Truth, Understanding, and Elgin’s Challenge: A New Case for Veritism

The Dialectic of “The Fixation of Belief”

Abstract:The standard interpretation of Peirce’s “The Fixation of Belief” is that it is supposed to be an argument for the superiority of science as a method of fixing beliefs. But the standard interpretation gives no explanation for why tenacity, authority, and a priori reasoning are the rivals, and these supposed rivals are never really refuted: tenacity is frankly better at fixing beliefs than the fallibilistic scientific method. Even worse, Peirce seems to cheat by judging science by a different standard. I propose instead that “Fixation” was written for an audience who was already pro-science and that the supposed rivals are instead vivid illustrations of what science is not. Furthermore, I propose that Peirce is again trying to take James’s advice to make his thoughts more accessible, this time by using a dialectical argument as a heuristic devise for a popular audience who might already know some Hegel. A dialectical interpretation can solve the problems generated by the standard interpretation: why these rivals, why no refutations, and why science is judged differently. Lastly, I suggest that Peirce was trying to out-Hegel the Hegelians by using their own beloved dialectic to show the superiority of the scientific method.

What use the Realist for a Theory of Truth?

Recently, Hasok Chang has argued that we should adopt a pragmatic account of truth on which truth is constituted by practical success. Central to his argument is the claim that truth in this sense can be pursued and that other senses of truth can’t be. In this paper, I present a dilemma for Chang’s view. Either practical success constitutes truth in a way that implies infallibility—a conclusion that I’ll argue is untenable—or the argument from pursuit fails. I end by suggesting that scientific realism alone commits us to very little with respect to truth.

Experiential deference and standpoint authority: a reason for optimism about moral deference

Standing Your Ground on Moral Disagreement

Moral disagreement is often invoked to support skeptical conclusions about moral judgment, typically by modeling it on the epistemology of peer disagreement. On the dominant picture, disagreement with a peer supplies higher‐order evidence of error and thereby rationally requires suspension of judgment or a substantial reduction in confidence. We argue that this evidential picture is problematic, especially in the moral domain. First, the conditions for epistemic peerhood are difficult to specify and apply without arbitrariness, and this undermines the assumption that disagreement is a uniform sign of error. Second, even where peerhood conditions are plausible, moral disagreement need not play the specific evidential role presupposed by the skeptical argument. Drawing on resources from social epistemology, we develop an alternative framework on which persistent moral disagreement can function as a structured form of collective inquiry, regulated by argumentative practices and epistemic institutions. On this view, steadfastness is not automatically a sign of epistemic arrogance; under appropriate conditions, it is compatible with epistemic humility, and it can contribute to both epistemic and moral improvement.

Functionalist Intuitions, Uncertainty, and Ontological Politics: Religious Studies for the Anthropocene

Following Hanegraaff’s (2020: 73) claim that pioneers in our field considered it “to be no less than essential for any adequate understanding of the history of human culture and society as such,” this text answers Schilbrack’s (2013) question: “After we deconstruct ‘religion’, then what?” The answer is formulated within the debate over the diplomacy of common world face-to-face challenges of the Anthropocene. Within the functionalist tradition, uncertainty and lack of control defined the situation from which religion and magic ought to originate. They constitute the key characteristic of the Anthropocene as a specific historical condition, too. Their practical handling unleashes the full range of world-making activities and processes that shape ways of inhabiting the environment and thus provides an excellent point of analytical focus that can efficiently do without concepts of both religion and belief.

Am I Trapped in an Echo Chamber?: A Skeptical Argument for Epistemological Communitarianism

This article develops two skeptical arguments targeting our inherently testimonial beliefs – beliefs we cannot confirm or disconfirm independently. I first examine a “mildly” skeptical argument introduced by Keith DeRose, which holds that I cannot know that the Bulls won last night from reading about it in the newspaper because I cannot know that the report is not mistaken. I argue that the most plausible response is that people are justified in trusting sources that are well-reputed in their community. However, this response opens the way for a second, more radically skeptical argument: I cannot know much of what I take myself to know through testimony because I cannot know that I am not trapped in a community in which untrustworthy sources enjoy a good reputation and trustworthy ones do not. After critically examining three general strategies to resist this second argument, I argue that none succeeds and that the best reply is instead to reject epistemological individualism for epistemological communitarianism. According to communitarians, if an individual’s inherently testimonial beliefs amount at all to knowledge, it is only in a derivative sense – it is because they belong to a community whose shared evidence grounds knowledge that no individual member could possess independently.