Abstract
It is commonplace to describe the pragmatist conception of truth (PT) as incompatible with correspondence theory. This popular description relies on a deflationary reading of Peirce and James’s many apparent endorsements of correspondence. This reading says they regarded it as a mere platitude or truism, not as a substantive piece of philosophical theorizing. There are two main reasons typically offered in support of this platitude narrative – (1) its consonance with Peirce’s original formulation of PT from 1878, and (2) the objections that pragmatists (including Peirce himself) frequently raised against various notions traditionally associated with CT (e.g. metaphysical realism, representationalism, etc.). I argue that neither reason is compelling and that PT and CT are compatible conceptions of truth.
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Notes
Misak 2018, p. 283.
Popular texts satisfying this description include Blackburn & Simmons (Ed.) 1999, Burgess and Burgess 2011, or Wrenn 2015. Contrast Kirkham 1992 and Raatikainen forthcoming, both of which acknowledge the difficulty of classifying pragmatism in relation to its supposed ‘rival theories’. The statement is also not borne out by historical scholarship, as this paper will show.
Of course, any theory of truth must incorporate an unknowable element, in the sense that there are inevitably some truths that may be unknowable. Thus, a better term here might be ‘incognizable’, for reasons I examine later.
‘Realism’ here means roughly the idea that there are real ‘generals’, such as laws, habits, and beliefs. It can also be understood, per Haack 1987 as ‘a claim to the effect that certain ways of classifying things are right, in the sense that they classify together things which really… are alike, and others are wrong.’ (p. 282)
I have in mind here scholars such as Brandom, Hookway, Misak, Price, and Rorty.
The other aspect is variously described as ‘fated convergence of opinion’, ‘inclusion in the ideal theory’, or as ‘indefeasible belief’, depending on how the author interprets Peirce.
See e.g. Vision 2009, pp. 15–16.
This formulation appears in EP 2:457 and appears to amend his earlier formulations in terms of ‘fated’ or ‘predestined’ opinions at the ‘ideal limit’ of inquiry. See Atkins (2016), p. 1187. Note that throughout, I follow Lane’s example in understanding ‘investigation’ to mean inquiry in accordance with the method of science, as described in Fixation. I also use small caps to denote the concept being clarified.
i.e. the assertion of a logical equivalence that putatively exhausts the content of the concept, such as: p is true iff it would be justified p under ideal epistemic conditions. See e.g. Wright 1992. Unfortunately, numerous analytic philosophers have nevertheless presented (and continue to present) pragmatist conceptions of truth in precisely such terms. See my (Howat 2013).
The label ‘pragmatic maxim’ is not Peirce’s but has become standard (see e.g. Hookway 2012). Peirce is explicit that he does not think the maxim can deliver the highest grade of clarity about every concept, see e.g. 5.467, 1905. All quotations in the next few paragraphs come from Ideas. As Lane 2018a rightly observes, many commentators fail to notice that Peirce does not apply the maxim (directly) to truth in Ideas.
The familiar story is that the cynic Diogenes of Sinope plucked a chicken and presented it to the Academy as the “Platonic human”, prompting the academy to amend its definition to include ‘…with flattened nails’. This is presumably an illustration of what it means for a definition to prove itself unable to survive dialectical examination as well as what fixing it might look like.
This echoes Peirce’s critique of what he calls the a priori method of inquiry in Fixation, viz. that it does not allow reality – something truly independent of what anyone thinks about it – to play a role in fixing or determining our beliefs.
No single pragmatic elucidation is exhaustive or final. Rather, our attitude towards such elucidations must always be fallibilist (individual clarifications can later be found to be incorrect), context-bound (the concept itself might evolve when deployed in novel contexts or situations), and open-ended (we will likely continue to learn a significant number of new things about the content of a concept over time as we interact with its instances). As Almeder 1979 points out, while the maxim appears to entail the claim that ‘the meaning of any sentence is exhausted by its sensory implications’, Peirce also held that ‘the sensory implications are unlimited.’ (p. 4). This marks pragmatic elucidation as crucially different from more familiar forms of reductive conceptual analysis. It also puts the possibility of a truly “analytic pragmatism” in doubt, pace Brandom 2008.
Later in his career, Peirce is explicit about the maxim producing conditionals with a specific syntactical/grammatical form, viz. subjunctive conditionals with consequents in the imperative mood - 5.18 (1903).
Bearing in mind that ‘science’, for Peirce and for other writers of his era, has a broader extension than it does in contemporary usage, e.g. Peirce regarded ethics, aesthetics, and logic as ‘normative sciences’.
