Prospects for Peircean Truth Dr. Andrew W. Howat Peircean Truth (PT) is the view that truth is in some sense epistemically constrained, constrained that is by what we would, if we inquired long enough and well enough, eventually come to believe. Contemporary Peirceans offer various different formulations of the view, which can make it difficult, particularly for critics, to see exactly how PT differs from popular alternatives like correspondence theories or deflationism. This paper therefore considers four possible formulations of PT, and sets out the different objections and challenges they each face and their relationships to one another. I focus upon the question of what, if anything, PT has to say about the property of truth. Keywords: truth; Peirce; properties; anti-realism; pragmatism What I call Peircean Truth (PT) is a conception of truth articulated and defended by contemporary philosophers, most notably Cheryl Misak and David Wiggins. PT 1 aspires to capture the spirit of Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmatist insights on the topic of truth, while emending or improving those insights in the light of contemporary research. The central idea behind PT is that truth is in some sense epistemically constrained, constrained that is by what we would, if we inquired long enough and well enough, eventually come to believe. There are, however, different ways of formulating PT, different ways of fleshing out the notion of epistemic constraint. Some of these involve explicit reference to a metaphysically substantive claim about the property of truth. Others involve a different emphasis, where the central notion is not a property claim, but the idea of a regulative assumption of inquiry. I will consider relationships between these different formulations, and show that each is vulnerable to different kinds 1 See in particular Misak (2004) and (2007) and Wiggins (2004). I have also defended a version 1 of PT in my 2013.
Transcript
!Prospects for Peircean Truth
Dr. Andrew W. Howat
Peircean Truth (PT) is the view that truth is in some sense epistemically constrained, constrained that is by what we would, if we inquired long enough and well enough, eventually come to believe. Contemporary Peirceans offer various different formulations of the view, which can make it difficult, particularly for critics, to see exactly how PT differs from popular alternatives like correspondence theories or deflationism. This paper therefore considers four possible formulations of PT, and sets out the different objections and challenges they each face and their relationships to one another. I focus upon the question of what, if anything, PT has to say about the property of truth.
What I call Peircean Truth (PT) is a conception of truth articulated and defended
by contemporary philosophers, most notably Cheryl Misak and David Wiggins. PT 1
aspires to capture the spirit of Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmatist insights on the topic
of truth, while emending or improving those insights in the light of contemporary
research. The central idea behind PT is that truth is in some sense epistemically
constrained, constrained that is by what we would, if we inquired long enough and well
enough, eventually come to believe. There are, however, different ways of formulating
PT, different ways of fleshing out the notion of epistemic constraint. Some of these
involve explicit reference to a metaphysically substantive claim about the property of
truth. Others involve a different emphasis, where the central notion is not a property
claim, but the idea of a regulative assumption of inquiry. I will consider relationships
between these different formulations, and show that each is vulnerable to different kinds
! 1
See in particular Misak (2004) and (2007) and Wiggins (2004). I have also defended a version 1
of PT in my 2013.
of objection. The overall goal of this paper is to foster greater clarity about the prospects
for a successful, tenable formulation of PT.
The structure of the paper is as follows. In §1 I consider a popular way of
formulating PT as a metaphysically substantive property claim – that the property of
truth is identical to a property like ‘superwarrant’ or ‘superassertibility’. I call this first
proposal Substantive PT. I then show that so-construed, PT entails an implausible claim
– that there cannot be unknowable truths. In §2 I consider an alternative formulation of
PT designed to avoid this implausible entailment, one that emphasizes the Kantian
notion of a regulative assumption – Regulative PT. I then show that so-construed, PT
apparently fails to make any metaphysically substantive claim about the nature of truth,
thereby threatening to collapse into deflationism. In §3 I consider the possibility that PT
might avoid this fate by introducing an alternative Peircean metaphysics of properties
and property claims, a possibility I call Metaphysical PT. I then show that any argument
for this approach appears doomed to beg the question. Finally, in §4 I consider a
formulation of PT that promises to avoid all of the above difficulties by formulating PT
as a pragmatic rather than a semantic claim, i.e. Pragmatic PT. I then suggest that this
approach may be too radical, and too anti-metaphysical, to deliver the kind of
substantive claim about truth and epistemic constraint that the Peircean wishes to
defend.
§1 – Substantive PT vs. Strong Epistemic Constraint
Evidence suggests that most philosophers believe that there is a property of truth and
consider it the task of a theory of truth to identify it. Moreover, there is substantial
! 2
agreement that the relevant property is correspondence to reality. The principal 2
opposition to this view is deflationism, according to which truth is merely a device of
assertion, and there is no feature or property (or no significant or substantive property)
that all true propositions have in common. A small minority however, believe that 3
while there is a property of truth, that property is not correspondence to the facts, but
rather some property directly related to our epistemic practices. That Peirceans 4
consider PT to be centrally a claim about the property of truth is very clear from their
writings:
Peirce, although he travels a fair distance along the same road as the deflationist, eventually parts company with the deflationist in that he thinks that he can say something about the property of truth, generally. (Misak 2007, 70)
!Peirce takes the merit of his position (i.e. searching for a naturalized truth property) to be that only then will we get a concept of truth which is relevant to inquiry (see CP 1.578, 5.553, MS 684: 11). (Ibid., 79)
!Surely we can find for Peirce some form of words that fastens down and promises in due course to help elucidate, in terms that essentially involve the business of inquiry and the method of “experience,” the nature of that property, namely truth,
! 3
See for example the PhilPapers Survey of Nov 2009, wherein 50.8% of respondents described 2
themselves as ‘accepting’ or ‘leaning towards’ correspondence theory, versus 24.8% who ‘accept’ or ‘lean towards’ deflationism. http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl
See Edwards 2013 for invaluable discussion of the role of properties in the debate between 3
inflationist and deflationist positions.
The same survey reveals that a mere 6.8% of respondents accepted or leaned towards an 4
‘epistemic’ conception of truth. For more on the nature of this epistemic constraint see below and my 2013.
which (unless we are complete strangers to opinion or doubt) is already familiar to any or all of us.
!Truth is the property that it is the aim of inquiry as such to find beliefs possessed of. [...]
