Inquiry Into Inquiry

I’ve begun reworking the InterSciWiki article on the Pragmatic Theory of Truth and I think it will be useful to develop it further.  The plan that usually works best for me is to revise the content on the wiki and serialize it on my blog.

The ISW article derives from the last Wikipedia version I edited:

• English Wikipedia • Pragmatic Theory of Truth • 14 Feb 2007

I copied that content to several other wikis around the web from 2007 on and a subsequent version of it eventually ended up at ISW, my main working wiki these days.

Here is the lead-in to the ISW article as it currently stands:

Pragmatic theory of truth refers to those accounts, definitions, and theories of the concept truth that distinguish the philosophies of pragmatism and pragmaticism.  The conception of truth in question varies along lines that reflect the influence of several thinkers, initially and notably, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, but a number of common features can be identified.  The most characteristic features are (1) a reliance on the pragmatic maxim as a means of clarifying the meanings of difficult concepts, truth in particular, and (2) an emphasis on the fact that the product variously branded as belief, certainty, knowledge, or truth is the result of a process, namely, inquiry.

Resources

• Truth Theory
• Pragmatic Theory Of Truth
• Correspondence Theory Of Truth

Re: Peirce List • Jerry Rhee (quoting Peirce)

The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to
by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth,
and the object represented in this opinion is the real. 
(CP 5.407, JR’s emphasis).

The key word here is “investigate”.  We can read that loosely as any method of fixing belief, but we know that Peirce ranked methods of fixing belief in order of their malleability to the impressions of reality, their aptness to let what is permanent, persistent, “something upon which our thinking has no effect” (CP 5.384) settle the matter once and for all.

• Tenacity, Authority, Plausibility, Inquiry

This is the question of “convergence”, a question that mathematicians, physicists, systems theorists, etc. have investigated in great detail.  As a rule we find that some methods of procedure, of stepping through a sequence of states, will eventually converge on a settled or stable state while others will not.  All that is relative, of course, to the mathematical model or theory we have in hand for describing states of information in time.  So we never quite escape the question of how to tell whether a model is good and succeeds in its purpose of giving us information about its object or whether it falls short of that object.

References

• Peirce, C.S. (1877), “The Fixation Of Belief”, Popular Science Monthly 12 (Nov 1877), pp. 1–15.  Reprinted in Collected Papers, CP 5.358–387.  Online.
• Peirce, C.S. (1878), “How To Make Our Ideas Clear”, Popular Science Monthly 12 (Jan 1878), pp. 286–302.  Reprinted in Collected Papers, CP 5.388–410.  Online.

Resources

• Truth Theory
• Pragmatic Theory Of Truth
• Correspondence Theory Of Truth

Re: Peirce List • Val Daniel

I propose that we complete the customary (incomplete/dyadic) theories of truth, viz., by consensus and by correspondence, by adding, Truth by “concordance” (what you, Jon, call “triple correspondence”).

Proposal accepted!  Actually, I feel like I’ve been working along these lines ever since I first met up with Peirce.  I’m currently fighting some emotional resistance — it makes me a little sad to look on those old wiki-scraps — the dreams we dreamed about what Wikipedia could be!  a true community of learning and inquiry!  but it was neither designed nor destined to become that.

At any rate, I would begin by poring over the relics I saved and trying to see what sense we could make of them.  By way of secondary literature, I remember Susan Haack’s Evidence and Inquiry and Cheryl Misak’s Truth and the End of Inquiry helping to frame the issues.  The papers Susan Awbrey and I wrote in the 90s and 00s attempted to tackle pieces of the puzzle, namely, how to integrate the object-facing and inter-sign aspects of semiosis, the first implied by correspondence theories and the second implied by consensus theories of truth.

References

• Awbrey, S.M., and Awbrey, J.L. (2001), “Conceptual Barriers to Creating Integrative Universities”, Organization : The Interdisciplinary Journal of Organization, Theory, and Society 8(2), Sage Publications, London, UK, pp. 269–284.  Abstract.
• Awbrey, S.M., and Awbrey, J.L. (1999), “Organizations of Learning or Learning Organizations : The Challenge of Creating Integrative Universities for the Next Century”, Second International Conference of the Journal ‘Organization’, Re-Organizing Knowledge, Trans-Forming Institutions : Knowing, Knowledge, and the University in the 21st Century, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA.  Online.
• Haack, Susan (1993), Evidence and Inquiry : Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, UK.
• Misak, Cheryl J. (1991), Truth and the End of Inquiry : A Peircean Account of Truth, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

Resources

• Truth Theory
• Pragmatic Theory Of Truth
• Correspondence Theory Of Truth

Re: Peirce List | Truth As Regulative Or Real • CG • JFS • JLRC

I’ve been reviewing the old articles mentioned in my last post and the more I look at them the more I think they might be worth salvaging.

John Sowa’s comment about the “major failures caused by ignoring [Peirce]” and Jerry Chandler’s remark about later readings serving as a “Procrustian bed for CSP’s concepts” are very much to the point in this context and I will have a few things to say along those lines in due time.

Resources

• Truth Theory
• Pragmatic Theory Of Truth
• Correspondence Theory Of Truth

Re: Peirce List | Truth As Regulative Or Real • CG • JLRC • JAS • JBD • JA • JFS
Cf: Peirce List | Pragmatic Theory Of Truth • JA

Comment 1

Folks who were around a dozen years ago will remember all the fun and fuss we had when some rather absurd things about Peirce’s theory of truth or the lack thereof popped up in various Wikipedious articles.  Some of us eventually hashed out a fairly useful account of a Pragmatic Theory of Truth, at least, in my humble opinion.

Incidental Musement

Busy watching Goblet of Fire 🔥 for about the dozenth time now, where I am finding Rita Skeeter’s theory of Alternative Truth especially poignant in view of current events, but I will dig up some old scraps of text later.

Comment 2

I haven’t looked at these articles since the days I wasted trying to justify the ways of Peirce to Wikipediots, other than to reformat them a little here and there, but some of their material may be instructive for ongoing discussions, especially the quotes from Peirce and Kant on the nominal character of truth definitions in terms of correspondence.  To make the shortest possible shrift, we need to keep in mind that “correspondence” for Peirce can mean “triple correspondence”, in other words, just another name for a triadic relation.

Resources

• Truth Theory
• Pragmatic Theory Of Truth
• Correspondence Theory Of Truth

Note.  The document histories of the latter two article forks tell me those drafts derive from Wikipedia revisions of 14 Feb 2007 and 29 Jun 2006, respectively.