HighBeam Research
Title: Pragmatism and truth: the comparison objection to correspondence.
Date: 6/1/1998; Publication: The Review of Metaphysics; Author: McDermid, Douglas
The comparison objection against the correspondence theory of truth does not refute
foundationalism or support a coherence theory of truth. Moreover, truth could still involve
correspondence in some way, although correspondence could not be a criterion of truth. The
objection mainly shows that correspondence cannot act as an ideal to guide inquiry. The
comparison objection has played an important role in pragmatists' arguments against the
correspondence theory.
The well-known dictum that truth consists in an "agreement" or
"correspondence" of thought with its object ... speedily leads
to a hopeless impasse, once the question is raised: How are
we to know whether or not our "truth" "corresponds" or "agrees" with
its real object? For to decide this question must we not be able to
compare "thought" with "reality," and to contemplate each as it is
apart from the other? This, however, seems impossible.(1)
How does the partisan of absolute reality know what this orders him to
think? He cannot get direct sight of the absolute; and he has no
means of guessing what it wants of him.(2)
How can anybody look at both an object (event) and a proposition about it
so as to determine whether the two "correspond"? And if one can look
directly at the event in propia persona, why have a duplicate proposition
(idea or percept, according to some theories) about it unless, perhaps,
as a convenience in communication with others?(3)
Despite its long and distinguised history, the correspondence theory of truth has recently had to
weather a barrage of forceful objections advanced by Rorty, Goodman, Putnam, Kuhn,
Davidson, Habermas, and others. In this paper I shall consider one such objection: the venerable
"comparison argument," designed to demonstrate that the correspondence theory plays right into
the skeptic's hands by making truth epistemically inaccessible. In general terms, we can
formulate the argument as follows:
If truth were a matter of correspondence with the facts, then
we could verify our belief that p only if we could somehow
confront p with the relevant portion(s) of reality and
confirm that the two "fit" or "agree." Since we
cannot possibly perform such a comparison, the intuitively appealing idea
that truth is correspondence with reality ironically results in something
virtually no-one wants to accept--namely, skepticism. Unless we are
prepared to concede that knowledge of the external world is an
impossibility, we must give up the correspondence theory in favor
of some conception of truth that can do justice to our claims to know.
My aim, in what follows, is twofold: first to determine what, if anything, the comparison
objection tells us about the correspondence theory of truth; secondly, to explore the objection's
relation to the tradition of pragmatism. I begin with the latter project.
I
The Comparison Objection and Pragmatism From Dewey to Rorty. Even if not peculiar to
pragmatists,(4) the comparison objection has been absolutely central to their case against
correspondence from the time of the classical pragmatists down to the present day. This is
reflected in an obiter dictum of F. C. S. Schiller, the Oxford pragmatist
In its logical aspect pragmatism originates in a criticism of fundamental
conceptions like "truth," "error," "fact," and "reality," the current
accounts of which it finds untenable or unmeaning. "Truth," for instance,
cannot be defined as the agreement or correspondence of thought with
"reality," for how can thought determine whether it correctly "copies"
what transcends it?(5)
Among the classical pragmatists, this emphasis on the epistemological consequences of
correspondence is nowhere more salient than in the writings of John Dewey. His oft-repeated
grievances(6)--that so called "copy" theories of truth make an unfathomable mystery of
verification, turning it into an absurd "process of comparing ready-made ideas with ready-made
facts"(7)--lies at the center of his exchange with Russell.(8) Dewey sees as fatal to the cause of
correspondence the following problem, which he refers to as "a fundamental difficulty that Mr.
Russell's view cannot get over or around":
The event to be known is that which operates, on his view, as cause
of the proposition while it is also its verifier; although the
proposition is the sole means of knowing the event! Such a
view ... seems to me to assume a mysterious and unverifiable
doctrine of pre-established harmony. How an event can be (i)
what-is-to-be-known, and hence by description is unknown, and
(ii) what is capable of being known only through the medium of a
proposition, which, in turn, (iii) in order to be a case of knowledge
or be true, must correspond to the to-be-known, is to me
the epistemological miracle. For the doctrine states
that a proposition is true when it conforms to that
which is not known save through itself.(9)
Quine echoes Dewey when he tells us that:
[W]e cannot detach ourselves from it [that it, our conceptual scheme] and
compare it objectively with an unconceptualized reality. Hence it is
meaningless, I suggest, to inquire into the absolute correctness of a
conceptual scheme as a mirror of reality. Our standard for appraising basic
changes of a conceptual scheme must be, not a realistic standard of
correspondence to reality, but a pragmatic standard.(10)
Of the many contemporary philosophers who are in sympathy with the basic thrust of Dewey's
critique, the most vocal member of the anticorrespondence chorus is undoubtedly Richard Rorty.
In his efforts to persuade us that language is not a medium of representation meant to mirror
nature, Rorty has repeatedly invoked the comparison objection, the intuitive core of which is
discernible in all his major writings:
[T]here is no point in raising questions of truth ... because between
ourselves and the thing judged there always intervenes mind, language, a
perspective chosen among dozens, one description chosen out of
thousands.(11)
[T]here is no way to get outside of our beliefs and our language
so as to find some test other than coherence. (12)
[T]he quest for a theory of reference represents a confusion between the
hopeless "semantic" quest for a general theory of what people are
"really talking about," and the equally hopeless "epistemological"
quest for a way of refuting the skeptic and underwriting our
claim to be talking about nonfictions. ... The latter demand is
for some transcendental standpoint outside our present set of
representations from which we can inspect the relations between
those representations and their object.(13)
[T]here is no way to think about either the world or our purposes except
by using our language. One can use language to criticize and enlarge
itself, but one cannot see language as a whole in relation to
something else to which it applies, or for which it is a means
to an end. ... The attempt to say "how language relates
to the world" by saying what makes certain sentences
true ... is the impossible attempt to step outside our
skins--the traditions, linguistic and other, within which we do
our thinking and self-criticism--and compare
ourselves with something absolute.(14)
[W]e can only compare languages or metaphors with one another,
not with something beyond language called "fact."(15)
The basic anti-intuitionist and antifoundationalist point common
to Derrida and these others [namely, Sellars, Quine, and Davidson]
is that knowledge is a matter of asserting sentences, and that you
cannot validate an assertion by confronting an object (e.g., a
table, the concept "tablehood," or the Platonic Idea of Table),
but only by asserting other sentences. This point is linked to
lots of other holist and antiessentialist doctrines, doctrines that make it
possible to set aside the subject-object, representationalist notions we
inherited from the Greeks.(16)
[T]here is no independent test of the accuracy of correspondence ...
unless we can attain what [Putnam] calls a God's-eye standpoint--one
which has somehow broken out of our language and our beliefs and
tested them against something known without their aid. But we have
no idea what it would be like to be at that standpoint.(17)
The sort of thing philosophers typically have said, that truth is
some sort of correspondence to, or accurate representation of,
reality seemed empty and pointless to James and Dewey. They agreed with
their idealist opponents that doubts about a belief's correspondence
to reality can only be settled by assessing the coherence of the
dubious belief with other beliefs.(18)
Pragmatists agree with Wittgenstein that there is no way to come
between language and its object. Philosophy cannot answer the
question: is our vocabulary in accord with the way the world is? ... I
read Sellars and Brandom as pragmatists, because I treat
psychological nominalism as a version of the pragmatist doctrine that
truth is a matter of the utility of a belief rather than of a relation
between pieces of the world and pieces of language. If our awareness
of things is always a linguistic affair, if Sellars is right that
we cannot check our language against our nonlinguistic awareness,
then philosophy can never be anything more than a discussion of the
utility and compatibility of beliefs-and, more particularly, of the
various vocabularies in which those beliefs are formulated. There is
no authority outside of convenience for human purposes that can be
appealed to in order to legitimize the use of a vocabulary. We have no
duties to anything nonhuman.(19)
The misgivings common to Dewey and Rorty have found expression in the work of a number of
contemporary philosophers who want to free themselves of the traditional idea that truth means
accuracy of representation or conformity to external, mind-independent fact.
Nelson Goodman, for instance, argues that "truth cannot be defined or tested by agreement with
`the world,'"(20) and he urges us to reject "the absurd notions of science as the effort to discover
a unique, prepackaged, but unfortunately undiscoverable reality, and of truth as agreement with
that inaccessible reality."(21) This stance is a corollary of Goodman's Protagorean conviction
that there is no ready-made reality, only a rich and irreducible plurality of man-made versions.
World-versions, however, cannot be measured "by comparing [them] with a world
undescribed,"(22) because the two are ontologically incommensurable: "[C]orrespondence
between description and the undescribed is incomprehensible."(23)
Hilary Putnam credits Kant with teaching us that "the whole idea of comparing our conceptual
system with a world of things-in-themselves ... to see if the conceptual system `copies' the
unconceptualized reality is incoherent."(24) It is not surprising, then, to learn that Putnam
himself opposes what he generically refers to as the "copy" conception of truth: since "the notion
of comparing our system of beliefs with unconceptualized reality makes no sense, "(25)" the
whole idea of truth's being defined or explained in terms of a `correspondence' ... has to be given
up. "(26)
Nicholas Rescher refuses to gloss truth as conformity to a noumenal Something-We-Know-NotWhat on similarly Kantian grounds, stressing "the essential inseparability of perception from
conceptualizing thought. "(27) From the claim that "raw experience uncooked by
conceptualization is not possible, "(28) Rescher infers that "reality-as-we-of-it (= our reality) is
the only reality we can deal with. "(29) Thus he concludes that truth cannot be "a matter of
corresponding to an in-principle inaccessible mind-independent reality."(30)
Donald Davidson has expressed sympathy, not with Kant, but with those members of the Vienna
Circle who defied Schlick: "There is no clear meaning to the idea of comparing our beliefs with
reality or confronting our hypotheses with observations. ... No wonder Neurath and Carnap were
attracted to the idea of a coherence theory!"(31) For a time he was content to follow Neurath,
and upheld a coherence theory on the grounds that the correspondence theory required "a
confrontation between what we believe and reality. (32) He called the very idea of such a
confrontation "absurd," however, because "we can't get outside our skins to find out what is
causing the internal happenings of which we are aware."(33)
Jurgen Habermas, too, has asserted that we will find the idea that truth is correspondence with
the facts attractive and defensible only if we are prepared to assume that it is possible to shed our
conceptual scheme and "take up a standpoint between language and reality," something he
dismisses as incoherent. (34)
Finally, the neo-Peircean Karl-Otto Apel calls attention to the aporias of the metaphysicalontological correspondence theory of truth," the most important of which consists in this, that
"no one can look behind the mirror of phenomena and examine the agreement--assumed by the
metaphysical correspondence theory of truth--between the phenomena represented or thought in
judgments and the things-in-themselves." (35)
We can see from this brief survey of neo-pragmatists that the comparison objection, far from
being a dusty museum piece or antique curiosity, is alive and well in contemporary debates on
truth. This, along with its historical prominence, suggests that the argument merits some
sustained critical treatment, which I shall endeavor to provide here. My basic question, then, is a
simple one: Does the comparison objection refute the correspondence theory of truth? We cannot
answer this question without first addressing another: On what grounds is comparison deemed
impossible, and dismissed as absurd?