!Truth is the property that anyone will want for his or her beliefs who sincerely inquires whether p (or not) and who seeks to ensure that any belief of his or hers to the effect that p (or not p) should be determined by circumstances not extraneous to the fact that p. (Last three quotations from Wiggins 2004, 114, emphasis added)
When it comes to saying specifically what property Peirce identifies with truth,
Peirceans tend to talk in terms of a sort of indefeasibility, something very much like
what Crispin Wright calls superassertibility. 5
were we to get a belief that would be forever assertible (a belief which would never lead to disappointment; a belief which would be indefeasible or not defeated were inquiry pursued as far as it could fruitfully go), then we would have a true belief. There would be nothing higher or better we could ask of it. (Misak 2007, 69)
Thus one obvious way to frame PT, one often favoured by its critics, is as the claim that
the property of being true is identical with the property of being ‘superassertible’, or
perhaps with the property of being ‘superwarranted’. Here are two fairly standard 6
! 4
Misak 2007 says of Wright: ‘He is right to think that superassertibility is an excellent 5
candidate for a pragmatist conception of truth. What he fails to see is that it is Peirce’s pragmatist account of truth.’ That is, she argues that superassertibility is, in most respects, the same thing as Peirce’s account of truth, whereas Wright believes it is distinct from Peircean truth because his approach is non-reductive (see Wright 2001, 759).
Both Wright (e.g. 1992) and Lynch (e.g. 2010) are critics of PT, and both standardly 6
understand PT in the way described in this section. Peirceans often call this a misinterpretation, as we shall see in §2.
characterizations of these two candidate properties:
Superassertibility (S): a proposition p is superassertible if and only if p is or can be, warranted to assert, and some warrant for the assertion of p would survive arbitrarily close scrutiny of its pedigree and arbitrarily extensive increments to or other forms of improvement of our information. 7
!Superwarrant (SW): The belief that p is superwarranted if and only if the belief that p is warranted without defeat at some stage of inquiry and would remain so at every successive stage of inquiry. 8
Thus, what I shall hereafter call Substantive PT is the view that the property of truth is
identical with a property such as (S) or (SW). Assuming for the time being that
Substantive PT is the correct interpretation of Peirce’s views on truth, is the view
plausible? To answer this question, we first need to consider how contemporary
philosophers typically go about evaluating theories of this kind – theories that involve
metaphysically substantive property claims.
PT’s critics evaluate the theory against a background I will call the Property
Framework. This is a set of assumptions that together set a standard against which
property claims are typically judged. Wright 2012 provides a schematic characterization
of the framework using four basic assumptions (n.b. the label is mine):
!The Property Framework
(1) There exists some property or feature F.
(2) F is had by all and only the true propositions.
! 5
Based on Wright 1992, 48. 7
Based on Lynch 2010, 38. 8
(3) Truth is the property consisting in being F.
(4) F is necessary and sufficient for explaining why those propositions are true. 9
!Given (4) in particular, those who endorse this framework will approach a claim like (S)
or (SW) with the following question in mind: does the claim successfully explain why
true propositions are true? The answer in both cases, so far as most commentators are
concerned, is a resounding ‘no’. The reason for this is that Substantive PT entails the
implausible conclusion that there can be no unknowable truths, and this means that the
view suffers from what Lynch 2010 calls the ‘scope problem’. 10
We want any theory of truth to have a comprehensive scope. That is, we want
such a theory to account for all of the different kinds of true propositions, rather than
merely a subset. There are the familiar, standard examples of empirical truths about
medium-sized dry goods, such as ‘snow is white’, ‘there is a cat on the mat’, etc. But
there are of course many others, such as mathematical truths (presumably ‘68+57=125’
is one such), legal truths (‘it is illegal under US law to murder another person’), and
(more controversially) moral truths (‘it is immoral to torture people’), among many
others. The scope problem arises when a theory of truth cannot successfully explain or
accommodate all of these different types of truths – when its explanatory scope is too
narrow.
! 6
Wright 2012, 92. Note that I have substituted ‘propositions’ for ‘sentences’, since I take PT to 9
be a view about the former, not the latter (though I don’t believe anything in particular hangs on this for my purposes).
See Lynch 2010, especially 36 onwards.10
Lynch takes PT to be synonymous with what I have labelled Substantive PT, and
specifically with the view that a belief is true if and only if it is superwarranted. The
main reason this formulation of PT faces the scope problem, according to Lynch, is
because it entails that all truths are knowable. Clearly, a theory that carries such an 11
implication cannot account for an important sub-set of true beliefs – beliefs that may be
both true and undecidable – since it entails that there are no such truths. Why think that
there are such truths? Lynch is trading upon a popular intuition – that ‘there are at least
some truths - perhaps about the distant past, or far side of the universe, or the number of
stars right now, for which no evidence will ever be available in principle.’ (Lynch 2010,
43) Since Substantive PT is incapable of explaining these truths, since it is incompatible
with their very existence, it thus cannot be the correct conception of truth.
As we will see in more detail in §2, Peirceans have often resisted the thought
that PT entails that all truths are knowable, suggesting they recognize the implausibility
of such a claim, and share the intuition that there could indeed be undecidable truths. 12
For brevity’s sake, let us hereafter label the claim that all truths are knowable ‘Strong
Epistemic Constraint’, or SEC. We can then summarize the scope problem as follows:
(1) Substantive PT entails SEC, (2) SEC is implausible – our intuitions suggest there
may be unknowable or undecidable true propositions, and (3) Substantive PT therefore
cannot explain what all truths have in common.
! 7
Lynch also says that PT faces the scope problem because it is anti-representationalist, and 11
that one cannot explain representational truths with an anti-representational theory. I suspect this objection begs the question in the ongoing debate over anti-representationalism. More on this in §4.
Haack 1982 is a notable exception, see 158: ‘[Peirce] cannot admit that there are unknowable 12
truths.’
Note that there are at least three ways a Peircean might respond to the scope
problem:
• Endorse Substantive PT, but deny it entails SEC
• Endorse Substantive PT, accept that it entails SEC, and deny that SEC is
implausible, or
• Deny that Substantive PT is the correct formulation of PT, and offer an
alternative.
I will consider the third of these options in the remainder of the paper. In the remainder
of this section however, I will argue that neither the first nor the second response are
viable options for rescuing Substantive PT, at least, not given the traditional,
metaphysical conception of what makes a property claim substantive.
In brief, the reason the Peircean cannot deny that Substantive PT entails SEC is
that the latter claim follows by a simple deduction from two premises – (1) Substantive
PT and (2) the T-schema. Since the defender of Substantive PT clearly cannot deny (1),
their only option is to deny (2) – yet denying the T-schema is not a viable option. At
least, it is not a viable option if the Peircean accepts the traditional conception of what is
involved in making metaphysically substantive claims about the nature of truth. To see 13
why this is so, let us turn briefly to what that traditional conception says.
According to the Property Framework, a truth is a kind of proposition in much
the same way that water is a kind of substance (Wright 2001, 753). Kinds have, at a
minimum, a nominal essence, which is to say, a set of features by reference to which we
! 8
I consider the possibility that the Peircean might challenge this conception in §§3-4.13
identify them as members of that kind. Claims that spell out these features are called 14
platitudes or truisms about instances of the kind. Thus, ‘water is odorless’, ‘water is
colorless’ and ‘water is transparent’ are all platitudes about instances of the natural kind
water. In the case of truth, the T-schema is one of a number of similar platitudes:
The T-Schema: The proposition that p is true if, and only if, p
Objectivity: The belief that p is true if, and only if, with respect to the belief that p, things are as they are believed to be.
