Truth, Inquiry and the Settlement of Belief: Pragmatist Accounts

2016

Abstract: This paper is primarily concerned with Peirce’s arguments (logical, semiotic, and pragmatic) for unity of speculative and practical reason. How-ever, I shall also discuss some philosophical problems to which this gives rise, in particular the question whether theory can be a guide for practice and whether philosophical results can be helpful in practical affairs.

2010

This paper is primarily concerned with Peirce’s arguments (logical, semiotic, and pragmatic) for unity of speculative and practical reason. However, I shall also discuss some philosophical problems to which this gives rise, in particular the question whether theory can be a guide for practice and whether philosophical results can be helpful in practical affairs.

Post-Truth, Fake News: Viral Modernity & Higher Education, (eds.) Peters, M., Rider, S., Besley T., Hyvonen, M. , 2018

Although certain recent developments in mendacious political manipulation of public discourse are horrifying to the academic mind, I argue that we should not panic. Charles Peirce’s pragmatist epistemology with its teleological arc, long horizon, and rare balance between robust realism and contrite fallibilism offers guidance to weather the storm, and perhaps even see it as inevitable in our intellectual development. This paper explores Peirce’s classic “four methods of fixing belief”, which takes us on an entertaining and still very pertinent tour through tenacity, authority and a priori speculation to the method of science – the only method which is both public and self-correcting. Although in the West we (mostly) proudly self-conceive as living in a ‘scientific age’, I argue that this is premature. Precisely insofar as we treat the misbehavior of governments as a harbinger of doom, we remain trapped in authoritarian modes of thinking which Peirce identified with medievalism, although modernity is increasingly quickening around us in worldwide information-sharing practices that are shaped entirely by mutual help. With this framework in mind, many tactics of recent media are most helpfully seen as belonging not to a post-truth, but a pre-truth stage of human intellectual development. Advice on this is sought from Plato, who of course also faced a world that was ‘pre-academic’.

The paper argues that there should be an intrinsic connection between thought and action. The key to deal with epistemological predicament is to recognize that the truth is not something private or individual. Although I disagree with Peirce's position in holding that it is only the scientific investigators, which determine what truth is, I agree with his notion that truth or knowledge is not an individual affair. Knowledge always involves cooperative undertaking. Peirce failed to recognize the normative nature of philosophy. In Peirce's epistemic investigation, there is a tendency to reduce all knowledge to what is measurable. Philosophy is not and ought not to aspire to be a science. It is one of the humanities. Instead of following the scientistically accepted principles in carrying out investigations, it relentlessly probes out the fundamental assumption and presupposition that underlies scientific principles. It seeks to know what all inquiries presuppose, what all of them need.

the pluralist, 2012

New pragmatists, 2007

The pragmatist tradition, both classical and contemporary, is oddly divided on the question of the coherence of a robust conception of objective truth. Whereas both Peirce and Sellars take Peirce's conception of meaning, on which the pragmatist tradition is founded, to make an essential contribution to an adequate account of objective truth, other pragmatists (notably James, Dewey, and Rorty) take that same conception to foreclose once and for all the possibility of such an account. There is, I think, real merit to both these wings of the tradition. My aim is not, however, to defend that claim-at least not directly-but instead to achieve a better understanding of the relationship between Peirce's pragmatist maxim and the notion of objective truth by reflecting on the nature and significance of that maxim. 1

Peirce makes it clear that doubt and belief oppose one another. But that slogan admits of a weaker and a stronger reading. The weaker reading permits and the stronger reading forbids the possibility that one can be in a state of doubt and of belief with respect to the same proposition at the same time. The stronger claim is standardly attributed to Peirce, for textual and philosophical reasons. This paper maintains that this standard construal is excessively strong. It argues that the secondary literature tends to presuppose the strong reading and that it often does so by confusing sufficient conditions for belief with necessary ones. It acknowledges some textual evidence on behalf of the strong reading but maintains that the relevant passages are as friendly to the weak as to the strong interpretation of Peirce. The paper then links the doubt-belief theory of “The Fixation of Belief” to the papers on probability that occupy the bulk of the Illustrations of the Logic of Science. It shows that Peirce’s discussion of probability, strength of belief, and weight of evidence makes room for confidence, but not belief, to be undermined and thus offers a more flexible version of Peirce’s theory of inquiry.

By contrast to current tendencies towards 'analytic' elucidation of truth through theories of correspondence, coherence and so on, I present a 'pragmatic' elucidation of truth through concrete development of the logical ideal in community, as first presented by Charles Peirce. In some key respects, this approach to truth can be viewed as 'quite Hegelian'. Presented at the Conference of the Australian Hegel Society: "Naturalism and Sociality", University of NSW, 14-15 February 2019.