beleif is immune from revision.
Quine recoiled from extending his holism as far as Dewey was prepared to go he
was leery of the idea that ethics might form part of our web of belief: apart from a salient
marker or two one finds uncharted moral wastes. (Quiddities:*) But Quines early
characterization of experience is certainly broad enough to bring moral judgments into the
fold. Observation sentences
can be roughly distinguished from others by a behavioural criterion, involving no
probing of sensations. For this is characteristic of them: witnesses will agree on the
spot in applying an observation term, or in assenting to an observation sentence
(1975:315)
This leaves room for the possibility that some ethical statements will be observational
thats odious upon seeing a sexual assault of a child, for instance.
Quine, with his pragmatist predecessors, is a naturalist and anti-foundationalist. He
made famous Neuraths metaphor regarding the growth of knowledge. We are like sailors
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adrift at sea, never able to return to drydock to reconstruct our boat out of the finest
materials. We work with what we have, replacing our boat of knowledge plank by plank, as
required by the surprise of experience. The resonances with the metaphors offered by the
early pragmatists are striking:
The naturalistic philosopher begins his reasoning within the inherited world theory
as a going concern. He tentatively believes all of it, but believes also that some
unidentified portions of it are wrong. He tries to improve, clarify and understand the
system from within. (1981:72)
That is a perfect summary of the pragmatism that Peirce was so keen to articulate. We go on
our settled beliefs until some surprising experience throws them into doubt. Then we revise
until we have another, better, settled belief upon which to rely.
6. Richard Rorty: Truth and Solidarity
Quines reluctance to embrace the pragmatist label left a space in the intellectual
landscape a space which Richard Rorty moved to fill in the 1970s. Rortys versions of
the pragmatist theory of truth tend to center around those of James. (Rorty 1995:71)
Unsurprisingly, the objections that were leveled against James are the challenges faced by
Rorty.
Rortys rendering of the pragmatic maxim is that our concepts cannot outrun our
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practices or our current and ongoing conversations in which we must form our beliefs,
make our decisions, and live our lives:
there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no
criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of
rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is
not obedience to our own conventions. (1982: xlii)
Rorty argues that there is no practical difference between aiming to hold true beliefs
and aiming to hold justified beliefs, and hence it makes no sense to speak of truth as a goal
of inquiry. The inquirer cant compare her beliefs with reality she can only try to live up
to her epistemic responsibilities or the standards of her epistemic community. The yearning
for an unconditional, impossible, indefinable, sublime thing like truth comes at the price of
irrelevance to practice. (2000:2)
Rorty goes on to maintain that truth is simply solidarity; or what we have come to
take as true; or what our peers will let us get away with saying. (1979:176) We must
substitute the idea of unforced agreement for that of objectivity(1991:38) in every
domain of inquiry in science as well as in morals and politics. (1991:36)
As with James, it looks as if the bar is being set very low. Any hypothesis that is
agreed upon, any hypothesis that we can get away with asserting, is as good as true. In
1909, James Pratt nailed the matter on the head with respect to Jamesian pragmatism. It
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seeks to prove the truth of religion by its good and satisfactory consequences. Here,
however, a distinction must be made; namely between the good, harmonious, and
logically confirmatory consequences of religious concepts as such, and the good
and pleasant consequences which come from believing these concepts. It is one
thing to say a belief is true because the logical consequences that flow from it fit in
harmoniously with our otherwise grounded knowledge; and quite another to call it
true because it is pleasant to believe. (1909:186-7)
The difference between the view of Peirce, on the one hand, and the view of James and
Rorty, on the other, can be nicely summarized by Pratts distinction, with one caveat. Peirce
holds that a belief is true because the logical consequences that flow from it fit in
harmoniously with our otherwise grounded knowledge and James and Rorty hold (or at
least fail to block the thought) that a belief can true because it is pleasant to believe.The
caveat is that Peirce insisted on a subjunctive formulation: a belief is true if the logical
consequences would fit harmoniously with our otherwise grounded knowledge, were we to
pursue our investigations as far as they could fruitfully go.
7. Ways Forward
The debate within pragmatism continues to this day. It is a debate between those who
take pragmatism to suggest that there is no truth and objectivity to be had anywhere and
those who take pragmatism to promise an account of truth that preserves our cognitive
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aspiration to getting things right. On the one side of the debate we have Rorty arguing, with
his classical predecessor James, that there is no truth at which we might aim - only
agreement within a community or what works best for an individual. On the other side of
the divide, we have Quine and his classical predecessor Peirce, arguing that we should not
look for a transcendental or metaphysical theory of truth, but we should nonetheless try to
do justice to the objective dimension of human inquiry to the fact that those engaged in
deliberation and investigation take themselves to be aiming at getting things right, avoiding
mistakes, and improving their beliefs and theories. Dewey and his successors, I suggest,
try to fall in the middle they would like to do justice to the objective dimension of inquiry,
but they have not given themselves the wherewithal to do so.
On the more objective kind of pragmatism, the fact that our inquiries are historically
situated does not entail that they lack objectivity. Neither does the fact that standards of
objectivity themselves come into being and evolve. The trail of the human serpent is over
everything (to use James phrase), but as Peirce and Ramsey saw, this does not toss us into
a sea of arbitrariness, where there is no truth or where truth varies from person to person
and culture to culture.
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References
James, William ((1907[1949]) Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, New York: Longmans, Green and Co.
James, William (1897)[1979) The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, in The Works of William James, volume 6, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press.
Misak, Cheryl (forthcoming) Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Peirce, Charles Sanders Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, i-iv C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss, eds., 1931-35; vii and viii, A. Burks, ed., 1958, Cambridge Mass.: Belknap Press.
--The Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, N. Houser (general ed.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Pratt, James B. (1909) What is Pragmatism? Reprinted in volume 1 of Shook, John (ed.) Early Critics of Pragmatism, vols.1-5. Bristol: Thoemmes Press (2001).
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Sellars, Wilfred (1962) Truth and Correspondence Journal of Philosophy, 59, pp.29-56.
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