Warrant Independence: Some beliefs can be true but not warranted and some can be warranted without being true.
Norm of Belief: It is prima facie correct to believe that p if and only if the proposition that p is true.
Goal of Inquiry: Other things being equal, true beliefs are a worthy goal of inquiry. 15
One familiar way of approaching these platitudes is to propose a reductive
definition. Such a definition is intended to explain the target kind’s nominal essence, as
captured by the platitudes, by reference to a single underlying feature that is essential to
the kind. For example, ‘liquid L is water iff liquid L is composed of molecules of H2O’
might well be considered a paradigm reductive definition of the kind term ‘water’.
Being composed of molecules of H2O would then serve as a necessary and sufficient
application-condition for the concept water. One might approach the platitudes about
! 9
These may or may not coincide with the concept’s application-conditions - the criteria whose 14
being met actually determine whether or not something belongs to the kind, depending on the role played by human responses in the constitution of the concept. See Howat (2011).
These are adapted from Lynch 2010, 8 onwards.15
truth in the same way, that is, by proposing a single property – such as correspondence
with reality or superassertibility – which is putatively essential to the kind.
However, the argument that Substantive PT faces the scope problem need not
presuppose that PT is such a reductive definition, or that it is intended to capture truth’s
singular essence. This is important, because Peirceans sometimes object that their critics
incorrectly characterize PT as a reductive theory. In reality, the only thing that we need 16
to assume in order to motivate the scope problem is that Substantive PT is intended to
be consistent with these platitudes or truisms about truth. Note that this is a perfectly
reasonable assumption. After all, one cannot explain the nature of a kind K if one’s
explanation is inconsistent with some of its key features, with its nominal essence.
Otherwise it would be as though someone offered to explain why lemons are sour,
acidic and typically orange in color. Noting that the orange color is not being touted as a
part of a set of necessary and sufficient conditions is missing the point. According to the
Property Framework, we must stay true to the nominal essence of the kind not in order
to arrive at the right reductive analysis, but in order to get a proper fix on the thing
about which we are theorizing. Thus, if a theory of truth were to contradict one of these
platitudes, then it would not really be a theory of truth at all. Consistency with the
platitudes is thus standardly considered a minimal requirement for being a genuinely
metaphysically ‘substantive’ theory or claim about the nature of truth. 17
We are now in position to see exactly why it is impossible for the Peircean to
endorse Substantive PT but deny that it entails SEC. There are two main reasons. First,
! 10
I’d like to thank an anonymous referee from this journal for pressing this concern. See also 16
Misak 2007, esp. Section 4.
For more on this ‘minimalist’ conception and its criteria, see Wright 1992. 17
it appears that the Peircean must agree to the platitudes in order to be theorizing about
the right concept. Second, when you combine those platitudes (and specifically The T-
Schema) with Substantive PT, SEC follows by a simple and uncontroversial deduction:
Take a proposition like (F): [P and no one will ever have any warrant for P.] Given (SW) and the T-schema, one can derive [(F) is superwarranted if and only if P and no one will ever have any warrant for P.] Now clearly (F) cannot be superwarranted. Hence from that fact and the above [It is not the case that (F) - that is, it is not the case that: P and no one will ever have any warrant for P.] (Lynch 2010, 42-3) 18
Having established that Substantive PT entails SEC, why is it not open to the
Peircean to accept the entailment, while denying that SEC is absurd or implausible?
After all, the Peircean might wonder what reason we have to think that there really are
undecidable or unknowable truths. The existence of such things seems to be a matter of
pure conjecture.
There are, I think, two main reasons why the Peircean should not commit
themselves to SEC. Together these constitute an inductive, rather than a deductive
argument, but given the plausible thesis that one cannot know what one cannot know,
this is perhaps the best for which one can hope. First, a commitment to SEC would be, 19
for the Peircean, dialectically self-defeating. Second, there are compelling counter-
arguments and examples that strongly suggest that SEC is false, even if they fall short
of proving it.
A commitment to SEC is dialectically self-defeating for two reasons. First, the
vast majority of philosophers (those Peirceans are presumably trying to convince) reject
! 11
Note that I have restructured this passage by adding square brackets for clarity and brevity. 18
Lynch is drawing upon Fitch’s paradox here – see Fitch 1963.
For compelling arguments in favor of these views see Rescher 2005, especially Chapter 8.19
it as obviously false and counter-intuitive. Though this by itself proves nothing, if
Peirceans can defend PT without committing themselves to something their opponents
consider obviously false, then for practical or dialectical reasons they surely ought to do
so. Second, as we shall see in the remainder of the paper, Peirceans can defend PT
without committing themselves to something their opponents consider obviously false.
In fact, as we shall see, they have done so in some detail. Misak 2004 for example, says
of the claim ‘(2) there are truths that inquiry would not catch’ that:
We have seen that Peirce cannot straightforwardly deny (2)... Since he has to entertain the possibility that the principle of bivalence might fail to hold, he has to entertain the possibility that there may be truths that would fail to be captured by inquiry. What he says is only that we must assume that (2) is false. (Misak 2004, 164, emphasis added) 20
The second reason that SEC is implausible is that there are compelling
arguments and counter-examples that suggest, though they do not (perhaps cannot)
prove that SEC is false. The arguments include those given by Rescher 2005 in support
of his compelling system of epistemic logic, those arising from Fitch’s paradox of
knowability and from Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. The apparent counter-21
examples include propositions such as the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis or the
Goldbach conjecture. 22
! 12
This is the formulation of Peirce’s view that I call Regulative PT, which I set out in detail in 20
§2.
See Battaly 2008 for an excellent summary and critical discussion. On Fitch’s paradox see 21
Fitch 1963, and Hart and McGinn 1976. On Heisenberg see Hilgevoord 2006.
The GCH says that for any infinite cardinal A there is no cardinal B such that A < B < 2A. The 22
GCH is widely held to be unprovable using the standard axioms of set theory. The (‘strong’ or ‘binary’) Goldbach conjecture says that all positive even integers can be expressed as the sum of two primes. For relevant discussion see Laraudogoitia (2009), esp. section 5.1. For an intriguing Peircean rebuttal to similar arguments, see Legg (2008a).
