Problems of Bilgrami’s veroteleologism
Federico Penelas – Universidad de Buenos Aires
I will call “veroteleologism” to the thesis according to which truth should be considered as
the final goal of inquiry. In what follows I will make some critical remarks to the defense of this idea,
as it appears in several papers by Akeel Bilgrami1. Let’s consider first the following antiveroteleologism argument.
AV1
Premise 1- If a goal is not recognizable when reached, the inquirer cannot have the intention of
reaching it as a goal.
Premise 2- In the context of inquiry, we are able to recognize when we reach justification of a belief,
but not when that belief is truth.
Conclusion 1- Truth is not a goal of inquiry; only justification can play that role.
Bilgrami considers this a valid argument, but he objects the second premise. Bilgrami’s
point is that, from a pragmatist philosophical frame, epistemology should take the first person’s
perspective, and in doing it, it should be noticed that truth is both the norm and the goal of inquiry.
Bilgrami does nothing more but draw this conclusion from Peirce’s model of belief-doubt. From this
perspective it is assumed to be a group of beliefs which constitutes our world-view and which we
use as a standard in the determination of the truth value of the rest of our beliefs. Beliefs
constituting such a group don’t need justification, for they are believed without any doubt
whatsoever. Thus, the idea of providing justification to beliefs about which we don’t have the
slightest doubt and which constitute our world-view lacks sense from the epistemological point of
view. The idea of justification starts working, then, just when our world-view is shaken and it must
therefore be changed. Thus, for Bilgrami, truth applies to doubt free beliefs, whereas justification
applies to hypotheses, which enter the game in the process of change of our system of doubt-free
beliefs. This being so, the goal of inquiry is not justification but truth, for what the inquirer wants to
know is which one of those beliefs about which he is in doubt can be added to his world-view, i.e.
which one is true. This is how the second premise of AV1 is objected, by pointing out that in the
context of inquiry (from the only relevant perspective, that is, that of the first person’s), we are
indeed able to recognize which of our beliefs are true, since these are the ones that constitute our
world-view, and the ones that don’t need to be justified since we don’t doubt them at all. Here
Bilgrami refers to Wittgenstein’s “hinge propositions”, and here I myself would like to refer to the
Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, who back in 1934 distinguished beliefs from ideas in an
Cfr. “Realism and Relativism”, “Pursuit an Analogy”, “Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry?: Rorty and Davidson on
Truth”
1
analogous way to Bilgrami’s distinction between beliefs and hypotheses 2. “We have ideas, but we
are in beliefs”, was Ortega’s slogan.
Let’s pay attention, however, to this new formulation of the former argument, which displays
certain reasons that can be put forward in favor of the thesis of truth’s non recognizability.
AV2
Premise A- A non-recognizable goal –that is, a goal that can’t be recognizable when reached- can’t
be thought of as a goal.
Premise B- If all of our beliefs can be revised, then we will never know when a belief is true.
Premise C- All of our beliefs are revisable.
Conclusion- Truth is not a goal of inquiry.
Bilgrami’s reaction to this argument is that of accepting its validity and taking premises A
and C as true, while rejecting premise B. Such a rejection, as Bilgrami concedes, is the most
difficult point in his standpoint. The difficulty rests in the fact that the acceptance of premise C along
with his thesis on doubt-free beliefs as true can compromise him with a relativism that he is not
disposed to accept. Certainly, pointing out that a belief constituting our world-view is true but
revisable presupposes that, when giving it up and taking its negation as non doubtable, we should
say that both p and not-p are true regarding the different perspectives outlined before and after the
revision; this leads us to assume a direct commitment to a notion of truth relative to belief systems.
Note here that such relativism allows us to reject premise B and thus disqualify the entire argument.
For this reason Bilgrami is obliged to do two things when confronting the argument: the first one is
proving us that his thesis on truth along with premise C won’t lead to relativism; the second one is to
outline an alternative way of objecting premise B. I want to stress that these are two different tasks.
My impression is that Bilgrami, in taking care of the firs one, thinks to be taking care of the second
one as well. If this is so, I think he owes us an argument of why resolving one of these problems
implies resolving the other one too. The debt is high, for the rejection of relativism implies loosing a
way to attack premise B. On the other hand, were my impression mistaken, then Bilgrami should
face up the second task by showing how truth is recognizable, even knowing that, given a certain
belief, one doesn’t know for certain that it will never be abandoned (what else does it mean that
every belief is revisable but this?), and that indoubtability is the trademark of the truth of beliefs.