II
The No-Independent-Access Argument and Foundationalism. Traditionally, pragmatists have
inveighed against the possibility of confrontation on the basis of the following argument:
A subject can compare his empirical beliefs with the facts to which the
propositions he believes ostensibly correspond only if he has unmediated
access to the world, that is, a direct intuitive grasp of a denuded and
unconceptualized reality. Such access he can never have: unable to shed his
conceptual scheme and get a glimpse of the world as it is in itself, he is
condemned to remain imprisoned within the ring of his private
representations, and therefore cannot join what God (or Nature) has put
asunder. So there is no hope of confronting our beliefs, either individually
or as a corporate body, with the "tribunal of sense experience," the
"world," the "facts," or "reality."
At this point the classical foundationalist protests. He thinks all this heavy-handed metaphorical
talk of "confrontation," of "being cut off from the world," or "trapped within the circle of one's
beliefs," merely obscures an issue which is quite straightforward when seen in the proper light.
Taking the traditional epistemic regress argument to show that not all justification can be
mediate, that is, a matter of relations of inference or evidential support holding among beliefs,
the foundationalist argues that, in addition to those beliefs which can be justified via an appeal to
other beliefs, there must be some basic beliefs whose status as justified does not depend upon the
support of other beliefs. Some have alleged that such foundational judgments are epistemically
justified in virtue of their relation to a privileged class of sensory presentations which provide us
with unmediated acquaintance with things as they really are.(36) According to our
foundationalist, it is here--at the level of the simple impressions of classical empiricism,
Russellian atomic propositions, raw feels, or the Protokollsatze of the Vienna Circle--that we
encounter reality in the raw via a mode of nondoxastic awareness or apprehension, and are
vouchsafed the direct contact the enemies of correspondence would deny us.(37)
If, however, the foundationalist is inclined to balk at his opponents' metaphors of "confrontation"
and "stepping outside one's conceptual scheme," then he must at least confess that he too,
operates with his own preferred set of metaphors, metaphors in which substantive philosophical
assumptions are embedded. He is held captive by a certain picture (closely associated with what
Wilfrid Sellars christened "the myth of the given"): the mind is portrayed as passive, receptive,
and inert, whereas the objects of knowledge impress themselves upon us in such a way that the
mind, if functioning properly, is seemingly compelled to mirror them accurately, or represent
them with a minimum of distortion (at least in the most elementary cases). The picture is a
familiar one--in one form or another it has been implicit in the tradition of modern
empiricism(38)--but is it one we ought to accept?
Here is an argument drawn from post-Kantian philosophy--we might call it "Hegel's dilemma"-which calls into question this way of thinking about cognition.(39) Our foundationalist contends
that basic empirical beliefs are justified by an appeal to a form of immediate apprehension
known as the "given." Now--this is the dilemma's first horn--suppose that, as its supporters
usually urge, the given is a direct sensory awareness of reality, a flood of raw and unprocessed
experience; as such, it is not discursively mediated, that is, structured or interpreted by concepts.
If, however, the given is unconceptualized, then it is bereft of cognitive content and thus neither
asserts or denies anything. Since such an ineffable nothing cannot stand in any logical or
epistemic relation to one's judgments or beliefs, the given is incapable of justifying basic beliefs,
and is therefore unfit to perform the function the foundationalist assigns to it.
This is surely an unwelcome conclusion. Is there any way to avoid it? This brings us to the
second horn of the dilemma, on which the foundationalist concedes that the given is not an
intuitive grasping of pure experience unsullied by conceptualization, but the result of interpreting
and imparting structure to what would otherwise be a formless and unintelligible chaos (what
James famously described as a "blooming buzzing confusion"). This move may appear to
promise escape to the correspondence theorist; after all, the given (here understood as the
product of imposing a scheme of categories on raw material) now possesses the propositional or
assertive content necessary to be an epistemic reason. Have matters really improved, however?
Closer inspection suggests that this route actually delivers the coup de grace. For once the
organizing and synthetic activity of our cognitive faculties is allowed to enter the picture--once,
that is, we appreciate the full force of the Kantian dicta that "intuitions without concepts are
blind," and that spontaneity, no less than receptivity, is required for empirical knowledge(40)-we must abandon the idea that there is some neutral and unconditioned source of content, some
way we could meet reality face-to-face without the intervention of our powers of
conceptualization and interpretation. Moreover, if that is indeed the case, it becomes hard to see
how an appeal to the foundationalist's given could save the correspondence theory of truth from
the original objection.
III
Pragmatism on Foundationalism and the Given. Up to this point, our treatment of the no
independent access argument has floated free of historical considerations; we have not tried to
establish any connection between antifoundationalism and pragmatism. What, then, do we
discover when we turn to the original texts?
The evidence is, I think, incontestable: virtually all philosophers associated with pragmatism
have followed Hegel in declaring givenism an untenable dogma of traditional empiricism.(41)
Pragmatists, it would appear, typically have little or no tolerance for the idea that our knowledge
of the world ultimately rests upon a class of observational statements accorded privileged
epistemic status (whether incorrigibility, certainty, or indubitability) in virtue of their special
relation to objects or facts. To get a sense of how strong and constant a theme
antifoundationalism has been in the pragmatist movement, I shall trace its gradual emergence,
beginning with the classical period, then dealing more briefly with more recent work in this
tradition.
(a) Classical Pragmatism. Peirce's hostility towards classical foundationalism dates from those
1868-9 papers in which he set out to exorcise what he called "the spirit of Cartesiansism."(42)
For Peirce, justification is primarily a matter of coherence among beliefs, not a relation to
something outside the circle of belief. Dismissing the Cartesian search for absolute indubitability
as quixotic, he contended that we can never rule out the possibility that a synthetic judgment is
free from error and immune from revision: all empirical claims are hypotheses, subject to further
review, and may undergo truth-value reversal if they cease to fit well with other members of
one's total doxastic system. Such "contrite fallibilism"(43) was, he held, a defining characteristic
of "the scientific spirit [which] requires a man to be at all times ready to dump his whole cartload
of beliefs, the moment experience is against them. ... [P]ositive science can only rest on
experience; and experience can never result in absolute certainty, exactitude, necessity, or
universality."(44) Rejecting the metaphor of an adamantine foundation for knowledge, Peirce
proposes another. Science, he tells us, "is not standing upon the bedrock of facts. It is walking
upon a bog, and can only say, this ground seems to hold for the present. Here I will stay till it
begins to give way."(45)
Ever eager to reform the tradition of British empiricism,(46) James was sharply critical of its
foundationalist and givenist presuppositions. Though he himself was avowedly anti-Hegelian--he
decried "the entire industry of the Hegelian school in trying to shove simple sensations out of the
pale of philosophical recognition"(47) and his spirited exchanges with Bradley and Royce are
legendary--James nevertheless sympathized with several broad strands in the fabric of postKantian thought, including its attempt to overthrow the classical empiricist picture of the mind as
purely passive and receptive in perception. Contesting the prevailing conceptions of experience
as "something simply given,"(48) and of the mind as "absolutely passive clay, upon which
`experience' rains down,"(49) James insists that the very possibility of experience presupposes
the application of mental categories, which order and structure the chaotic "blooming buzzing
confusion" of the sensory manifold. His attack on foundationalism takes various forms: he
emphasizes what he refers to as "the dumbness of sensations [which are] neither true nor false;
they simply are;(50) denies that a subject's introspective awareness of his mental states is
incorrigible;(51) anticipates the doctrine that perception is theory-laden and conditioned by
expectation;(52) and declares that the givenist idea of a direct encounter with reality in the raw is
a chimera:
When we talk of a reality "independent" of human thinking, then, it seems a
thing very hard to find. It reduces to the notion of what is entering into
experience and has yet to be named, or else to some imagined aboriginal
presence in experience, before any belief about the presence had arisen,
before any human conception had been applied. It is what is absolutely dumb
and evanescent, the merely ideal limit of our minds. We may glimpse it, but
we never grasp it; what we grasp is always some substitute for it which
previous human thinking has peptonized and cooked for our consumption. If
so vulgar an expression were allowed us, we might say that wherever we find
it, it has already been faked.(53)
It is ironic: by rejecting the foundationalist conception of an unmediated, nonjudgmental mode of
access to the facts in favor of the view that perception requires the fusion of sensational and
conceptual elements, James comes down on the same side of the question as the post-Kantians
with whom he so often found himself at loggerheads. This convergence is reflected in the
treatment of mysticism found in The Varieties of Religious Experience, where James deploys
something akin to the Hegelian dilemma. Here the issue is primarily epistemological: Can socalled `mystical experiences'--that is, states of consciousness in which an individual apparently
has a direct encounter with the divine--be used as evidence for theistic claims? James's negative
answer flows from his conviction that two distinctive characteristics of mystical experiences are
mutually exclusive. The first of these marks is ineffability: the sort of mental state in question is
such that it "defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given. ... In this
peculiarity mystical states are more like states of feeling than like states of intellect."(54) That is,
James is strongly inclined to deny that mystical experiences are states with propositional
content.(55) Yet--and this brings us to the second point--those who have undergone mystical
experiences do indeed regard them as cognitive, that is, as sources of genuine insight or
knowledge. As James expresses it, a certain "noetic quality" is customarily attributed to them:
"Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to
be also states of knowledge. ... They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and
importance."(56)
The problem, then, is simple: How can a state lacking assertive or propositional content provide
epistemic support for other claims? James believes that there is no way to resolve this tension,
and concludes that mystical experiences cannot be both ineffable and possess noetic quality.
