The Pragmatists and the Human Logic of Truth
|Chapter 2
Pragmatist truth: Cash value or ideal value? The main objections
Entrées d'index
Texte intégral
1I shall be quick on the well-known objections that have been raised against the pragmatists’ account of truth.
1. First objection: truth as utility
- 1 James, P, p. 106; James, MT, p. 42.
- 2 Engel, 2002, Truth, p. 35.
- 3 On this, see Dokic & Engel, Ramsey, vérité et succès, 2001, p. 43.
2The most current objection to the pragmatist theory of truth is that utility is neither necessary (there are useful false beliefs) nor sufficient (there are useless true beliefs) for truth. Under its crude form, the Jamesian thesis: “the true is only the expedient”1 is open to quite obvious objections. For there are many things which it may be useful to believe and yet which are patently false and vice versa. In many cases too, ignorance, credulity, even stupidity turn out to have more cash value than knowledge or intelligence. And there is an infinite number of truths which it is frankly useless to believe. Besides what is the criterion of utility? Not only is it very hard to determine when the consequences of a belief are good, but the criterion of utility depends most often on our opinions. It may vary from one individual to another, from a community to another and pragmatism is quickly apt to sink into mere relativism.2 Ramsey here has set the view straight.3
- 4 Ramsey, OT, 91.
Let us take, for example, the belief in hell. To say a man believes in hell means, according to the pragmatists, that he avoids doing those things which would result in his being thrown into hell, and which he would not avoid on account of any other consequences they may have. Such conduct will be useful to the man if it really saves him from hell, but if there is no such place, it will be a mere waste of opportunities for enjoyment. But besides this primary utility there are other ways in which such conduct may or may not be useful to the man or others; the actions from which a belief in hell cause him to abstain might bring disasters in their train either for him or for others even in his present life. But these other consequences of the belief, whether useful or not, are clearly not relevant to its propositional reference or truth, and if the pragmatist definition makes them relevant this only shows that the definition must be corrected by qualifying clauses or even abandoned altogether.4
3A belief is not true because it is useful, but useful because it is true. Our beliefs are true when our actions are successful, and vice versa, but neither can be reduced to the other. A belief is a successful disposition to act, if and only if the belief is true. In other words: p is true iff p is useful and p is useful iff p is true.
- 5 Putnam, CCWJ, p. 178.
All the elements of James’s theory of truth –the Peircean component, the idea that our practical interests play a role, James’s conception of ‘agreement,’ and the notion that truth ‘happens’ to an idea – have to be kept in mind when one is interpreting any single statement in James’s complex text.5
- 6 Haack, 1976, “The pragmatist theory of truth”, p. 237.
- 7 Russell, 1908, “James’s Conception of Truth”.
- 8 James, MT, p. 146-147.
4As inquiry only ends by acquiring a stable belief, the true is indeed what it is satisfactory to believe. And since to be satisfied by a belief is first of all not to be disturbed by a doubt, truth is indeed somewhat redundant with belief. But this does not imply that truth is a pseudo-problem, that truth and satisfaction are two synonymous terms, or that “satisfactory” should be interpreted as “emotionally” comfortable.6 So, when Russell accuses the pragmatists of subjectivism,7 James refutes this accusation which amounts to assimilate the useful or advantageous consequences of a belief to a mere criterion of truth. But those consequences are “proposed”, he contends, “rather as the lurking motive inside of every truth-claim, whether the ‘trower’ be conscious of such motive, or whether he obey it blindly. They are proposed as the causa existendi of our beliefs, not as their logical cue or premise, and still less as their objective deliverance in content. They assign the only intelligible practical meaning to that difference in our beliefs which our habit of calling them true or false comports.”8
2. Second objection: the confusion between criterion and definition
- 9 Haack 1976, “The pragmatist theory of truth”, p. 237.
5The pragmatists are also accused of having confused criterion and definition. But such a criticism, again, is ill-founded, since such a dichotomy is precisely what their theory of meaning finds unacceptable. If this is a confusion, then one has to show it in criticizing their theory of meaning itself.9
6Now such a theory presents original and fruitful elements, provided at least one sees that the insistency on the necessary links to be established between meaning and its sensible effects, experiences, practices and actions, should not be taken in a reductive sense, but, on the contrary, in the sense in which:
- 10 Thayer, 1981, Meaning and Action: a critical history of pragmatism, p. 140.
