According to the correspondence theory of Truth a statement is True if it accurately corresponds to the state of affairs of the world. In other words, it does not matter what anybody thinks about a certain fact, it is True if it describes the mind independent reality.

Pragmatic theories of truth are a reaction and, in many cases, a critique of the correspondence theory of truth of which they are often put forwards as an alternative. At the very least, they propose to be theories that capture aspects of truth that the correspondence theory misses. For instance, we can only perceive reality through mind dependent processes so it is unclear if we can ever know if something is True in the correspondence sense. Maybe in the mind independent reality we are a bunch of brains in a vat who are given the sensory stimulus to simulate our perceived reality.

A more unpresuming approach to truth could be that to recognize our epistemic limitations and define truth in a way that is more accessible to us and that captures how we use truth. Following this line of thinking a pragmatist may define truth as what will be accepted “at the end of inquiry”.

Specifically, in previous posts, we define truth as the result of inquiry performed by a perfectly rational agent with full information on the matter. We also take an inquiry to be founded on natural attributes humans universally posses (valuing the law of non contradiction, sensory experience, valuing coherence, etc. ) and developed by gathering information and checking hypothesis (similarly to the scientific method). Notice also that, since we are not perfectly rational agents and we never have full information, we can only get approximately close to the truth. Under this interpretation an inquiry is a down to earth process that employs some basis we all appear to share to parse the evidence we manage to gather. In the end a pragmatist acknowledges that he can’t know if something is absolutely True but he can make educated guesses on what is true through inquiries. For a slightly more comprehensive explanation one can take a look here.

An interesting variation of taking the pragmatist path to truth regards the ethical sphere. What may a pragmatist say about moral statements? Are they truth-apt?

When reading the modern philosophical definitions regarding morality we clearly see the markings of the correspondence theory of Truth. Moral realism is usually defined as the position according to which there are mind-independent (objective) moral Truths. These Truths are then a fact of reality that we may appeal to to proclaim an action as good or bad.

If one is convinced by the pragmatic approach to truth the canonical definition of moral realism will leave him unsatisfied. Indeed, if the correspondence theory of Truth is misguided there is little reason to utilize it to define moral truths. The classical definition of moral realism would fall victim to the same objections the pragmatist had with the correspondence theory of Truth. So, for a pragmatist, the ethical sphere would seem to be in need of a revamp of it’s definitions just like the epistemic sphere did. Maybe, as for truth, much more can be understood about morality by capturing how we think about ethics and how we justify moral norms.

If we wish to acknowledge our epistemic limitations in the moral domain, paralleling the pragmatic approach to truth, then moral Truth, Goodness, Ought, Etc. must become moral truth, goodness, ought, etc. Meaning that a new definition for moral truth is needed that considers our predicament as beings that are shackled to the mind-dependent experience of reality. As in the epistemic case, we can’t access what we Ought to do according to the mind-independent reality, because we are limited to the mind dependent reality, and even if we could it would be ephemeral to us.*

Keeping the essence of the pragmatic definition of truth, a moral truth would be what is accepted at the end of inquiry, but how can we even perform an inquiry in the moral domain?

To do so we need to expand the foundation used in the epistemic sphere to include other psychological universals: the ones concerning how we think we ought to behave. Note that this is not an inflation of our ontology, because the basis we use, just as in the epistemic case, should be empirically verifiable (cross-cultural and across times). In other words, just as we take the value of coherence for granted, because (we argue) it belongs to the set of attributes bestowed on us by nature, the same may be true for some initial bedrock moral principles. These moral principles should be analogous to principles such as the law of non contradiction or the law of the excluded middle, they belong in the same class. Then, given a moral foundation, we may find (derived) moral truths in the same way our inquiry allowed us to operate for scientific cases.

We are shackled by nature to think we ought to behave a certain way.**

The foundation we obtain should then allow us, in principle, to tell us which actions we ought to perform and what is good and what is bad. We should get closer to what is morally true by a correct use of our natural structures for morality, just as we got closer to truth by an exact use of our natural structures employed in the pursuit of knowledge. Moreover, if such a bedrock basis existed and was universal (as required) the objectiveness of moral facts would be captured by the universality of the foundation (again we parallel the epistemic case). The situation described is similar to the position we found ourselves in when analyzing how we pragmatically justify truth, first, we conjectured (with some evidence) the existence of a (universal) common framework (comprised of coherence, induction, etc) we use to justify truth (needed to pursue the “one true conclusion”) and then one can advance his inquiry in pursuit for truth.

As before the natural foundation from which one begins an inquiry, be it moral or otherwise, is not immune to being inquired upon itself (does it exist? what should it be comprised of?) this maintains a self critical attitude towards knowledge and morality that the pragmatist cherishes. These falsifiable aspect of the pragmatic foundationalist versions of morality and epistemology we have been describing are an added benefit to the theories.