What we have here, I think, is essentially the first horn of Hegel's dilemma: if the "given" is a
form of immediate and nonconceptual apprehension, how can it possibly function as a reason, as
a source of justification? Although James stops short of drawing a general antifoundationalist
moral in The Varieties of Religious Experience,(57) his remarks suggest he was keenly aware of
this parallel.(58)
Dewey, the inheritor of Peirce's fallibilism, maintains that the assumption that knowledge must
rest upon certain foundations blocks the road of inquiry, retarding intellectual progress: "The
history of science shows that when hypotheses have been taken to be finally true and hence
unquestionable, they have obstructed inquiry and kept science committed to doctrines that later
turned out to be invalid."(59) In his Gifford Lectures, The Quest for Certainty, Dewey explored
the causes and effects of the traditional separation of theory from practice, and earned a
reputation as a stern critic of foundationalist epistemologies in the process. His primary target is
one consequence of the rigid theory/practice dichotomy: the "spectator theory of knowledge,"
that is, the tendency of modeling knowing on seeing, or of representing knowledge as a sort of
idle contemplation or passive beholding which transforms the knower but not the objects
known.(60) The spectator theory, he argued, is the cul-de-sac into which the quest for certainty
leads. For the traditional notion that knowledge (unlike non-theoretical pursuits or practical
activity) requires certainty leads ineluctably to the view that the objects of knowledge must be
immutable and hence cannot be altered by being known. Insisting on certitude thus forces us to
conclude that "the object of knowledge is a reality fixed and complete in itself, in isolation from
an act of inquiry which has in it any element of production of change."(61) Though Plato's Forms
are the paradigmatic instance of such objects, Dewey is convinced that this set of assumptions
has outlived the metaphysics of the ancients and continues to exert a pernicious if
unacknowledged influence on modern philosophy. Indeed, he goes so far as to claim that
virtually all modern epistemologies have been spectator theories:
[T]heories of knowledge differ enormously from one another. Their quarrels
with one another fill the air. The din thus created makes us deaf to the
way in which they say one thing in common. ... They all hold that the
operation of inquiry excludes any element of practical activity that
enters into the construction of the object known. ... The common essence
of all these theories, in short, is that what is known is antecedent to
the mental act of observation and inquiry, and is totally unaffected by
these acts; otherwise, it would not be fixed and unchangeable. This
negative condition, that the processes of search, investigation,
reflection, involved in knowledge relate to something having prior being,
fixes once and for all the main characters attributed to mind, and to
the organs of knowing. They must be outside what is known, so as not to
interact with the object to be known.(62)
Empiricist foundationalism is a case in point. Its notion of "the given" or "immediate knowledge"
conforms to the basic structure of the spectatorial model: the subject passively apprehends an
independent reality, reflecting or mirroring objects unchanged by being reproduced in the
medium of intellect.(63) Endorsing and extending Kant's insight that "sensible and rational
factors ... are allies, cooperating to make knowledge possible,"(64) Dewey wants to get rid of
givenism--a doctrine which, as he sees it, has impeded philosophical progress: "The history of
the theory of knowledge or epistemology would have been very different [that is, better] if
instead of the word `data' or `givens,' it had happened to start with calling the qualities in
question `takens.'"(65) Urging us to denounce the given as a myth and forego the quest for
certainty, Dewey's polemics against the spectator theory broaden the critique of Cartesian
foundationalism initiated, some six decades earlier, by Peirce.
(b) Post-Classical Pragmatism. The themes so dear to Dewey, James, and Peirce--the rejection of
the idea that objects or states of affairs are given directly to a purely receptive consciousness in a
pristine prejudgmental mode, and the denial of the suggestion that empirical knowledge rests on
a sure and unalterable foundation--have figured prominently in the post-positivist critiques of
traditional empiricism found in Wittgenstein, Quine, Kuhn, Goodman, Putnam, Rorty, and
Davidson. Here I shall enumerate only a few of the more noteworthy instances of this resistance.
Wittgenstein's private language argument, if sound, challenges the foundationalist assumptions
traditionally favored by empiricists, insofar as they commit us to a broadly Cartesian picture on
which sensations or mental states--the foundations of knowledge--are private inner episodes to
which a subject has privileged introspective access. Moreover, the phenomenon of "seeing as"
(illustrated with the figure of a duck-rabbit)(66) is significant in this context: it suggests the
extent to which the output (whether one sees a duck or a rabbit) is underdetermined by the input
(the visual stimulus). This stress on the interpretative dimension of perceptual experience
arguably puts the classical doctrine of the given on the defensive.
For Quine, the metaphor that best captures the structure of our doxastic system is not that of an
edifice built upon adamantine bedrock, but that of an unanchored raft mariners repair as they
journey across the open sea, mariners and replacing planks as they see removing and replacing
planks as they see fit.(67) In the absence of any unrevisable commitments or incorrigible
statements, justification goes holistic, becoming a matter of maximizing coherence and fit within
the system. Of particular importance is the preservation of equilibrium between the continuous
barrage of sensory experience and the more entrenched theoretical statements which, though
central to our current view of the world, are nonetheless themselves potentially subject to
revision.
Influenced by considerations drawn from the history of science and, to a lesser extent, Gestalt
psychology and Wittgenstein, Kuhn became dubious about the logical positivists' belief in a pure
observation language in which we could frame "neutral and objective reports on `the given.'"(68)
Judging the observation/theory distinction to be "exceedingly artificial,"(69) he denied there
could be any strict and categorical separation between them, and spoke approvingly of "the
intimate and inevitable entanglement of scientific observation with scientific theory."(70) The
commitment to the theory-laden character of observation is central to Kuhnian philosophy of
science: along with a holistic view of meaning, it forms the basis of his argument for the muchdiscussed incommensurability thesis.
Long a foe of traditional foundationalism,(71) Goodman has explicitly acknowledged his debt to
"the Kantian theme of the vacuity of the notion of pure content" and scatters his essays with
references to the "overwhelming case against perception without conception, the pure given,
absolute immediacy," "the speciousness of the `given,'" and "the false hope of a firm
foundation."(72) Observation is saturated in theory: facts, far from being passively grasped, are
"small theories,"(73) fabricated or constructed using symbol systems. Since reality is fashioned
rather than found, "there is no world independent of description."(74)
Putnam is in substantial agreement with Goodman: in a review of Ways of Worldmaking he
endorses the latter's view that "perception is notoriously influenced by interpretations provided
by habit, culture, and theory,"(75) and he has himself denied that there exist experiential inputs
"which are not themselves to some extent shaped by our concepts ... [or] conceptually
contaminated."(76) More recently, Putnam has argued that the only access we have to the world
is through discourse: "the idea that we sometimes compare our beliefs directly with
unconceptualized reality ... has come to seem untenable. ... [W]e compare our discourse with the
world as it is presented to us or constructed for us by discourse itself, making in the process new
worlds out of old worlds."(77)
"Can we see ourselves as never encountering reality except under a chosen description?" queries
Rorty, who has also singled out the foundationalist idea of givenism for attack.(78) Central to his
case is his oft-repeated charge that foundationalism succumbs to "the urge to coalesce the
justificatory story and the causal story"(79): it maintains that what justifies certain beliefs is their
relation to something extra-linguistic transcending our web of belief, whereas the true nature of
this relation is not rational or justificatory, but naturalistic and causal. Rorty goes so far as to
claim that this conflation of the logical space of reasons with that of causes is the original sin that
made a discipline called epistemology seem both possible and fruitful: "[T]he notion of a `theory
of knowledge' will not make sense unless we have confused causation and justification in the
manner of Locke."(80)
Davidson echoes and seconds this last sentiment when he argues that traditional empiricism has
failed to perceive that sensations or perceptual inputs lack conceptual content and so can only
cause, not justify, beliefs. He credits Neurath with seeing that the foundationalist's error lies "in
trying to turn this causal bridge into an epistemological one, with sense-data, uninterpreted
givers, or unwritable sentences constituting its impossible spans."(81) Since, then, "nothing can
count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief,"(82) we should reconcile ourselves
to the fact that "empirical knowledge has no foundation and needs none."(83)
IV
Hegel or Neurath? By this point, it should be clear that pragmatists are unsympathetic (to put it
mildly) to the foundationalist's attempt to save the correspondence theory of truth by invoking a
special class of basic noncognitive apprehensions. However, caution is needed: despite the
appearance of unanimity, not all the writers mentioned have rejected foundationalism on the
basis of the argument we looked at in section II. The pragmatist marriage of certain themes of
post-Kantian philosophy with fallibilism means that Hegel's dilemma is often found side by side
with less persuasive attempts to refute foundationalism by denying that any beliefs are immune
from revision. Before we examine the Hegelian objection in detail, then, I think it will prove
useful to distinguish it from a weaker argument with which it is commonly conflated.
The basic conflation is nicely exemplified in the writings of the positivist Neurath. Opposing
Schlick's foundationalism and correspondence theory,(84) Neurath sought to argue for a brand of
coherentism by challenging Carnap's then-influential characterization of protocol statements as
"statements which express a pure immediate experience without any theoretical addition." His
case rested primarily on two arguments which he often ran together--presumably because both
assume no rigid and categorical distinction can be drawn between theory and observation or
between judgment and experience:(85)
(1) the first argument, essentially Hegelian in orientation, runs thus:
since all observation is contaminated or conditioned by theory, there is
no norgudgmental form of cognition, and hence no neutral experiential
input against which one might test one's beliefs;
(2) The second argument again sets out from the claim that all observation
statements are theory-laden or "processed."(86) Assuming that whatever is
theory-laden cannot provide us with a direct or unmediated grasp of the
world, Neurath concludes that, at least in principle, no statement--not
even simple ground-floor observation sentences--can be regarded as certain
or immune from revision: "the fate of being discarded may even befall a
protocol statement. There is no `noli me tangere' for any
statement. ..."(87)
Neurath appears to have been convinced that this second argument was sufficient to refute both
the correspondence theory and foundationalism. I wonder, however, if he was entitled to be so
sanguine. Treated as an attack on correspondence, it is hard to see how the argument from the
theory-laden character of protocols adds anything substantial to Hegel's more straight forward
argument. Seen as a raid on the foundationalist citadel, the second argument is decidedly
inferior. For even if we grant Neurath his premises, the general anti-foundationalist conclusion
would follow only if it is assumed that the foundations of knowledge must be absolutely
certain.(88) While it is true that some in this century (for example, C.I. Lewis) have followed this
path, it is open to the foundationalist to opt for a more liberal line, and require only that basic
beliefs possess a substantial degree of initial plausibility or intrinsic credibility.(89) This means
that the strongest moral one could draw from Neurath's second argument is not antifoundationalism, but fallibilism.(90) To its credit, the Hegelian objection wisely bypasses the
question of certainty, seeing it as the side-issue it is (at least in this context). Instead, it sets up a
dilemma that goes straight to the heart of traditional foundationalism: either the given is not a
cognitive state with propositional content (in which case it can justify nothing) or it is such a
state (in which case it is itself a judgment in need of justification).