(1) it is better to favor the habitual or dispositional rather than the sensational (James) effects;10
- 11 For example, to say that a diamond is hard does not mean that if it is pressed upon, it will be scr (...)
(2) experiences should be taken in a general, possible, conditional (or Peirce’s realistic) sense of “would-be” (and not as singular, concrete, present or even future ones);11
(3) the practices and actions implied in meaning are conceived and aim at an end: they are conducts oriented towards the development of concrete reasonability;
(4) whatever means we have in order to individualize and singularize our statements (in particular through indices and icons which come and give a hand to propositional symbols), the meaning of any proposition remains irreducibly indeterminate (under both forms of generality and vagueness);
- 12 Misak, 2004a, “Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)”, p. 4.
(5) finally, Peirce often says that the pragmatist maxim merely captures one part of what is implied in knowing the meaning of an expression which is never given by a simple definition, but provided by the pragmatic elucidation to which one proceeds, afterwards, in examining the practices, context, etc. associated with it.12 In that respect, pragmatism is a form of or at least, has close links with, contextualism.
- 13 Putnam, 2001, “Skepticism, Stroud and the Contextuality of Knowledge”.
- 14 Ibid., p. 2.
- 15 Ibid., p. 3.
- 16 Ibid., p. 5.
- 17 Tiercelin, 2005, Le Doute en question, conclusion.
7This is a feature on which Putnam has insisted in his criticism of scepticism and of the arguments for it put forward by Barry Stroud, recalling that such teachings may also be found in Austin and Wittgenstein.13 If skepticism seems to have some weight on us, it is because we leave it impress us by some erroneous conceptions of meaning and knowledge, and that we forget, in particular to what extent the possibilities of error that should be taken account of before claiming to know anything must be so only in respect with their sensitivity to the particular context in which they are expressed. Which does not mean that the meaning of what we say should vary from one context to another: to mean something, is indeed to say something about the world, which implies, on the part of the speaker, that he possesses certain competences, that he “knows the meaning” of each sentence he is able to use before using it, or that he understands its use by another speaker of the sentence in the context; and for sure, such a “knowledge of the meaning” plays an essential role in that it enables the speaker to know what use is being made of the sentence in the context.14 It also implies constraints (what Peirce would call the presence of the dynamical object) on what the speaker can do with the sentences, if he does not want to violate or modify the meaning. However, contrary to those who treat meanings as “Platonic objects” or “mental objects” and view the “meaning” of a sentence as determining the truth-evaluable content of that sentence, for the contextualist pragmatist, “the truth-evaluable content of sentences depends both on what they mean (what a competent speaker knows prior to encountering a particular context) and on the particular context, and not on meaning alone.”15 Now all the skill of the sceptic consists in letting us believe that to doubt, know, mean, are enterprises which it is possible to envisage and evaluate outside any context.16 However, as I have argued,17 although pragmatists (at least in Peirce’s sense) admit some contextualist elements, it is important to bear in mind that they resist a purely contextualist understanding of meaning and a purely contextualist approach to knowledge.
3. Third objection: against verificationism
- 18 Haack, 1976, “The pragmatist theory of truth”, p. 234; Ayer, introduction to James, MT and P, 1975, (...)
8In spite of the fact that Peirce’s views were for a long time associated with verificationism, it is of course James who has mostly defended truth in terms of verification. Yet, on that ground once more, one should be cautious.18 Indeed, if James seems to be more interested in particular truths which can be verified in the short run, than in the totality constituted by the individual truths reached in the long run, first he does not limit true ideas to those that are actually verified but to the ideas of which it is possible to say that they will be, hence to the ideas that are verifiable and in the long run. Secondly, James admits that most of the beliefs we judge true are only at best verified in an indirect way.
- 19 James, P, p. 100.
Truth lives, in fact, for the most part, on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs ‘pass,’ so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.19
- 20 James, P, p. 99.
Thirdly, some proposition can be said true or false, even if no one has ever verified or falsified, or even envisaged them: but such a way of expressing oneself has little interest.20
- 21 That is what James plainly says in MT, p. 121
- 22 Haack, 1976, “The Pragmatist theory of truth”, p. 239.
- 23 Putnam, CCWJ, p. 177ff.; Haack, 1984, “Can James’s Theory of Truth Be Made More Satisfactory?”
