The Pragmatists and the Human Logic of Truth
|Chapter 3
From the value of truth to truth as a value and as a norm
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1In summary, we can, I think, find the following interesting elements in the pragmatists’ approach to truth.
1. A nice balance of several components of the theories of truth
- 1 Hookway, Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism, 2000, p. 90. To which one might add themes close, at ti (...)
2The pragmatists do not refuse the classical theories of truth as much as they present a fine balance of some of their elements while providing a framework which makes it possible for us to understand them better.1 If they reject correspondence, they do insist on the fact that truth is independent, up to a point, of what we believe and at any rate that truth imposes some kind of “agreement” with reality, a reality which is defined both by the constraint of existential resistance (Peirce’s Secondness) but also by the capacity of resistance of our hypotheses to experience. Peirce often links the awareness of truth to the shock constituted by the discovery of our errors and disappointments. Illusion and doubt are the motor of inquiry, “the first step towards truth”.
2. A salutary deflation
- 2 Misak, 1998, “Deflating Truth: Pragmatism vs. Minimalism”; Hookway, Truth, Rationality and Pragmati (...)
3But secondly, we find a salutary deflation of the concept. By the epistemic and realistic elements it contains, the pragmatist theory of truth avoids the traps of the classical (correspondentist, coherentist, Platonist) theories; by refusing to raise truth to the rank of a “property”, it de-dramatizes in advance the theories of truth and operates an obvious deflation of the concept. Truth is not a proposition written in a Fregean, or Platonic world of ideas: it is metaphysically neutral.2
- 3 Tiercelin, 1999a, “Comment donner un visage humain à la vérité sans la défigurer? Sur le pragmatism (...)
It is a point which I had not stressed enough in 1999,3 being maybe too quick in my blaming Putnam to throw the baby (metaphysics) with the bathwater (metaphysical realism). It seems to me more accurate now to say that Peirce both defends the view that the concept of truth is metaphysically neutral, but also the condition of possibility of the no less necessary obligation to study, in a second moment, its metaphysical consequences. If truth involves the concept of reality (although those concepts should be kept distinct), it is important to see, then, whether one interprets it in a realist or nominalist way. However, the question remains a complex one, since it is also clear that Peirce’s pragmaticism comes from (more than it concludes to) the conviction that real universals exist and that, not without reasons, Peirce reminds us that all our analyses (included the one we lead on the concept of truth) involve an “implicit metaphysics”, and this is precisely why it is better, once and for all, to measure its perverse effects on our ideas, with the help of the pragmatist method of clarification. From that point of view, one may wonder whether it is not also to indulge into some kind of metaphysical illusion to believe in any possible metaphysical neutrality, at whatever stage of analysis.
3. Truth is a platitude, but a serious one
- 4 James, MT, p. 142.
- 5 James, MT, p. 143 ; Putnam, CCWJ, p. 181.
4However, such a ferocious criticism does not prevent the pragmatists from considering truth as a serious business, an ideal which guides as much James4 as Peirce, and which probably explains why James keeps on maintaining a distinction between what is relatively and what is absolutely true.5
- 6 Haack 1997a, “We, pragmatists...”
- 7 Maybe this is why Rorty tends more and more to compare (legitimately or not) his position with that (...)
- 8 Noted by Susan Haack, 1997a, “We, pragmatists...”.
5Incidentally, contemporary readers seem more prone today to come back to the examination of that question than they may have been at a certain time. It is Putnam’s case, but it is also Rorty’s case, whose assertions on truth are almost all in direct opposition to those of Peirce,6 but who seems more eager today to defend a minimalist position on truth than to bury the topic once and for all.7 A few examples:8
- 9 Rorty, 1992, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids”, p. 141.
I do not have much use for notions like […] “objective truth”.9
- 10 Rorty, ORT, p. 32.
Truth is entirely a matter of solidarity.10
- 11 Rorty, SS, p. 62.
There is nothing to be said about either truth or rationality apart from descriptions of the familiar procedures of justification which a given society – ours – uses.11
- 12 Richard Rorty, 1988, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy”, p. 271.
I think that the very idea of “fact of the matter” is one we would be better off without.12
- 13 Rorty, CP, p. xiii.
A pragmatist theory […] says that Truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically interesting theory about.13
- 14 Rorty, CP, xvii)
[True statements only express] empty metaphysical compliments, rhetorical pats on the back.14
- 15 Rorty, CP, p. 161.
