2. The Marks of Truth

In 1976, well before I arrived in Oxford, Wiggins had given a British Academy Lecture which had become a classic, ‘Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life'. He had argued there that, if we are to understand value, we must abandon the flattened account of ‘what is just so' (Wiggins, Reference Wiggins1976 [1987], p. 90). When the world impinges upon us and we find values there, value properties are not created, but ‘lit up’ by the mode of attention we bring to bear upon it. (Wiggins, Reference Wiggins1976 [1987], p. 90). A truth is no less a truth because it requires a certain sensitivity to apprehend it.

The lecture was followed in 1980 by ‘What would be a Substantive Account of Truth?’, in which Wiggins argued that bare disquotation was not the key to anything. A theory of truth must show how and why assertions aim at truth. Next Wiggins revised and resubmitted for our attention improved accounts: ‘Truth, and Truth as Predicated of Moral Judgments’ (presented in 1983, published in 1987) and ‘Marks of Truth: An Indefinibilist cum Normative View of Truth and the Marks of Truth’ (2002). He followed those with ‘Reflections on Inquiry and Truth Arising from Peirce's Method for the Fixation of Belief’ (the 2004 paper for the Cambridge Companion to Peirce). His argument is refined further in revised versions of these pieces for the forthcoming volume of his Selected Papers titled Meaning, Truth and the Limits of Analysis. All these papers move towards a conception of truth that has clear and explicit pragmatist leanings, even if Wiggins wasn't fully alert to this until the mid-1980s.

Wiggins argues that the concept of truth has resisted traditional philosophical definition or analysis. If we are to understand the concept, we must travel an alternative route. We should place truth in its own conceptual neighbourhood and seek to establish within that neighbourhood, the Fregean ‘marks’ of the concept (if all Fs are Gs, then G is a mark of F). In setting out these characteristics of true judgments, we must not beg the question about what kinds of judgments might admit of truth and falsity. We must not, for instance, adopt a heavy-handed metaphysics that says that truth is that which corresponds to the facts, and facts are constituted by mind-independent objects and relations between them. That approach expels, for instance, ethical and aesthetic judgments from the orbit of truth from the outset.

We might add to Wiggins's worry that it is not only ethics and aesthetics that are expelled by the metaphysical conception of facts. As various proponents of the correspondence theory eventually saw, to the peril of their programs, this approach rules out, or at least requires an explanation as to why they aren't ruled out, a host of other seemingly important things: causal and lawlike hypotheses, open generalisations, counterfactual conditionals, as well as philosophy and metaphysics itself. Take the early Wittgenstein. At the end of the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, in which he tried to show how every meaningful elementary proposition pictures simple elementary objects in the world, he advised the reader, who had just worked through his propositions of philosophy, to employ those propositions in order to reach his conclusions, and then kick the philosophical ladder out from underfoot, leaving it to rot on the ground. Ethics and aesthetics fared better – they were unsayable in the primary language, but somehow higher than what could be said in that language. Wittgenstein eventually gave up on the metaphysical project, having been battered by the the pragmatist objections of his translator, Frank Ramsey, and became what we call the later Wittgenstein, capitulating to Ramsey's insistence that philosophy should be focused on meaning as use and the primacy of practice.

Wiggins begins not with a metaphysics of what it is for a proposition to represent the world, but with the idea that we must explore the conceptual connections between truth, meaning, interpretation, assertion, and radical translation in order to arrive at the marks of the concept of truth. They are: 1) Truth is a primary dimension of assessment for beliefs; 2) If p is true, then it will, under favourable circumstances, command convergence, the best explanation of which will turn upon the actual truth of p; 3) In order to interpret x as the belief it is, there must be something distinct from x, namely how thing have to be for x to succeed in its aim to be correct; (4) Every true belief is true in virtue of something; 5) the conjunction of any true beliefs is true (Reference Wiggins1987 [1991], p. 152).

Let me simply say of Mark 4 that it doesn't commit us to an ontology of truth-makersFootnote ¹ and move on to the most obviously pragmatist of truth's characteristics, Mark 2: If p is true, then it will, under favourable circumstances, command convergence, the best explanation of which will require the actual truth of p.

