Pragmatism and Truth: The Comparison Objection to Correspondence

Abstract

The well-known dictum that consists in an or of with its object ... speedily leads to 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 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 duplicate proposition (idea or percept, according to some theories) about it unless, perhaps, as convenience in communication with others?(3) Despite its long and distinguised history, the correspondence theory of has recently had to weather 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 argument, designed to demonstrate that the correspondence theory plays right into the skeptic's hands by making epistemically inaccessible. In general terms, we can formulate the argument as follows: If were 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 comparison, the intuitively appealing idea that 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 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 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 with reality, for how can 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 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. …

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