But it is true that in his “We, pragmatists”, Rorty would not class Peirce, of whom he thinks that his “contribution to pragmatism was merely to have given it a name.”15
- 16 Misak 2004, “Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)”, p. 6; Hookway, 2000, Truth, Rationality and Prag (...)
- 17 Ramsey, OT, 40.
- 18 Ramsey, OT, p. 8.
- 19 Ramsey, PP, p. 38.
- 20 Ramsey, PP, p. 39.
6So truth is but a platitude, but it is a serious one. Maybe there is not much to say about truth as such except that it is true that p iff p. And from that point of view, there is nothing mysterious nor problematic in truth. But as truth is connected with assertion, there is a lot to be done on the side of the consequences such an assertion has for our beliefs, judgments and actions: otherwise one is merely indulging in empty gesticulations.16 This is what the up to a point “redundantist” Ramsey underlines, when he notes, on the one hand, that truth is “strictly a property of beliefs”17 (and not, for example, of desires, wishes or interrogations), for contrary to those mental states which could be candidates to propositional reference, beliefs do not lack an affirmative or assertive character;18 and, on the other hand, that “there is no separate problem of truth”,19 while, on the contrary “if we have analyzed judgment, we have solved the problem of truth”:20 for the fact that the meaning of the word “true” should be in itself transparent and rendered by the equivalence (E) in no way implies that such a definition should dispense us from the analysis of the truth conditions of the beliefs.
- 21 Dokic & Engel, 2002, Ramsey, Truth and Success, p. 24.
7And, as Dokic and Engel observe, such truth conditions are “in no way subjective or non-factual, for they would not be truth conditions at all. They are real and objective, because beliefs are real states of agents, defined in terms of the desires which are related to them and in terms of actions that they can cause.”21 Ramsey develops a functionalist conception of beliefs: beliefs are determined by their causal role, together with the causal role of desires and their joint production of actions. But then,
- 22 Ramsey, PP, p. 146.
- 23 Dokic & Engel, 2002, p. 25.
it follows that if the truth conditions of a belief are (inter)defined through the associated desires and the resulting actions, and if beliefs are real states, then these truth conditions are real and the truth of beliefs has to be defined though the existence of objective conditions in the world. Ramsey’s pragmatic conception of truth conditions does not imply that the contents of beliefs are subjective. On the contrary he insists that beliefs have the function of “representing real states of the world”. Beliefs are “maps by which we steer”:22 they would not be maps if they did not have the function of describing the environment. So it clearly means that it is a realistic conception of truth, and not an anti-realist conception, nor even a deflationist one. It is indeed “a form of pragmatist realism which associates truth to belief-habits and to actions”.23
- 24 Peirce, CP, 2. 535, 2. 438.
8The same attitude may be found in Peirce who opposes what is the nominal or definitional part of truth (which is right but of little use), to what constitutes its genuine analysis, and involves all the signs which endow a proposition with a content, not only its symbols, but its indices (which alone can indicate of what reality one is talking about), and its icons, those maps Ramsey also alludes to, which for Peirce correspond to those kinds of “mental photographs” indispensable for any meaningful assertion.24
9As Putnam emphasized, the great value of the pragmatists’ contribution lies in the interdependence they establish between truth and utility, practice, what it is satisfactory to believe, what one should believe, verify, confirm, or give assertibility conditions to, and not in the reduction of truth to any of the latter.
- 25 Haack, 1976, “The pragmatist theory of truth”, p. 247-248.
Russell found the stress put by the pragmatists on the experiential cash-value of true beliefs distasteful” and “was apt to say that Pragmatism was an engineers’ philosophy, bound to lead to cosmic impiety, or at any rate to fascism”; but we should rather concentrate on the “important service this stress on the experiential cash-value of true beliefs can do us, in raising the neglected question, what exactly, one should expect of a theory of truth.25
- 26 In that respect, it is just as exaggerate, as one still too often does, to underestimate the role p (...)
- 27 Although a great admirer of Peirce, Isaac Levi has contested that Peirce did accomplish as much as (...)
After all, in defining truth not by the utility of what we do believe in fact, but by the utility of what an ideal agent would believe, placed in ideal conditions, or “at the limit of inquiry”, the pragmatists indicate that the criteria of utility they are aiming at are first of all cognitive or epistemic criteria;26 the true is what pays, but what pays cognitively, in a domain where the supreme value is understood as a value of knowledge and inquiry.27
4. Truth as a norm
- 28 Apart from the requirement of “commitment” in the enterprise of knowledge which Levi stresses, let (...)