V
Supervenience To the Rescue. The question before us is clear: Is Hegel's dilemma as devastating
as its proponents suppose? Let us direct our attention to the two principles responsible for
generating the difficulty:
(1) If there exists some mental state y to which S's belief x owes its
epistemic status (such that y is a sufficient condition for x's being
justified for S), then y itself must be a candidate for epistemic
assessment or justification.
(2) Only doxastic states are candidates for justification.
If the foundationalist wants to combat the Hegelian menace, he must find fault with at least one
of these theses. Thesis (2) seems defensible, however, since it can be validly derived from two
unobjectionable assumptions: (a) only those states of a subject which are potentially bearers of
truth or falsity are candidates for epistemic appraisal; and (b) beliefs are the only mental states
which are truth-bearers. Thus it is to the first principle foundationalists must look if they are to
refute Hegel. Fortunately for them, it is not difficult to find fault with (1), since it is inconsistent
with the exceedingly plausible doctrine that epistemic properties supervene on nonepistemic
ones (which might be seen as a corollary of a more general thesis, namely, that evaluative
properties supervene on nonevaluative ones).(91)
Given two distinct families of properties, [Alpha] and [Beta], we can say that [Alpha] supervenes
on [Beta] just in case it is necessarily true that if two things share all properties in [Beta] then
they must share all properties in [Alpha].(92) Surely some application of this notion is
compelling: it makes no sense to suppose that an individual man could be a good man, although
a person exactly like him in all nonethical respects was not; that a work of art might be beautiful
but one identical to it in all nonaesthetic respects be ugly; or that a belief is justified, whereas one
endowed with all and only those naturalistic properties the former possesses might have an
entirely different epistemic status; and so forth. If, however, the epistemic properties of a belief
(being justified, evident, certain, and the like) are indeed dependent upon its nonepistemic or
naturalistic properties in such a way that the former are determined once the latter are fixed,
nothing would seem to prevent us from allowing that a basic belief x derives its justification
from its origin or, for instance, is warranted in virtue of the fact that x was causally produced by
y, the experience which the belief is about. This suffices to show that, pace Hegel and the
pragmatists who follow his lead, the suggestion that a doxastic state might derive its positive
epistemic status from a nondoxastic state is neither paradoxical nor irredeemably mysterious.
Granted, it would be incorrect to claim that y justifies x, if that is taken to mean that y transmits
justification to x. As a nondoxastic state, y is simply not the type of thing to which the category
of justification can correctly be applied. Rather, we ought to say that the noncognitive state y
"generates" x's justification.(93)
If this is correct, then we should reject thesis (1). Lest foundationalists claim victory
prematurely, however, we should point out that this alone is insufficient to vindicate or establish
foundationalism. Since the doctrine of epistemic supervenience is consistent with an allegiance
to some brand of coherentism, the bare fact of its truth does not constitute an argument for
foundationalism.(94) Nevertheless, the supervenience thesis functions in a useful negative
capacity: it enables the foundationalist to defend his position against those who assume that
epistemic properties are metaphysically autonomous. Unfortunately, such attitudes are less
widespread than we might hope. The idea that criteria of justification cannot be formulated in
nonnormative terms arguably lies at the root of at least four positions which have exerted
considerable influence in recent work in the theory of knowledge: (1) Popper's treatment of "the
problem of the empirical basis," in which he denied that basic observational reports could be
justified by experience;(95) (2) some of Sellars' better known antigivenist quips in "Empiricism
and the Philosophy of Mind";(96) (3) Rorty's complaint that foundationalist epistemology
follows Locke in confusing causation and justification;(97) and (4) Davidson's critique of the
attempt to ground justification on the testimony of the senses.(98)
VI
Two Further Difficulties. Thus far we have confined our discussion to the first part of the
comparison objection. We shall now focus on the latter half of the argument in which it is argued
that, since the correspondence account makes it impossible to establish a connection between
cognition and its objects, the theory engenders skepticism and consequently ought to be
abandoned. I shall argue that it would be a mistake to reject correspondence as the definition of
truth solely on the basis of the comparison objection, even if we grant that we lack the direct
access to the facts the so-called "absurd comparison" evidently requires. Consider the following
pair of objections, which take aim at the assumptions necessary to draw the anticorrespondence
conclusion:
(a) Conflation of metaphysical and epistemological issues. The objection fails to distinguish
between the nature of truth and its criterion, that is, between the property in virtue of which true
statements are true, on the one hand, and, on the other, the property in virtue of which true
beliefs can be identified as such by the believer.(99) Since a criterion is intended to provide a
mark or a test available to an epistemic subject that enables him to determine whether or not his
belief is true, it can function effectively only if the properties it claims correlate positively with
truth are immanent, that is, are something the subject could detect through reflection or
introspection. Hence if we are prepared to concede that "there is no way to get outside of our
beliefs and our language,"(100) then correspondence, as a relation holding between something in
the mind and something wholly outside it, cannot serve as a truth-criterion. Even so, how is this
supposed to constitute a refutation of the correspondence theory of truth? Since the theory is
concerned only with truth's nature, the argument's conclusion is a blatant non sequitur. (101)
(b) Internalism. Why should we see the absurdity of confrontation as proof that the
correspondence theory entails the impossibility of empirical knowledge? Presumably, the
assumption that is supposed to license this inference is that none of S's basic empirical beliefs
possesses the degree of warrant or epistemic status required for knowledge unless S himself can
compare it with the appropriate states of affairs and so ensure that his belief passes the test laid
down by the truth-criterion. However, in maintaining that a truth-criterion is needed to stave off
skepticism, the objectors have assumed that S's beliefs qualify as justified only if he himself
justifies them, that is, has in his cognitive possession supporting arguments, reasons, or evidence.
We may describe this stance as broadly internalist, since it assumes that what justifies a belief
must be an object of possible awareness, that is, something to which the subject for whom that
belief is justified has reflective cognitive access.(102)
Such a conception of epistemic justification seems unduly narrow, however, and has in recent
decades been put on the defensive by varieties of externalism which currently dominate the
epistemological landscape. Theories of the latter sort generally explicate justification in terms of
the reliability of belief-forming processes (or cognitive faculties, or intellectual virtues), thereby
countenancing the existence of justification-making properties that cannot be disclosed or
ascertained through reflection or introspection.(103) This suggests that if the correspondence
conception of truth is allied to a reliabilist epistemology, no criterion would be needed to fend
off the skeptic: a subject's true belief could acquire the epistemic status necessary for knowledge
even though the subject might not be in a position to adduce reasons as support, provided (say)
his belief is sufficiently sensitive to the truth, `tracking' it across possible worlds.
VII
A Case For Coherence? The comparison objection has often been invoked by philosophers who
favor a coherence theory of truth as part of a larger effort to discredit their competition and make
a persuasive prima facie case for their own view.(104) Neurath is a case in point. In a wellknown passage, he wrote:
Statements are compared with statements, not with `experiences,' not with
a `world,' nor with anything else. All these meaningless duplications belong
to a more or less refined metaphysics and are therefore to be rejected.
Each new statement is confronted with the totality of existing statements
that have already been harmonized with each other. A statement is called
correct if it can be incorporated into this totality. What cannot be
incorporated is rejected as incorrect.(105)
More recently, Hilary Putnam and Nicholas Rescher have also drawn coherentist morals from the
alleged impossibility of confrontation and the consequent demise of correspondence.(106) In
Reason, Truth, and History, Putnam frames a conditional that makes this move explicit:
If the notion of comparing our system of beliefs with unconceptualized
reality makes no sense, then the claim that science seeks to discover the
truth can mean no more than that science seeks to construct a world picture
which, in the ideal limit, satisfies certain criteria of rational
acceptability. (107)
Rescher's case for the coherence theory of truth he defends as part of his so-called "conceptual
idealism" proceeds by way of a similar inference:
Reality is thus not a mysterious unknowable something-or-other
hidden away behind an impenetrable curtain. ... To take this stance is,
in effect, to abandon the correspondence theory of truth for a
coherence theory. ... One is led to take this line by considering that, as
we have no theory-independent apprehension of reality, the best we
can possibly do is to construct a coherent conceptual theoretical
scheme about reality. (108)
Is the dialectical strategy common to Neurath, Putnam, and Rescher sound? Apparently not. Let
me suggest that if the argument in its present form creates trouble for the correspondence theory
of truth, it puts the coherence theory on the defensive as well. For if a coherence account is to be
preferred to the correspondence view on the basis of the comparison objection, then we must
assume an individual cognizer's system of beliefs, unlike a transcendent and elusive realm of
facts, is something to which he has unproblematic access. Yet it is far from obvious that this
assumption is tenable. Consider the following two objections.
(1) A Double Standard? Coherence theories are often thought appealing because they stress the
connection between truth and human epistemic capacities, and so are believed to furnish us with
a standard or criterion we can actually trust and use. To verify a belief or statement, we need not
perform some miraculous self-transcending comparison. Instead (as Neurath plainly states), all
we have to do is ensure that the new element fits harmoniously or coheres with--what, precisely?
Given the coherentist emphasis on epistemic accessibility, we might suspect coherence with
one's present corpus of beliefs is all that is required. Yet that cannot be so: such an outright
identification of truth with justification simpliciter is rendered problematic by the commonplace
observations that even well justified beliefs can be false, and that truth, unlike justification, is not
a property that a statement can "lose." Evidently, a less easily obtainable form of coherence must
be invoked: p is true if and only if it would be a member of an ideally coherent (that is,
consistent, absolutely complete, and systematically integrated) set of beliefs. The trouble with
this is obvious. Once the proponent of a coherence theory feels the need to posit some ideal
system or focus imaginarius in terms of which truth is defined, he allows the comparison
objection, his old ally, to reappear in a new and decidedly unfriendly guise. For how now can S
tell whether a given belief of his, even if coherent with his current doxastic system, will be a
member of the elect final set?