- 24 Peirce, CP, 6.485.
9So a pragmatist does not necessarily defend a theory of truth according to which truth is verification. And if he takes the true to be the verifiable, it is most often to link it with a verificationist theory of meaning, the meaning of a proposition being its conformity with possible experience, or its verification (including its ideal verification) and it is, by the way, what confers once again an irreducible indeterminacy to meaning. Even so: the difficulties James encounters in trying to replace “verifiable” by “truth” lead him also to hold that Truth is a “growing corpus”, which individual truths join as they are verified; to that extent, as Haack does not fail to observe, he hardly can resist the objection according to which “if a belief is true just in case it is verifiable, all these individual truths are true before they are verified;21 so the Truth consists always of the same truths, and does not, after all grow.”22 So there really is a tension (or rather “inconsistency”) here between two theses;23 (1) the view that truth should be taken as an agreement with a reality which is independent of us; (2) the view that truth is something that we make. In virtue of (1), truth is discovered: as soon as one discovers that a judgment is true, it always was. In virtue of (2), truth is created: judgments that were not true before become true. Now, these are prima facie two contradictory theses. And Peirce, alluding to (2) did not fail to denounce what he called James’s “mutability of truth” conception: “It seems to me a pity [James] should allow a philosophy so instinct with life to become infected with seeds of death in such notions as that of… the mutability of truth”.24
4. Fourth objection: against Peirce’s view of truth as a “limit” and as “ultimate opinion”
- 25 Peirce, W 3, p. 273.
10The true, in his view, is mainly defined as “the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate.”25 Or in Putnam’s words:
- 26 Putnam, RTH, p. 49-50 & 61.
‘Truth’ is some sort of (idealized) rational acceptability – some sort of ideal coherence of our beliefs with each other and with our experience as those experiences are themselves represented in our belief system – and not correspondence with mind-independent or discourse-independent states of affairs.26
- 27 Putnam, CFVD, p. 123.
Many, including Putnam himself, have objected that this implies an excessive idealization.27
- 28 Russell, 1939, « Dewey’s New Logic ».
“It is metaphysically impossible for there to be any truths that are not verifiable by human beings”. Russell also mocked the “social prophecy” which he saw in the idea that the beliefs held by the last man on earth whatever they are, will be true: “As the last man on earth will presumably be entirely occupied in keeping warm and getting nourishment, it is doubtful whether his opinion will be any wiser than ours.”28
11There is a large controversy about Peirce’s idea here. I shall only mention the main responses to such charges of idealization. First when Peirce talks of agreement at the limit of inquiry he does not mean systematic convergence. Consensus on truth is an agreement which does not imply that one gets closer to a limit, by some sort of convergence. Peirce is even so little convinced by the view that hypotheses would be getting closer to the truth that he observes that opinion can oscillate throughout generations before one comes to a permanent fixation:
- 29 Peirce, W 3, p. 79.
The perversity or ignorance of mankind may make this thing or that to be held for true, for any number of generations, but it cannot affect what would be the result of sufficient experience and reasoning. And this is what is meant by the final settled opinion.29
- 30 Wright, 1992, Truth and Objectivity, p. 45. “Peircian truth” has been defined by Wright as “what is (...)
- 31 Peirce, CP, 2.661, 5.457, 2.664 & 6.610.
- 32 Peirce, CP, 6.610.
12Second, the notion of “final opinion” can mean two things.30 (1) The future sense: The community will find an answer to all the questions to which it is possible to answer, and truth is the product to which the scientific community is destined. A true hypothesis therefore is a hypothesis on which one would agree if inquiry were pursued long enough, at the limit. (2) Truth is what the community would come to, if it were to pursue its search indefinitely. But it is the second option – i.e. that of a conditional conception of truth31 – to which he really commits himself. So it might well be that some questions to which one could de jure bring an answer, did not find any; and that one never reached on them any truth.32
- 33 Peirce, CP, 5.565.
