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

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).

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

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

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.

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)

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

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

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:

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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)

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:

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

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

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

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)

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

References

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