Cheryl Misak

It seems that no philosopher these days wants a theory of truth which can be accused of being metaphysical. But even if we agree that grandiose metaphysics is to be spurned, even if we agree that our theory of truth should be a deflated one, the controversy does not die down. A variety of deflationist options present themselves. Some, with Richard Rorty, take the notion of truth to be so wedded to metaphysics that we are advised to drop it altogether. Others, with Paul Horwich, take the disquotational or equivalence schema—'p' is T if and only if p—to completely capture the content of the predicate 'is true'. And others argue that there is a conception of truth to be had which is non-metaphysical but which goes beyond the triviality expressed by the disquotational schema.

: C.S. Peirce is infamous for his assertion that the ideas of truth and belief are out of place in vital or ethical matters. We must go on instinct and custom. But he also asserts that his view of truth is applicable to ethics - a true belief about what is right or wrong is the belief that would stand up to all deliberation, experience and argument. I shall resolve this tension in Peirce's work in favor of the cognitivist reading. That is, I shall argue that Peirce presents us with an attractive view of truth which makes sense of the thought that our moral judgements aspire to truth.Key-words: truth, inquiry, Experience, belief, ethics.Resumo: C.S. Peirce é famoso por sua afirmação de que as idéias de verdade e crença não se relacionam a questões vitais ou éticas. Devemos contar com o instinto e o costume. Mas ele também afirma que sua visão da verdade é aplicável à ética - uma crença verdadeira a respeito do que é certo ou errado é a crença que suportaria toda deliberação, experiência e argumentação. Eu solucionarei essa tensão na obra de Peirce em favor da leitura cognitivista. Em outras palavras, argumentarei que Peirce nos apresenta uma visão atrativa da verdade, que compreende a idéia de que nossos juízos morais aspiram à verdade.Palavras-chave: verdade, inquirição, experiência, crença, ética.

Frank Ramsey is usually taken to be an emotivist or an expressivist about the good: he is usually taken to bifurcate inquiry into fact-stating and non-fact stating domains, ethics falling into the latter. In this paper I shall argue that whatever the very young Ramsey's view might have been, towards the end of his short life, he was coming to a through-going and objective pragmatism about all our beliefs, including those about the good, beauty, and even the meaning of life. Ethical beliefs are not mere expressions of emotion, but rather fall under our cognitive scope. They can be assessed as rational or irrational, true or false.

The pragmatist view of politics is at its very heart epistemic, for it treats morals and politics as a kind of deliberation or inquiry, not terribly unlike other kinds of inquiry. With the exception of Richard Rorty, the pragmatists argue that morals and politics, like science, aim at the truth or at getting things right and that the best method for achieving this aim is a method they sometimes call the scientific method or the method of intelligence – what would now be termed deliberative democracy. Hence, the pragmatists offer an argument for democracy which appeals to the quality of the decisions supplied by democratic procedure. Why should we value decisions that are the products of voting after open debate over private decision-making and then voting, over bargaining, or over elimination of those who disagree with us? We should value them because the deliberative democratic method is more likely to give us true or right or justified answers to our questions. Rorty, of course, thinks that no inquiry aims at the truth and that nothing about pragmatism speaks in democracy's favor. This paper will show how his brand of pragmatism betrays what is good and deeply interesting in the pragmatist tradition.

This commentary explores the disagreement between Alex Klein and Cheryl Misak about the core insights of American Pragmatism, against a background of agreement. Both take the history of early American pragmatism to be a vital part of the history of analytic philosophy, not a radical break with it. But Misak argues that James seeks to loosen the usual epistemic standards so that religious and scientific belief can both be justified by a unitary set of evidentiary rules, and Klein argues that James’s aim is not primarily to seek a rationale or justification for religious belief. At the heart of the debate is a matter still very much alive in philosophy of science: the nature and status of indispensability arguments or arguments purporting to show that we need to assume some things in order to conduct inquiry.

It is sometimes said that contemporary pragmatists place too much emphasis on language and not enough on experience. This objection might hold for the pragmatism of Richard Rorty and his students, but it does not hold for the pragmatism of C. S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. I shall argue that we should return to the classical pragmatists and their truth-and-experience position. Indeed, an important insight at the very heart of pragmatism is that language and experience cannot be pulled apart.