We have now set up an arduous task for ourselves: trying to understand if there are bedrock moral principles that are empirically universally shared. Although we have previously argued that there are epistemic concepts that are natural to humans the mountain in front of us now appears bigger. There are though some things that come in our support: first we must consider that, just as for our epistemic rules, humans can misapply their natural principles. For instance, We can find patterns by an erroneous use of induction were there actually are none and we can be incoherent without realizing it. The natural tenets of morality should then be observed as dominant and consistent but we should not expect them to be found in every single practical setting. Secondly, it would be peculiar if all healthy humans did not have something in common in our thoughts on how we ought to act, after all we are a biological species and we seem to be able to find all sorts of patterns regarding broad aspects of how other species behave. It might even seem strange if humans were a complete tabula rasa concerning what they perceive as being good.

Maybe our journey into discovering a moral foundation is not so doomed as it initially seemed.

In a following post we will argue that, spoiler alert, a universal foundation for morality does in fact exist and that it may be somewhat subsumed by the self evident truths specified by Sidwick in The Methods of Ethics. He reaches them looking inside himself with an “armchair analysis” but nowadays there are other, more quantitative studies, that point in a similar direction. The, often cited, two self evident intuitions of Sidwick are:

1) The principle of prudence or rational self-love - (My) well-being is good on the whole.

“As a rational being I am bound to aim at good generally, – so far as it is attainable by my efforts, – not merely at a particular part of it”.

“The mere difference of priority and posteriority in time is not a reasonable ground for having more regard to the consciousness of one moment than to that of another”.

2) The principle of Rational benevolence - Universality principle.

“the good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view of the Universe, than the good of any other”

Mirroring Sidwick’s dualism, we will similarly argue that we are influenced by two forces, one that is rationally egoistical and the other that is aware of the fact that the suffering of all members of the tribe matters (the force that makes us capable of sacrificing for the sake of others).

The second force also allow us to recognize how we should ideally behave with respect to others.

*Imagine we have a device that tells us what is Good and Bad in the mind independent reality and it told us that torturing an innocent child was Good. We would not feel that performing the torture is good, we instinctively recognize such an act as being horrendous, because we are naturally inclined to care for the young and not make them suffer uselessly. In this sense what is morally True in the mind independent reality is fleeting, just as it was in the epistemic case.

** If we provide a valid and sound argument, for why we can access, at the very least partially, the mind-independent reality through our senses, and we discovered that we do indeed have a universal bedrock foundation for how we think about morality (in the mind-independent reality) then we could call ourselves a moral realist of the naturalist type. This just to say that the position we have argued for is very close to moral naturalism.

EDIT: If we take only one definition of Truth, the correspondence one, and we accept that our process of justification is mind dependent we can still reach a fallabilist version of truth. But this raises questions on how do we know the process of justification is mapping onto the mind independent reality, something that we avoid with the pragmatic definition.

Let’s take a pragmatic theory of truth that defines truth as the result of inquiry performed by a perfectly rational agent with total information on the matter. How would this definition work, in applications, for regular human beings? How much can we capture of the notion of truth?

Well, for starters, we will be unable to be totally confident we have found truth; we are not hyper rational beings and we will never posses all the information on a certain matter.

What the definition suggests, regarding the truth of a claim, is to try to acquire as much information as possible and evaluate it without biases in the most rational way we can (in this context we can take “being rational” as meaning utilizing our natural structures, concerning truth, in the correct way).

To get a handle on pragmatic truth let’s begin with elementary cases and then build up to more complex scenarios. As a starter, can we look at our hand and say that it is true that it has five fingers?

Formally we all have an ongoing inquiry into the matter: everyday (induction) we see our hand (sensory experience) we feel stuff with it and all our sensory inductive observations are in line with us having a certain amount of fingers (coherence).

If we actually have five fingers (sorry for your loss otherwise) our inquiry, as described previously, will point to the fact that it’s almost certainly true we have five fingers. Of course, In day to day conversations, when we estimate the likelihood of something being true as very high, we can drop the “almost certainly” and just claim that it is true that our hand has five fingers. Everything seems to be working fine here, let’s move on to something a bit more complex.

Say someone says that the moon is made out of cheese, does it follow from our pragmatic foundationalist definition of truth that such a statement is very likely to be false?

Notice that, as opposed to our last case, we don’t have direct sensory experience on the matter. How may we then proceed to build an inquiry?

Here comes a thorny topic: a fact that we usually find to be true by virtue of inquiry is that people don’t normally blatantly lie to one another, sure they lie to each other some of the time (generally when there is some egoistic interest to be gained from the lying) but most of the time people are quite sincere.

Also by inquiry we may notice that people seem to operate under a similar framework as us, they have very similar sensory experiences and they conduct their own inquiries that often end up agreeing with ours. This leads us, by inductive reasoning, to assign a certain value to what people tend to believe is true when we conduct our own inquiries. But the value we assign to what others think about a certain thing should be decided carefully. For instance we should value the beliefs of someone who is an expert in a field we are inquiring into more than the beliefs of other groups of people who have less experience and information on the matter.

Taking into account this brief detour and going back to our cheesy moon example we can now appreciate how our inquiry may be conducted: we have never heard about anybody (induction) who has ever believed the moon is made of cheese, some of our physical laws would be off if that was the case (coherence) and nobody would lie about such a matter because there are no incentives to do so (induction). We can be pretty confident in stating that the moon is not made out of cheese.