I anticipate that a Peircean might attempt the following line of reply, in hopes of
holding onto Substantive PT in the face of the above considerations. I suspect it is
unsuccessful, however. It begins with the suggestion that the idea of unknowable truths
is, for a Peircean, somehow incoherent. More specifically, the reply is that the notion of
an unknowable or undecidable truth lacks pragmatic meaning, what Peirce called ‘the
third grade of clarity’ (Peirce 1878). The whole notion that there are or could be
unknowable truths, goes this reply, has no consequences for experience or for action and
so fails Peirce’s famous test of metaphysical significance or legitimacy (the pragmatic
maxim). 23
Leaving aside for a moment the danger of begging the question (the pragmatic
maxim being at least as controversial as anything we might say about truth), it seems to
me that a proposition’s undecidability clearly does have consequences for action and
experience. A set theorist who hopes to construct a proof or conduct an inquiry must
take into account the fact that the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis may be true, and
yet she cannot prove it. Its unprovability, or its potential truth may act as a constraint on
what other things she can and cannot prove, on what assumptions she can or cannot
make, on what results she can expect, and so on. The same might presumably be said
for various scientific principles or hypotheses. 24
! 13
I am grateful to Cathy Legg for proposing this reply. See Legg 2014, Section 4. For an 23
explanation of the maxim, and how it is supposed to supply a criterion for both significance and meaning-identity for metaphysical hypotheses, see Misak 2004, Chapter 1. For invaluable critical discussion see Hookway 2012. As an anonymous referee rightly notes, another possible strategy is to rely upon a Dummettian critique of semantic realism, and specifically the notion of verification-transcendent truth. For more on this see e.g. Hale 1997.
E.g. Heisenberg’s uncertainty relations as discussed in Hilgevoord (2006).24
A Peircean might argue that this is a classic example of what Peirce considered
the cardinal philosophical sin - ‘blocking the road of inquiry’. Yet it is surely undeniable
that inquiry does, from time to time, encounter roadblocks like this one, and the
unprovability of certain (perhaps true) propositions seems to me to act as a real and
significant constraint on our endeavors in mathematics and no doubt in many other
areas. Thus, while there is clearly much more the Peircean might say here, the above
suggests there is a heavy burden of proof on the Peircean to demonstrate that the notion
of undecidable or unknowable truth is, in any non-question-begging sense, meaningless.
Thus, as far as I can see, Substantive PT, understood against the background of
the Property Framework, commits the Peircean to SEC, and this leads to the scope
problem. That makes Substantive PT a poor candidate for a theory of the substantive
property that all true propositions share.
§2 – Regulative PT vs. the Collapse Into Deflationism
As I hinted in the foregoing section, many Peirceans are well aware of the
difficulties facing Substantive PT, and have thus offered a rather different formulation in
response. On what I call Regulative PT, a Peircean about truth is not attempting to 25
identify a property that is necessary and sufficient for explaining what all truths have in
common. Instead, the Peircean’s real interest lies in understanding and explicating the
role the concept of truth plays in our practice of inquiry. This interest is best satisfied by
identifying what Peirce (following Kant) called certain ‘regulative assumptions’ of
inquiry. Specifically, PT might focus on elucidating a regulative assumption like this
one:
! 14
Misak 2004, Wiggins 2004, Hookway 2004 and Howat 2013 all rehearse versions of the 25
scope problem, and offer replies similar to the following.
If a hypothesis H is true, then if inquiry into H were pursued long enough and
well enough, then H would be believed.
I have elaborated and defended a form of Regulative PT, based on the above claim,
elsewhere, so I will offer only a schematic characterization here. In particular, I will 26
focus solely on how Regulative PT avoids the commitment to SEC (thus avoiding the
scope problem), and how it nevertheless faces its own unique challenge – specifically, it
appears in danger of collapsing into deflationism.
In brief, the reason Regulative PT does not entail SEC is as follows. If I argue
that ‘one must assume p in order to perform some task T’, it does not falsify that claim
to observe that p may be false. For example, if I argue that ‘you must assume that the
deck contains 52 cards if you are to calculate your odds of winning correctly’, it does
not falsify that claim to observe that the deck may not contain 52 cards. Similarly then,
if Peirce or the Peirceans are merely saying that inquirers must assume SEC (or to be
more precise, a claim that entails SEC) in order to inquire rationally concerning any
objective hypothesis, it does not falsify that claim to observe that SEC could be false.
Instead it merely shows that when we inquire we are forced to make (‘regulative’)
assumptions that may or may not turn out to be true.
Thus, there are good reasons for a Peircean to prefer Regulative PT. It rescues
Peirce’s views from the implausible commitment to SEC. Note that Regulative PT also
fits rather better with some of Peirce’s central methodological commitments.
Specifically, Regulative PT fits well with Peirce’s desire to maintain a bright line
between traditional reductive philosophical definition (the search for ‘clearness’ and
! 15
See Howat 2013. See also Hookway 2012, Chapter 3. 26
‘distinctness’ as he called them) and pragmatic elucidation (the search for ‘pragmatic
meaning’). Substantive PT thus seems wrongheaded not simply for its commitment to 27
SEC, but because it does not accord with the pragmatist methodology Peirce advocates
in some of his central works on truth (in particular Peirce 1877 and 1878). I therefore
agree with those Peirceans who argue that PT does not entail SEC (again, see the above
quoted passage from Misak 2004, 164). However, I want to suggest that this particular
rescue package comes at a cost – it is in grave danger of collapsing into deflationism.
We began by noting that many Peirceans and their critics commonly characterize
PT as a metaphysically substantive claim about the property of truth. This is
understandable and helpful, since it clarifies the relationship between PT and more
familiar and popular theories of truth such as correspondence, deflationism, etc.
However, the shift to Regulative PT threatens to rob us of this clarity. In particular, it is
unclear whether on this new formulation, PT any longer includes or entails any claim
about a property or the nature of truth as such. At best, it appears Regulative PT
encompasses important and insightful claims about the nature of our practices,
especially inquiry, the norms governing them, and/or the structure of reasons. It does
not, however, seem to say anything about truth itself – it says nothing about its
reference or essence, about any property to which the term or concept refers. This raises
the question of where the Peircean stands regarding such a property. If they believe
there is one, why haven’t they told us what it is? If they do not believe there is one, then
how does their view differ from that of the deflationist or redundancy theorist?
Thus, despite its exegetical and dialectical advantages, Regulative PT, since it
eschews any metaphysically substantive property claim about truth, is as a result much
! 16
More on this in §4.27
more difficult to distinguish from deflationism. Happily, Misak has raised exactly this
issue in print (Misak 2007). She suggests the main bone of contention between PT and
deflationism is the notion of substantiality:
...the deflationist... has an impoverished view of practice. The pragmatist of the Peircean stripe will argue that once we see that truth and assertion are intimately connected - once we see that to assert that p is true is to assert p - we can and must look to our practices of assertion and to the commitments incurred in them so as to say something more substantial about truth. Hard on the heels of the thought that truth is internally related to assertion comes the thought that truth is also internally related to inquiry, reasons, evidence, and standards of good belief. (Misak 2007, 70)
I believe Misak is right to focus on substantiality, and on clarifying what PT can say that
is ‘more substantial’ than deflationism. For without greater clarity about what
substantiality could mean, it appears as if these are the only two options available to the
Peircean:
(1)the Peircean reverts to Substantive PT, at the cost of committing themselves to
SEC and suffering the scope problem, or
(2)the Peircean concedes that there is no property of truth, in which case their view
appears to collapse into deflationism.
