Truth, Inquiry and the Settlement of Belief: Pragmatist Accounts

Résumé 0

Pragmatism is a doctrine that enlists several authors holding different, apparently irreconcilable positions. Pragmatist philosophers often cast views that might seem clearly the opposite slogan of their other pragmatist peers who ascribe themselves this name. Pragmatists like Richard Rorty, for example, believe that fallibilism forbids us to accept that truth can be the end of inquiry. Rorty complains about Peirce’s «methodolatry» and pushes forward for an account free of metaphysical commitments with theories of truth. Against this view, other Peircean pragmatists, such as Cheryl Misak and Christopher Hookway, offer an understanding of the sense in which truth can be an end of inquiry and of the way in which belief is settled rationally. In this paper, I aim to ponder Misak’s efforts and to further carry them towards a more substantive view of realism that is needed to achieve what Peirce called «the method of science» for the settlement of beliefs.