Looking at the process of the last inquiry we described, we may notice that we often build on previous inquiries (coherence) that we currently consider to be true. There is no problem in doing this and it is to be expected (A brief intro to Bayesian reasoning could make this passage more rigorous but that is a topic for another post). To reach our conclusion in the previous inquiry we have built on the facts that people don’t generally lie without incentive and that our current understanding of physical laws does not support the moon being made out of cheese. Inquiries rest on truths found it by inquiry.

Now let’s tackle a harder case: say we are hallucinating that there are giraffes in the distance, would a pragmatist then consider the claim that there are giraffes in the distance to be true?

We are in a tricky scenario where our senses are deceiving us. Initially, if we were in some remote African village, we might think that there really were giraffes in the distance. After all, our senses don’t usually deceive us (induction) and giraffes live in our habitat (coherence) so nothing out of the ordinary. If we start referring to the giraffes and people start telling us they are nowhere to be seen we would start getting some observations that run counter to the initial results of our investigation. Our ongoing inquiry into truth would have to be revised, now we might be unsure if the giraffes are real or not anymore. Acquiring more evidence, like actually going towards the giraffes and seeing if they vanish could allow us to convince ourselves that we where hallucinating. In this case we can see how even a modest inquiry can be updated with further evidence in a way that is very natural.

Even with a very ruff sketch of how a pragmatic theory of truth might function we see that the theory already manages to captures some of the complexities of how we use an justify truth.

To conclude let’s see an example of how two pragmatists can in theory resolve disagreements through dialogue.

Person 1: The earth is flat.

Person 2: My inquiry does not point to this being true, check out these photos taken from a space station.

Person 1: Those photos are fake.

Person 2: I am ready to put in question my evidence but do you have any evidence to support the fact that the photos are fake.

Person 1: There is a global conspiracy to pretend the world is spherical, there is plenty of evidence for this: take this leaked email from a politician that calls astronauts actors.

Person 2: Let’s share all our evidence with one another so we get on the same level of information.

Person 1: Sure

Person 2: It appears to me you are overestimating by a lot the likelihood of a global conspiracy being true, utilizing your way of conducting induction is equivalent to thinking that a die tossed randomly 10000 times that always comes up heads has a side with tails on.

Person 1: I see my mistake now. (notice that in practice you will essentially never be able to reach this point because it’s very difficult for humans to admit they are wrong, one of their many biases that keeps us from being perfectly rational).

This simple example has the aim to show that in theory, if both pragmatist interlocutors have the same information set, the only disagreement they can have is if they are misapplying somewhere their natural rules for truth seeking (induction, coherence, etc). One should ideally be able to pin point the exact place where the mistake occurs and draw an analogy to a simpler case where the same error in reasoning would draw to an obviously absurd conclusion. Of course in not all cases is it easy to determine where the truth lies - one may think about making hypothesis in a scientific enterprise - and there could be multiple options that seem reasonable. It can get difficult to understand which is the more likely to be true.

We just gave some simple examples to fix ideas. All feedback welcome.

One of the approaches to characterize truth is given by the early pragmatists who saw truth as the result of inquiry, but what exactly is an inquiry? At the beginning of the Pragmatist tradition an inquiry was seen as having some structure to it, it was not a disorganized arbitrary approach that could be undertaken haphazardly. The archetypal form of inquiry, generally held in high regards by pragmatists, was the scientific method as it provided a systematic procedure to seek truth. Early pragmatists appreciated the scientific method because it looked for graspable knowledge within the scope of humanity, it was not a misguided journey in search of absolute Truth. With the passing of time many Pragmatic philosophers gave their thoughts on what constitutes an inquiry and a clear definition is hard to narrow down. In this article we will argue in favor of a possible foundation for inquiry that would get us closer to defining it’s structure better.

As we have discussed previously, a foundation for inquiry that delineates where to begin the search of knowledge may benefit a pragmatic definition of truth. If nothing else because clearly outlining the specific building blocks that comprise an inquiry may allow one to maintain the objectiveness of truth. Indeed, allowing the rules of inquiry to vary wildly at the whims of the inquirer’s desires quickly leads to accepting a certain degree of relativism. The possible candidate for a foundation, we will be focusing on, is an underpinning comprised by psychological human universals (Norenzayan, 2005) if they exist. In such a way everybody could begin an inquiry and, in principle, be able to refer back to assumptions that are commonly understood by all.

Following this route, there are many components that could be included in a bedrock basis for inquiry: sensory experiences, the law of non contradiction, the law of the excluded middle etc. According to the pragmatic ethos, these should not be considered a priori absolute Truths, rather they should be seen as starting points we are naturally inclined to accept. Let’s sketch together some of the most likely candidates that may be placed in our common toolbox.

As anticipated, an element that appears irreplaceable to construct an inquiry is our capacity for sensory experiences. We all appear to be able to perceive things around us and generally we tend to place a lot of credence in our senses: if a car is coming towards us we move, if the cheese smells bad we bin it. Sure, our senses may be deceiving us (maybe we are a brain in a vat) but a pragmatist that embarks on the journey of inquiry accepts that one has to begin somewhere, even if the starting point is not assured. The focus of a pragmatist is not on seeking mind-independent Truths, but on reaching knowledge within our grasp.

