To my best belief: just what is the pragmatic theory of truth?
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Charles Sanders Peirce c1880.
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One might think that the answer is obvious. A true belief gets reality right: our words correspond to objects and relations in the world. But making sense of that idea involves one in ever more difficult workarounds to intractable problems. For instance, how do we account for the statement ‘It did not rain in Toronto on 20 May 2018’? There don’t seem to be negative facts in the world that might correspond to the belief. What about ‘Every human is mortal’? There are more humans – past, present and future – than individual people in the world. (That is, a generalisation like ‘All Fs’ goes beyond the existing world of Fs, because ‘All Fs’ stretches into the future.) What about ‘Torture is wrong’? What are the objects in the world that might correspond to that? And what good is it explaining truth in terms of independently existing objects and facts, since we have access only to our interpretations of them?
Pragmatism can help us with some of these issues. The 19th-century American philosopher Charles Peirce, one of the founders of pragmatism, explained the core of this tradition beautifully: ‘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.’ Truth is a property of our beliefs. It is what we aim at, and is essentially connected to our practices of enquiry, action and evaluation. Truth, in other words, is the best that we could do.
The pragmatic theory of truth arose in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1870s, in a discussion group that included Peirce and William James. They called themselves the Metaphysical Club, with intentional irony. Though they shared the same broad outlook on truth, there was immediate disagreement about how to unpack the idea of the ‘best belief’. The debate stemmed from the different temperaments of Peirce and James.
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.’ He was more a vista than a crannies man, dead set against technical philosophy. At the beginning of his book Pragmatism (1907) , he said: ‘the philosophy which is so important to each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means.’ He wanted to write accessible philosophy for the public, and did so admirably. He became the most famous living academic in the United States.
The version of the pragmatist theory of truth made famous (or perhaps infamous) by James held that ‘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 labour, is … true INSTRUMENTALLY.’
‘Satisfactorily’ for James meant ‘more satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will emphasise their points of satisfaction differently. To a certain degree, therefore, everything here is plastic.’ He argued that if the available evidence underdetermines a matter, and if there are non-epistemic reasons for believing something (my people have always believed it, believing it would make me happier), then it is rational to believe it. He argued that if a belief in God has a positive impact on someone’s life, then it is true for that person. If it does not have a good impact on someone else’s life, it is not true for them.
Peirce, a crackerjack logician, was perfectly happy working in the crannies as well as opening out the vistas. He wrote much, but published little. A cantankerous man, Peirce described the difference in personality with his friend James thus: ‘He so concrete, so living; I a mere table of contents, so abstract, a very snarl of twine.’
Peirce said that James’s version of the pragmatic theory of truth was ‘a very exaggerated utterance, such as injures a serious man very much’. It amounted to: ‘Oh, I could not believe so-and-so, because I should be wretched if I did.’ Peirce’s worries, in these days of fake news, are more pressing than ever.
On Peirce’s account, a belief is true if it would be ‘indefeasible’ or would not in the end be defeated by reasons, argument, evidence and the actions that ensue from it. A true belief is the belief that we would come to, were we to enquire as far as we could on a matter. He added an important rider: a true belief must be put in place in a manner ‘not extraneous to the facts’. We cannot believe something because we would like it to be true. The brute impinging of experience cannot be ignored.
T he disagreement continues to this day. James influenced John Dewey (who, when a student at Johns Hopkins, avoided Peirce and his technical philosophy like the plague) and later Richard Rorty. Dewey argued that truth (although he tended to stay away from the word) is nothing more than a resolution of a problematic situation. Rorty, at his most extreme, held that truth is nothing more than what our peers will let us get away with saying. This radically subjective or plastic theory of truth is what is usually thought of as pragmatism.