- 29 Putnam, POQ, p. 7.
- 30 Putnam, POQ, p. 72.
10That truth should not be a “heavy” substantial property does not mean therefore that it is not a norm. Truth is what inquiry aims at, and it obeys “norms of rationality” as many contemporary writers remind us.28 Such an importance lent to inquiry, present in Peirce as in Dewey, is something Putnam also recognizes and advocates: namely it takes account of experience, views inquiry as “cooperative human interaction with an environment”, retorts to an intersubjective model of a community of inquirers working with maxims and not with algorithms, inquirers who have in view “the real problems in human life”.29 For a pragmatist, even the notion of truth makes no sense in “moral solitude” for “truth presupposes a standard external to the thinker.”30 To that extent, for a pragmatist, the ideas of inquiry and reality are impossible to dissociate from that of truth.
- 31 Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities” (1868), W 2, p. 212.
- 32 Peirce, CP, 5.357.
- 33 Peirce, W 2, p. 469 (1871, Berkeley Review).
11But so is the idea of the community. (Some have been ironical about the exact meaning of that concept in Peirce’s analysis: but everything tends to show that if it does not have the empirical meaning of a group of individual thinkers since “to make single individuals absolute judges of truth is most pernicious,”31 with no final authority, it does not have either the sense of a “transcendental.”32 Even if it is viewed as something “wider than man,”33 it does not mean that for Peirce, the concept refers to anything ethereal.)
- 34 See the end of Peirce’s “Grounds of validity of the laws of logic” (1868; W 2, p. 242-272; CP, 5.35 (...)
- 35 Peirce, W 2, p. 356 (1869-70).
- 36 Peirce, W 2, p. 357)
12In that sense again, it is deeply a human logic of truth, linked with the idea of community as to a “social logical principle,”34 for the true cannot be something to which I am the only one to refer: it is necessarily intersubjective. Indeed, Peirce considers that “the opinions of most persons upon most subjects may be entirely neglected,”35 but he would yet find it “folly in [him] not to doubt what men as capable as [himself] of forming a correct conclusion doubt.”36 This is a point on which Wittgenstein could be easily “enrolled” in the pragmatist bandwagon. In Über Gewwissheit (On Certainty), he writes:
- 37 Wittgenstein, UG, § 156.
In order to make a mistake, a man must already judge in conformity with mankind. (Damit der Mensch sich irre, muss er schon mit der Menschheit konform urteilen.)37
And Wittgenstein also attaches great importance to the fact that the things we know in a very certain way, are also things that others also know, at least if they are of the type of those enumerated by Moore. This kind of “knowledge” is rooted in forms of communautary action and existence in which individual certainty strengthens and reinforces itself by the fact others too are certain:
- 38 Wittgenstein, UG, § 288 & 289.
I know, not just that the earth existed long before my birth, but also that it is a large body, that this has been established, that I and the rest of mankind have forebears, that there are books about all this, that such books don’t lie, etc. etc. etc. And I know all this? I believe it. This body of knowledge has been handed on to me and I have no grounds for doubting it, but, on the contrary, all sorts of confirmation. And why shouldn’t I say that I know all this? Isn’t that what one does say? But not only I know, or believe, all that, but the others do too. Or rather, I believe that they believe it. I am firmly convinced that others believe, believe they know, that all that is in fact so.38
- 39 Wittgenstein, UG, § 252.
But it isn’t just that I believe in this way that I have two hands, but that every reasonable person does.39
- 40 Wittgenstein, UG, § 298.
“We are quite sure of it” does not mean just that every single person is certain of it, but that we belong to a community which is bound together by science and education.40
- 41 Wittgenstein, UG, § 299.
What is essential, is the fact that we agree on this, and that we know and show continually that we agree. We are collectively satisfied by certain ways of seeing things, for example of the idea that the earth is round (“We are satisfied that the earth is round”41) and decided to maintain them, whatever happens.
- 42 Wittgenstein, UG, § 291.
We know that the earth is round. We have definitely ascertained that it is round. We shall stick to this opinion, unless our whole way of seeing nature changes. “How do you know that? – I believe it.”42
This means not that they are incorrigible, but that, in order to abandon them, we should have to modify our whole conception of nature and of man.
- 43 Wittgenstein, UG, § 292-293.