Another, somewhat maligned, element of the group of universal tools we may posses seems to be our ability to perform inductions*, or better the fact that we can’t help but consider induction an instrument that gets us closer to truth. Due to the seemingly uncontroversial fact that all healthy humans posses a certain ability to perform pattern recognition there should be little doubt that induction belongs in our common foundation. If a person in front of us is flipping a coin and it comes up heads 10 times in a row we can’t help but suspect that the coin might be rigged and has heads on both sides. If the person flips the coin another 100 times and it still only comes up heads we can’t help but think the coin, almost definitely, has a head on each side.

As many have noticed, induction is weird, so it’s made fun of a lot. We struggle to describe the rules that govern it and we know it doesn’t always lead us to truth let alone (mind-independent) Truth. Famous is the case of the “inductive turkey” that all year round was fed at 9 pm until on Christmas eve, when he was expecting his food, was brutally decapitated. A funny story until we recognize that all the physical laws that we have discovered could change tomorrow and we would be the left counting our feathers. Nonetheless it is apparent that many of our truths are based on our inductive inferences and although it is true that induction does fails us sometimes, in important cases it does not: the sun rises every day, the air we breath does not suddenly turn poisonous, etc. Taking the pragmatic route to truth, we should embrace induction with open arms, being grateful for a tool that has given us a lot, and include it as one of the bedrock elements that comprises an inquiry.

Another candidate that could be placed alongside sensory experiences and induction, as part of a foundation for inquiry, is coherence. Coherence, the quality of being logical and consistent, captures a host of principles some of which we have already named (the law of non contradiction and the law of the excluded middle). In particular coherence allows us to employ our deductive capabilities. As in the previous cases it may be hard to pin point exactly the universal facets of coherence, but one might suspect there is indeed something that we all value in it, after all every know language is based on consistent rules. Pin pointing exactly the psychological universals that contribute to our proclivity for coherence is an empirical matter that, if solved, would clarify further what being coherent really means.**

Now that we have briefly described some ingredients of an inquiry we should also specify that the correct usage of the natural rules that comprise an inquiry is baked into our understanding of the concepts themself, e.g., if a coin is flipped four times and it comes up tails twice and heads twice, it would be (obviously) wrong to then assume by inductive inference that the coin is rigged. There is a correct way to use the instruments in our toolbox, that is also natural, and is implied by and essential to the instruments themself. Notice though that this does not mean that it is easy to always perform an inquiry by the book, we know we are not infallible, our senses can deceive us, we often perform mistaken inferences, and we can be incoherent. We can follow our natural rules incorrectly. Nevertheless, if an agent want to get closer to truth, he should strive to inquire following the rules of inquiry as optimally as possible.

At this point, to not overwhelm in details, we can conclude our ruff sketch of what constitutes an inquiry and turn to our pragmatic definition of truth: truth is the result of inquiry.

Although our pragmatic definition of truth as “the result of inquiry” is getting more and more precise there is still an important detail to iron out: we know that different subjects can reach different conclusions, even if they are using the same natural structures to conduct their inquiry. This can be due to a difference in information sets between individuals or because, as just remarked, humans are prone to falling victims to a host of biases that can distort, often unconsciously, an inquiry. For instance an ancient Roman might be led by his inquiry to think that the earth is flat because he has always perceived it as flat (sensory input + induction) and everyone he knows, who have no reason to lie to him, thinks it is flat (sensory input + induction + induction). While a Greek astronomer might think that the earth is spherical because he knows others facts about the cosmos and those lead him to his conclusion (that is perfectly coherent with his sensory experience of the world). Here we are in a case of asymmetric information. For another example of a disagreement on the results of inquiry take an astrologist and a scientist that reach different conclusions on whether it will rain tomorrow. The astrologist bases such a prediction on the fact that Jupiter was clearly visible last night, the scientist bases his prediction on the best meteorological models available to him. Here one inquiry was not performed correctly, it did not follow the right systematic procedure, in other words, it was performed irrationally.

These examples showcase that by simply defining truth as the result of inquiry everyone could reach their own truth, in particular we could (and would) find that something is true for somebody and not true for someone else. Allowing our definition of truth to find that something is both true and not true doesn’t capture one of the essential characteristics of how we think about truth: objectivity.

Pragmatist are generaly well aware of this fact so their definitions of truth aim to correct for the problem. Thus we obtain accounts that, for example, view truth as what would be the result of scientific inquiry, if scientific inquiry were allowed to go on indefinitely.  Alternatively, true beliefs are those “that would withstand doubt, were we to inquire as far as we fruitfully could on the matter”. (Misak, 2000) On this account truth “stands up and would continue to stand up to reasons and evidence”. A modernized approach to defuse the relativist bomb could be to define truth as the result of inquiry performed by a perfectly rational agent with full information on the matter [1].

With this pragmatic definitions of truth we can never really be sure we have reached truth, nobody is a perfectly rational agent and nobody has perfect information, although we can aim to get as close as we possibly can. A sincere encapsulation of the human condition. The pragmatic conception of truth keeps us humble but at the same time pushes us to give our very best, it captures the graspable essence of truth. 

So, after all this, what does one gain from a “pragmatic foundationalist” view of epistemology?