(2) The Circularity Problem. On reviewing the principles assumed by the original argument, we
immediately realize that in order to refute the skeptic, it is not enough that the beliefs of a subject
merely cohere. To satisfy the skeptic, S would have to have in his cognitive possession some
reason to suppose that his beliefs formed a systematically coherent and suitably comprehensive
set. In order to determine whether and to what extent his beliefs constitute such a system,
however, he must first possess an adequate grasp of what beliefs he actually holds. Now, what
reason might the skeptics have to suppose that his meta-beliefs (that is, beliefs about the contents
of his belief system) are true, or apt to be true? Unless he has some such reason or assurance, he
lacks justification and skepticism ensues (at least on the principles assumed by the comparison
objection). Yet those meta-beliefs surely cannot be justified by an appeal to coherence.
Why? Suppose for a moment that his meta-beliefs could be justified in virtue of their coherence
with his overall system of beliefs [B.sub.1]-[B.sub.n], Given the constraint imposed by the
assumed internalist conception of justification, it follows that S must know (or at least
warrantedly suppose) that his meta-beliefs are in fact congruous with [B.sub.1]-[B.sub.n]. This
presupposes, however, that he is aware he holds [B.sub.1]-[B.sub.n]; otherwise, how could he
have any idea of the relations (logical, probabilistic, or explanatory) holding between them and
his meta-beliefs? Thus the attempt to justify meta-beliefs by appealing to coherence is
objectionably circular, since it takes for granted the very thing we set out to prove--namely, that
one possesses an adequate and basically accurate grasp of one's own doxastic system.
All of this strongly suggests that coherence cannot be the criterion of truth. Moreover, since
those who endorse the original objection to correspondence truth either disregard the distinction
between criterion and essence altogether or maintain that something cannot constitute the nature
of truth if it is not its criterion as well, we may turn the objectors' logic against them, and
conclude that coherence cannot be the nature of truth.(109)
I conclude, then, that the advocates of a coherence theory of truth cannot profitably exploit the
comparison argument. It seems about as damaging to their own view as it is to the
correspondence theory.(110)
VIII
Correspondence: A Regulative Ideal of Inquiry? So it seems the comparison objection fails to
unseat the correspondence theory of truth. Does that mean that all the passages we reviewed
earlier, ranging from the classical period to present, are nothing but a catalogue of an error with
an impeccable pedigree? Surely that would be jumping to conclusions. In this final section, I
shall propose a different interpretation of the argument, according to which its purpose is not to
refute correspondence theories--let us not forget that Peirce,(111) James,(112) and Dewey(113)
all admitted "conformity of thought with its object" as the nominal definition of truth(114)--but
simply to call attention to the methodological limitations of all such traditional accounts. On this
reading, the argument is intended to establish a purely negative thesis: that no representationalist
notion--correspondence, copying, adequation, picturing, mirroring, and the like--is fit to function
effectively as a regulative or action-guiding ideal.(115) In other words, understanding truth as
correspondence does not furnish inquirers with rules of action.
To see how one might argue that correspondence is not a conception of truth capable of assisting
us in our efforts to attain it, recall what Kant said about regulative Ideas in the Transcendental
Dialectic. Although the three so-called "transcendental Ideas"--the concepts of the soul, of the
world, and of God--are not possible objects of knowledge, since they correspond to no object of
possible experience, Kant nevertheless insists that they are not to be dismissed as vacuous
notions with which reason can dispense. On the contrary, he claims that there is a
methodological function the Ideas are uniquely qualified to perform:
Although we must say of the transcendental concepts of reason that they
are only ideas, this is not by any means to be taken as signifying that
they are superfluous and void. For even if they cannot determine any
object, they may yet, in a fundamental and unobserved fashion, be of
service to the understanding as a canon for its extended and consistent
employment. The understanding does not thereby obtain more knowledge of
any object than it would have by means of its own concepts, but for the
acquiring of such knowledge it receives better and more extensive
guidance.(116)
Kant thus attributes heuristic value to these concepts: he argues that the Ideas, used immanently
as providing rules or maxims for the empirical employment of reason, must be employed if
reason is to satisfy its interest in achieving the greatest possible degree of systematic unity and
coherence. The Transcendental Ideas are therefore methodologically indispensable, since they
"contribute to the extension of empirical knowledge without ever being in a position to run
counter to it."(117)
Let us apply this to the matter at hand: the quest for a methodological conception of truth capable
of regulating the conduct of inquiry. Regulative ideals seem similar in certain fundamental
respects to commands, orders, and imperatives, at least inasmuch as both sorts of things are
concerned to guide and direct conduct. Now we obviously need to distinguish between simply
behaving in accordance with a rule (bare external conformity) and actual obedience (intentional
conformity), since one could coincidentally happen to perform an action specified by an order
without obeying it (as when it is given in a language one does not understand). It is therefore
clear that real obedience (which is our sole concern here) is possible for us only if we grasp the
satisfaction-conditions of the command, that is, understand what would count as compliance or
fulfillment. If we take the analogy between commands and ideals seriously, we may say that one
cannot intentionally conform one's practice to a regulative ideal, or be said to follow deliberately
the rules or prescriptions it lays down for conduct, unless one can understand what it would
mean to succeed in doing what the ideal instructs us to do.
To appreciate how someone might move from this claim to an anticorrespondence conclusion, let
us suppose three things. First, assume that we, as inquirers, want a substantive conception of the
goal of inquiry that will regulate our pursuit of it and facilitate its attainment. Secondly, assume
that correspondence is proposed as such a conception. Understood in light of what we have said
above, these two assumptions imply that correspondence will be adequate as a regulative ideal
only if we understand what it would mean to succeed in achieving this aim. Yet it appears we
have good reasons to suspect we do not understand this if we suppose, thirdly, that the
comparison objection is right at least to this extent: we cannot step outside of our language and
conceptual scheme and compare our beliefs to the facts to see if they fit. In short, if we conceive
of the goal of inquiry as "correspondence with reality," then since we are barred in principle from
ascertaining whether or not we have been successful, we really do not understand what we are
aiming at--and so, in a strict sense, cannot be said to aim at it at all. It is pointless to tell inquirers
to represent reality--not because reality cannot be represented, but because it is not something to
which we can effectively aspire.
We might try to express this point in a more intuitive way by saying that telling inquirers their
objective is to represent reality makes about as much sense as enjoining a congenitally blind man
to produce a detailed and faithful painting of a landscape. Even if the blind man somehow
miraculously got things right, we would not say he was guided or directed by the external objects
he was told to depict. If this interpretative suggestion is basically correct, then the pragmatists
believed that something similar is true in the case of inquirers. For how can we regard ourselves
as obeying the order expressed in the imperative "Represent reality?" It is not at all clear that we
could, if we assume that we can aim or intend to copy something only if we have some mode of
access to the original, as when, for instance, an art student hones his skill by trying to reproduce
Rubens' The Miracle of St. Ignatius, or a counterfeiter forges Taiwanese currency, or an
impersonator mimics the speech and mannerisms of the Canadian Prime Minister. If, as these
commonplace cases suggest, accurate representation or duplication is possible as a goal or object
of striving only when the originals are available for inspection, copying and correspondence
cannot function as effective action-guiding ideals, because we are denied access to the things to
be represented. This, one might say, is the truth contained in the comparison objection, albeit in a
disguised and distorted form.
There are several wrinkles with this proposal, however. If the basic pragmatist claim is that
representationalist injunctions are vacuous and offer no guidance to would-be representers, how
is the case of ideal consensus supposed to succeed where the notion of correspondence fails? If
correspondence is disqualified from playing a regulative role on the grounds that external and
mind-independent facts are beyond one's ken, how can one permissibly appeal to the opinions of
one's fellow inquirers, which are presumably no more accessible? In other words, is not the
consensualist simply guilty of playing by a double standard?(118) Thus even if we are receptive
to this attempt to put the correspondence theory in its proper place, we might wonder whether
Peirce and Habermas manage to come up with anything better.(119)
IX
Conclusions. What, then, are we to say about the comparison objection? Unless our
investigations have led us astray, we are in a good position to appreciate the appeal of the
following six theses:
(1) The "comparison objection" has long been central to pragmatism's case against the
correspondence theory of truth, and betrays the movement's debt to Kantian and post-Kantian
idealism. In historical terms, the argument connects the pragmatists of the classical period
(especially Schiller and Dewey) with contemporary exponents of neo-pragmatism (for example,
Rorty, Goodman, Putnam, Rescher, Davidson, Habermas, and Apel), and therefore indicates one
respect in which pragmatism is a coherent (internally unified) movement.
(2) The conclusion of the "no independent access argument" is fundamentally correct: we cannot
verify beliefs or assertions simply by measuring them against an unconceptualized reality, since
our only access to the world is through discourse. Nevertheless, we must be careful not to
exaggerate or misunderstand the implications of this negative thesis. In particular, we need to
guard against three morals wrongly drawn by some.
(3) First, we must not claim that the comparison objection refutes foundationalism. Even if we
grant the impossibility of confronting basic beliefs with raw chunks of fact, we are still free to
retain the leading foundationalist idea (that is, that there are sources of epistemic justification
other than relations among beliefs), provided we embrace the doctrine of epistemic
supervenience. (This, as we observed, is not a positive argument for foundationalism, however.)
(4) Moreover, the comparison objection does not prove that the nature of truth cannot consist in
some form of correspondence between the contents of our judgments and the way the world is.
At most, the evident absurdity of confrontation gives one reason to deny that the criterion or test
of truth is correspondence or "agreement with reality."
(5) Nor (pace Neurath, Putnam, and Rescher) can we use the argument to argue for a coherence
theory of truth. For we can easily construct a variation on the original argument that applies just
as much to coherence as to correspondence.
(6) How, then, are we to understand the pragmatists' use of the comparison objection? The
argument's real target, we suggested, might be correspondence understood, not as a nominal or
purely formal definition of truth, but as a regulative ideal of inquiry. On this reading, the point of
the comparison objection would be to demonstrate that representationalist notions are incapable
of guiding or directing inquirers in their pursuit of truth. It remains to be seen, however, whether
the positive proposals of the classical pragmatists can succeed where the traditional
correspondence conception allegedly fails.(120)
Correspondence to: Department of Philosophy, Brown University, Box 1918, Providence, RI
02912.
(1) F. C. S. Schiller, "Truth," in Humanistic Pragmatism: The Philosophy of F. C. S. Schiller, ed.
Reuben Abel (New York: The Free Press, 1966), 154-70.
(2) William James, The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism (London: Longmans Green
and Company, 1909).
(3) John Dewey, "Propositions, Warranted Assertibility, and Truth," in Problems of Men (New
York: Philosophical Library, 1946), 331-53.