Wiggins asks us to consider Mark 2 from the inside:

Wiggins then asks us to consider Mark 2 from the outside, from the perspective of someone who has to interpret a sentence ‘item t is F,’ without yet knowing what that means. The would-be interpreter must determine what the belief is ‘keyed to, or has to be sensitive to’:

Both the subject and the interpreter have to see a belief ‘as responding to the ins and outs of some reality or other’ (Reference Wiggins1987 [1991], p. 150).

As promised, moral judgments are at least candidates for possession of this mark of truth. Wiggins re-employs an example of Gilbert Harman's. If I come round a corner and see a group of youths setting a live cat on fire, I will join in the consensus that the act is callous and gratuitously cruel. Moreover, the best, or even only, explanation of this consensus requires reference to what those young people did and is sensitive to a whole range of events that have the property of gratuitous cruelty. Such evaluations are contestable and need not command the convergence of anything like all rational humans everywhere or at some final, fated, end of inquiry, as some versions of pragmatism might have it. They need only be open to criticism and to the prospect of principled convergence – to being answerable to an objective standard of correctness.Footnote ²

3. Wiggins on Peirce

From his earliest papers on truth, Wiggins was alert to one of Peirce's central insights. In ‘Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life’, he made his first remark about Peirce. The Peircean view of inquiry and rationality requires that we conform our belief as far as possible to ‘that which is destined, the world being what it is, to be ultimately agreed by all who investigate’. The world being as it is – the ‘primary qualities of nature’ – ‘in one guise or another, will always pull their weight in all explanatorily adequate theories of the world’ (1976 [1991], p. 120). That is, Wiggins (rightly) saw Peirce as linking truth to what human inquirers would converge upon, with that convergence being shaped by the world.

‘Truth, and Truth as Predicated of Moral Judgments’ took the insight further. Wiggins perceived that Peirce did not present ‘a strict analytical definition of truth – still less … misdefine it as the predestinate opinion’ (Reference Wiggins1987 [1991], p. 161). Here too Wiggins got Peirce right. He thought that a dispute about definition is usually a ‘profitless discussion’ (Peirce, CP 8. 100, 1900). Definition retains a place in making our concepts clear – the correspondence theory, for instance, is fine as a merely ‘nominal’ definition of truth. That last statement from the founder of the pragmatist theory of truth may seem surprising to those who take pragmatism to hold that truth is whatever works here and now, for this or that person. But Wiggins was not surprised. He was attentive and attracted to this aspect of Peirce's position.

Peirce went on to say that there is a more important task for the philosopher than nominal definition. That task is the business of pragmatism – exploring the practices with which truth is entwined: belief, assertion, reason-giving, and inquiry. We ‘must look to the upshot of our concepts in order to rightly apprehend them’ (CP, 5. 3, 1902). If we want to understand a concept, ‘we must not begin by talking of pure ideas – vagabond thoughts that tramp the public roads without any human habitation – but must begin with men and their conversation’ (CP, 8. 112, 1900). Wiggins sums up Peirce's idea: when a concept is ‘already fundamental to human thought and long since possessed of an autonomous interest’, it is pointless to take our task to be one of definition (Reference Wiggins and Shantz2002, p. 316). Rather, we ought to attempt to get leverage or a fix on the concept; by exploring its connections with practice. Peirce wants to ‘elucidate truth in its relations with the notion of inquiry’. Once we see that truth and assertion are intimately connected – once we see that to assert that p is true is to assert that p – we can look to that which our practices of investigation and assertion commit us. Hard on the heels of the idea that truth is internally related to assertion comes the thought that truth is also internally related to inquiry, reasons, evidence, and standards of well considered belief. If we unpack the commitments we incur when we make an assertion, we find that we have imported all these notions.

On this version of pragmatism, which I join Peirce and Wiggins in commending, in order to unpack our concept of truth, we must articulate what is involved when we believe or assert. One thing we find when we explore belief and assertion is something that goes against the grain of the caricature of pragmatism. The caricature, which derives from William James's looser statements of his position, has pragmatism identifying truth with what we want to believe. But our proper aim in belief and assertion isn't to arrive at beliefs that make us feel comfortable or beliefs that align with intellectual fashion. We want our beliefs to be answerable to something so that they ‘stick’ (Wiggins's term) or prove ‘indefeasible’ (Peirce's term).