Peirce, however, managed to influence a few people himself, despite being virtually unknown in his lifetime. One was the Harvard logician and Kant scholar C I Lewis. He argued for a position remarkably similar to what his student W V O Quine would take over (and fail to acknowledge as Lewis’s). Reality cannot be ‘alien’, wrote Lewis – ‘the only reality there for us is one delimited in concepts of the results of our own ways of acting’. We have something given to us in brute experience, which we then interpret. With all pragmatists, Lewis was set against conceptions of truth in which ‘the mind approaches the flux of immediacy with some godlike foreknowledge of principles’. There is no ‘natural light’, no ‘self-illuminating propositions’, no ‘innate ideas’ from which other certainties can be deduced. Our body of knowledge is a pyramid, with the most general beliefs, such as the laws of logic, at the top, and the least general, such as ‘all swans are birds’, at the bottom. When faced with recalcitrant experience, we make adjustments in this complex system of interrelated concepts. ‘The higher up a concept stands in our pyramid, the more reluctant we are to disturb it, because the more radical and far-reaching the results will be…’ But all beliefs are fallible, and we can indeed disturb any of them. A true belief would be one that survives this process of enquiry.
Lewis saw that the pragmatist theory of truth deals nicely with those beliefs that the correspondence theory stumbles over. For instance, there is no automatic bar to ethical beliefs being true. Beliefs about what is right and wrong might well be evaluable in ways similar to how other kinds of beliefs are evaluable – in terms of whether they fit with experience and survive scrutiny.
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We talk a lot about "truth" these days.
What is it, anyway??
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Thank you.
Dear Friend Bob Nelson: You give us much food for thought on this important topic.
Thanks for posting it.
The model I have for epistemology is based, in part on the pragmatism of Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, William James; and as modified by more modern philosophers such as Richard Rorty, Warner Morse, J. Michael Young, and Richard Cole.
The writings of Carl Hempel and Ernest Nagel on emergent properties; and Walter Kaufman are also part of my mix.
My method of choice for an epistemological model is this.
Start running models both ways using the three major sources of knowledge.
They are sense experience and extensions of such by technology, reason, and revelation and extensions of such using metaphysical tools.
Start small. use physical matter and their interrelationships which can be quantified using the same techniques the same ways.
Empirical, imminent inductive, a posteriori data.
Then go large. Revealed metaphysical, eternal transcendent.
Meet in the middle.
A Priori, deductive, logical.
Test among competing theories of truth which pass the bars of consistency, coherence, clarity, and correspondence to things everyone agrees upon.
Unsurprisingly, few make it that far.
For those still standing, use pragmatism as the final exam.
See which of the remaining theories give the greatest insights into things we do not yet know.
Use what works best in each of the level of the great chain of being.
At the lowest levels, use science and technology. They work most effectively in the physical chemical and biological spheres in the hard sciences.
Less precisely, yet still of value in the softer sciences (psychology, anthropology and sociology for example).
For matters metaphysical, use the tools and methodologies of religion, spirituality and the humanities.
They best give us insights into those important matters beyond the range and domain of the physical world.
Pragmatically, they give us the best insights into areas of abstraction.
Long story short, use what works where it best applies.
As one ascends the levels of truth up the ladder of knowledge, the tools needed, like the geography as one goes up each rung alters.
Good work Bob.
Good work indeed.
Peace and Abundant Blessings Always.
Enoch.
Thank you, Enoch
I often wonder if there's any point in seeding articles like this one. Is there a place on NT for something that is neither funny nor political
But just one good Reply, like yours... will keep me motivated for a while...
Dear Brother Bob: Please keep them coming.
We are not eveyones cup of tea.
That said, together we can raise the level to the extend the snarks, trolls, derailers, disrespectors, and sowers of discord seeds lower it.
Checks and balances. Checks and balances.
The community needs positive, meaningful leadership to counter negativity.
You, others and I can supply knowledge where others display ignorance.
Warmth to contravene coldness.
Acceptance where others exclude.
Affirmation where others demean.
Diversity of views where others push monolithic mindless sloganistic agendas.
Checks and balances, my good friend and brother.
Checks and balances.
Onward and upward.
Enoch.
Now I'm super -motivated!
Finding truth is likely the most ambitious possible goal. Other than formal systems (where we create the rules and thus can calculate truth) truth seems to be elusive. We can get close to truth (or so it seems) but we have no way of gauging whether an apparent truth is absolute or if the future will reveal exceptions.
