Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation by Cheryl Misak

Author:Cheryl Misak [Misak, Cheryl]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: General, philosophy, ebook
ISBN: 9781134826179
Google: QZKKAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2002-02-07T00:03:41.295523+00:00

Convergence and the end of inquiry

It is supposed to be a pillar of the pragmatist position that our beliefs would converge in some kind of ideal limit of inquiry. We have seen that we can quiet some worries about that ideal limit by reformulating the pragmatic maxim in terms of beliefs that could not be improved, rather than beliefs we would converge upon under certain conditions. But even when that is cleared up, the idea of convergence can be responsible for much misunderstanding and subsequent dismissal of pragmatism. Quine has suggested, for instance, that Peircean pragmatism takes the notion of successive approximation, which is defined for numbers, and hopelessly tries to apply it to theories (1960: 23, 1981b: 31). I want to make it clear, by running interference on some confusions, just what ought to be meant by the claim that a true belief is one which we would agree upon.

The pragmatist takes correct judgement not to be a matter for the individual, even though it is the individual who does the judging, but as a matter for the community of inquirers. Peirce was adamant that the ‘Cartesian Criterion’ - ‘Whatever I am clearly convinced of is true’ - makes individuals judges of truth, which is ‘most pernicious’ (CE 2, 212). But this is not supposed to be the thought that the community is the epistemic agent - that it is the community which does the knowing or which has the beliefs, so to speak. Individuals are the possessors of belief, but whether or not a person’s belief is correct is a matter of what the community would determine. What fits with my experience is not of paramount importance as far as truth is concerned. What is important is what fits with all the experience that would be available, what the community of inquirers would converge upon. A hallucination, Peirce says, is a compulsion which does ‘not fit into the general mass of experience’ (CP 7.647).

One misconception about this community-based view of truth arises with respect to how the force of experience is supposed to encourage convergence. It might be right to say the following kinds of things. If we find that a person feels nothing for the plight of battered women, then taking him to a shelter for women where he can see for himself, as it were, how women experience battering, is something which we think ought to compel him to think differently. And we think that someone who is unmoved by the suffering of those under her employ in, say, apartheid South Africa is missing a moral cog - her failure to be compelled by the experience of others speaks against her.

But we should not leap from these thoughts to the idea that we will in fact be compelled so frequently by the experience of others that we will converge in our opinions. That is not what is meant by experience being compelling. We will often improve our views by taking into account what other people find compelling.

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