Wiggins makes this argument in the ‘Postscript’ to the volume Needs, Values, Truth, in which ‘Truth, and Truth as Predicated of Moral Judgments’ appeared. He looked back in that Postscript on his ‘clear debts’ to Peirce (Reference Wiggins1987 [1991], p. 340). Wiggins picks up on Peirce's idea in the well-known, but much-misunderstood, ‘The Fixation of Belief’ is that propositional attitudes aimed at truth (as opposed to mental states such as wishful thinking and idle supposition) see themselves (in Wiggins's words) ‘on pain of extinction’ as ‘answerable to something’ (Reference Wiggins1987 [1991], p. 344). In Peirce's words, if you discover that a belief ‘is determined by any circumstance extraneous to the facts’, you ‘will from that moment not merely admit in words that that belief is doubtful, but will experience a real doubt of it, so that it ceases to be a belief’ (Peirce W 3: 253, p. 1877). One of ‘the essentials of belief, without which it would not be belief’ is that if ‘the facts remain lamentable’ or speak against your belief, it is thrown into doubt. Of course, not everyone keeps their beliefs responsive to facts, and even those who try don't always succeed. Peirce's point is that, if we are to see our beliefs as aiming at truth, we commit ourselves to being responsive to the facts.Footnote ³

Wiggins sometimes puts it as follows. The kind of convergence that is a mark of truth is not ‘a mere intersubjectivity or chorus of agreement … If the convergence in the belief that item t is F is to be relevant to truth … then what put that belief there and holds it there has to be nothing more and nothing less than the fact that the item t really is F’ (Reference Wiggins1987 [1991], pp. 150-51). What is the best explanation of my belief that SARS-CoV-2 was rare in Lethbridge Alberta on July 10, 2020 and what is the best explanation of the convergence of my belief with that of others? If the best explanation of why I arrived at my belief is that SARS-CoV-2 was rare at that time and place, then the belief is oriented towards truth if. If not – if I arrived at only because I wanted to travel there to see my parents, then it was something like wishful thinking, not a belief aimed at truth.

Again, ethical judgments are not ruled out as being genuine beliefs aimed at the truth. The best explanation of my belief that it was cruel, racist, indecent, and murderous of the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin to kneel on George Floyd's neck until he died is that it was in fact cruel, racist, indecent, and murderous. The fact that others, such as the police union, might see the act otherwise does not make the matter relative and unsuitable for a truth value. There is disagreement, but the question is whether we will reach a point ‘where there is nothing else to think’ (Reference Wiggins1987 [1991], p. 348). That involves taking into account all the available evidence, scrutinizing the motives for people making various claims, and deliberating about the matter. If the upshot of this inquiry is that there is nothing else to think, then that is the kind of convergence which is a mark of truth. Sometimes, as in this instance, a court makes the determination, but that need not always be the case. No court needed to resolve the disagreement about torturing the cat.

One hard question for the pragmatist is who is in and who is out of the community who gets to say there is nothing else to think? In his 2006 book Ethics, Wiggins gives his answer:

I have argued for a less diffuse standard of adjudication: those who ignore or denigrate the experience of others show themselves to not be engaged in the search for truth, for that search is to get a belief that stands up to the experience of all.

It is important to note that we find persistent disagreement in other domains of inquiry as well as in ethics. There is disagreement even about whether the earth is round. The question is whether the explanations of the competing beliefs are answerable to something. The answer is yes and that there is nothing else to think but that it is indeed round. Questions about SARS-CoV-2, torture, and planetary geography will each have different ways of being answerable to something. We will marshal different kinds of evidence and we may hold our beliefs with different degrees of confidence. But that does not speak against our well-founded ethical judgments being candidates for ‘an objective property of a special subset of the sentences that are thrown up by, and then survive within, certain processes of thinking and talking that can stand up, more or less, against criticism’ (Reference Wiggins1987 [1991], p. 348).