Truth is a character which attaches to an abstract proposition, such as a person might utter. It essentially depends upon that proposition's not professing to be exactly true. But we hope that in the progress of science its error will indefinitely diminish, just as the error of 3.14159, the value given for π, will indefinitely diminish as the calculation is carried to more and more places of decimals. What we call π is an ideal limit to which no numerical expression can be perfectly true.33
13That definition, given by Peirce for the Baldwin Dictionary, calls for two remarks. First, reality is not limited to the simple external reality of the phenomena, but it extends to entities which are not liable to observations. To decide or to agree on the fact that something is true is not, therefore, to verify by observation that such is the case:
- 34 Peirce, CP, 5.565.
The truth of the proposition that Caesar crossed the Rubicon consists in the fact that the further we push our archaeological and other studies, the more strongly will that conclusion force itself on our minds forever – or would do so, if study were to go on forever.34
Which makes it possible to say, in the second place, that statements about the past or about unobservable entities, but also ethical statements are, in principle candidates for truth; even though they have no link whatsoever with empirical observation:
- 35 Peirce, CP, 5.589).
There are certain inferences which, scientifically considered, are undoubtedly hypotheses and yet which practically are perfectly certain. Such for instance is the inference that Napoleon Bonaparte really lived at about the beginning of this century, a hypothesis which we adopt for the purpose of explaining the concordant testimony of a hundred memoirs, the public records of history, tradition, and numberless monuments and relics. It would surely be downright insanity to entertain a doubt about Napoleon's existence. A still better example is that of the translations of the cuneiform inscriptions. […] We call them in science established truths, that is, they are propositions into which the economy of endeavor prescribes that, for the time being, further inquiry shall cease.35
- 36 Hookway, 2000, Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism, p. 49.
- 37 Ibid.
14So it is important to bear in mind that Peirce’s position does not require that we can ever reach, or even make sense of, a state of perfect evidence. It requires only “that we can reach a state where no further evidence would disturb the belief that we have arrived at.”36 Which, in Peirce’s mind, means that, even if we have reached a point at which our opinions as responsible inquirers are not going to be disturbed by further inquiry, “we never have any absolute guarantee that this position has been reached.”37 No matter how confident we are that we have the truth, further experience could surprise us and oblige us to throw all our beliefs overboard.
- 38 Misak 1998, “Deflating Truth: Pragmatism vs. Minimalism”, p. 408.
Far from suggesting that a belief is one which we find good to believe at the moment, he argued that since we cannot know when we have a belief which would never lead to disappointment, we cannot know when we have a true belief. Nonetheless, when we offer a justification for ‘p is true’, we give a justification for the claim that p itself. For what we do when we try to establish the truth of a claim is to show that, thus far, it fits with all the evidence and argument and that we have reason to think that it will continue to do so. So truth is connected to human inquiry (it is the best that inquiry could do), but it goes beyond any particular inquiry (it is not simply the upshot of our best attempts).38
- 39 Peirce, CP, 5.589.
So, according to Peirce, what we call in science “established truths” are “propositions into which the economy of endeavor prescribes that, for the time being, further inquiry shall cease.”39
This remark helps us to answer a Fifth Objection connected to the preceding one.
5. Fifth objection: the buried secrets
15How should we analyze those “buried secrets”, those hypotheses which must, or so we think, have determinate truth-values, but which will not be agreed to be true or false, no matter how far inquiry is prolonged?
- 40 Peirce, “How to make our ideas clear” (1878), W 3, 274.
But I may be asked what I have to say to all the minute facts of history, forgotten never to be recovered, to the lost books of the ancients, to the buried secrets. […] Do these things not really exist because they are hopelessly beyond the reach of our knowledge?40
As Misak remarks:
- 41 Misak, 1991, Truth and the End of Inquiry, p. 139.
We surely think, for example, that the issue of how many times Churchill sneezed in 1949 is an objective one: the hypothesis “Churchill sneezed exactly fifty-two times in 1949” is either true or false. But it is extremely unlikely that inquiry would ever settle the issue of how many times Churchill sneezed in a given year. It is not, it seems, a consequence of the true hypothesis that Churchill sneezed some n times that inquiry would finally settle upon that. And thus it seems that, on Peirce’s account, the hypothesis has no truth-value. The principle of bivalence does not hold in a case in which it seems that it should hold.41
- 42 Peirce, CP, 4.547n1 & 7.35.
