Examining the Pragmatic Theory of Truth
“I should like you, O men of Athens, to join me in examining what I conceive to be his inconsistency.”
—Socrates, Apology
In the Introduction of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty claims that truth is “an automatic and empty compliment which we pay to those beliefs which are successful in helping us do what we want to do.”[1] This is an interesting and witty claim about the nature of truth. Suppose we interpret the claim in a basic pragmatist sense as follows: a proposition is true if and only if it is useful to someone for the sake of achieving some goal.[2] Call this the pragmatic thesis (PT) of truth. According to the PT, truth is instrumentally valuable for the sake of some other end.
Now, we should admit that true propositions are often useful to achieve some goal, such as when someone uses the true statement “My gas tank is full” to make a decision about driving straight to the grocery store rather than stopping for gas on the way. (We should also admit that true propositions are sometimes not useful at all, and sometimes are obstacles to usefulness, such as when a professional athlete who seems to be in peak form and plans to compete for many more years is informed by a physician that it is true that he has a heart condition which requires him to retire from competition.) We should also grant that, descriptively speaking, some folks use ‘true’ to refer to claims that help them somehow. But the PT doesn’t claim merely that truth is useful in this way. Rather, the PT holds that truth is identical to the property of a proposition’s being useful.
Note a few problems with PT. First, some claims which are clearly false (in the sense of not corresponding to the pertinent facts) are nevertheless useful. One of the motivations to lie is that speaking an intentional falsehood can be a useful means of obtaining something desired or avoiding something undesired. We often object to the behaviors of politicians and salespersons because they use lies and other forms of deceit as tools to get what they want. If truth is mere usefulness, then (at least some) lies are true, which seems absurd.
Second, some useful claims are items of bullshit (in the Frankfurtian sense) that do not match the relevant facts. I wouldn’t want to claim that a piece of BS which doesn’t match the facts is nevertheless true because useful. Third, if some claim is useful for someone, we can still ask the question: “Does the claim correspond to the relevant facts?” If the answer is affirmative, then the claim possesses a property of correspondence that is different from its property of usefulness. We normally call this property of correspondence ‘truth.’ What should we call it if ‘truth’ refers merely to usefulness? Why not call propositions that correspond to the facts “true” and propositions which are useful “useful”?
Fourth: suppose that some proposition p is useful to some person S. We can ask: “Does it correspond to the relevant facts that p is useful to S?” If so, then the proposition “p is useful to S” (call this proposition q) is true in the correspondence sense, but q itself doesn’t seem to be useful, which suggests that the correspondence sense holds in cases in which the usefulness sense does not. Fifth, one can ask the pragmatist: “You either take PT to (a) correspond to the relevant facts or (b) not to correspond. If (a), then you appear to be committed at a fundamental level to the correspondence theory of truth; this commitment undermines PT. If (b), then you are committed to the view that PT doesn’t match up with the facts, which suggests that there’s no good epistemic reason to accept PT; this commitment also undermines PT. Thus, you seem faced with the dilemma of either undermining your thesis in the first way or in the second way.”[3]
And sixth: suppose that p is useful to Jones but not to Smith. If the truth of a proposition is identical to its usefulness, then p is both true and not true, which seems contradictory. The supporter of PT might respond that there is no contradiction because p is true with respect to Jones but not with respect to Smith. By putting p into the proper contexts, one can avoid the contradiction. If this response works, it nevertheless suggests that PT reduces to alethic subjectivism. But this view has serious problems.
[1] See p. 10 here: https://ronliskey.com/docs//philosophy-and-the-Mirror-of-Nature-by-rorty.pdf
[2] I don’t mean to suggest that Rorty himself accepted this interpretation. In any case, the “usefulness” of PT can be construed non-epistemically insofar as the goal according to which a proposition is useful is not an epistemic goal; perhaps it is a prudential goal. Or “useful” can be construed as epistemic insofar as the goal is epistemic. Hence, we have reason to distinguish between non-epistemic pragmatism and epistemic pragmatism.
[3] Here, it is open to the pragmatist to claim that there are no objective facts; instead, there are only subjective interpretations of the world. On this view, however, PT would seem to be some merely subjective perspective on the world, in which case one is free to reject it and take up some other subjective perspective. This subjectivist move doesn’t provide much support for the PT.