In Wiggins's Reference Wiggins and Misak2004 contribution to the Cambridge Companion to Peirce, he called for ‘fresh studies’ of Peirce's texts and engaged in his own scholarship (Wiggins, Reference Wiggins and Misak2004, p. 89). The importable theme from Peirce is again that our concern for truth is latent in belief itself, with ‘inquiry being the expression of that very concern’ (Wiggins, Reference Wiggins and Misak2004, p. 91). To fail to doubt after discovering that a belief has been determined by circumstances extraneous to the facts is to misunderstand ‘the nature of the disquiet or the irritation of not knowing’ (Wiggins, Reference Wiggins and Misak2004, p. 94). Doubt is resolved by looking to the object of the disquiet.

In the Cambridge Companion paper Wiggins discerned a new argument in Peirce for this conclusion. When we have a convergence of opinion that is stable and stands up to experience, we infer, via what Peirce called abductive inference (inference to the best explanation), that the convergence is caused by something real. In Peirce's hands, not only is that inference fallible, but so is the judgment upon which we converge. Wiggins shows how this idea works nicely for straightforward perceptual judgments. Nothing else but there being three windows in my bedroom will explain my seeing it to be so; my recollection of it being so when I am out of the house; the photographs; the floor-plans; the reports of visitors, and so on. As Peirce put it, experience ‘jabs you in the ribs’ (CP, 6.95, 1903). The force of experience impinges upon me and the best (but fallible) explanation of what impinges upon me is that there is a reality which determines our beliefs. In this case, the reality of there being three windows in my bedroom determines my belief that there are three windows there.Footnote ⁴

Peirce thought his idea fitted nicely for mathematics as well as for straightforward perceptual judgments. Not only might we have practical bridge-building kinds of expectations using applied mathematics, but even hypotheses in pure mathematics have consequences when we manipulate diagrams, in which Peirce's proof system was expressed. We experiment upon this diagrams and of observe the result ‘so as to discover unnoticed and hidden relations among the parts’ (W, 3: p. 41, 1872). The mathematician's ‘hypotheses are creatures of his own imagination; but he discovers in them relations which surprise him sometimes’ (CP, 5, 567, 1901). This surprise is the force of experience. Wiggins follows the pragmatist model works for mathematics. The best explanation of Peter believing that 7 + 5 = 12 is that all the other answers are blocked or excluded. Everything leads to 7 and 5 making 12. We infer that the best explanation of that is that 7 and 5 do indeed equal 12.

But what about ethics? Well, the best explanation of Paul's belief that slavery is unjust and unsupportable will be a long and complex argument that there is nothing else to think but that slavery is unjust and unsupportable. Such an assessment may not be available for all ethical judgments, but that is only to be expected. Ethics is a domain of inquiry in which there is a great deal of underdetermination. Both Peirce and Wiggins try to honour the objective and subjective aspects of the concept of truth and in ethics, the subjective aspect will be more prominent than in some other domains of inquiry. A thread running through Wiggins's work is that invention and reality are both at work in our judgments. To shift Peirce's thought about mathematics to ethics, our ethical beliefs are creatures of our own cultural and individual sensibilities, but we can discover things about our relations with others which can surprise us. We make these discoveries by paying attention to the objects of our belief – to those other people. Alice's belief that there is no racial discrimination in present-day America ought to be shaken by the videoed deaths of George Floyd and others by the hands (and knees) of the police. If her belief is not shaken, then she is not paying attention to the world or to the experiences of others, but only to the comfort of her own mental state.

A final insight of Peirce's explored and endorsed by Wiggins is that abduction provides a vindication of induction. Hume says that inference from the known to the unknown comes from habit, not reason, and asks how we can rationally claim to know from the fact that bread has nourished me in the past to the general conclusion that bread is nourishing. Peirce thought that all beliefs are habits and, as Wiggins puts it, habits ‘can be good or bad’ (Reference Wiggins and Misak2004, p. 120). Arguing from the known to the unknown is an indispensable habit of human reasoning. The question is how to do it in a way that is not reckless or ill-calculated. Some generalisations about what is nourishing must be relied upon if life is to go on. Our focus should be on trying to critically assess those generalisations. We arrived at the hypothesis that bread nourishes by invoking it as the explanation for why some people thrived and others did not. Having naturally arrived at such a hypothesis, we then scrutinize and test it. (Think of experimentation with Cornell Bread during WWII, in which it was shown that we can indeed live on bread alone.) If our belief fails these tests, we shall start repairing it. This is an idea that will resurface in Ramsey and, when combined with the arguments set out above by Peirce and Wiggins, will be part of a compelling pragmatist account of truth.