In the remainder of the paper, I will consider two novel ways to think about
substantiality, which may help the Peircean to find alternatives to the two horns of this
apparent dilemma. The above formulations make two assumptions in particular about
substantiality that Peirceans have good reason to challenge. The first assumption is that
there is no alternative to the traditional metaphysical conception of substantive
properties (i.e. the Property Framework, the role of platitudes in satisfying it, etc.). The
! 17
second assumption is that the only way for a claim about truth to be substantive is for it
to identify a (or the) property of truth. Thus, I will now consider two further, more
speculative formulations of PT, which focus on challenging each of these assumptions
in turn. 28
§3 – Metaphysical PT vs. Begging the Question
How might a Peircean challenge the traditional conception of what makes a
claim about truth metaphysically substantive? One obvious resource is Peirce’s own
distinctive metaphysics. Unlike many later pragmatists, Peirce was interested in
attempting to rehabilitate metaphysics. He lamented what he saw as its ‘puny, rickety
and scrofulous’ state (CP 6.6), and attempted to find a new, useful role for it within his
philosophical system. This is one reason he later changed the name of his position from
pragmatism to ‘pragmaticism’. He says of the pragmaticist:
instead of merely jeering at metaphysics. . . the pragmaticist extracts from it a precious essence, which will serve to give life and light to cosmology and physics (CP 5.423)
In this section I will look to Peirce’s metaphysical views to see whether a third
formulation of PT might be possible, one that will distinguish his views from the
deflationist’s, without leading to the absurd implications of Substantive PT. I will argue
that it is difficult to see how such an approach could get off the ground without begging
the question.
With respect to the metaphysics of properties or universals, Peirce was
unabashedly ‘a realist of a rather extreme stripe’. Here is how he defines that realism:
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Like Substantive PT and Regulative PT, there are some textual precedents for these 28
formulations (Pragmatic PT and Metaphysical PT), but they are fewer and more tenuous.
Anybody may happen to opine that “the” is a real English word; but that will not constitute him a realist. But if he thinks that, whether the word “hard” itself be real or not, the property, the character, the predicate, hardness, is not invented by men, as the word is, but is really and truly in the hard things and is one in them all, as a description of habit, disposition, or behavior, then he is a realist. (CP 1.27 Fn P1 p 9)
Moreover, Peirce is perfectly at ease discussing various mathematical and logical
properties such as negation, the disjunctive property of being either 0 or ∞, and even
properties he calls ‘Kanticity’ and ‘Aristotelicity’ (CP 2.550, CP 3.347, CP 3.398, CP
4.121, and CP 6.122). Speaking of properties themselves, Peirce says this:
I am, then, to define the meaning of the statement that the probability, that if a die be thrown from a dice box it will turn up a number divisible by three, is one-third. The statement means that the die has a certain “would-be”; and to say that a die has a “would-be” is to say that it has a property, quite analogous to any habit that a man might have. (CP 2.664)
He makes a similar point about the nature of properties – their being essentially
forward-looking or counterfactual, as habits are – here:
But to say that a body is hard, or red, or heavy, or of a given weight, or has any other property, is to say that it is subject to law and therefore is a statement referring to the future. (CP 5.545)
The above quotations show that Peirce clearly had his own distinctive approach
to the metaphysics of properties. A new formulation of PT, which we’ll call
Metaphysical PT can thus be motivated by noting how natural it seems for a Peircean to
consider truth to be a property in Peirce’s special sense. That is, when we look back at
our initial attempts to characterize PT – as the claim that truth is a property like (S) or
(SW) – we will quickly note that both characterizations involve a future course of
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events whereby belief in a proposition would be believed or warranted to assert no
matter how much more information we acquired or inquiry we conducted.
How though could making use of Peirce’s distinctive metaphysics allow us to
rehabilitate one of those property claims? The key would presumably be to adjust or
replace the Property Framework, and in particular, the aspect of that framework that led
to the problems with Substantive PT. That aspect seems to be the notion of a nominal
essence, framed as a set of platitudes. It is not hard to find precedents within Peirce’s
work for rejecting this kind of approach, or within contemporary work broadly
congenial to pragmatism. 29
Thus, in the interest of charity, let us suppose that Metaphysical PT says that a
property claim should not to be evaluated based on its consistency with a set of prior
platitudes like The T-Schema, but rather based on whether it correctly captures the
consequences of an object’s possessing the relevant property. Let us also be generous
enough to assume that this could somehow help the Peircean avoid the scope problem
and the commitment to SEC. Even so, it seems to me that such an approach, however it
is further developed, will inevitably face a very significant challenge. This challenge
can be framed in either scholarly or dialectical terms. First consider the scholarly
version.
In his ‘classification of the sciences’, Peirce places logic before metaphysics.
Indeed, he places metaphysics last among the types of philosophy, after phenomenology
and what he calls the normative sciences (esthetics, ethics and logic). What this means 30
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Consider Peirce’s critique of what he called the ‘a priori’ method in his 1877. Or consider 29
experimental philosophy’s critique of intuition-driven philosophical methods, e.g. Feltz & Cokely 2011, Stich 1990. See also Baz 2012a.
See e.g. the 1903 classification in CP 1.181.30
is that for Peirce, metaphysics is logically dependent upon all of the other philosophical
‘sciences’, including logic itself (a pretty natural and appealing thought). But this way
of thinking about metaphysics doesn’t align very well with Metaphysical PT.
Metaphysics is after all itself a type of inquiry, and one whose aim is presumably truth.
Thus, if our understanding of truth were a product of metaphysics, then – on Peirce’s
classification of the sciences – metaphysics would be responsible for generating the
norm that guides itself. This risks begging the question by dint of vicious circularity. It
also raises a worry about failing to rule out incorrigible error. Hookway writes:
If we make use of results obtained through logically monitored empirical (or metaphysical) inquiry in carrying out investigations into the legitimacy of methods of inquiry, then we risk incorrigible error; we might use an incorrect empirical [or metaphysical] theory which leads us to adopt mistaken procedures of inquiry which, in turn, confirm our acceptance of that empirical [or metaphysical] theory. (Hookway 2002, 188)
Thus, it appears that from a Peircean perspective, our understanding of truth (qua guide
to inquiry) must not come from, or rely upon, a particular metaphysics of properties, on
pain of begging the question, and of risking incorrigible error.
Here is the dialectical version of the same problem. Peircean claims about the
nature of properties seem likely to be at least as controversial as any claim about the
nature of truth, and given the above, PT arguably serves as the basis for much of what
Peirce says about metaphysics. If that were correct, then it would be plainly circular 31
and thus question-begging to employ Peirce’s metaphysics in support of PT.