In other words, we may have stumbled onto a number of absolute truths but we have no way of knowing. Thus we are left with approximations of truth. So what makes something true (as best we can tell)? I would agree with the following:
In essence, the more a fact 'works' (demonstrates correctness) the closer it is to absolute truth. The major flaw in this reasoning is that the correctness of a fact is a function of the tests we conduct. If we do not test our fact the right way it will appear to approximate truth even though it may be wrong. For example, the geocentric model which held the Earth at the center of the universe was repeatedly verified as true because our testing methodology was flawed (based partly on our own arrogance).
Some hold that truth is what seems right to them - a personal truth. This is where religion lives. If it feels right (to me) and continues to feel right over time then it is true. The result is a plethora of truths - varying by person - with no means to gauge proximity to objective truth other than popularity. Why is it true that Jesus Christ is the savior? Because so many people believe it to be true. Belief is not necessarily truth - especially if there is no way to measure the accuracy of the 'fact'.
Truth, it would seem, should not be a function of popularity but rather a function of what demonstrably works. A heavier than air collection of metal, rubber and plastic can be made to fly and that evidence corroborates the underlying science and engineering. QED (quantum electrodynamics) can predict behavior to ~10 decimal levels of precision. In my book, our best approximation for truth will be measurable facts. A fact that holds up to continual scrutiny coupled with a high level of precision will likely be the closest we ever come to absolute truth.
Enoch's contribution seems useful here. We would perhaps be wiser to accept the idea of "different kinds of truth", subject to different thought processes.
The problem, of course, is to affect the right thought process for a given circumstance...
Back to the question of what constitutes truth:
Oh, no! Courageux mais pas téméraire!
If brains like James and Pierce can't come to a conclusion, I'm sure not going to stick my neck out!
It seems to me that "truth" isn't singular.
What is the truth of the story of Job? Job may not have existed... but his story nevertheless holds truth.
Is gravity true, even if we don't know what it is?
So maybe your questions must be situated in a context...
Then I do not understand the point of your seed. If we are not going to intellectually opine on what truth is and, importantly, how it is measured what are we to discuss?
You will get to discuss the moving target that is always placed on these threads/seeds/articles.
My take-away from the seed is that there is no single definition of truth. I cannot find fault in either Piece or James.
In a given context, we must decide what truth is applicable and adequate. "Pi = 3.14159" is not true, but it's "true enough" for most needs. I mentioned Job, where historical truth and literary truth collide. And the very notion of "historical truth" is open to much discussion!
Truth in a physical science is often just "to what decimal", but elsewhere it's harder to define.
Truth in economics.......
The truth just is. Truth is one thing that need not be described with other words...
If one must argue semantics and definitions to debate what is truth we are all lost.
There is what we know and what we think but neither of those equates with a lie...
Some think they know stuff they believe to be true regarding religion, for instance.
It is futile debating with one who believes in things there is no evidence of existing.
Not everyone is a rational objectivist but then you are quite aware of that by now...
Individually, our own truths must be whatever we personally "believe" to be the truth.
For some this must be based upon evidence or experience. For others merely a belief.
Me? I despair debating what is and what is not true with those who believe in...magic.
Too often we make allowances for those who are prone to magical thinking or fantasy.
Most kids grow out believing in Santa, the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy. Some do not.
Probably due to fear of death otherwise sane people will believe in implausible things...
The problem, of course, is that your truth may be diametrically opposed to my truth. Which means that one or the other is... untrue.
How does one bring supporting facts to the question, "Is the Book of Job true?"?
Some truths are inherent ( "A circle is round") , some are "agreed upon" ( "Chicago is north of Louisville") and some truths are relative. ( If two people are facing each other and there is a tree off to their side, in one case the tree is to the left of the individual, and in the other case the tree is to the right.). I would say that most, but not all, truth is relative to the observer.
"A circle is round" is semantics: the definition of "circle".
"Chicago is north of Louisville" is objective, observed. Measurably true.
As long as we're talking about physical objects, we can usually reach a "true" description. When we move to intangibles... it's trickier...