How many times did Churchill sneeze in 1941? How many cigars did Castro smoke? True: even if the opinion is fated to come to agreement, such a fate has nothing of a blind and rigid mechanism. Relying on his propensity view on probabilities, Peirce compares this rather to the throwing of a pair of dice: when you throw a pair of dice, you can be sure that it will not fail to obey at one moment its would-be, its propensity to fall on a double six, although this does not imply any logical necessity.42
- 43 See Tiercelin 1993a, Peirce et le pragmatisme, p. 99-101; Engel, 1983, “Croyances, dispositions et (...)
- 44 Peirce, W 3, p. 281.
- 45 Peirce, W 2, p. 100.
- 46 Peirce, W 3, p. 293.
- 47 Peirce, CP, 8.380.
- 48 ¨Peirce, CP, 5.457.
- 49 See Levi,1997a, “Inference and Logic according to Peirce”, p. 46.
16Such a conception is very important to make sense of the type of scientific realism Peirce has in view, and also of what distinguishes (or not) his position from Ramsey’s.43 Peirce insists in particular on the fact that it is but in a relaxed manner that we can talk of the “probability of an hypothesis” or of a “conclusion”: in all the cases, if we do, it must be identical to the measure of the success- ratio of the type-argument;44 for a probability attribution is the representation of a “general statistical fact”, or of a “real objective fact”.45 If one can therefore in a sense (as Ramsey will also acknowledge) take account of some degrees of belief in a hypothesis “which varies with the chance of the thing believed, as deduced from all the arguments,”46 it is provided those have an “intimate connection with” objective probabilities. In that respect, Peirce would have been opposed to what we nowadays call ‘bayesianism’, and would have had little sympathy for the kind of weight Ramsey puts on the fact that the rational agents have probability distributions in terms of degrees of beliefs which are numerically determined on any space of possibilities. In the same way, it is only in a relaxed way that one can talk of the probability of an “event” in an “absolute” sense, the chance of an event is linked with the combination of all the relevant arguments which exist for us in our present state of knowledge. The probabilities of hypotheses, of degrees of beliefs, and “absolute” or “antecedent” probabilities must therefore all be inferred from empirical confirmations alone – relative frequencies observed from the success of type-arguments. Probability, for Peirce, is a matter of propensities (of would be as will also be the case with Popper) i.e. relational physical properties understood as the products of consistent experimental devices47 but irreducible to them: for they are only relative to our knowledge and to the experimental set up; they are relational properties, not indeed in the sense of “permanent entities”, but, at least of “tendencies” or “dispositions”,48 in a way close to what is defended today by such advocates of “dispositional essentialism” as Brian Ellis or Alexander Bird. However, Peirce would agree with Ramsey (who considers himself a disciple) on many points, in particular on the fact that it is possible to establish a logic of coherence for probable inference as well as it is for deductive inference.49
- 50 Peirce, W 2, p. 272.
- 51 Misak, 1991, Truth and the End of Inquiry, p. 140.
- 52 Peirce, CP, 5.603.
- 53 Misak, 1991, Truth and the End of Inquiry, p. 140-141. If the principle of bivalence holds, then ev (...)
17But even if we cannot be “sure that the community ever will settle down to an unalterable conclusion upon any given question”, we must assume hope for the possible application of the principle of bivalence, for “the only assumption upon which [we] can act rationally is the hope of success,”50 in other words, we must have the hope (a regulative though living hope) that for any hypothesis “a prolonged inquiry would declare it to be either true or false;”51 otherwise, it would “block the path of inquiry” and make oneself unable to know any positive fact whatsoever.52 The question whether such and such hypothesis is objective may be something that one only knows in the long run. But it is yet possible, now and then, here and there, to have more or less reasonable beliefs on which hypotheses are objective and which are not.53
18If such were not the case, then no hypothesis would have any pragmatic meaning and one would adopt an anti-philosophical attitude.
- 54 Peirce, W 3, p. 274 (1878).
Though in no possible state of knowledge can any number be great enough to express the relation between the amount of what rests unknown to the amount of the known, yet it is un-philosophical to suppose that with regard to any given question (which has any clear meaning), investigation would not bring forth a solution of it, if it were carried far enough.54
Thus Peirce is neither an unbound idealist nor a fanatical anti-realist. It is more accurate to say that he constantly oscillates between a more optimistic attitude and an attitude close, in many respects, due to the radical both epistemic and ontological fallibilism he also defends, to scepticism itself (more on this later).
19Hence (1)
- 55 Peirce, CP, 5.407.
