Abstract
Apparently, aiming to comply with the norm ‘Believe that P if and only if the proposition that P is true’ can hardly differ from aiming to comply with the norm ‘Believe that P if and only if the proposition that P is epistemically justified’. So one may be tempted to agree with Richard Rorty that the distinction between truth and justification is pragmatically useless because it cannot make any difference ‘when the question is about what I should believe now’. I resist this conclusion by arguing that the distinction between truth and justification is pragmatically useful even if the two properties are indeed normatively coincident. The argument I offer turns on the claim that truth plays an explanatory role that justification is inherently incapable of playing. However, my contention is not just that the distinction between truth and justification is pragmatically useful because truth is a bona fide explanatory notion. It is that the distinction between truth and justification is pragmatically useful because the realization that the former plays an explanatory role that the latter is inherently incapable of playing gives access to reasons which would otherwise escape our attention. If truth is a bona fide explanatory notion, the distinction between truth and justification is pragmatically useful because it is precisely when the question is about what I should believe now that attending to such a distinction will often make a difference – and it will make a difference even if the two properties are in fact normatively coincident.
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Notes
I have discussed the alleged epistemological virtues of accounts of truth couched in epistemic terms in Volpe (2003).
The claim that the notion of truth is explanatorily idle is a leitmotif of Rorty’s reflection on the subject. Particularly prominent in Rorty (1991), it is reluctantly qualified in Rorty (1998b), but its essential thrust remains unaltered. The acknowedgment that the distinction between truth and justification can prove useful in the explanation of our failures is immediately withdrawn by observing that ‘useful’ does not mean ‘essential’ (ibid.: 19 n. 1). And while Rorty feels compelled to make room for Davidson’s use of the notion of truth in the development of a theory of verbal interpretation, he plays down the significance of this concession by reiterating the point that ‘“It’s true!” is not a helpful explanation of why science works or of why you should share one of my beliefs’ (ibid.: 25 n. 23).
It has been suggested to me that Rorty might regard the relation between something’s not making a difference to my decisions about what to do and something’s not making a difference to what I should believe now as somewhat more indirect: the distinction between truth and justification might make no difference to my decisions about what to do in the sense that it does not make a difference to my ways of belief acquisition, i.e., to my ways of acquiring habits of action. It is of course absolutely right to insist that Rorty, like all pragmatists, thinks of beliefs as habits of action rather than as representations. However, it is clear from the context that the ‘decisions’ mentioned in the passage quoted in the previous section concern belief, not action selection – in a footnote Rorty expressly talks of ‘deciding what to believe now’ (Rorty 1998b: 19 n. 1).
This point was brought to my attention by an anonymous referee for this journal, who noted that one might conceivably violate the truth (or justification) norm by failing to believe that P when the proposition that P is true (or justified) and nobody holds the belief that P – and it would be awkward to describe such a situation as one in which an agent fails to believe that P and yet the belief that P, that nobody holds, is true (or justified).
Interestingly enough, none of these claims entails that it is impossible to draw any distinction whatsoever between truth and justification. Elsewhere Rorty says that he is ready to admit ‘that one cannot identify the concept of truth with the concept of justification’ (Rorty 2007: 45), and he even acknowledges that one cannot take warranted assertibility (which he takes to be substantially equivalent to epistemic justification) to be ‘the property preserved in valid inference’ (ibid.: 42). Yet, he insists that the distinction between truth and justification is just a piece of idle metaphysics, because the difference between these two things ‘makes no difference to my decisions about what to do’. It is precisely because PUT is consistent with the claim that it is possible – though pragmatically useless – to draw a distinction between truth and justification that the arguments offered on behalf of this distinction by Dummett (1973: 450), Brandom (1976) and Wright (1992: 19–21) among others have no real bite against it. These arguments, if successful, show that our concepts of truth and justification are not coextensive; but that does not engage the charge that the distinction between truth and justification is ultimately worthless.