Further experiments cannot give the lie to our earlier ones, at most they may change our whole way at looking at things. Similarly with the sentence: “Water boils at 100°C.”43
13It seems that no philosopher today seems to wish a theory of truth which might be accused of sounding metaphysical. And among those who think it still makes sense to look for one, many take it that the only way to avoid metaphysics is to keep to a deflationist (whatever the variant may be) account. As the pragmatists have seen, we can perfectly reach a conception of truth which remains metaphysically neutral but does not prevent, all the same, to go beyond mere formalism and to measure what counts in truth, which, in the case of Peirce (but probably in his only case) also imposes to come back to the questions raised by metaphysics, once it has been “purified”.
- 44 Ramsey, OT, p. 57.
- 45 Ramsey, OT, p. 6.
(After all, as Ramsey puts it, “in order to be knowledge, a judgement must be not merely true and certain, but also well grounded.”44 “We must distinguish one question ‘what is truth ?’ from the quite different question ‘what is true ?’ If a man asked what was true, the sort of answer he might hope for would either be as complete an enumeration as possible of all truths, i.e., an encyclopaedia, or else a test or criterion of truth, a method by which he could know a truth from a falsehood. But what we are asking for is neither of these things, but something much more modest; we do not hope to learn an infallible means of distinguishing truth from falsehood but simply to know what it is that this word ‘true’ means. It is a word which we all understand, but if we try to explain it, we can easily get involved, as the history of philosophy shows, in a maze of confusion.”45)
- 46 Misak, 2004a, “Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)”, p. 5. See also D. Wiggins’s evaluation in his “ (...)
- 47 Misak, 1998, “Deflating Truth: Pragmatism vs. Minimalism”, p. 420-421.
- 48 Misak, 1998, “Deflating Truth: Pragmatism vs. Minimalism”, p. 421-422. See also Misak, 2000, Truth, (...)
14We have here a subtle and compelling view. Peirce’s route to the concept of truth is through belief, inquiry, and deliberation: the assertions and practices linked to truth and to the seeking of truth. By making this our focus, we discover something about what we aim at: truth.46 This explains why, for a pragmatist, truth is never, as one curiously tends to think today, a topic confined to epistemology. As Cheryl Misak very rightly observed, where a deflationist has great difficulty in fully engaging the question of what kinds of statements the truth predicate applies to, where “he has trouble, for instance, engaging in the long-standing debate over whether statements about what is just or unjust, odious or acceptable, are such that they are either true or false, as opposed to the standards of some local discourse or other”, the pragmatist, on the other hand, considers that the clarification of the meaning of the concept of truth makes it not only possible but necessary to come up to the heart of the matter as soon as possible. In particular, he does not think that our moral judgments should be excluded from the scope of truth and knowledge (he is mostly a cognitivist), despite the fact that there might be many statements which are not bivalent47 or that we encounter them there in a weakened sense, “a second rate truth and knowledge”.48 This is precisely why the skeptical challenge raises itself for a pragmatist as naturally and immediately at the level of ethics at it arises at the level of knowledge and truth. And that it can apply to, and at least, in my view, should be met as such, at the more metaphysical level of the reality of the external world.
- 49 See Tiercelin, 2005, Le Doute en question.
15Now, it is here, precisely, not so much in the way they stress the necessary links to be drawn between all such issues as in the order of priority they seem to establish between them, that we find the most important points of departure among pragmatists and a means to evaluate the degree of efficiency they have (or not) in resisting the various challenges posed by skepticism. Of course, I cannot go in this talk through all the complexities of their approaches,49 but I would just like to give a hint at what the main differences are and on what aspects, as far as I am concerned, I find their contribution particularly relevant and fruitful for the contemporary debate.
Notes
1 Hookway, Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism, 2000, p. 90. To which one might add themes close, at times, to a certain hermeneutics (Apel, 1982, “C.S.Peirce and the Post-Tarskian Problem of an Adequate Explication of the Meaning of Truth”, p. 6).
2 Misak, 1998, “Deflating Truth: Pragmatism vs. Minimalism”; Hookway, Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism, 2000, p. 62-63, 53, 77 & 80-1.
3 Tiercelin, 1999a, “Comment donner un visage humain à la vérité sans la défigurer? Sur le pragmatisme de Putnam”.
4 James, MT, p. 142.
5 James, MT, p. 143 ; Putnam, CCWJ, p. 181.
6 Haack 1997a, “We, pragmatists...”
7 Maybe this is why Rorty tends more and more to compare (legitimately or not) his position with that of Davidson, which seems a good combination of minimalism and pragmatism. See for ex. Rorty, ORT and Rorty 1995, “Is Truth a Goal of Enquiry: Davidson vs Wright”. See also his recent exchange with Engel: Engel & Rorty, 2005, À quoi bon la vérité ?