(4) Here is a short list of those who have taken it seriously: Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics, bk. 2
(1677), in The Ethics, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and Selected Letters, 2d ed.,
trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 43; John Locke, An Essay Concerning
Human Understanding, bk. 4, chap. 4, sec. 3 (1690), ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1975); George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge,
secs. 86-7 (1710), in Berkeley: Philosophical Works, ed. M. R. Ayers (London: J. M. Dent,
1975), 71-153; David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding, sec. 12 (1748), in
Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A.
Selby-Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); Immanuel Kant,
Blomberg Logic, secs. 92-3 (c. 1770), and Jasche Logic, Introduction, sec. 50 (c. 1800), in
Lectures on Logic, trans. J. M. Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 5-246,
and Critique of Pure Reason (1781), trans. N. Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1964), A1405
(all references are to pagination in the first [A] and second [B] German editions); G. W. F.
Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper Torchbooks,
1967), 141-2; Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature" (1836), in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected
Essays, ed. L. Ziff (New York: Penguin, 1982), 35-82; Hermann Lotze, Microcosmus: An Essay
Concerning Man and His Relation to the World (1864), 2 vole., trans. E. Hamilton and E. Jones
(New York: Scribner's, 1894), 2:628-30; Christoph Sigwart, Logic (1873), 2 vole., trans. H.
Dendy (London: Swann Sonnenschein, 1895), 1:3069; Josiah Royce, The Religious Aspect of
Philosophy (New York: Harper, 1885), 388; Bernard Bosanquet, Logic, or The Morphology of
Knowledge, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), 1:2-3; F. H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and
Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), 108; Franz Brentano, The True and The Evident
(1917), trans. R. M. Chisholm et al. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 24, 111; George
Santayana, Skepticism and Animal Faith (New York: Dover, 1923), 167-70; Martin Heidegger,
"Vom Wesen der Wahrheit" (1930), in Gesamtausgabe I: Abteilung: Veroffentliche Schriften
1914-1970 Band 9: Wegmarken, (Klostermann: Frankfurt am Main, 1976), 177-202; Otto
Neurath, "Sociology in the Framework of Physicalism" (1931/32), in Philosophical Papers.
1913-1946, ed. and trans. R. Cohen and M. Neurath (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983), 59-90, esp.
66; Etienne Gilson, L'Espirit de la Philosophie Medievale (Paris: Libraire Philosophique J. Vrin,
1932), 30-1; A. C. Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey (New York: The Humanities Press 1933),
197-8; Carl Hempel, "On The Logical Positivists' Theory of Truth," Analysis 2, no. 4 (1935): 4959; Brand Blanshard, The Nature of Thought, 2 vols. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1939), 2:2689; and C. J. Ducasse, "Propositions, Truth, and The Ultimate Criterion of Truth," Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 4, no. 3 (1944): 317-40, esp. 334.
(5). F. C. S. Schiller, "Pragmatism," in The Encyclopaedia Brittanica (1947), 18:413-4.
(6) See John Dewey "The Problem of Truth" (1911), in John Dewey: The Middle Works (18991924), ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbonville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 6:12-68,
esp. 34; "Contributions to A Cyclopedia of Education" (1912/13), in John Dewey: The Middle
Works (1899-1924), ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbonville: Southern Illinois University Press,
1979), 7:207-365, esp. 358-9; and Essays In Experimental Logic (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1916), 181.
(7) John Dewey, "The Logic of Verification" (1890), in John Dewey: The Early Works (18821898), ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbonville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 3:83-9.
(8) See John Dewey, "Dewey's New Logic," in The Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. Paul Schilpp
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1939), 135-56; "Propositions, Warranted
Assertibility, and Truth," in Problems of Men (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), 331-53.
Ralph Sleeper chronicles the mayor epistemological disagreements between the two in The
Necessity of Pragmatism: John Dewey's Conception of Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1986), 78-86; a more thorough and perceptive review of their dispute is given by T. Burke
in Dewey's New Logic: A Reply To Russell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 16676, and 240-5, who defends Dewey against Russell's objections.
(9) Dewey, "Propositions, Warranted Assertibility, and Truth," 343.
(10) W. V. O. Quine, "Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis," in From a Logical Point of View
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), 65-79, esp. 79.
(11) Richard Rorty, "Professionalized Philosophy and Transcendentalist Culture," in
Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 60-71, esp.
67.
(12) Rorty Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979),
178.
(13) Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 293.
(14) Rorty, "Introduction: Pragmatism and Philosophy," in Consequences of Pragmatism
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xviii-xix, esp. xiii-xlvii.
(15) Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),
20.
(16) Rorty, "Two Meanings of `Logocentrism': A reply to Norris," in Essays on Heidegger and
Others: Philosophical Papers Volume 11 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 10718, esp. 110.
(17) Rorty, "Introduction: Antirepresentationalism, Ethnocentrism, and Liberalism," in
Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers Volume I (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 1-20, esp. 6.
(18) Rorty, "Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry?" 281-300, 281.
(19) Rorty, "Robert Brandom on Social Practices and Representations," in Truth and Progress:
Philosophical Papers Volume III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3:122-37, esp.
127.
(20) Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), 17.
(21) Reconceptions, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), 49; emphasis mine.
(22) Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 4.
(23) Goodman, Reconceptions, 154. These themes harken back to Goodman's influential paper,
"The Way The World Is," in which he dismissed the picture theory of language as "obviously
wrong," and argued that there can be no faithful representation of the way the world is, for the
simple reason that "there is no such thing as the structure of the world for anything to conform to
or fail to conform to"; Goodman, "The Way the World Is," in Problems and Projects
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1972), 24-32, esp. 24, 31. For a careful and sober analysis of Goodman's
provocative claims, see Israel Scheffler, "The Wonderful Worlds of Goodman," Synthese 45
(1980): 201-9; "Some Responses to Goodman's Comments in Starmaking," Philosophia
Scientiae 2, no. 2 (1997): 207-11.
(24) Hilary Putnam, "Convention: A Theme in Philosophy," in Realism and Reason:
Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 3:170-83, esp. 177.
(25) Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 130.
(26) Putnam, Realism With A Human Face (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990),
41. See McDermid, "Putnam on Kant on Truth," Idealistic Studies, forthcoming, however, where
I argue that Kant (unlike Putnam) saw very clearly that the impossibility of comparison does not
refute the correspondence theory of truth.
(27) Nicholas Rescher, Conceptual Idealism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973), 10.
(28) Rescher, Conceptual Idealism, 4.
(29) Rescher, Conceptual Idealism, 169.
(30) Rescher, Conceptual Idealism, 168. See also Rescher, The Coherence Theory of Truth
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 5-9, for another presentation of the comparison objection.
Note, however, that Rescher claims his goal is not to "abandon a correspondence theory of truth,
but merely [to] endow it with a suitable interpretation"; Rescher, Conceptual Idealism, 169.
(31) Donald Davidson, "Empirical Content," Grazer Philosophische Studien 16/17 (1982): 47189, esp. 477.
(32) Davidson, "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge," in Truth and Interpretation:
Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, em. Ernest Lepore (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1986), 307-19, esp. 307.
(33) Davidson, "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge," 312. He has since recanted, and
no longer thinks this a sound objection against correspondence truth. Cf. Davidson
"Afterthoughts," in Reading Rorty, ed. Alan Malachowski (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 1347; and "The Structure and Content of Truth," Journal of Philosophy 87, no. 6 (1990): 279-328,
for second thoughts on the position defended in his "A Coherence Theory of Truth and
Knowledge."
(34) Jurgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, trans. W. Hohengarten (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1992), 135.
(35) Karl-Otto Apel, "Fallibilismus, Konsenstheorie der Wahrheit und Letztbegrundung," in
Philosophie und Begrundung, ed. W. R. Kohler, et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Forum fur
Philosophie, Bad Homburg, 1987), 116-211, esp. 125. (36) Note that here I am not assuming that
all foundationalists must hold that basic beliefs are justified by their relation to something else of
which the subject is aware ("the given"). They certainly have other options. For instance, they
may contend, with Chisholm, that foundational beliefs are self-justifying; or they may go and
deny that what confers justification or warrant on basic beliefs must be available to the subject.
(This is not, of course, to say that these alternatives are unproblematic; nevertheless, it would
take additional argument to undermine them.)
(37) This seems to have been Schlick's answer to Neurath and Hempel: "I have been accused of
maintaining that statements can be compared with facts. I plead guilty. I have maintained this. ...
It is my humble opinion that we can compare anything to anything if we choose"; Moritz
Schlick, "Facts and Propositions," Analysts 2, no. 5 (1935): 65-70. Unfortunately, he failed to
elaborate on these provocative remarks which, in the absence of sustained and argumentative
support, are merely suggestive. See Hempel "Some Remarks on `Facts and Propositions,'"
Analysis 2, no. 6 (1935): 93-6, for commentary and critique.
(38) In saying this, however, I do not mean to suggest that the basic givenist idea does not
predate the early modern period; arguably, one can detect it, at least in embryonic form, in Duns
Scotus's distinction between intuitive and abstractive cognition--a conception later taken up by
his fellow Franciscan William of Ockham, whose influence on the formation of modern
empiricism has been duly noted.
(39) This label is more a matter of convenience than exact scholarship, since we find the
argument in earlier idealist writings-as in Fichte's The Vocation of Man, trans. Peter Preuss
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), not to mention Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. KempSmith (London: Macmillan, 1964). See also the section on "Sense-Certainty" in Hegel's The
Phenomenology of Mind, as well as the Introduction. Charles Taylor, "The Opening Arguments
of the Phenomenology," in Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. A. MacIntyre (Garden
City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1972), 151-88, and Robert Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel: a Study of G. W.
F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), provide helpful
and instructive commentary on the arguments in these sections. Variants on the basic objection
can be found in T. H. Green, Preliminary Dissertation and Notes in A Treatise of Human Nature,
vol. 1 (London: Longmans Green and Company, 1878); F. H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and
Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914); Wilfrid Sellars, "Empiricism and the Philosophy of
Mind," in Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 127-96;
Michael Williams, Groundless Belief (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Simon
Blackburn, Spreading The Word (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); and Laurence Borgour, The
Structure of Empirical Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).
(40) See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith (London, Macmillan, 1964), A512/B75-6.