On the other hand, all the followers of science are animated by a cheerful hope that the processes of investigation, if only pushed far enough, will give one certain solution to each question to which they apply it. […] This great hope is embodied in the conception of truth and reality. The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality.55
Or:
- 56 Peirce, CP, 7.77.
I will assume, then, that scientific doubt never gets completely set to rest in regard to any question until, at last, the very truth about that question becomes established…science is foredestined to reach the truth of every problem with as unerring an infallibility as the instincts of animals do their work, this latter result like the former being brought about by some process of which we are as yet unable to give any account.56
(2) But also:
- 57 Letter of 1908 to Lady Welby, in Peirce, 1958, Selected Writings, p. 398.
I do not say that it is infallibly true that there is any belief to which a person would come if he were to carry his inquires far enough. I only say that that one is what I call Truth. I cannot infallibly know that there is any truth.57
Or:
- 58 Peirce, CP, 7.219.
We are therefore bound to hope that, although the possible explanations of our facts may be strictly innumerable, yet our mind will be able, in some finite number of guesses, to guess the sole true explanation of them. That we are bound to assume, independently of any evidence that it is true.58
- 59 Apel, 1982, “C.S.Peirce and the Post-Tarskian Problem of an Adequate Explication of the Meaning of (...)
- 60 Putnam, CFVD, p. 123.
- 61 MS 496, in Peirce, 1966, The Charles S. Peirce Papers, Microfilm Edition.
- 62 Peirce, CP, 5.357, 5.160, 2.650, 2.655, 8.153.
- 63 Peirce, CP, 2.113 (1901); cf. 3.432.
- 64 Peirce, CP, 7.219 (1901); W 2, p. 272.
- 65 Peirce, CP, 7.219.
- 66 Peirce, CP, 6.610 (1893).
20Putnam is therefore wrong, when he, again recently, blames Peirce – and also Apel who follows him59 – for holding a theory of truth one “essential” feature of which would be that it is “metaphysically impossible for there to be any truths that are not verifiable by human beings”,60 and for seeing in it a form of anti-realism, because he “would make the limits of what can be true of the world dependent on the limits of human verification capacities”. Not only Peirce does not claim that one will reach agreement on all questions: the fact that it is logically possible that inquiry should go on indefinitely without producing a final answer only shows that to some questions there is no answer61, not that for all question which is capable of receiving one, one will not reach an ultimate answer. But, once again, the notion that science will continue in fact and that on all the questions liable to receive an answer an ultimate opinion will be reached is most often described as a hope or a presupposition of human rationality.62 Peirce has always the view that it is not because a thing is indispensable that it is necessarily true, and in a version of the Kantian difference between a hundred real thalers and a hundred possible thalers, he says: “I do not admit that indispensability is any ground of belief. It may be indispensable that I should have $500 in the bank – because I have given checks to that amount. But I have never found that the indispensability directly affected my balance, in the least.”63 Simply, one must start form that principle “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.”64 It is something “that we are bound to assume, independently of any evidence that it is true.”65 We cannot be sure that the community ever will settle down to an unalterable conclusion upon any given question. Even if they do so for the most part, we have no reason to think the unanimity will be quite complete, nor can we rationally presume any overwhelming consensus of opinion will be reached upon every question.66
- 67 Ramsey, OT, p 96.
21But Putnam is also wrong to make an anti-realist of Peirce in a second way. Indeed Peirce is the first to underline the possible (even probable) reality and irreducibility of vagueness. What Ramsey also seems to envisage, remarking, in passing, that the admission of vagueness could be an argument which the coherentists might use, but which, in fact they are not aware of:67 this is why, as pointed out previously, there are answers which inquiry will never reach, but also questions which are intrinsically vague to which no answer will ever be given, or to which it would be pointless to try and find one (how many times did Polonius cut his hair?)
22But fundamentally, Peirce’s conception of truth is such that he who searches it may be able and forced to adopt it. The human logic of truth he defends goes hand in hand with the view that:
- 68 Ms 684, p. 11, 1913, quoted by C. Misak, 1991, Truth and the End of Inquiry, p. 159.