Let’s see the way in which Bilgrami undertakes the first task, this is, how he argues in favor
of the idea that his pragmatism doesn’t imply relativism. Bilgrami points out that “what has to be
shown to stave off relativism, is that in those cases when two inquirers contradict one another on
some matter (or when a verdict at a later inquiry-stage contradicts the verdict of an earlier inquirystage), it is every bit as bad and intolerable as when the same inquirer contradicts himself at a one
and the same stage of his inquiry. Every bit as bad, in the sense that in those cases too we want to
2
See “Ideas y creencias”, in J. Ortega y Gasset, Ideas y creencias, Madrid, Espasa Calpe, 1940, pp. 17-61.
say that only one of the contradictory beliefs is true”3. A way of sustaining this last idea is by
abandoning bilgramian pragmatism (columbian pragmatism according to Bilgrami), which doesn’t
segregate epistemologically belief from truth. Such an abandonment allows completing the game by
pointing out that one of the two beliefs is the true one, even when the inquirer doesn’t know which
one it is. Now, according to Bilgrami, a pragmatist doesn’t contradict himself if he notes that “it is
intolerable that the same inquirer at the same stage of inquiry contradicts himself”. The problem
would lay in the possible insistence in that the case of the inquirer which contradicts himself in the
same stage of inquiry (let’s call this case I) is not identical to that of two inquirers with contradictory
beliefs, or to that of one inquirer with contradictory beliefs in different stages of his inquiry (let’s call
these other situations case II). This denial of identification would leave our pragmatist just with a
relativistic way of accounting for the cases of divergence among inquirers (or different stages of
inquiry): to point out that there is no real contradiction among them at the end, for the truth of each
of the beliefs is relative to the different backgrounds or doctrines. Thus, for Bilgrami, the entire
weigh of his argument lays in the possibility of identifying case I and case II.
For Bilgrami, the identification of case I and case II is exactly the point of Davidson’s
argument against the third dogma of empirism. This is how it is possible to distinguish pragmatism
from relativism. In his words: “when it is reported that two inquirers or two inquirer-stages
confidently judge respectively that p and not-p, relative to their doctrines or background sets of
beliefs, there is no scope to make this harmless report slide into the quite different and relativistic
point that the truth of p and not-p is relative to their respective doctrines or background sets of
beliefs. Such a slide is blocked, despite the fact that the pragmatist denies the segregation of
confident judgment from truth, because the pragmatist has now (by Davidson's argument) been
given the resources to say that only one of these two contradictory beliefs of the two inquirers or
inquirer-stages is right, just as much as he has the resources to say it of two contradictory beliefs of
one inquirer at a single stage of inquiry” 4.
In order to face this rejoinder from Bilgrami I want to address to the following perplexity.
Giving the way in which he formulates his point, case I and case II should be characterized in terms
of beliefs, not in terms of hypotheses, for only of the first we can predicate truth in an indubitable
way. Now, what does it mean, from Bilgrami’s standpoint, that an inquirer maintains, at the same
time, contradictory beliefs? Note that the situation should be such that wouldn’t involve doubts for
the inquirer, that is, none of these beliefs should become a hypothesis tested against the rest of the
beliefs sustained by the inquirer. In cannot either be claimed that one of the two beliefs (or both) is
(are) sustained unconsciously, for then the entire bilgramian characterization of beliefs as
indubitable objects of knowledge seems to become banal (or, more charitably, it may end closer to
the wittgensteinian non-cognitivism of the “hinge propositions”). In order to the argument to work in
3
4
“Realism and Relativism”
Ibid.
terms of Bilgrami, this situation must be possible in stronger terms than those of the mere logical
possibility. But if, following Peirce, beliefs are guides to action, and according to Bilgrami, they are
those items of our cognitive system about which we do not doubt and that serve as standards in the
assessment of hypotheses, is it possible, epistemically or practically, an inquirer believing both p
and not-p? Isn’t this actually the situation that motorizes the justificatory process, with opposing
hypotheses in play?
Let’s present a last argument, a more rortian one I think, against the idea that truth is not a
goal of inquiry. The argument runs as follows.