Firstly, one retains the fallabilist essence of pragmatism. Secondly, one can enjoy a theory with falsifiable elements to it: if we discovered that no psychological universals exist then the theory would be debunked. Accepting such a fact one can hardly call the foundation from which one begins an inquiry as being dogmatic.

Thirdly, we retain one of the main qualities of the correspondence theory of truth: objectivity. If everyone believes that a true fact is false such a consensus, according to our pragmatic definition of truth [1], will have no bearing on the veracity of the matter. It is only if agents, who are totally informed, act perfectly rationally that truth can be reached.

Lastly, one may hope to have a logically sound framework that does not venture too far, into matters beyond our current comprehension. If it turns out that our senses do indeed map onto the mind independent reality, and our brain allows us to parse such information without error so much the better.

YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1h34EmLOXoM4br4R8RWkog

*We could also include in our foundation the long lost brother of induction: abduction, but let’s keep it as bare bones as possible for now.

**Interestingly, coherence and induction can sometimes be viewed as two sides of the same coin. Take the example of seeing a person flip a coin 10 times that always comes up heads but the person flipping the coin claims that it is not a rigged coin. We could suppose that the person is lying and that the evidence points to the coin being rigged, although if we also knew (by inductive observation) that the person flipping the coin never lies (he has taken a vow to his god to never lie and we have always seen him tell the truth) we would have two observations that are at odds: by inductive inference the results of the coin tosses suggest that the coin is rigged, but we would also not expected (again by inductive inference) that the person flipping the coin would lie. We can look at this example as two separate inquiries that clash (the inquiries are not coherent) or as a single big inquiry where we are considering as observations the tuple formed by the result of the coin toss and the claim of the person (a single inductive inference that leaves us undecided). Both choices of inquiry, if performed rationally, should give the same credence to weather the coin is rigged or not  (that would depend on how much time we have known the man flipping coins).

REFERENCES:

Misak 2000, Truth, Politics, Morality, New York: Routledge.

A. Norenzayan and S. J. Heine (2005) Psychological Universals: What Are They and How Can We Know?  Psychological Bulletin.

Let’s assume we are convinced that Truth -the capital t Truth, the mind-independent truth- can’t be know by us meager humans (at least in our current state). We could then turn to radical skepticism, although, as Bertrand Russel said “Skepticism, while logically impeccable, is psychologically impossible, and there is an element of frivolous insincerity in any philosophy which pretends to accept it” (Bertrand, 1948). If the skeptic considers mind-independence the only notion of truth worth considering, he is self-admittedly using a concept of knowledge that can never be accessed and thus is of no interest to any project in our lives, resulting in a position that may appear somewhat vacuous. Also, espousing a theory that one can’t fully believe in seems pretty unsatisfactory. But what even remains of our conception of truth once we recognize our epistemic limitations? Surprisingly, quite a bit can be salvaged.

Pragmatic theories of truth have been in business for a couple of centuries, they have often focused on how the concept of truth is used and what speakers are doing when describing statements as true: depending on the version, speakers may be commending a statement, signaling its scientific reliability, or committing themselves to giving reasons in its support. Pragmatic theories also often focus on the criteria by which truth can be judged and are put forward as an alternative to Skepticism and the correspondence theories of Truth.* They are usually associated either with C.S. Peirce’s proposal that true beliefs will be accepted “at the end of inquiry” or with William James’ proposal that truth be defined in terms of the utility it provides.

The history of pragmatism is rich, there have been many thinkers with different ideas that adopted, in some shape or form, the same philosophical banner. We will focus mostly on the Peircean tradition of truth who’s slogan is “truth is the result of inquiry”, where, generally, an inquiry is a process, governed coherently by certain rules, aimed at acquiring warranted beliefs. There are various definitions (that tend to be a bit vague) of what an inquiry might be, for example In Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, John Dewey defined inquiry as “the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole”.

Importantly, for some pragmatist, different inquiries may have very different constraints (sometimes practically none at all) or obey alternative rules, by consequence, following the view that inquiries can be performed in many ways, all retaining the same importance when it comes to establishing truth, some pragmatic thinkers embrace a relativistic view of truth. Thus it’s possible —following (Haack, 2004)— to distinguish two radically different stripes of pragmatism, which perhaps explain its so diverse manifestations: reformist pragmatism and revolutionary pragmatism. The former recognizes the legitimacy of the traditional questions linked to the truth of our cognitive practices and tries to reconstruct philosophy. The latter one abandons the notions of objectivity and truth and rejects philosophy as a search, it simply aims to “continue the conversation of humanity”.

Reasons why some pragmatic thinkers might want to extend themself as far as abandoning objectivity can be searched for in the historical context in which pragmatism frolicked. In many ways pragmatism was a reaction to classical foundationalism: the school of thought that Truth rested on some sound bedrock basis made of a-priori or god-given principles. For some pragmatists foundational rationalists based the pursuit of knowledge on abstract principles in a monistic and dogmatic way emphasizing postulates beyond or outside the flux of experience which, if known, would yield immutable objective Truth. Pragmatists rejected this way of thinking about truth, they highlighted how knowledge had to be inevitably pursued following a mind dependent process and that absolute Truth would ultimately always be out of reach.