4. A Contribution from Ramsey

Wiggins is true to form in the most recent iteration of his thoughts about truth: ‘An Indefinibilist cum Substantivist View of Truth and the Marks of Truth’, for Meaning, Truth and the Limits of Analysis. He is a little more explicit about what he finds good and bad in the correspondence theory:

He remains set against deflationism:

But deflationism will not suffice:Footnote ⁵

If we want to understand what truth is, we should establish in a discursive way that ‘this or that relation holds non-accidentally’ between something's being true and its being such-and-such:

All this will be familiar from Wiggins's earlier work. But there is a footnote on the first page of the newly revised paper, in which Wiggins says he has discovered that there is an analysis or definition of truth which seems fine as it stands:

This ‘second and improved’ definition of truth is from the book manuscript Ramsey was working on in 1929, the last year of his life. It was first published as On Truth in 1991. Wiggins relies on Ian Rumfitt's excavation of the definition in which Ramsey says: ‘Our definition that a belief is true if it is a “belief that p” and p, but false if it is a “belief that p” and not p’Footnote ⁶ (Rumfitt and Wiggins are interested in this definition because it goes against Tarski in that it shows that it is possible to give a correct specification of the extension of ‘true’ in terms that do not overtly involve that word.) Ramsey had been building up to the definition since 1922, when, as an undergraduate, he translated the Tractatus and wrote the first commentary on it. He thought it ‘a most important book … of extraordinary interest’.Footnote ⁷ But even then he registered a worry that ‘the system [is] altogether unsound’ and that the book did not, as its author claimed, finally solve all philosophical problems (Reference Ramsey1923, p. 465).

Wiggins goes no further with Ramsey and, indeed, until now had not paid any serious attention to Ramsey. Yet there is a striking similarity between what one might call their signature moves with respect to the analysis of truth. Ramsey noted in his critical notice of the Tractatus that if we adopt Wittgenstein's picture theory, we ‘incidentally’ solve the problem of truth or at least, it is ‘evident that there is no such problem’.Footnote ⁸ What it is for a proposition to be true is for its elements to be arranged just as the elements in the world are arranged: ‘if a thought or proposition token “p” says p, then it is called true if p, and false if ¬p’.Footnote ⁹ Ramsey would employ this definition of truth every time he wrote about truth from then to his death in 1930. He said things like: ‘The most certain thing about truth is that “p is true” and “p”, if not identical, are equivalent’ (Reference Ramsey, Rescher and Majer1921 [1991], p. 118); ‘“It is true that Caesar was murdered”’ means no more than that Caesar was murdered’ (1927 (1990), p. 38). Such statements have led many to think that Ramsey was a founder of the redundancy theory of truth, in which the concept of truth is superfluous and can be eliminated.Footnote ¹⁰ It is what Wiggins takes to be Ramsey's first ‘and less satisfactory’ definition.

I have argued this was never Ramsey's resting point.Footnote ¹¹ Each and every time he set out the deflationary definition, Ramsey immediately followed it by saying that once we have laid out the matter in this way, the problem of truth doesn't disappear. In fact, we are just getting started. Ramsey prefaces his deflationary remarks by saying that he should briefly discuss truth ‘before we proceed further with the analysis of judgment’, and he finishes his discussions by concluding that ‘if we have analysed judgment we have solved the problem of truth’.Footnote ¹² The assertion of the truth of p is equivalent to the assertion that p. But that leaves all the hard work still ahead of us. The deflationary move must be followed by an examination of belief, judgement, and assertion, which will provide us with a complete theory of truth. Simon Blackburn puts my point nicely: Ramsey's ‘famous dismissal of the idea that there is a separate problem of truth is but a prelude to his hurling himself at problems of meaning and assertion’.Footnote ¹³

