Abstract
My concern in this paper is a debate between Pascal Engel and Richard Rorty documented in the book What’s the Use of Truth? Both Engel and Rorty problematize the natural suggestion that attaining truth is a goal of our inquiries. Where Rorty thinks this means that truth is not something we should aim for at all over and beyond justification, Engel maintains that truth still plays a distinct (conceptual) role in our intellectual and daily lives. Thus, the debate between Engel and Rorty ends in a standoff. In the present paper, I question the claim that truth is not a goal of inquiry. I do so from the point of view of a systematic and general theory of rational goal-setting which has its roots in management science. I argue, in this connection, that Rorty’s central claim rests on a principle of goal-setting rationality that is generally invalid. The bottom line is that the goal of truth, like other visionary goals, is likely to have the positive effect of increasing motivation and effort, and this may offset the drawbacks which Rorty, rightly, calls attention to. In largely following Rorty in this regard, Engel is making one concession too much to his opponent.
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Notes
Sections 3–5 draw on Olsson (2015).
Page references are to What’s the Use of Truth? unless otherwise indicated.
A more detailed version of this argument is given by Crispin Wright (1994, pp. 19–21).
The account of SMART+ in this section draws mainly on Edvardsson and Hansson (2005). The reader is advised to consult that paper for additional references.
For a related issue and some complications, see Bovens and Olsson (2002).
For the purposes of simplicity and definiteness, I will in the following take “truth” in its objectivist or realist sense as referring to correspondence with an external reality, although I conjecture that much of the reasoning that follows would survive a weakening to “empirical adequacy”, or the like.
It could be objected that Peirce is here using “truth” in a technical sense, signifying what is collectively accepted by all researchers once scientific inquiry has come to an end. Truth in that sense presumably does not exert any direct influence on a particular mind now. Still, this is an implausible interpretation of Peirce in the present context, as there is no concrete sign that truth should be given any special technical meaning.
As an anonymous referee pointed out, Peirce later in Fixation (p. 18) seems to contradict his initial thesis: “There are Real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those Reals affect our senses according to regular laws, and, though our sensations are as different as are our relations to the objects, yet, by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how things really and truly are; and any man, if he have sufficient experience and he reason enough about it, will be led to the one True conclusion.”
As an anonymous referee pointed out, true belief can be logically stronger than mere belief only if it can meaningfully be distinguished from it, and Peirce’s view might be that we delude ourselves if we assume that there is such a distinction to be drawn. On this interpretation, Peirce is applying here his well-known pragmatic maxim (“Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object”). However, the direct textual evidence does not favor this interpretation. What Peirce writes is, again: “But put this fancy to the test and it proves groundless; for as soon as a firm belief is reached we are entirely satisfied, whether the belief be true or false.” Peirce is here clearly distinguishing true belief from mere belief, implying that such a distinction can be drawn, adding that we are satisfies ones we have reached the latter whether or not we have also reached the former.
As I holistically reconstruct the argument in Fixation, Peirce is asking: how should we determine, in a way that is not question-begging, the best way of settling opinions? Assuming that one should aim at beliefs that are true is obviously question-begging because this is denied by proponents of, say, the method of tenacity, who think that we should hold on to any old belief that comes first to mind. What everyone can agree upon, regardless of method advocated, is only that we want to have beliefs that are stable and do not easily go away, so the main question in Fixation is how this outcome is best achieved. Peirce then concludes, famously, that if one concedes that much, one must hold the scientific method to be superior, as all other methods lead to unstable beliefs. On this holistic interpretation, it is strictly speaking unnecessary to claim, as Peirce initially does, that the settlement of opinion is the sole aim of inquiry. Rather, what he should have stated is that if, in the beginning of the investigation, we agree on nothing else, we must at least agree that everyone values having stable opinions.
I am here assuming a standard fallibilist account of justification according to which a belief can be justified without being true.
I am grateful to anonymous referee for stressing this point.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to three anonymous referees for their careful reading of earlier versions and for many helpful suggestions.
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Olsson, E.J. Engel vs. Rorty on truth. Synthese 194, 1433–1450 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0968-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0968-x