AV3
Premise 1- If something doesn’t make difference in practice, then it should not make difference in
philosophy.
Premise 2- The practice of pursuing the truth consists in the elimination of doubt.
Premise 2- The justificatory practice consists in remove the challenges placed against my belief.
Premise 3- The removal of challenges eliminates doubt.
Premise 4- Free of doubt beliefs are true.
Conclusion1- In the context of investigation, the practice of pursuing truth doesn’t differ from the
practice of pursuing justification.
Conclusion 2- There is no philosophical difference between truth and justification.
Conclusion 3- Truth as a goal of inquiry is, in the best case, just a rhetoric device for alluding to the
idea that inquiry has justification as a goal.
I think that when facing this argument, Bilgrami should have to accept all the premises, but
he should also denounce a non-sequitur. Now, I don’t find in Bilgrami’s papers any way to state this
report. The only way of doing this would be by protesting against the non inclusion in the argument
of a premise preventing the drawing of the difference: the premise that would claim that, besides
the practice of justification, there is another practice (it is important that it should be something that
the person does and not something he suffers) by which an inquirer can dispel his doubts. I haven’t
found in Bilgrami’s papers any explicit signal of an epistemic non justificatory practice whatsoever. It
seems difficult in its turn that Bilgrami’s approach would contain implicitly the idea of such a
practice. For, once one has justified his hypothesis, is there anything else that the inquirer should
do in order to believe it? It should be something that the individual does to beliefs, and not merely to
hypotheses. Here, Ortega seems more enlightened than Bilgrami when he tells us that “with beliefs
we don’t do strictly anything” 5.
As a final remark, I want to point out that an anti-veroteleologist pragmatist as Rorty (and
more explicitly, as Brandom) also assumes that inquiry happens within a frame of beliefs that are
not doubted. And, by virtue of the laudatory use of truth, he wouldn’t have any problem whatsoever
5
J. Ortega y Gasset, “Ideas y creencias”, p. 19.
in saying that we take them as true, because, along with Michael Williams or Brandom, he
considers these beliefs as justified by default, justified in practice, and the trademark of such tacit
justification shows itself in the unchallenged global consensus that they bear. Thus, so far, the
difference to Bilgrami wound’t has to be more than terminological. But apparently Bilgrami wants to
say more, he wants to say that truth is the goal of inquiry. Now, in his approach, if truth is identified
with the unquestioned, then the goal of inquiry is not truth but agreement. This is the possible goal,
undoubtabitity being just a by-product of the absence of challenge by our epistemic peers. Bilgrami
is right in noting that the cautionary use of truth doesn’t have perlocutionary consequences for the
inquirer. For the warning that any of the beliefs that we take as true can be false instead is a
general remark incapable of defying our conception of the world (this is actually Peirce’s critique to
Descartes´ model of doubt-belief). But what does indeed raise doubts is the presence of
disagreement with our peers. It is curious that Bilgrami disdains the epistemological import of
audiences to which the inquirer addresses. It seems enough for him to admit that, insofar it is the
precautory use of truth what supports premise 2 of AV1, and such a use doesn’t have any practical
consequence, then premise 2 can be given up from a strictly pragmatist point of view. But an antiveroteleologist as Rorty does not stand on the cautionary use in order to finishing his point on truth
not being the goal of inquiry. If the goal of inquiry is, for Peirce and according to Bilgrami, the
dissolving of the doubt, it is not reached until we stop being challenged by our peers. Once we have
reached consensus, and as a consequence we have added new beliefs to our world-view, we have
then new candidates to praise with the truth predicate. But, would it be possible to dispel our doubts
and take a belief as true even when our community disagrees with us regarding it, being that this
disagreement does not make appeal to the cautionary use of truth but to details relevant to the
context of acceptance of the belief? I don’t understand how this possibility could be defended and
maintained within pragmatism. This contributes to maintain Rorty’s idea that it is justification,
construed as an inter-subjective enterprise through which we reach the relevant consensus that
eases our doubts, the goal of which we can make sense of in characterizing the practice of inquiry.
The idea of truth as a goal of inquiry, idea that supports the veroteleologist conception, continues
without making any difference whatsoever in practice, even when adopting the first person
perspective so dear to Bilgrami.