(41) The conflation Hegelians find in givenism can be traced back to the British Empiricists, who
used "idea" in a double sense, to encompass both objects of sense experience and truth-bearers or
propositional-like entities. Green, Preliminary Dissertation and Notes, made much of this, as
does Jonathan Bennett, Locke, Berkeley, Hume: Central Themes (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1971), 20-5. On the given more generally, see Chisholm, The Foundations of Knowing
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1982), 12647.
(42) C. S. Peirce, Selected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss, 6
vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931-1935), 5:264.
(43) Peirce, Selected Papers, 1:14.
(44) Peirce, Selected Papers, 1:55.
(45) Pierce, Selected Papers, 5:589. Some have seen Pierce as the grandfather of modern
coherentism. Thus Skagestad remarks that "[i]t is no exaggeration to say that Peirce
revolutionized the theory of knowledge by rejecting foundationalism"; Skagestad, The Road of
Inquiry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 18; see also 17-23. This is a verdict with
which W. B. Gallie, Peirce and Pragmatism (London: Penguin, 1952), 59-83, would appear to be
in substantial agreement. To my mind, however, this is an exaggeration, for reasons to be
discussed below in Section IV.
(46) On James's goal of reforming empiricism without turning Kantian, see Ralph Barton Perry's
magisterial study (1935), The Thought and Character of William James, 2 vols. (Boston: Little,
Brown, & Co., 1935), 1:543-54; 555-63; 564-72.
(47) William James, The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism (London: Longmans Green
and Company, 1909), 12-3. In this area, his favorite target was T. H. Green, whose critique of
empiricism (Preliminary Dissertation and Notes) James dubbed "intellectualist" (James,
Pragmatism [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1907], 111) his preferred abusive epithet for antipragmatists. It is significant that Dewey, whose esteem for Hegel James never shared, applauds
"T. H. Green's devastating critique of sensationalism"; Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry in
John Dewey: The Later Works (1925-1953), ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbonville and
Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 12:510.
(48) James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1950), 1:402.
(49) Ibid., 403.
(50) James, Pragmatism, 111.
(51) "If to have feelings or thoughts in their immediacy were enough, babies in the cradle would
be psychologists, and infallible ones. The psychologist must not only have his mental states in
their absolute veritableness, however, he must report them and write about them, name them,
classify and compare them and trace their own relations to other things. ... And as in the naming,
classing, and knowing of things in general we are notoriously fallible, why not also here?";
James, The Principles of Psychology, 1:189.
(52) "... we can hardly take in an impression at all, in the absence of a preconception of what
impressions there may possibly be"; James, Pragmatism, 112.
(53) James, Pragmatism, 112.
(54) James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Mentor, 1902), 319.
(56) See James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 339-40, 347, 351, and 355.
(56) James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 319. See also pp. 341-4
(57) This reticence, I suspect, results from James's confusingly expressed (and, I think, confused)
conclusions in the lectures on mysticism. Instead of framing the discussion in terms of epistemic
notions, he speaks chiefly of the "authority" of mystical experiences, or of their power to
"convince"; James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 78-9. Such talk has the disadvantage
of blurring causal and normative questions. However, as I read James, he allows that mystical
experiences causally prompt or induce one to hold certain sorts of religious beliefs; that is what
he means by granting that "mystical states of a well-pronounced and emphatic sort are usually
authoritative over those who have them"; James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 353.
What he is dubious about, though, is whether these experiences can support or justify those
beliefs; in that sense, he denies their "authority."
(58) "Our own more "rational" beliefs are based on evidence exactly similar in nature to that
which mystics quote for theirs. Our senses, namely, have assured us of certain states of fact; but
mystical experiences are as direct perceptions of fact for those who have them as any sensations
ever were for us. The records show that even though the five senses be in abeyance in them, they
are absolutely sensational in their epistemological quality, if I may be pardoned the barbarous
expression, that is, they are face to face presentations of what seems immediately to exist";
James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 353.
(59) Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, 145.
(60) Precisely what Dewey meant by the "spectator theory" is still a matter of debate, as is the
extent to which his attack on it succeeded. See George Dicker, Dewey's Theory of Knowing
(Philadelphia Philosophical Monongraphs, 1977) and Christopher Kulp, The End of
Epistemology: Dewey and His Current Allies on The Spectator Theory of Knowledge (Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992), who disagree on both counts. (61) Dewey, The Quest for
Certainty, in John Dewey: The Later Works (1925-1953), ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbonville and
Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 4:19. Here we pass over the details of
Dewey's complex socio-historical account of the genesis of the spectator theory and restrict
ourselves to his fundamental point. See chapters 1 and 2 of his The Quest for Certainty.
(62) Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, 4:18-9.
(63) See Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, 142-60, for a critique of "immediate
knowledge."
(64) Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, 137.
(65) Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, 142. See also chapter 7 in which Dewey makes it plain that
his agreement with Kant is more negative than positive. That is, he believes Kant justly accused
his empiricist and rationalist predecessors of being one-sided, of stressing one half of the
receptivity/ spontaneity, sensibility/understanding, and intuitions/concepts dualisms at the
expense of the other. Yet he is far from uncritical of Kant's own view; note especially pages 13745. See Dewey's "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy," in John Dewey: The Middle Works
(1899-1924), ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbonville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 10:352, 12-3.
(66) See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1953), 2:xi.
(67) Quine, "Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis," 78-9.
(68) Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1970), 127.
(69) Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 52.
(70) Kuhn, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1977), 267.
(71) See Goodman "Sense and Certainty," in Problems and Projects (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1972), 60-8.
(72) Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 1, 6, and 7.
(73) Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 97.
(74) Goodman, Reconceptions (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), 154.
(75) Putnam, "Reflections on Goodman's Ways of Worldmaking," in Realism and Reason:
Philosophical Papers Volume III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 3:155-69, esp.
155.
(76) Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 54.
(77) Putnam, "The Craving For Objectivity," in Realism With A Human Face (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 120-31, esp. 121.
(78) Rorty, "Introduction: Pragmatism and Philosophy," xxxix.
(79) Rorty, "Pragmatism, Davidson, Truth," 148.
(80) Rorty, Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979),
152.
(81) Davidson, "Empirical Content," 488.
(82) Davidson, "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge," in Truth and Interpretation:
Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. Ernest Lepore (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1986), 307-19, esp. 310.
(83) Davidson, "The Myth of the Subjective," in Relativism, ed. Michael Krausz (Notre Dame:
Notre Dame University Press, 1989), 159-72, esp. 166.
(84) We should point out that Neurath rarely distinguished carefully between truth and
justification.
(85) Neurath had a third argument as well: since the existence of mind-independent facts is
unverifiable, the realist correspondence theory, insofar as it requires their postulation, must be
condemned as "metaphysical" and non-sensical, according to the positivists' verification criterion
of meaningfulness.
(86) Neurath, "Protocol Statements," in Philosophical Papers 1913-1946, ed. and trans. R. Cohen
and M. Neurath (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983), 91-9, esp. 96.
(87) Neurath, "Protocol Statements," 95.
(88) In fairness to Neurath, we should observe that Schlick, his immediate target, accepted this
assumption or something very close to it. See Schlick's conception of the foundations of
knowledge in his "Uber das Fundament der Erkenntniss," Erkenntnis 4 (1934): 79-99, as well as
Scheffler, Science and Subjectivity, 2d ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982).
(89) See C.I. Lewis, The Mind and The World Order (New York: Scribners, 1929), and An
Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1946). For a more liberal view-akin to what Laurence Bonjour, The Structure of Empirical Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1985), has referred to as weak foundationalism--see Alston, Epistemic
Justification (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989).
(90) Note that there is good reason to suppose that what Peirce wanted to contest was not
foundationalism per se, only what he thought was an overly stringent and restrictive
characterization of knowledge's foundations as certain. See Robert Almeder, The Philosophy of
C. S. Peirce: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 82, and C. Delaney,
Science, Knowledge and Mind: A Study in the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame, 1993), 89, both of whom maintain Peirce was only interested in
opposing strong foundationalism.
(91) See James Van Cleve, "Epistemic Supervenience and The Circle of Belief," Monist 68
(1985):90-104; and Ernest Sosa, "The Foundations of Foundationalism," in Knowledge in
Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 149-64, and "The Raft and the
Pyramid: Coherence ersus Foundations in the Theory of Knowledge," in Knowledge in
Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 165-91.
(92) Some might object that this is not strong enough. For what I have described corresponds to
what Jaegwon Kim has called weak supervenience in his "Concepts of Supervenience,"
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 48 (1987): 315-26. Kim argues that we need a
stronger notion of supervenience which can do justice to the intuition that the relation of
determination or dependence must be constant over possible worlds. However, the point I am
trying to make does not hinge on the precise characterization of supervenience; I have chosen the
weaker formulation because it is widely accepted and so not likely to provoke needless
disagreement.
(93) Here I follow the terminology of Van Cleve in "Epistemic Supervenience and The Circle of
Belief."
(94) At least it is not an argument for what Sosa calls substantive foundationalism, though it
could be used to support formal foundationalism. See Sosa, "The Foundations of
Foundationalism." (95) See Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London:
Hutchinson, 1959). Chapter 5 of Susan Haack's Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction
in Epistemology (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993) contains a vigorous critique.
(96)"The essential point is that in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are
not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space
of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says"; Sellars, "Empiricism and the
Philosophy of Mind," 169. There is some indication (for example his remarks, on p. 131, about
the epistemological analogue of the naturalistic fallacy) that Sellars subscribes to our principle
(1) because he feared that to do otherwise would be to maintain that the normative could be
reduced to the descriptive. A similar desire to safeguard the logical space of reasons from
reduction informs the other positions mentioned, but it seems misguided: supervenience does not
entail the reducibility of the supervenient properties to the subvenient base. Indeed, it was this
feature of the concept which originally made it attractive to those seeking to defend some form
of nonreductive physicalism. See Davidson, "Mental Events," in Essays on Actions and Events
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 207-25.
(97) Locke's seminal error, according to Rorty, was to suppose that "a quasi-mechanical account
of the way in which our immaterial tablets are dented by the material world will help us know
what we are entitled to believe"; Rorty, Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature, 143. This theme is
prominent in his recent writings, and I believe that it is Rorty's fundamental objection to
foundationalism. See Rorty, "The Very Idea of Human Answerability to the World: John
McDowell's Version of Empiricism," in Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers Volume III
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 138-152, which is critical of John McDowell's
sophisticated attempt to revive the core of empiricism in a way that can accomodate the
Sellarsian claim that all awareness is a linguistic affair. Rorty claims that McDowell's resolution,
though ingenious, is unnecessary: we should just give up on the idea that experience exerts
rational control over inquiry, and "turn away from the very idea of human answerability to the
world"; Rorty "The Very Idea of Human Answerability," 142-3. This is something Rorty
applauds Robert Brandom for doing: Brandom, he says, "helps us to tell a story about our
knowledge of objects that makes almost no reference to experience"; Rorty, "Robert Brandom on
Social Practices," 122.