Adding to this reactionary spirit, after world war II, there was a backlash against eugenics and the general view that human behavior could be explained by biological factors. Anthropologists such as Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict championed the idea that infants were essentially a blank slate a “tabula rasa” and the scientific consensus coalesced around such a view: humans were born with an empty mind which is filled by experience. In such a post-modern climate it’s not surprising that pragmatic philosophers like Richard Rorty could no longer see any grounding for an objective truth (famously Rorty wanted to reduce objectivity to solidarity). If humans were, like the science of the time suggested, a blank slate, a search for some pragmatic natural foundation seemed doomed to fail. It would then seem only reasonable that, without a common starting point, any inquiry into truth should be given the same standing, a position that quickly leads to accepting a certain degree of relativism.

Our-days the science is quite different, the anthropological consensus seems to have shifted from the blank slate hypothesis to the belief that a certain number of human universals exist. These are features of behavior or psyche that all human beings possess; instead of being a blank slate we may be a partially engraved slate (with still plenty of white to fill in). Perhaps then, some forms of pragmatism, viewed as antithesis to foundationalism, in accordance to a Hegelian dialectical view of progress, may have overshot their mark.

For these reasons a synthesis of foundationalism and pragmatism could be in order. Such a synthesis should proposes itself as an alternative to the correspondence theory of truth and to Skepticism, recognize our epistemic limitations and the fallibilist nature of our relationship with knowledge but still aim at conserving objectivity in truth. It should aim at being “logically impeccable” while retaining the graspable essence of truth. Can it be done?  One could argue that some have already tried (Haack, 1993).

A way of proceeding, that maintains the pragmatic ideal that truth may be found at the end of inquiry but also adds a pinch of (modest) foundationalism to the recepy, could be to require that any inquiry should rest on common ground. In accordance with the spirit of pragmatism such a foundation shouldn’t be made of a-priori (mind-indipendent) Truths or God-given principles rather it should be comprised of tools that humans use for an investigative process. A naturalistic way of specifying such a foundation could be given by a set of psychological universals that all humans posses (A. Norenzayan et al. 2005).** According to this view, the bedrock basis of an inquiry for a (naturalistic) pragmatic foundationalist would not be comprised of Truths but by a set of structures that have been imposed on us because of our nature (taking a page from the naturalized epistemology literature).

One could include in this set the law of non-contradiction, the law of excluded middle, the concepts of space and time, sensory inputs, etc. Reaching a scientific consensus on what principles should be included in such a foundation would require more research. For now, by being both the investigators and the subject of investigation, we can specify two ways to find these basic building blocks on which to build truth: the armchair approach and the cross-cultural approach.

For the armchair route, a good rule of thumb to identify foundational intrinsic factors is to try to do without them from the comfort of our own homes: if attempting to abandon one hurts our brain and ultimately appears impossible then one might be onto something. Here the foundationalist spirit of characterizing the starting points as self-evident would be maintained (but we shouldn’t use the language “self-evidently True”).

 The cross-cultural approach instead would be comprised of a scientific investigation into what epistemic foundations do all humans tend to use empirically when discussing the truth of some fact.*** For example it may be the case that, independently of culture, all (healthy) humans employ the law of non contradiction (Huss, 2010).**** Similarly one could conjecture that humans universally value coherence, having languages based off rules. Of course, being that we are at the beginning phases of the journey of scientifically investigating what psychological universal might exist, there is still work to be done in this area.

As might be expected, many of the “self-evident” Truths championed by classical foundationalists are indeed good candidates for being psychological universals. So the foundation for pragmatic inquiry may be very similar to an a-priori basis a foundationalist could pick to ground Truth. The difference is that, while a classical foundationalist might consider his set of starting points as being absolutely True mind-independent preconditions of experience or axioms given to him by an omniscient god, a pragmatist would regard them less flatteringly as “rules of our existence” or laws we are forced to obey because of our nature. Here we take an approach similar to Dewey that believed that even such mainstays of logic as the laws of contradiction and excluded middle are not to be taken as a priori Truths, but rather as “conditions which have been ascertained during the conduct of continued inquiry to be involved in its own successful pursuit” (Dewey, 1938) as no independently existing ‘real’ things had a place within Deweyan ontology.

In particular we place ourselves in the general setting where we allow for the possibility of our foundation of being life form-dependent. In such a setting the possibility that different beings could, in principle, reach truth or (mind-independent) Truth differently -with other forms of inquiry- is left open (the fact that we can specify para-consistent logics might be a clue that this is a reasonable possibility).

By adopting a form of "pragmatic foundationalism” one places himself in the realm of mind-dependence, acknowledging some of the classical problems in epistemology as being unsolvable; instead of treating them as difficulties to overcome they are regard as results that spell out the limits of knowledge, so that we may advance our path towards a better understanding of what we can call truth.*****

YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1h34EmLOXoM4br4R8RWkog

*Sometimes opposing philosophical theories seem to actually underpin different aspects of the same concept. The correspondence theory of truth captures our intuitions about the existence of an external mind-independent world and pragmatic theories of truth capture elements of how we use truth. For other examples of this phenomenon see Consequentialism, Deontology and Virtue ethics or Cognitivism vs non Cognitivism (the margins aren’t wide enough to get into details here).

