Pragmatism and Correspondence
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Pragmatism and Correspondence Andrew Howat 1 Received: 13 April 2020 / Revised: 13 August 2020 / Accepted: 24 August 2020 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract It is commonplace to describe the pragmatist conception of truth (PT) as incompatible with correspondence theory. This popular description relies on a deflationary reading of Peirce and James’s many apparent endorsements of correspondence. This reading says they regarded it as a mere platitude or truism, not as a substantive piece of philosophical theorizing. There are two main reasons typically offered in support of this platitude narrative – (1) its consonance with Peirce’s original formulation of PT from 1878, and (2) the objections that pragmatists (including Peirce himself) frequently raised against various notions traditionally associated with CT (e.g. metaphysical realism, representationalism, etc.). I argue that neither reason is compelling and that PT and CT are compatible conceptions of truth. Keywords Pragmatism . Truth . Correspondence . Realism . Nominalism
“Truth consists in the existence of a real fact corresponding to the true proposition.” (C.S. Peirce, W3: 282, 1878) “Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their ‘agreement,’ as falsity means their disagreement, with ‘reality.’ Pragmatists and intellectualists both accept this definition as a matter of course…” (James 1907, p. 91). “…the [classical] pragmatists conclude that the intuition that truth is correspondence should be extirpated rather than explicated.” (Rorty 1991, p. 80.) “Pragmatism arose out of a rejection of the correspondence theory.” (Misak 2016, p. 284)
* Andrew Howat [email protected]
1
Department of Philosophy, California State University Fullerton, Fullerton, CA 92834, USA
Philosophia
In her entry on ‘The Pragmatist Theory of Truth’ for the recently published Oxford Handbook of Truth, Cheryl Misak writes: It should be clear that pragmatism, of any stripe, will be set against versions of the correspondence theory of truth, on which a statement is true if it gets right or mirrors the human-independent world. For that concept of truth introduces an element that is unknowable by human inquirers and believers.1 Statements along these lines are typically regarded as axiomatic, particularly in mainstream literature on theories of truth.2 Nevertheless, I shall argue that this commonplace assumption rests on a mistake. The pragmatist conception of truth (PT, hereafter) need not be ‘set against’ the correspondence theory of truth. From its origin in the work of pragmatism’s founder C. S. Peirce, it was only ever set against one particular form of the correspondence theory. Only a nominalist correspondence theory raises the problem that Misak rightly highlights here.3 A scholastically realist correspondence theory is, I shall argue, compatible with Peirce’s original vision for the pragmatist theory of truth.4 Such an argument may seem to some utterly doomed from the outset. For it is undoubtedly true that for over a hundred
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