8 Noted by Susan Haack, 1997a, “We, pragmatists...”.
9 Rorty, 1992, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids”, p. 141.
10 Rorty, ORT, p. 32.
11 Rorty, SS, p. 62.
12 Richard Rorty, 1988, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy”, p. 271.
13 Rorty, CP, p. xiii.
14 Rorty, CP, xvii)
15 Rorty, CP, p. 161.
16 Misak 2004, “Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)”, p. 6; Hookway, 2000, Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism, p. 97.
17 Ramsey, OT, 40.
18 Ramsey, OT, p. 8.
19 Ramsey, PP, p. 38.
20 Ramsey, PP, p. 39.
21 Dokic & Engel, 2002, Ramsey, Truth and Success, p. 24.
22 Ramsey, PP, p. 146.
23 Dokic & Engel, 2002, p. 25.
24 Peirce, CP, 2. 535, 2. 438.
25 Haack, 1976, “The pragmatist theory of truth”, p. 247-248.
26 In that respect, it is just as exaggerate, as one still too often does, to underestimate the role played in Peirce by instinct but also sentiments, feelings and affects in knowledge (Tiercelin 1993b, 377ff; Hookway 2000), as it is to oppose the “pragmatic” and the “cognitive” in James.
27 Although a great admirer of Peirce, Isaac Levi has contested that Peirce did accomplish as much as he claims to: he reproaches him (as well as Popper) to hold his view of the “ultimate end of inquiry” and a “messianic realism”, which, associated furthermore with his fallibilism, prevents him from taking seriously enough the short term possibilities of error, a requirement which he himself holds indispensable, if one wants to conduct inquiry as it should and also the “enterprise of knowledge”. From an epistemological point of view this reproach may not be totally ill founded. See Levi 1983, The Enterprise of Knowledge, p. 70-72; Levi, 1991, The Fixation of Belief and Its Undoing, 1991, p. 58; Levi, 1997b, The Covenant of Reason, p. 54.
28 Apart from the requirement of “commitment” in the enterprise of knowledge which Levi stresses, let us mention Wright (1992, Truth and Objectivity, p. 92-93), who insists on the importance of “cognitive commands”, or Brandom (1994, Making it explicit, p. 287), who identifies in the pragmatist approach “a performative, anti-descriptive strategy, emphasizing the act of calling something true rather than the descriptive content one thereby associates with what is called true”; in other words, who underlines the assertoric force which goes hand in hand with a truth statement as much as with the explanation we could give of the use of that word or concept (Hookway, 2000, Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism, p. 63).
29 Putnam, POQ, p. 7.
30 Putnam, POQ, p. 72.
31 Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities” (1868), W 2, p. 212.
32 Peirce, CP, 5.357.
33 Peirce, W 2, p. 469 (1871, Berkeley Review).
34 See the end of Peirce’s “Grounds of validity of the laws of logic” (1868; W 2, p. 242-272; CP, 5.354-357), in which Peirce says that “this sentiment is rigidly demanded by logic […] and justified by its indispensableness for making any action rational.”
35 Peirce, W 2, p. 356 (1869-70).
36 Peirce, W 2, p. 357)
37 Wittgenstein, UG, § 156.
38 Wittgenstein, UG, § 288 & 289.
39 Wittgenstein, UG, § 252.
40 Wittgenstein, UG, § 298.
41 Wittgenstein, UG, § 299.
42 Wittgenstein, UG, § 291.
43 Wittgenstein, UG, § 292-293.
44 Ramsey, OT, p. 57.
45 Ramsey, OT, p. 6.
46 Misak, 2004a, “Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)”, p. 5. See also D. Wiggins’s evaluation in his “Reflexions on Inquiry and Truth Arising from Peirce’s Method for the Fixation of Belief” (2004).
47 Misak, 1998, “Deflating Truth: Pragmatism vs. Minimalism”, p. 420-421.
48 Misak, 1998, “Deflating Truth: Pragmatism vs. Minimalism”, p. 421-422. See also Misak, 2000, Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation; and Misak, 2004b, “Peirce on Vital Matters”, p. 150ff.
49 See Tiercelin, 2005, Le Doute en question.
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