Especially by those who subscribe to the popular, anti-representationalist characterization of pragmatism. See e.g. Brandom 1988.
Advocates of the platitude narrative, of course, are well aware of this evidence and have their own story about the significance of Peirce’s subsequent remarks. I deal one such response in §2.1.
On the meaning of ‘substantive’ in this context, see my (Howat 2018).
Though Short rightly highlights Peirce’s reservations about the term ‘representation’ (see esp., ch. 2).
Peirce understands the term ‘nominalism’ in an unusual and very broad sense, comprehensively treated in Forster 2011.
I’m inspired here by Legg and Giladi 2018.
For more on these see e.g. Atkins 2016 and my 2018.
Putnam 1994 describes the rejection of skepticism as one of four characteristics of pragmatism.
Of course, to do this it must supply the relevant specifications. But as I said above, I think it’s clear Peirce does this (see §3).
That is, Lane believes this was Peirce’s view by around 1905, after he had revisited his argument in Ideas and made key adjustments.
See Russell 1992 [1909]; McDermid 2006, p. 34, Sher 2016, p. 136, and Vision 2009 (Preface, x) who writes: “[CT] doesn’t even, as some of its competitors do, give us something to go by, a criterion, for detecting particular truths. Rather, it lays out the conditions for a use of a truth concept (presumably, our current one)…”.
That is to say, our ordinary criteria for identifying elements likely appeal to more immediately sensible qualities such as color, density, reactivity of various kinds, etc. This is not to deny that in highly specialized contexts in which atomic weights are the only pertinent/available data, it might serve as a useful criterion. The same may apply, mutatis mutandis, to truth as correspondence. That is, we might end up saying that ordinarily, correspondence is not something we can or do rely upon to determine the truth of something, but in certain special cases (such as evaluating the accuracy of a picture or a map, for example), it might well be useful. See Hookway 2002 for this line of thought in action (though Hookway does not seem to recognize this as a threat to what I’ve called the platitude narrative).
For example: “cognizability (in its widest sense) and being are not merely metaphysically the same, but are synonymous terms.” (W2:208, 1868). Though see Wilson (forthcoming) for an argument that Peirce’s position on this is complicated.
One might be tempted to argue that since virtually everyone understands CT as inherently nominalist, this justifies rejecting (CT) in favor of a thicker or more substantive criterion. Misak 2018 appears to make precisely this argument, so I address it in §3.
Though again, Wilson (forthcoming) provides a helpful counterpoint here.
This is what a pragmatist means by the term ‘mind-independence’. Notice that it does not entail that mind-independent things are incognizable or independent of ‘thought in general’.
I’m indebted to two anonymous referees for pressing me on this important point.
Misak 2018, p. 426
Perhaps someone might object that this move is question-begging. There are two things to say here. First, as should be clear from the above, Peirce and other pragmatists offer plenty of independent arguments for the conclusion that these terms ought to be understood in this way (and against nominalist alternatives); PT does not start with these understandings but reaches them by arguing for and then applying the pragmatic maxim. Second, even if that weren’t the case, if correct, this objection would make it equally question-begging to require that the terms be understood in a way acceptable to a nominalist. This is precisely why only a schematic or minimal characterization like (CT) can work here – if we introduce any further substance, we beg the question and rule out positions with a genuine claim to being correspondence theories. Indeed, I take this to be the whole rationale for David’s offering a minimal or schematic characterization. Vision 2009 does the same thing for the same reason.
Per Peirce’s remark to this effect at 5.408, 1878.
Which in turn is inspired by Migotti’s 1998 interpretation of Peirce’s pioneering effort to reconcile truth’s independence (from what you or I or anyone believes) with its accessibility (a true proposition’s being necessarily cognizable).
Haack 1987, pp. 288–9.
It is, of course, completely open to Peirce scholars to argue that Peirce shouldn’t have done this and this may well be why some cling to the platitude narrative. Yet as Atkins 2016 notes, Peirce’s distinctive vision of facts is ‘virtually unstudied’ (p. 1177), so it is, at best, unclear that his ontology of facts has been rejected for good reason (and seems likely it has been rejected based on the assumption that a nominalist ontology of facts would be unacceptable to a pragmatist).
Atkins 2016, 1182–3.
One other consideration that deserves more space than I can give it here - if a pragmatist concedes the platitude that truth is correspondence with reality, but refuses to offer any further explanation of what this means, it is (at best) not obvious they are observing Peirce’s single most important philosophical injunction - “Do not block the way of inquiry!”.
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Howat, A. Pragmatism and Correspondence. Philosophia 49, 685–704 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00261-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00261-y