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That is, truth’s being essentially forward-looking (a commitment to how things would be) 31
could be construed as the basis for Peirce’s account of properties. Metaphysical PT suggests things are the other way around, and this is precisely what raises the worry about begging the question, particularly in light of the classification of the sciences.
Thus Metaphysical PT faces a difficult challenge in establishing the nature and
role of metaphysics in Peirce’s philosophical system, in such a way that it can lend
support to a Peircean property claim, without begging the question or risking
incorrigible error. Numerous commentators on Peirce’s system make similar 32
observations or raise similar or related problems. Thus, although it may be that there is 33
a way to develop Metaphysical PT so as to avoid this difficulty, for my part and for
now, I cannot imagine what that is.
§4 – Pragmatic PT vs. Grammatically Substantive Uses of ‘Truth’
Thus far I have considered three different formulations of PT. I have argued that
Substantive PT, or the claim that truth is a property like superassertibility, entails the
implausible claim that all truths are knowable. I have raised the concern that Regulative
PT, or the claim that we must assume that any given true hypothesis is knowable,
threatens to collapse into deflationism. I then noted an apparent dilemma for the
Peircean – between a substantive but implausible formulation of PT vs. a non-
substantive formulation of PT seemingly indistinguishable from deflationism. I
suggested the Peircean might turn to Peirce’s distinctive metaphysics of properties
(creating Metaphysical PT) in an attempt to overcome this dilemma. I then argued
however that Metaphysical PT looks doomed to beg the question, at least until
Peirceans figure out how to argue for the relevant metaphysics without presupposing
PT.
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This problem is a central focus in some of my forthcoming work.32
See for example Goudge 1950’s claims about the tension between the ‘naturalist’ and the 33
‘transcendentalist’ Peirce, and related discussions in Mayorga 2007, Murphey 1993, Reynolds 2002, Skagestad 1981, and many others.
This brings us to our final possibility: the hope that there is a second, different
way to overcome the apparent dilemma between metaphysics (or ontological theories of
truth like correspondence theories) and deflationism (or merely semantic theories). A
useful suggestion about where to begin comes from Legg 2014:
One might think that the truth-theorist is forced to choose between ontological and semantic accounts. Ontological posits or no ontological posits – does this not partition logical space? But the practice-based nature of Peirce’s theory of meaning, and its teleological explication of concepts, breaks up this dichotomy. If we hold a belief p to be true, Peirce can say more about what this means than merely: p, whilst not needing to say that something exists, the very existence of which entails p. Rather, our holding p to be true means that we expect that future inquiry will converge on p. (Legg 2014, 207)
The key thought here is that there is something distinctive about Peirce’s methodology
(his theory of meaning, his approach to conceptual analysis) that will allow us to
overcome the dilemma. This in turn might allow the Peircean to explain what it could
mean to say something substantive about truth (something more than the deflationist),
without resorting to implausible or question-begging metaphysics.
In order to arrive at a fourth formulation of PT then, we first need to say a little
more about those distinctive aspects of Peirce’s methodology. In his paper How to Make
Our Ideas Clear, Peirce explains the notion of ‘pragmatic meaning’, and that it is one of
three ‘grades of clarity’, the other two being (1) the ability to deploy a concept
successfully (‘clearness’) and (2) the ability to define it in other terms (‘distinctness’).
Legg writes:
At the first grade, we can identify a concept’s instances without necessarily being able to say how. At the second grade, we can give the concept a verbal or ‘nominal’ definition, as found in a dictionary. At the third grade, we can derive future expectations from hypotheses containing that concept. Thus, in Peirce’s famous
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example, the first grade of clarity is to state, ‘This table is hard’, the second grade is to state something like, ‘Hardness is the ability to resist pressure’, and the third to predict, ‘If I rest my lunch on this table, it will not fall through’. (Legg 2014, 205)
The first two grades may aptly be described as ‘semantic’, in the sense that
mastering the semantics of a term means knowing something of its intension or sense
(viz. a verbal definition) and something of its extension or reference (viz. being able to
apply it in particular cases). Note however that what pragmatic meaning adds to the
other two grades of clarity, according to Peirce, is not anything ontological, but rather
an understanding of the consequences – for experience or for action – of hypotheses
containing the target concept.
There is no obvious place within contemporary semantic frameworks for
practical consequences. They do not clearly fit categories like ‘sense’, ‘reference’,
‘intension’, ‘extension’, etc. So it is no small wonder that critics locked into such
semantic frameworks overlook the Peircean’s concern with consequences and focus
instead on the familiar: the property claim and whether it unites and explains truth’s
nominal essence. This is exactly what happens when Peirceans stray too close to
Substantive PT, as we saw in §1.
As Peirce’s notion of pragmatic meaning suggests however, there may be other
ways to say substantive things about a concept than by way of ontology. These things
will not be aspects of the semantics of a term or concept, but its pragmatics. To
motivate the idea of substantive pragmatic claims about language, consider the more
recent and perhaps better-known example of J.L. Austin’s speech act theory. Austin
1955 famously argued that traditional semantics had overlooked important dimensions
of meaning, the same thought that motivates Peirce’s quest to elucidate pragmatic
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meaning. Austin construed those missing aspects as what we do with words, not with
any part of their literal meaning (such as a property they might pick out). He attempted
to capture what we do with words in terms of three types of speech acts. One of those is
admittedly closely wedded to semantics – the locutionary act being the act of meaning
something with one’s words. However, the perlocutionary and illocutionary acts - what
one does with words by and in saying them – those acts are much more plausibly
concerned with consequences. The perlocutionary act is explicitly about the
consequences of a speech act, though they are not the kind of consequences Peirce had
in mind when he tried to define pragmatic meaning. The illocutionary act is concerned 34
instead with the practical dimension of the speech act itself. Here is Rae Langton
elaborating on Austin’s famous example where one man says to another ‘shoot her’:
By saying "shoot her," the first man shocked the second; by saying "shoot her," the first man persuaded the second to shoot the woman. That description captures some of the effects of what was said: it captures what Austin called the perlocutionary act. But if you stop there you will still have left something out. You will have ignored what the first man did in saying what he said. So you go on. In saying “shoot her,” the first man urged the second to shoot the woman. That description captures the action constituted by the utterance itself: it captures what Austin called the illocutionary act. (Langton 1993, 295)
Why, then, could we not apply a similar model to Peirce’s insights about truth?