**We should probably say “a set of psychological universals that all healthy humans posses“, e.g., a person in an insane asylum that believes he is both Jesus and Napoleon may be shorthanded in the faculties that allow him to recognize the law of non contradiction.

*** Here we might stumble into some circularity issues (we are inquiring into what our foundation might be starting from a foundation of inquiry) on the other hand if we are shackled by some fixed starting points in our pursuit of truth that is exactly what one should expect. Maybe this problem can be overcome by utilizing the cross cultural approach to self correct any discrepancies in a starting foundation obtained by an armchair approach. Iterating on this procedure should eventually lead to a shared foundation.

**** Maybe there are some edge cases where the law of non contradiction should not be used, as dialetheism points out, but one can specify such exceptions at the foundational level.

***** Notice that we are exiting the Munchausen trilemma by acknowledging that we are shackled by our nature to take certain truths as foundational without ulterior justification. We also admit that we can’t be 100% certain of such truths but this shouldn’t stop us from pursuing knowledge, beginning from our given starting point.

REFERENCES:

R. Bertrand (1948). Human knowledge, its scope and limits.

J. Dewey (1938). Logic: The Theory of Inquiry.

S. Haack (2004) Pragmatism, old and new, Contemporary Pragmatism.

S. Haack (1993)  Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology.

B. Huss (2010) Cultural differences and the law of noncontradiction: Some criteria for further research, Philosophical Psychology.

A. Norenzayan and S. J. Heine (2005) Psychological Universals: What Are They and How Can We Know?  Psychological Bulletin.

In A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis Sigmund Freud declared that humanity had suffered three historic humiliations, one cosmological, one biological, and one psychological.

The cosmological one was Galileo’s discovery that the earth was not at the center of the universe: humanity was not reserved the prized spot suited for the crowning achievement of all creation. Our home is but a microscopic blip in a quasi-infinite space.

The biological one was Darwin’s discovery that we share a common ape ancestor with chimpanzees: the various creatures of nature were no longer a compelling way to fill the background in which humanity was lovingly placed. Mankind was not qualitatively any different than the animal kingdom.

The psychological one was implicitly inflicted by Freud himself (ironically he stated this in an essay regarding human narcissism) by uncovering the unconscious: contrary to what we would like to believe about ourselves, our mind is a “labyrinth of impulses” we are not completely in control of. We are subject to a host of biases over which we have no direct authority.

Contemplating this list some philosophers *cough* Nietzsche *cough*, depending on their inclinations, might think of making other additions (God’s death, the loss of free will, and so on).

Presently we will focus on another humiliation we believe humanity is struggling to come to terms with; the epistemological one. Taking for granted the most popular philosophical theory on Truth: the correspondence theory of Truth, we can’t understand how to know if something is True or not.

The correspondence theory of Truth, as the name suggests, states that the Truth or Falsity of a statement is determined only by how it relates to the world and whether it accurately describes (i.e., corresponds with) the world. A statement is True by virtue of some mind-independent facts about reality.
The compelling idea behind this definition of Truth is that what makes a statement True is not whether or not we think it is True, rather, a statement is True if the underlying facts of the world correspond to what the statement is claiming. For example if we all happily believed that the world was flat that would not make it True. For a statement to be True It does not matter how many people believe in it or how useful this belief might be, what matters is if the statement is accurately describing the underlying reality of things.

At first glance, the definition of Truth, given by the correspondence theory of Truth, seems to capture everything we would want but, as often happens when things seem too good to be true, there are problems. The main one is that we experience reality only through a mind-dependent process. We cannot step outside our own minds to compare our thoughts with mind-independent reality but that is precisely would we would have to do to gain the knowledge of something being True or not according to the correspondence theory. Thus the correspondence theory of Truth leads us to a kind of skepticism about the external world because the required mapping between our thoughts and reality is not ascertainable.

Nothing wrong with a little skepticism, but, more problematically, if we accept that trough mind-dependent processes we have no accurate access to mind-independent reality, we are unable to discriminate between those statements which are true and those which are false. The statements unicorns exist and dogs exist would both be similarly unknowable to us. Maybe the creatures we label as being dogs through our sensory experience are unicorns in the mind-independent reality.
Some cultured readers might be reminded of Kant who held that we can’t know anything of the Noumena (the mind-independent reality) since we only experience the Phenomena (our sensory perceptions).

A way to resolve this problem could be to postulate that our sensory experiences are somehow correctly mapping onto the mind-independent reality but it’s not clear why this should be. One also stumbles into Berkeley’s puzzle:

1. Sensory experience grounds our understanding and knowledge of objects and properties.
2. Sensory experience can only ground understanding and knowledge of itself.
3. So our understanding and knowledge are limited to sensory experience and its qualities.
   

If sensory experience only reveals features of itself, how is it even possible for it to ground our understanding and knowledge of mind-independent objects?

The customary examples showing how our sensory observations could fail to correspond onto the mind-independent reality vary from imagining one is a brain in a vat (setting popularized by Hilary Putnam) who is being stimulated to experience the mediocre life of a philosophy student in the twenty-first century (à la Matrix), to envisioning an evil demon (due to Renè Descartes) that presents to a subject, unbeknownst to him, a complete illusion of the external world.

