Truth, Politics, Morality

"One of the features in the development of pragmatism is that pragmatists are constantly faced with the challenge of taking science seriously, but not losing sight of evaluative questions, moral questions, social and political questions. We saw that driving James’s pragmatism was the need to reconcile science and values in a very broad sense. We saw that Dewey thinks that the values, in effect, start the whole thing, that’s how you keep them reconciled: you start with the social, the political, the normative. Quine has only one essay about values and it’s very short. His work is all about philosophy of science, philosophy of logic, epistemology and philosophy of language, and that sort of thing. Misak is a very interesting figure in this very long story of pragmatism. She publishes Truth, Politics and Morality in 2000 and it’s a return to Peircean pragmatism for the purpose of getting democratic theory right. Peirce himself, like Quine, wrote almost nothing about values. He certainly wrote nothing about politics, philosophically. In letters that we have where Peirce does talk about politics he says very unfortunate things about slavery, about women, and about democracy . So it’s a strange return to Peirce for the repurpose of moral and political philosophy. Here’s the nub of the book: We talked earlier about Peirce’s conception of meaning and the pragmatist’s maxim, the idea that epistemology is about conduct. That’s the core, the germ of the thought that Misak is developing here. As it turns out, Peirce thought a very funny thing about truth that Misak is reviving and, in a way, trying to clarify. Peirce thought that “truth is what an ideal community of enquirers is fated to believe.” In other words, he thinks that the truth is the ideal end point of enquiry, what we will come to believe if we continue enquiring. It’s called the “end of enquiry” conception of truth and, like James, Peirce articulates this thought in a lot of unfortunate ways. It seems an odd thought and you might think it gets the explanatory relation backwards. You might say, “No, no wait a minute! It’s the truth of the proposition that explains the convergence of opinion in the course of enquiry. It’s not the convergence of opinion in the course of enquiry that explains the truth.” Misak gives, I think, a much more promising gloss on that thought. She’s saying: this is how Peirce should have expressed it, this is what Peirce really means. Peirce thinks, like a good pragmatist, that if you’re interested in understanding a philosophical concept, we’ve got to draw out its implications for human practice. Peirce thinks that what we are doing when we are attributing truth to a particular belief is we are affirming, “Nigel, go and enquire — you’ll come to agree with me.” Or, “If we keep looking at reasons and keep challenging this thought, it’s going to stand up to the challenges. It’s almost a [John Stuart] Millian idea, that what we are doing with truth talk is making a prediction about the ability of a particular belief to which we attribute truth to withstand philosophical scrutiny and answer objections. That’s exactly right. But it’s also, notice, an intrinsically social idea. If I say of some sentence “It’s true,” Peirce is saying — on Misak’s interpretation — that part of what I am saying is, “Nigel give me your arguments, give me your objections, let me hear about your reasons for holding some other belief. Let’s enquire together.” When I say, of a proposition, P is true, I’m saying that that process is going to leave P standing. That’s exactly right. And like Popper’s, notice, it’s a social enterprise. As it is in Popper, the conception of truth is tied to an intrinsically social conception of enquiry. She says, to put it in a slogan, that proper enquiry, understood as this social enterprise, requires democratic institutions. She thinks that our commitment to the truth of our own beliefs requires us to commit to the thought that those beliefs would withstand the scrutiny of critics. The commitment to the truth of our beliefs requires us to have an open society. So it’s a conception that tries to move from this enquiry, this social conception of epistemology, to democratic politics. Cheryl and I are allied on a lot of philosophical issues. We fight a lot of philosophical battles on the same side, and this one is the core thing upon which we agree as philosophers. Democracy is many things, it’s certainly a moral commitment to treating people as free and equals. But democracy is also, very importantly, an epistemological proposal. Democracy is tied to epistemic practices. Democracy is a kind of society – it’s not just a decision procedure, it’s not just voting and elections and Supreme Court decisions. It is a kind of society that fits the Popperian description of the open society. It’s about freedom of enquiry and association and free speech and all the other freedoms we associate with contemporary constitutional democracies. If we care about truth, we have to care about sustaining the social and political conditions under which our beliefs can be challenged and scrutinized and those conditions are democratic. So you get a very direct argument from epistemology to democracy in Cheryl Misak’s book."