(98) "The relation between a sensation and a belief cannot be logical, since sensations are not
beliefs or other propositional attitudes. What then is the relation? The answer is, I think, obvious:
the relation is causal. Sensations cause some beliefs and in this sense are the basis or ground of
those beliefs. A causal explanation, however, does not show how or why the belief is justified.
The difficulty of transmuting a cause into a reason plagues the anti-coherentist"; Davidson, "A
Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge," 311.
(99) See Rescher's The Coherence Theory of Truth, esp. chaps. 1 and 2, for a detailed account of
this distinction, repeatedly stressed by Russell in "On the Nature of Truth and Falsehood," in
Philosophical Essays (London: Routledge, 1910), 147-59; "William James's Conception of
Truth," in Philosophical Essays (London: Routledge, 1910), 112-30; and The Problems of
Philosophy, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912). (Ironically, Rescher's book, entitled The
Coherence Theory of Truth, offers only a coherence theory of justification.)
(100) Rorty, Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979),
178.
(101) Unless, that is, we refuse to acknowledge the distinction between questions about truth and
questions about justification (something we have been given no reason to do). Rorty, however, is
undeterred by all this: he asserts that "there is no pragmatic difference between the nature of
truth and the test of truth, and ... the test of truth ... [is] not `comparison with reality'"; Rorty,
"Introduction: Pragmatism and Philosophy," xxix. See also his "Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry?
Davidson vs. Wright," Philosophical Quarterly 45, no. 180 (1995): 281-2. He still stands by this
view: he says that he finds "the nature-criterion distinction a broken reed. ... What is the point of
the pragmatist maxim about `making a difference' if not that a nature that doesn't hook up with a
criterion is just a flatus vocis--an empty gesture?" (Personal communication with the author).
(102) Here I follow the characterization of internalism put forward by Roderick Chisholm: "The
internalist assumes that, merely by reflecting on his own conscious state, he can formulate a set
of epistemic principles that will enable him to find out, with respect to any possible belief he has,
whether he is justified in having that belief. The epistemic principles that he formulates are
principles that one may come upon and apply merely by sitting in one's armchair, so to speak,
and without calling for outside assistance. In a word, one need consider only one's state of
mind"; Roderick Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge, 3d ed. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall,
1989), 76.
(103) Influential champions of externalist theories of the sort alluded to here include D. M.
Armstrong, Belief, Truth and Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973);
Alvin Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1986); Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1981); and Sosa, Knowledge in Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
The basic idea goes back at least to F. P. Ramsey, "Knowledge," in The Foundations of
Mathematics and Other Logical Essays (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1931), 258-9, if not
to Santayana, Skepticism and Animal Faith (New York: Dover, 1923). For reservations about
this approach, see Chisholm's Theory of Knowledge, and Haack's Evidence and Inquiry.
(104) Dewey is a notable exception. Since he denied that coherence could guarantee truth, he
was never attracted by a coherence theory, even during his early idealist phase, as Morton White
points out in The Origin of Dewey's Instrumentalism (New York: Columbia University Press,
1943), 79.
(105) Neurath, "Sociology in the Framework of Physicalism," 66.
(106) See chaps. 25-6 in vol. 2 of Blanshard's The Nature of Thought. It is tempting to add Rorty
in this list, given his penchant for saying things such as "there is no way to get outside of our
beliefs and our language so as to find some test other than coherence"; Rorty, Philosophy and
The Mirror of Nature, 178. This is a remark which inspired Davidson, who cited it with approval
during his own coherentist phase (Davidson, "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,"
310). Consider, too, Rorty's more recent suggestion that we "think of the skeptic as having
pressed the philosopher back from a more ambitious notion of truth as accurate representation to
the more modest notion of truth as coherence among our beliefs"; Rorty, "Heidegger,
Contingency, and Pragmatism," in Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers
Volume II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 30. Since, in Rorty's writings, "the
skeptic" almost invariably means someone wielding the comparison objection, it is easy to get
the impression that Rorty wants to erect a coherence theory on the ruins of correspondence. This,
however, is inconsistent with the pronounced deflationary strain in his writings, according to
which we (that is, neo-pragmatists) ought to resist the urge to replace the correspondence theory
with a rival account, on the grounds that "truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have
a philosophically interesting theory about"; Rorty, "Introduction: Pragmatism and Philosophy,"
xiii. On this point, then, Rorty differs sharply from Putnam, who regards constructive theorizing
about truth as a legitimate philosophical project; see the latter's critique of Rorty's attempt to get
along without a substantive notion of truth in "A Comparison of Something with Something
Else," New Literary Studies 17 (1985): 60-81.
(107) Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 130.
Putnam had earlier equated rational acceptability with coherence (Putnam, Reason, Truth, and
History, 55).
(108) Rescher, Conceptual Idealism, 170. Though not a neo-pragmatist, Simon Blackburn
describes this move with sympathy and insight: "But if no judgment or experience has a pure
footing in the way things are, uncontaminated by our powers of thought and imagination ... is it
even possible to think of our beliefs as responding to facts, let alone corresponding to them? Or
are we left with a kind of majority tyranny in which any odd judgment, formed on an occasion,
but surrounded by occasions which prompt conflicting judgments, is deemed false, whilst the
majority are deemed true (and said to correspond to the facts)? It is this problem that leads to the
coherence theory of truth"; Simon Blackburn, Spreading The Word (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1984). Note, however, that Blackburn does not endorse this strategy.
(109) For the record I should point out that Blanshard falls into the latter class; unlike many of
his coherentist brethren (for example, Neurath), he explicitly distinguishes between criterion and
essence. Nevertheless, he believed that "the only test of truth that is not misleading is the special
nature or character that is itself constitutive of truth"; Blanshard, The Nature of Thought, 2:268.
(110) This is a problem not just for those who take coherence as the nature of truth, but also for
internalists who hold a coherence theory of justification. Bonjour (The Structure of Empirical
Knowledge) has shown a fine awareness of the difficulty described here, and has attempted to
meet it by invoking the "doxastic presumption," according to which a subject does in fact hold
(more or less) the set of beliefs he takes himself to hold. This move has been widely criticized,
however. See, for instance, Sosa, "Theories of Justification: Old Doctrines Newly Defended," in
Knowledge in Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 108-30. (111)
Peirce's attitude towards the correspondence theory changed over his career, and not everything
he says about it is consistent: in some places he seems to dismiss it outright, whereas elsewhere
he suggests that its shortcomings are merely pragmatic or methodological as opposed to
metaphysical (that is, it is acceptable as a formal definition, but useless in the context of inquiry).
These ambiguities have spawned a sizable secondary literature, in which various attempts have
been made to reconcile Peirce's seemingly contradictory pronouncements. Almeder ("Peirce's
Thirteen Theories of Truth," Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society 21 [1985]: 7794), who discerns thirteen distinguishable theories of truth in Peirce, makes a convincing case for
the view that all such attempts are futile. On the question of correspondence, Altshuler ("Peirce's
Theory of Truth and the Revolt Against Idealism," Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce
Society 18 [1982]: 34-56) and Christopher Hookway (Hookway, Peirce, [London: Routledge,
1985]) argue Peirce rejected correspondence, whereas Skagestad, (The Road of Inquiry),
Almeder, and Cheryl Misak (Misak, Truth and the End of Inquiry [Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1991]) present a more forceful case for the opposing view, acceptance of which is
presupposed here.
(112) When James takes up the topic of truth in lecture 6 of Pragmatism, he begins by offering a
conciliatory olive-branch to his opponents: "Truth ... is a property of our ideas. It means their
`agreement,' as falsity their disagreement, with `reality.' Pragmatists ... accept this definition as a
matter of course"; James, Pragmatism, 91.
(113) according to Dewey, pragmatism "supplied (and I should venture to say for the first time)
an explanation of the traditional theory of truth as a correspondence or agreement of existence
and mind or thought"; Dewey, Essays In Experimental Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1916),24.
(114) Selected Papers, 1:578.
(115) This is particularly evident in Apel who, like Peirce, does not so much reject
correspondence as find that (unlike consensus) it is not methodologically useful
["methodologisch brauchbaren"; Apel, "Fallibilismus," 141]. Note, too, Misak's view: "It strikes
me that the pragmatists (at least, Peirce) ... objected to taking the correspondence definition of
truth to be the important philosophical task. Peirce, I think, wasn't trying to clarify the notion of
correspondence--that's a useful enough notion as it stands, for someone who hasn't come across
the word `truth' before. It is empty or unconnected to experience, however, and so cannot suffice
as a full account of the notion of truth. What is needed is a pragmatic elucidation"; Personal
communication.
(116) Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A329/B385.
(117) Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A671/B699.
(118) Further, one could object that consensus cannot be employed as a regulative ideal unless
some notion of correspondence is preserved, since (as C. B. Martin has pointed out to me) the
idea of a final opinion arguably cannot be a source of guidance unless we presuppose some
notion of fit or agreement between beliefs and a future of state of affairs.
(119) There is an additional difficulty: Don't the idealizations Peirce and Habermas invoke (the
"final opinion," or "rational consensus") make them vulnerable to a variant of the dilemma facing
coherence theories of truth? If, for instance, truth is identified with the results of our present
inquiry, or with what we can currently achieve rational agreement about, we encounter obvious
problems which include the sort touched on above, when we explained why the simple equation
of truth with justification won't do. In order to protect the theory against refutation, it is tempting
to idealize the relevant epistemic notion, and take refuge in Peirce's "end of inquiry," or
Habermas' "ideal speech situation." If we do that, however, we are no longer dealing with
something accessible, and so it is unclear how, on the consensus theorist's own principles, we
can actually use these idealizations (which are, for the most part, practically unrealizable) to
regulate inquiry. (Asking myself, "Would this be believed at the end of inquiry, or accepted by
all under optimal conditions of discourse?" is little or no help). We need to hear more from
defenders of the Peircean view about these and other issues.
(120) I am grateful for the comments of Justin Broackes Cheryl Misak, Richard Rorty, Israel
Scheffler, Eckhard Schmidt, Ernest Sosa, and James Van Cleve.
This document provided by HighBeam Research at http://www.highbeam.com