As an anonymous referee for this journal pointed out to me, this is apparently just an instance of a general normative principle that could be formulated as follows: One can be blamed for failing to comply with a norm of the form ‘Do A if and only if condition C obtains’ only if one does A even though one has no reason for thinking that C obtains or if one doesn’t do A even though one has reason for thinking that C obtains. This seems to me a plausible principle, but I take it that the existence of the sort of epistemic blameworthiness (and blamelessness) that is invoked in the argument does not depend, ultimately, on the principle’s being unrestrictedly true.
I assume, as customary, that epistemic justification bears an internal relation to truth – which of course doesn’t mean that epistemically justified beliefs are invariably true.
Philosophers who endorse PUT typically ascribe to their opponents the claim that we should adopt as a norm of belief some sort of correspondence of our representations to the deep structure of reality or to an unknowable thing-in-itself (Rorty 1998a: 4; Rorty 1998b: 19 f.). But there is no need to construe the opposition between truth and justification in terms of such heavily metaphysical versions of the correspondence theory. For present purposes, truth will be satisfactorily characterized by the (non-paradoxical) substitution-instances of
(M) Necessarily, truth is a property that is possessed by the proposition that P if and only if P.
The constraint expressed by the (non-paradoxical) substitution-instances of this schema may be called Moore’s Condition (Moore 1953: 274 ff.; cf. Aristotle, De Int. 9: 18a39-b2). Moore’s contention was of course merely that no plausible conception of truth may conflict with the propositions expressed by such instances. On the other hand, philosophers with deflationist leanings tend to believe that such propositions encapsulate everything there is to say – very little indeed, in their view – about truth itself. Be that as it may, the propositions expressed by the (non-paradoxical) substitution-instances of (M) give a reasonably clear idea of the sort of thing the philosophers who don’t accept PUT maintain should be kept accurately distinct from justification.
Again, talk of propositions might be looked at with suspicion by those who are convinced that belief-tokens are habits of behaviour rather than representational states. However, I take it that nobody will deny that there is something in common between acting on the assumption that P and acting on the belief that P, and here reference to propositions is just a handy way to talk about this common feature.
Having got to the station in time to catch his train, Gladstone is of course justified to believe that his navigational efforts have been successful.
One might object to (P2) that an agent could have a (defeasible) reason for believing that a proposition is justified – a reason that is not undermined by further evidence – and yet fail to be under an obligation to believe it if the reason is too weak to licence (let alone mandate) the relevant belief. Quite. But in the case at hand it seems obvious that the reason acquired by the agent is strong enough, and the argument does not purport to establish that the distinction between truth and justification always makes a difference to what one should believe here and now, but only that there are cases where it does.
It seems obvious to me that Gladstone can come under the epistemic obligation to believe that Right Street is true (as opposed to justified) only by attending to the difference between truth and justification. More generally, I am inclined to deny that a difference that one does not attend to can make a difference to what one should believe ‘now’ (I am sure that Rorty and the pragmatist writers that are the target of my argument would agree). On the other hand, if our epistemic obligations were conceived in a more idealized manner, the claim that a difference that one does not attend to can make a difference to what one should believe ‘now’ might perhaps appear more plausible. In that case, it would be easy to provide an alternative version of the Best Explanation Argument that does not turn on Gladstone’s recognizing that the hypothesis that Right Street is true offers a better explanation of his practical success than any competing hypothesis, but on the fact that the hypothesis that Right Street is true offers a better explanation of his practical success than any competing hypothesis.
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Acknowledgments
An ancestor of this paper was presented at the Conference on Truth (and Relativism) held in Turin and Bologna in June 2010. Thanks to all present for discussion. I am especially grateful to Mario Alai, Andrea Bianchi, Annalisa Coliva, Delia Belleri, Marian David, Paul Horwich, Elisabetta Lalumera, Paolo Leonardi, John MacFarlane, Diego Marconi, Sebastiano Moruzzi, Carlo Penco and an anonymous referee for Philosophia for many helpful comments and suggestions.
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Volpe, G. Truth and Justification: A Difference that Makes a Difference. Philosophia 43, 217–232 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-014-9559-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-014-9559-1