Alethic pluralism for pragmatists

Tom Kaspers

doi:10.1007/s11229-022-03558-5

Alethic pluralism for pragmatists

Tom Kaspers^*

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

Pragmatism and the correspondence theory of truth are longtime foes. Nevertheless, there is an argument to be made that pragmatists must embrace truth as correspondence. I show that there is a distinctive pragmatic utility to taking truth to be correspondence, and I argue that it would be inconsistent for pragmatists to accept the utility of the belief that truth is correspondence while resisting the premise that this belief is correct.

In order to show how pragmatists can embrace truth as correspondence, I develop a kind of alethic pluralism, which treats pragmatist truth as theoretically fundamental to truth as correspondence. This theoretical fundamentality of pragmatist truth allows the pragmatist to conditionally accept truth as correspondence for certain discourses without falling prey to the typical pragmatist objections to correspondence. This pluralist account of truth thus allows pragmatists to concede that, for certain domains of discourse, truth is correspondence, without thereby betraying their pragmatist principles.

Original language	English
Number of pages	19
Journal	Synthese
Volume	200
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03558-5
Publication status	Published - 28 Feb 2022

Keywords

Pragmatism
Alethic pluralism
Truth
Correspondence

Access to Document

10.1007/s11229-022-03558-5Licence: CC BY

Kaspers_2022_Synthese_Alethic-pluralism-pragmatists_CC
Copyright © The Author(s) 2022. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
Final published version, 740 KBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

@article{1ab7bf3151364549b9d91a2cee367a60,

title = "Alethic pluralism for pragmatists",

abstract = "Pragmatism and the correspondence theory of truth are longtime foes. Nevertheless, there is an argument to be made that pragmatists must embrace truth as correspondence. I show that there is a distinctive pragmatic utility to taking truth to be correspondence, and I argue that it would be inconsistent for pragmatists to accept the utility of the belief that truth is correspondence while resisting the premise that this belief is correct.In order to show how pragmatists can embrace truth as correspondence, I develop a kind of alethic pluralism, which treats pragmatist truth as theoretically fundamental to truth as correspondence. This theoretical fundamentality of pragmatist truth allows the pragmatist to conditionally accept truth as correspondence for certain discourses without falling prey to the typical pragmatist objections to correspondence. This pluralist account of truth thus allows pragmatists to concede that, for certain domains of discourse, truth is correspondence, without thereby betraying their pragmatist principles.",

keywords = "Pragmatism, Alethic pluralism, Truth, Correspondence",

author = "Tom Kaspers",

year = "2022",

month = feb,

day = "28",

doi = "10.1007/s11229-022-03558-5",

language = "English",

volume = "200",

journal = "Synthese",

issn = "0039-7857",

publisher = "Springer",

number = "1",

}

TY - JOUR

T1 - Alethic pluralism for pragmatists

AU - Kaspers, Tom

PY - 2022/2/28

Y1 - 2022/2/28

N2 - Pragmatism and the correspondence theory of truth are longtime foes. Nevertheless, there is an argument to be made that pragmatists must embrace truth as correspondence. I show that there is a distinctive pragmatic utility to taking truth to be correspondence, and I argue that it would be inconsistent for pragmatists to accept the utility of the belief that truth is correspondence while resisting the premise that this belief is correct.In order to show how pragmatists can embrace truth as correspondence, I develop a kind of alethic pluralism, which treats pragmatist truth as theoretically fundamental to truth as correspondence. This theoretical fundamentality of pragmatist truth allows the pragmatist to conditionally accept truth as correspondence for certain discourses without falling prey to the typical pragmatist objections to correspondence. This pluralist account of truth thus allows pragmatists to concede that, for certain domains of discourse, truth is correspondence, without thereby betraying their pragmatist principles.

AB - Pragmatism and the correspondence theory of truth are longtime foes. Nevertheless, there is an argument to be made that pragmatists must embrace truth as correspondence. I show that there is a distinctive pragmatic utility to taking truth to be correspondence, and I argue that it would be inconsistent for pragmatists to accept the utility of the belief that truth is correspondence while resisting the premise that this belief is correct.In order to show how pragmatists can embrace truth as correspondence, I develop a kind of alethic pluralism, which treats pragmatist truth as theoretically fundamental to truth as correspondence. This theoretical fundamentality of pragmatist truth allows the pragmatist to conditionally accept truth as correspondence for certain discourses without falling prey to the typical pragmatist objections to correspondence. This pluralist account of truth thus allows pragmatists to concede that, for certain domains of discourse, truth is correspondence, without thereby betraying their pragmatist principles.

KW - Pragmatism

KW - Alethic pluralism

KW - Truth

KW - Correspondence

U2 - 10.1007/s11229-022-03558-5

DO - 10.1007/s11229-022-03558-5

M3 - Article

SN - 0039-7857

VL - 200

JO - Synthese

JF - Synthese

IS - 1

ER -

Alethic pluralism for pragmatists

Abstract

Keywords

Access to Document

Fingerprint

Cite this