On such an interpretation, the central Peircean commitment to truth’s being
epistemically constrained is not a claim about its semantics (the definition or reference/
extension of ‘truth’), but is rather a claim about what we now call pragmatics, a claim
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The perlocutionary act concerns the effects of the speech act upon the audience, whereas 34
Peirce’s ‘pragmatic meaning’ concerns ‘sensible effects’ and their ‘practical bearings’, i.e. if a proposition is true, what consequences would follow for future experience and rational conduct.
about the way the concept of truth is used in practice. Specifically, the central Peircean 35
idea is that the function of the concept of truth is to perform an action – to commit
oneself to a certain expectation about the future course of inquiry. 36
Brandom 1987 develops just such a distinctively pragmatic version of the
classical pragmatists’ take on truth, and suggests it consists of four components: (1) a 37
performative, anti-descriptive strategy, whereby one focuses ‘the act of calling
something true rather than the descriptive content one thereby associates with what is
called true’, (2) an account of this act as involving the adoption of a ‘normative stance
or attitude’, (3) an account of this stance or attitude as essentially practical – the
resolution to adopt the relevant belief as a guide to action, particularly with respect to
making inferences, and (4) an account of the measure of success of such a resolution in
terms of the success of the relevant actions or inferences. He continues:
…the theory claims that once one has understood acts of taking-true according to this four-part model, one has understood all there is to understand about truth. Truth is treated, not as a property independent of our attitudes, to which they must eventually answer, but rather as a creature of taking-true and treating-as-true. The central theoretical focus is on what one is doing when one takes something to be true, that is, our use of ‘true’, the acts and practices of taking things to be true that collectively constitute the use we make of this expression. It is then denied that there is more to the phenomenon of truth than the proprieties of such takings. I call theories of this general sort ‘phenomenalist’, in recognition of the analogy with the
! 26
Rochberg-Halton 1986 provides a fascinating insight into the origins of the modern 35
semantics/pragmatics distinction via Charles Morris’s reading of Peirce. See esp. chapter 4.
For more on pragmatism as an alternative form of conceptual analysis focused on a concept’s 36
function or purpose (the ‘teleological’ element mentioned by Legg), see Blackburn 2011 and Price 2012.
In Brandom 1988. He is primarily focused on James and Dewey, rather than Peirce, though it 37
is clear that the roots of the approach lie in Peirce’s theory of meaning.
paradigmatic subjective phenomenalism concerning physical objects, whose slogan was “esse est percipi”. (Brandom 1987, 76-7)
Some aspects of his work suggest Peirce might have approved of this
‘phenomenalist’ aspect of the view Brandom describes. For example, when Peirce
formulated the pragmatic maxim, his methodological rule for achieving the third grade
of clarity, he notoriously tacked on a rather bold claim:
Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object. (CP 5.2, emphasis added)
Aspects of Misak’s views also suggest sympathy for the idea that a pragmatic
elucidation of truth is intended to be exhaustive. She says of the pragmatist that their
‘guiding thought’ is a naturalist one: that there ‘is nothing more to the concept of truth
than what we can squeeze out of the concept of first-order inquiry’. She is also
comfortable with Brandom’s idea that on the pragmatist’s view ‘truth is deflated… it is
ontologically unexciting – it carries no commitments about what exists.’ (Misak 2007,
78-9, emphasis added.)
What, then, is Pragmatic PT’s putatively exhaustive characterization of truth?
Building on this pragmatic, phenomenalist foundation, Pragmatic PT might say that
when someone asserts that p is true, they not only assert p (as the deflationist says), but
they also adopt a particular normative stance towards it, thereby incurring various
commitments. One thing the Peircean’s account of this normative stance will say is that
it involves adopting p as a guide to action, including or especially the inferences one
can draw from it. One commitment that flows from adopting p as a guide to action, 38
! 27
For more on interpreting Peirce as an inferentialist, and his relation to Brandom’s 38
inferentialism, see Legg 2008b.
which is clearly of special concern to the Peircean, is this: asserting ‘p is true’ means
endorsing the claim or expectation that were anyone to inquire long enough and well
enough concerning whether p, they would inevitably come to believe it, and this belief
would prove to be indefeasible (in the special sense we first tried to capture using the
notions of superassertibility and superwarrant). Chris Hookway has made a similar 39
suggestion, though the commitment that interests him most is to what Peirceans call the
‘convergence thesis’, or the idea that if a proposition is true, then the beliefs of all
inquirers concerned with it are ‘fated’ to converge, provided inquiry is carried on long
enough and well enough:
Describing something as true involves taking up a ‘normative stance or attitude towards’ it: it is to endorse it and to incur various normatively grounded commitments to it. For example: we commit ourselves to the expectation that future experiment and experience will not require us to withdraw the claim. Peirce’s account of truth conforms to this mark of pragmatism: taking something to be true commits me to expecting a long-run fated convergence in opinion. (Hookway 2002, 63-4) 40
There is a great deal more to say of course about how Pragmatic PT might work, but
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An anonymous reviewer asks: why not cast this as a property claim? That is, as the idea that 39
when we say something is true we commit ourselves to the instantiation of a property, even though the Peircean is not committed to there being any such property? This would seem to cut against the central idea behind Pragmatic PT however – that pragmatism is precisely a form of analysis that is anti-descriptive and performative. What the Peircean wishes to do is to avoid the traditional representationalist mode of analysis, whereby we see the need to find some thing to which a concept refers, and switch to a mode where our central concern is what we are doing. This does not rule out some kind of hybrid approach of the sort envisioned (in fact, on one way of reading Brandom, his is just such a view). I regret I cannot explore this possibility in greater detail here.
Note that Pragmatic PT is related to but distinct from the kinds of expressivist analyses 40
offered by Price (2003, 2010, 2011), Brandom 1988 and others, in that it allows for (and perhaps relies upon) the existence of a clear distinction between semantics and pragmatics, a distinction many neo-pragmatists prefer to deny.
the above sketch should be sufficient to answer the three questions that concern us most
here. How would Pragmatic PT be more substantive than deflationism? How does it
avoid the scope problem? And, what are the prospects for such a formulation of PT?
What Pragmatic PT adds to deflationism is a detailed story about normativity. 41
This story is substantive because it says things about truth that have a firm basis in
reality and are therefore important, meaningful or considerable – the very definition of
‘substantive’. Telling or endorsing this normative story involves denying that the 42
infinite string of instances of the disquotational schema exhausts the content of our
concept of truth, putting Pragmatic PT seemingly at odds with deflationism. Unlike 43
Substantive PT however, Pragmatic PT’s claims are based on the reality of a human
practice (assertion), not some practice-independent or mind-independent property. This
is the sense in which it is ‘phenomenalist’. Though it insists upon the reality and
importance of the relevant normative phenomena, it insists that there is nothing more to
the notion of truth. Pragmatic PT’s claim is substantive therefore, because it tries to tell
us important things about the act of assertion, the norms governing it, and the
commitments one incurs in performing it.
! 29
Some argue that deflationism is not capable of accounting for the normativity of truth. See 41
Stoljar & Damnjanovic 2013, Section 7.5 for an overview.