But our problems with Truth do not end here. Not only is it unclear how to know if any ordinary statement is True or not, we also struggle to find rational justifications for holding any belief whatsoever. A result (pardon my mathematical background seeping through) that spells out the classical problem of justification in the theory of knowledge is the Münchhausen trilemma.

If it is asked how any given proposition is known to be True, a justification may be provided. Yet how does one know if the justification given is true? Another justification is needed to justify its veracity. But then how do we know that the justification of the justification is true? The Münchhausen trilemma states that there are only three ways to exit this impasse:

• A circular argument in which the justification of some proposition presupposes the truth of that very proposition
• A regressive argument, in which each proof requires a further proof, ad infinitum
• A dogmatic argument, which rests on accepted precepts that are merely asserted rather than defended

In each case, we are left unsatisfied. Karl Popper (wisely) labeled the trilemma as unsolvable, while (probably for some of the considerations we have been discussing) Bertrand Russell reluctantly deemed Skepticism “logically impeccable”.      

In short, things are looking grim for our relationship with what we believed could never betray us: Truth. How can we deal with it?

There are, broadly speaking, three ways to handle a humiliation. The first is to refuse to recognize one has been humbled (a choice widely regarded as being suboptimal) in our case, this is the philosophical equivalent of doubling down on the fact that we can know and prove the Truth of everyday statements. This path may lead to creating complex epistemological arguments that try to trick our rational faculties into believing they are true. 

The second is to revel in the misery of being shamed (another suspicious choice). The corresponding philosophical position would be an abandonment of the hope to reach any knowledge whatsoever, a hard-line epistemological nihilism. Nothing is really true, nothing is really valuable. We are but a stochastic joke of an unflinching universe.
One can take this route, if he is so inclined, but maybe it is early to call off any further investigations concerning truth.

The third avenue is to humble oneself, acknowledge the humiliation, and then try to learn from it to become better.  Rethink our expectations and go back to the drawing board.
To overcome the other three humiliations specified by Freud, one can notice that, we courageously chose this path, but what does this entail philosophically for the case of our epistemological humiliation?

First, we should look at the bright side of what has been done up until now. Our expedition in search of truth using the definition given by the correspondence theory of Truth did not actually come back empty-handed, rather it came back with an undecidability result: any ordinary statement like “my hand has five fingers” is not wrong, rather it is neither rationally provable nor refutable. Thus we needn’t abandon the intuition that there is some real mind-independent reality out there if we were so inclined.

After having counted our fortunes, we can then embark on another project in search of truth where we weaken our assumptions a bit to aim for discoveries within our reach.* The goal could be to humbly understand what we are doing when we say something is true, what are the basis on which - we humans - justify truth? Perhaps some things are more likely to be truer than others and maybe we can salvage some of the desirable properties of Truth as described by the correspondence theory. Pragmatic theories of truth, like the ones of Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, can be seen as initial attempts to pursue these projects.

The problem of the capital t Truth may be beyond our reach for now (until we find our second black monolith) but there is much left to be investigated on what truth means for us and to what concept of truth we can aspire.

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*When there is a foundational problem in mathematics this kind of procedure is done all the time. We wish to retain the essence of some framework that we have discovered has some logical flaw in it that makes it incoherent or impracticle to work with so we weaken some parts of our definitions. As an example in probability theory, one can think of the “discovery” (petite humiliation) that not all subsets of an uncountable set are measurable, in particular we cannot define a probability space on the power set of the real numbers without losing some desirable properties of measures. The solution: (humbly) weakening the generality of the objects we work on, instead of any subset we work with sigma algebras.

EDIT: (cosmetic reason for using a pragmatic definition of truth)

 A thought experiment to show how the definition of truth give by the correspondence theory of Truth is somewhat vacuous is the following: Imagine we had developed a machine that could tell us if something was True or not in the mind independent reality with 100% certainty, and the machine told us that the fact that the moon was made of cheese was True, although to us it still seemed made of rubble and stone (eating it would have the same exact effect on us as eating a rock would). Then even knowing that the fact that the moon is made of cheese is True would be sort of pointless, for all intents and purposes that matter to us it’s still made of rocks, we see it as a rocks, we digest it as a rock, we smell it as a rock, it behaves according to all the physical laws a satellite made of rock would. Although it is technically True that it is made of cheese nowhere does this “matter” for us. This thought experiment should at least show that having another, more pragmatic, definition of truth may make things simpler (in the case at hand it we could say that the fact that the moon is made of rock is true).

EDIT2: (sidestep reason for using pragmatic definition of truth)

A benefit of recognizing the value of both the definition given by the correspondence theory of truth and the pragmatic one is that if we take only the correspondence definition we then have to have an argument for why the mind dependence process of justifying Truth maps onto the mind independent reality. Indeed there are argument for why such a mapping might hold, but there are also counterarguments that the ultimate skeptic will revert back too (evolutionary debunking arguments- our senses evolved for survival not for Truth). Using the pragmatic definition of truth we can sidestep the need for such a mapping.