Abstract

Pragmatism and the correspondence theory of truth are longtime foes. Nevertheless, there is an argument to be made that pragmatists must embrace truth as correspondence. I show that there is a distinctive pragmatic utility to taking truth to be correspondence, and I argue that it would be inconsistent for pragmatists to accept the utility of the belief that truth is correspondence while resisting the premise that this belief is correct.In order to show how pragmatists can embrace truth as correspondence, I develop a kind of alethic pluralism, which treats pragmatist truth as theoretically fundamental to truth as correspondence. This theoretical fundamentality of pragmatist truth allows the pragmatist to conditionally accept truth as correspondence for certain discourses without falling prey to the typical pragmatist objections to correspondence. This pluralist account of truth thus allows pragmatists to concede that, for certain domains of discourse, truth is correspondence, without thereby betraying their pragmatist principles.

Highlights

  • If there is one thing a traditional pragmatist loathes, it is the correspondence theory of truth

  • The correspondence theory of truth seems to violate any kind of pragmatism whatsoever, since endorsing such a “transcendental” standard for correctness means committing oneself to a standard which implies a departure, per impossibile, from our practices and from “that with which we have dealings”

  • I have argued that pragmatists should accept truth as correspondence for some domains of discourse

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Summary

Introduction

If there is one thing a traditional pragmatist loathes, it is the correspondence theory of truth. In this article I argue that the belief that truth is correspondence has a bearing on our practices, by showing that the rejection of this belief leads to a higher degree of stubbornness in the face of disagreement This stubbornness is a theoretical vice for some domains of discourse, such as scientific domains of discourse, but not necessarily for other domains, such as discourse on matters of taste. Given that I argue in this article that pragmatists do not have to endorse these objections and that they neither have to reject truth as correspondence, I could not follow McDermid in basing my characterization of pragmatism on the various objections against the correspondence theory of truth. The kind of pragmatism that ensues is one that takes correspondence to be a pragmatic commitment

The pragmatic value of aiming for correspondence
60 Page 6 of 19
Correspondence as a useful fiction
Pragmatist alethic pluralism
Two pragmatist interpretations of (Metalevel)
The comparison objection and the constructivist objection
Some features of pragmatist alethic pluralism
Conclusions
Full Text
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