See OED definitions 3 and 5 of ‘substantive’. Note that a source of confusion here may be the 42
ambiguity in the term ‘substantive’, since it can also designate the grammatical substantive. I address this below.
‘Seemingly’ because there are those who believe the deflationist can tell a robust or 43
substantive story about the norm of assertion. If they are correct, then there is another objection to Pragmatic PT I have not discussed here – that it wrongly assumes that deflationism is incapable of delivering pragmatically or normatively substantive claims. I intend to pursue this issue in greater depth in future work, and thank an anonymous referee for raising the issue. See Bar-On & Simmons 2007 for discussion.
Despite being more substantive than deflationism, Pragmatic PT does not lead
to the scope problem. For the problem emerges only when we undertake the task of
explaining all true propositions (some one feature they all have in common), but
Pragmatic PT is not in the business of doing this. Instead, it is in the business of
explaining acts of assertion. Would Pragmatic PT fail to explain acts of assertion where
the thing asserted is undecidable or unknowable, in parallel fashion to Substantive PT?
No, because one cannot generate the same inconsistency at the pragmatic level. If
someone asserts something of the form ‘p and no one will ever have any warrant for p’,
we would be quite correct to think this assertion is faulty, a performative error. It is
pragmatically incorrect, or infelicitous, to assert an unknowable truth. Pragmatic PT
would say something like this: the speaker is involved in a sort of pragmatic paradox,
on one hand committing themselves to the expectation that those who inquire long
enough and well enough will indefeasibly believe that p, and yet on the other denying
that any amount of inquiry will fix belief one way or the other. Thus, Pragmatic PT
does not face the scope problem.
Brandom, however, rightly notes that any view developed along these lines will
face some other familiar and powerful objections, not least the so-called Frege-Geach
problem. Clearly, the concept of truth can quite sensibly be used in non-performative,
embedded contexts, such as within conditionals inside an inference. How then can the 44
adoption of this normative stance be the whole story about truth, when it appears we can
use the concept of truth to do a number of other things?
! 30
Such as ‘if it is true that p, then q’, in which p is clearly not being asserted. For an important 44
recent discussion of the problem and what it does and does not challenge in performative analyses, see Baz 2012b.
This lacuna in the pragmatist approach to truth has prompted Brandom to
endorse a different phenomenalist view about truth – a view known as prosententialism,
first developed by Grover, Camp and Belnap 1975. An exposition of this view is beyond
the scope of this paper. What matters for our purposes is that Misak offers good reasons
to think that prosententialism is bound to be unacceptable from a Peircean standpoint
(and thus, not a promising direction for developing a pragmatic form of PT).
Specifically, Misak 2007 argues that prosententialism prohibits the Peircean from
saying the most important substantive things they want to say about truth – not
‘substantive’ in the sense of important or with a firm basis in reality, but ‘substantive’ in
the grammatical sense. Indeed, Brandom seems ready to admit to this:
talk in which the substantive ‘truth’ appears in a way not easily eliminable in favor of ‘true’ will receive no construal by such theories [as prosententialism]. Philosophers do say things like ‘Truth is one, beliefs are many’ and ‘Truth is a property definable in the vocabulary of some eventual physics’, which are illegitimate according to the account of ‘true’ offered here. The phenomenalist is not permitted to say things like this, denies that ordinary people do, and so counts it no defect of the account that it fails to generate readings for this sort of fundamentally confused remark. (Brandom 1987, 91)
We are left then with two significant challenges facing the further development
of Pragmatic PT. First, if we construe it as a form of phenomenalism about truth, which
focuses exclusively on how we use truth in assertion, then the view is vulnerable to the
Frege-Geach problem: not all actual uses of truth are assertions, and thus the claim that
the pragmatic elucidation of truth in terms of assertion exhausts the concept of truth is
implausible. Second, if we construed Pragmatic PT instead as the sort of
prosententialism defended by Brandom, Grover and others, then it becomes impossible
for the Peircean to say the sort of grammatically substantive things she wants to say
! 31
about truth. More specifically, a prosententialist appears to be committed to the idea that
a claim like ‘truth is epistemically constrained’, which I have called as the central claim
of PT, is a ‘fundamentally confused remark’.
§5 Conclusion
I have argued that PT, and its central commitment to epistemic constraint, could be
formulated in at least four different ways. Each of these ways faces its own unique
challenges.
Peirceans and their critics often initially characterize PT in terms of a
metaphysically substantive claim about the property of truth – about its nature or
essence. This formulation, which I call Substantive PT, is widely considered
implausible. This is because it entails that all truths are knowable, and it cannot
therefore adequately explain the existence of undecidable truths. Although it may not be
possible to prove that such truths exist, Peirceans should (and mostly do) prefer to avoid
ruling out their very possibility.
These problems with Substantive PT often lead Peirceans to retreat to the more
modest Regulative PT, which says only that we must assume that truth is epistemically-
constrained in order to inquire rationally concerning any putatively objective
hypothesis. The cost of this retreat however is that it becomes very difficult to say how
PT differs from deflationism, since Regulative PT says nothing about the nature or
essence of truth, and thus seems quite compatible with, even congenial to, the notion
that there is no such thing. This leads to an apparent dilemma, whereby the Peircean
must seemingly choose between an implausible but substantive claim about truth, or a
plausible, but merely deflationist claim about truth.
! 32
I then considered two somewhat speculative ways to overcome this apparent
dilemma by challenging its underlying assumptions. Metaphysical PT attempts to draw
upon Peirce’s distinctive metaphysics in order to salvage a substantive claim about the
property of truth. In doing so however it turns to a set of Peircean claims at least as
controversial, if not more so, than Peirce’s claims about truth and epistemic constraint,
thereby risking incorrigible error and begging the question. Pragmatic PT is inspired by
the notion that a philosophical claim can be substantive without being metaphysical.
Pragmatic claims appear to be potentially substantive, in that they tell us important and
meaningful things about the nature of the act one performs in saying a proposition is
true. Pragmatic PT commits the Peircean to a form of phenomenalism however, which
renders the view either implausible, or fundamentally at odds with its central claim.
My hope is that these arguments help to clarify the prospects for Peircean Truth.
Whether these prospects are promising or bleak I leave it to the reader to decide. I am
personally optimistic that some interpretation of Peirce’s powerful insights about truth
and inquiry may one day overcome these challenges.
!Acknowledgements: Thanks to Nathaniel Goldberg, Chris Hookway, Nils Kurbis, Cathy Legg, Paniel Reyes Cardenas and the faculty and grad students at UC Irvine for invaluable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I am indebted to Cheryl Misak for her exceptional work and support of my research. Thanks also to Mike Lynch and Doug Edwards for invaluable discussion, suggestions and inspiration.
!!
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