Real pragmatic truth is truth as can and ought to be used as a guide for conduct.68
Such a conception presents at least three advantages: “to provide the rational framework for inquiry to proceed” (hence, I would say, it is genuinely “logical”), to “make sense of the practice of inquiry as the search for truth”, as something which is not transcendent, beyond inquiry, but accessible (hence, it is, I would add, genuinely “human”), and finally “to justify a methodology” by encouraging the inquirer to put his beliefs to the test of experience. As Misak remarks,
- 69 Misak, 1991, Truth and the End of Inquiry, p. 154.
Peirce’s distinctive contribution to debates about truth is to see that, if the aim of inquiry is to get true beliefs, then truth must be thought of as the best that inquiry would do, given as much time and evidence as it takes to reach beliefs which would not be overturned.69
- 70 Misak, Ibid., p. 163.
- 71 Peirce, CP, 5.565; 5.89.
23Truth is not an “honorific” term which we put on warranted beliefs (James, Rorty); if we have no serious reason to refuse to call a certain hypothesis true, then we should call it so.70 Peirce does not go so far as claiming that a hypothesis which would be believed at the end of inquiry would thereby be necessarily true (his fallibilism forbids it, in particular), but he finds it hard to give any meaning to the view according to which the best possible hypotheses that inquiry might produce, could be false, or again, that one could reasonably doubt some statements on the past, even if they transcend our possibilities of verification.71 Strictly speaking, then, one cannot demonstrate the exclusion, on any topic whatever, of the logical possibility of error, but the fact that it is logically possible for a thesis to be false, does not imply that it should be doubted. It is always possible that one should come to an agreement on the false and not on the true, but this is very unlikely. And, obviously, contrary to a presupposition rendered necessary by the success science encounters in the settlements of conflicting opinions,
- 72 Peirce, CP, 8.43.
if we think that some questions are never going to get settled, we ought to admit that our conception of nature as absolutely real is only partially correct. Still, we shall have to be governed by it practically; because there is nothing to distinguish the unanswerable questions from the answerable ones, so that investigation will have to proceed as if all were answerable. In ordinary life, no matter how much we believe in questions ultimately getting answered, we shall always put aside an innumerable throng of them as beyond our powers. We shall not in our day seek to know whether the centre of the sun is distant from that of the earth by an odd or an even number of miles on the average; we shall act as if neither man nor God could ever ascertain it. There is, however, an economy of thought, in assuming that it is an answerable question. From this practical and economical point of view, it really makes no difference whether or not all questions are actually answered, by man or by God, so long as we are satisfied that investigation has a universal tendency toward the settlement of opinion.72
Notes
1 James, P, p. 106; James, MT, p. 42.
2 Engel, 2002, Truth, p. 35.
3 On this, see Dokic & Engel, Ramsey, vérité et succès, 2001, p. 43.
4 Ramsey, OT, 91.
5 Putnam, CCWJ, p. 178.
6 Haack, 1976, “The pragmatist theory of truth”, p. 237.
7 Russell, 1908, “James’s Conception of Truth”.
8 James, MT, p. 146-147.
9 Haack 1976, “The pragmatist theory of truth”, p. 237.
10 Thayer, 1981, Meaning and Action: a critical history of pragmatism, p. 140.
11 For example, to say that a diamond is hard does not mean that if it is pressed upon, it will be scratched, but that if it were, it would be scratched: which amounts to admit that hardness is a dispositional property of the diamond whose reality cannot be reduced to its hic et nunc observable or experimental effects, but is, strictly speaking, conditional and capable of being formulated in terms of a law of nature: in a word, just as the existence of external realities depends on the fact that opinion will finally settle in beliefs in them, those realities existed before belief appeared and even caused that belief. “Though the hardness is entirely constituted by the fact of another stone rubbing against the diamond yet we do not conceive of it as beginning to be hard when the other stone is rubbed against it; on the contrary, we say that it is really hard the whole time, and has been hard since it began to be a diamond. And yet there was no fact, no event, nothing whatever, which made it different from any other thing which is not so hard, until the other stone was rubbed against it.” (Peirce, CP, 7.340.)