The definition proffered in On Truth is not so much a new and improved definition as a restatement of the argument he was always inclined to make. A belief is true if and only if there is a way it says things are and they are thus. Ramsey notes that, while he hasn't used the word ‘correspondence’, his account of truth will be mistaken for a correspondence theory. But ‘this talk of correspondence, though legitimate and convenient for some purposes, gives . . . not an analysis of truth but a cumbrous periphrasis, which it is misleading to take for an analysis’ (Reference Ramsey, Rescher and Majer1929 [1991], p. 19).

That is, the definition is followed by the signature move. If we are to have a complete analysis of truth, we need to ask what it is for a belief to be a belief that p. ‘[O]nly when we know the structure of belief can we say what type of correspondence it is that unites true belief and facts’ (Reference Ramsey, Rescher and Majer1929 [1991], p. 11). Once we've set out the deflationary ‘truism’, we must look for a complete account of ‘the kind of merit in a belief to which we refer in calling it true’ (Reference Ramsey, Rescher and Majer1929 [1991], p. 9). With Peirce, Ramsey characterised a belief as a habit the strength and quality of which can be measured by seeing how the habit plays out in action. It is not possible to understand the ‘truth or falsity of thoughts without considering the effects they have on our acting either directly or indirectly through dispositional beliefs’ (Reference Ramsey, Rescher and Majer1929 [1991], p. 101). The pragmatists, Ramsey says, ‘had a laudable desire for an account of truth which went deeper than the mere formal reduction of truth to reference’. The pragmatist acknowledges the truism and goes beyond it by telling us what it is for a particular belief to be the belief that it is. That explanation will appeal to the belief's causes and effects.Footnote ¹⁴ For Ramsey, ‘meaning is mainly potential’.Footnote ¹⁵

That is, despite Ramsey's offering a formal definition of truth, in another sense ‘true’ remains indefinable. For Ramsey's definiens involves the notion of believing that P, and his argument is that the notion of truth is bound up with the notion of belief. So what Ramsey gives us is not something which would enable someone who had no inkling of what truth is to get a grip on the notion. The ‘definition’ is merely as one part (the less interesting part) of the larger story of how truth relates to other basic notions. Taking as given an understanding of ‘believe that p’, Ramsey shows us how to define truth. But it makes just as much sense to take truth as given and to try to explain belief using that notion. There is no canonical order of philosophical explanation and even if there was, there is no reason to assume that ‘believing that p’ would be more basic than ‘true’ in such an order.Footnote ¹⁶ In doing that more difficult work – in analysing the relationship between truth, belief, and action – Ramsey follows a path that Wiggins would take 100 years later, even if the fact that Ramsey had trod it in the 1920s was obscure to him.

The way Ramsey draws out the relationship between truth, belief, and action is akin to Wiggins's convergence requirement. When we take on the project of assessing our beliefs or habits, we need to be alert to whether our belief is connected to the facts. This idea is another of Ramsey's trademarks. In the 1925 ‘Facts and Propositions’, he argued that if a chicken believes that a certain caterpillar is poisonous, it abstains from eating that kind of caterpillar on account of the unpleasant experiences associated with that behaviour. That is the pragmatist account of meaning or content. But the chicken's behaviour has to be

Here is the argument as it appears in the 1929 ‘General Propositions and Causality’:

Ramsey gets Peirce wrong here – Peirce was careful to say that truth isn't what we will believe in the end, but what would stand up to all evidence and inquiry. But the point is clear enough in Ramsey. To put in Wiggins's language, this community's consensus that eating strawberries causes stomach-ache can be criticized, for they did not attend to the object of their beliefs – the strawberries and whether or not they did indeed cause stomach-ache.

Finally, here is the argument in Ramsey's book manuscript:

Again, that's the pragmatist theory of content or belief, which Ramsey's accepts. He continues:

The convergence on the idea of hell had better attend to the object of the consensus – whether there is really is a hell.