12 Misak, 2004a, “Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)”, p. 4.
13 Putnam, 2001, “Skepticism, Stroud and the Contextuality of Knowledge”.
14 Ibid., p. 2.
15 Ibid., p. 3.
16 Ibid., p. 5.
17 Tiercelin, 2005, Le Doute en question, conclusion.
18 Haack, 1976, “The pragmatist theory of truth”, p. 234; Ayer, introduction to James, MT and P, 1975,p. xxii.
19 James, P, p. 100.
20 James, P, p. 99.
21 That is what James plainly says in MT, p. 121
22 Haack, 1976, “The Pragmatist theory of truth”, p. 239.
23 Putnam, CCWJ, p. 177ff.; Haack, 1984, “Can James’s Theory of Truth Be Made More Satisfactory?”
24 Peirce, CP, 6.485.
25 Peirce, W 3, p. 273.
26 Putnam, RTH, p. 49-50 & 61.
27 Putnam, CFVD, p. 123.
28 Russell, 1939, « Dewey’s New Logic ».
29 Peirce, W 3, p. 79.
30 Wright, 1992, Truth and Objectivity, p. 45. “Peircian truth” has been defined by Wright as “what is justified at an ideal limit of enquiry”. Not only it would be a state where all information has been taken into account for an assertion, but also of which the inquirer would be aware. But this is a complete distortion of Peirce’s thought.
31 Peirce, CP, 2.661, 5.457, 2.664 & 6.610.
32 Peirce, CP, 6.610.
33 Peirce, CP, 5.565.
34 Peirce, CP, 5.565.
35 Peirce, CP, 5.589).
36 Hookway, 2000, Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism, p. 49.
37 Ibid.
38 Misak 1998, “Deflating Truth: Pragmatism vs. Minimalism”, p. 408.
39 Peirce, CP, 5.589.
40 Peirce, “How to make our ideas clear” (1878), W 3, 274.
41 Misak, 1991, Truth and the End of Inquiry, p. 139.
42 Peirce, CP, 4.547n1 & 7.35.
43 See Tiercelin 1993a, Peirce et le pragmatisme, p. 99-101; Engel, 1983, “Croyances, dispositions et probabilités, Peirce et Ramsey” ; Levi, 1980a, “Induction as Self Correcting According to Peirce”; Levi, 1997a, “Inference and Logic according to Peirce”, p. 40.
44 Peirce, W 3, p. 281.
45 Peirce, W 2, p. 100.
46 Peirce, W 3, p. 293.
47 Peirce, CP, 8.380.
48 ¨Peirce, CP, 5.457.
49 See Levi,1997a, “Inference and Logic according to Peirce”, p. 46.
50 Peirce, W 2, p. 272.
51 Misak, 1991, Truth and the End of Inquiry, p. 140.
52 Peirce, CP, 5.603.
53 Misak, 1991, Truth and the End of Inquiry, p. 140-141. If the principle of bivalence holds, then even if the truth value of a meaningful proposition cannot be established, one still knows that it is in fact true or false. The knowledge of the fact that it is true or false goes beyond our capacity to determine the application of the predicates “is true” and “is false”. This is what Peirce seems to consider, in perfect coherence with the views he defends in his semiotic of vagueness. See Tiercelin, 1993b, La Pensée-signe: études sur Peirce, chap. 5.
54 Peirce, W 3, p. 274 (1878).
55 Peirce, CP, 5.407.
56 Peirce, CP, 7.77.
57 Letter of 1908 to Lady Welby, in Peirce, 1958, Selected Writings, p. 398.
58 Peirce, CP, 7.219.
59 Apel, 1982, “C.S.Peirce and the Post-Tarskian Problem of an Adequate Explication of the Meaning of Truth: Towards a Transcendental-Pragmatic Theory of Truth”.
60 Putnam, CFVD, p. 123.
61 MS 496, in Peirce, 1966, The Charles S. Peirce Papers, Microfilm Edition.
62 Peirce, CP, 5.357, 5.160, 2.650, 2.655, 8.153.
63 Peirce, CP, 2.113 (1901); cf. 3.432.
64 Peirce, CP, 7.219 (1901); W 2, p. 272.
65 Peirce, CP, 7.219.
66 Peirce, CP, 6.610 (1893).
67 Ramsey, OT, p 96.
68 Ms 684, p. 11, 1913, quoted by C. Misak, 1991, Truth and the End of Inquiry, p. 159.
69 Misak, 1991, Truth and the End of Inquiry, p. 154.
70 Misak, Ibid., p. 163.
71 Peirce, CP, 5.565; 5.89.
72 Peirce, CP, 8.43.
© Collège de France, 2014