Ramsey's account of truth, like those of Peirce and Wiggins, argues that something is so or that there is something at issue, without engaging in what Wiggins calls the spurious attempt to ‘unpick or unscramble’ from the mutual evolution of the concepts of truth and meaning ‘primitive notions supposedly underlying and enabling the evolution of the whole cluster’. Ramsey saw that as Wittgenstein's mistake:

One effect of not cramming all true beliefs into exact logic is that Ramsey (again like Peirce and Wiggins and unlike Wittgenstein) does not from the outset rule out the propositions of ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics. A true belief is one that corresponds to the facts, but we cannot specify that any further than to say that correspondence is the type ‘or types, since [it] may be different with different forms of belief’ – of relation between thinking that such-and-such is the case and such-and-such's actually being the case (Reference Ramsey, Rescher and Majer1929 [1991], p. 11). Beliefs about values might well be oriented towards, and assessed in term of, the way things are.Footnote ²¹ Ramsey thought that truth is a property of ‘mental states’ with propositional reference or ‘that something or other is so-and-so’. He was interested in the range of so-and-sos to which the truth predicate can be applied – in exploring propositional reference without any pre-conceived notion of what its objects must be. He started to ask, in the book manuscript, whether moral and aesthetic beliefs could be candidates for truth, but he died before he finished.

5. A Concluding Remark about Bivalence and Intuitionism

Our three pragmatists – Peirce, Ramsey, Wiggins – try to extract the insight from deflationist and correspondence theories of truth. They argue that truth is something at which human beliefs aim and that we humans invent concepts and practices. But they also argue that we must take seriously the idea that we also find objects, values, and whatever else are beliefs are about.

This attention to the objects of our beliefs sidesteps what Ramsey called the ‘ludicrous’ pragmatism of Williams James, who seemed to think that a belief in hell need not take into account whether hell existed, but only whether the belief was satisfying (Reference Ramsey, Rescher and Majer1929 [1991], p. 91). But radical subjectivism is not the only objection that has been set against pragmatism. Another is that the pragmatist's convergence requirement imperils the principle of bivalence – the principle that every statement is either true or false. It seems either true or false that there were precisely two racoons in my garden at midnight on April 30, 2001. But since that wasn't inquired into, its truth or falsity seems put into question by pragmatism. There would never be a convergence upon it. Peirce's response to problems of this kind, which he called ‘buried secrets’, was to invoke a hope that, had we inquired into the matter, we would have found an indefeasible answer. The hope although not necessarily true (it seems that quantum mechanics, for one thing, might falsify it), is one that we must accept if we are to inquire into any matter. Peirce, in Wiggins's words, saw that ‘there are all sorts of truths we shall never formulate and never could’. Peirce's key concern is Wiggins's – it is a concern about ‘the propositions we shall ourselves arrive at, express, affirm or believe’ (Wiggins, Reference Wiggins and Misak2004, p. 117).

Ramsey, towards the end of his life, saw the connections between pragmatism and the denial of bivalence. Here the pragmatist is given a hand by Rumfitt. He makes use of the minimalist Ramsey definition of truth to question the principle of bivalence. The Ramsey definition, he says, only holds of clear cases – only when a statement is a clear instance of saying that such-and-such and only when it is clearly the case or not the case that such-and-such. The definition does not hold of borderline or vague statements, such as ‘Donald Trump is bald’ or of mathematical statements about the infinite, such as Cantor's Continuum Hypothesis. Similarly the intuitionist mathematician, working on some open problem, whether p, hopes, in advance of inquiry, that either p is the case or not-p is the case and tries to prove it one way or another. But she does not know that either p or not-p. In 1929, Ramsey himself was moving towards an intuitionist logic, which refuses to affirm the principle of bivalence. Perhaps he saw that intuitionism fits better with his general approach than the logicism he had tried to defend and repair in his undergraduate thesis. One would like to have seen where he had gone with the idea.

One thing is clear. There is a deeply interesting pragmatist lineage that runs from (not via, given Wiggins's innocence about Ramsey) Peirce to Ramsey to Wiggins. As Ramsey put it in a 1929 paper titled ‘Philosophy’, that pragmatism neglects neither the subjective nor the objective sides of truth and knowledge.Footnote ²²