Much as I admire these essays by the philosophers Joshua Cohen and David Estlund, I approach the task of commenting upon them with trepidation. Though perhaps less philosophically challenged than other historians, intellectual historians pride ourselves on bracketing questions of the truth of the ideas of those we study—let alone the truth of any particular conception of what it means to say an idea is true—in favor of putting both the truths and the falsehoods alike that human beings may have told in the past into a context that helps us to understand how they came, rightly or wrongly, to say such things. Most of us blithely leave to others any corrosive doubts about the epistemological underpinnings of the truth of the explanations and interpretations that we ourselves offer.
So rather than engage in unaccustomed amateur philosophizing in the brief space allotted me here, I would like to attempt something else that intellectual historians quite often do well, what one of our number, Daniel Rodgers, has labeled “corralling.” By this he means the practice in which intellectual historians, acting as “shepherds,” assemble a group of thinkers who may not in their own time have engaged one another at all and construct an engagement that they might well have had.1
The horses I would like to put in the corral with Cohen and Estlund are some contemporary neopragmatist philosophers led by Cheryl Misak and Robert Talisse, whose thoughts on truth and politics seem to me to intersect nicely with theirs. One of the distinct advantages of corralling intellectuals who are still alive is that, in doing so, one might provoke an actual conversation of their own making.2
Like many American political theorists these days, both Cohen and Estlund argue within a framework established by John Rawls in Political Liberalism (1993), though each seeks to amend that framework in significant and distinctive ways.3 They share a dissatisfaction with Rawls’s attempt to divorce political liberalism from questions of truth and a determination to reunite the two, though in decidedly different fashions. Cohen proposes to package the public reason of Rawls’s political liberalism with an underwhelming, nonmetaphysical “political conception of truth” that permits truth-claims of a sort that do not threaten the divisive, politically destabilizing consequences that led Rawls to banish all truth-claims from public reasoning. Estlund is less fearful than Rawls and Cohen of a public square filled with contentious (“real” and not merely “political”) truth-claims grounded in competing and incompatible “comprehensive doctrines,” as long as these truth-claims take a backseat for justificatory political purposes to outcomes generated by the procedures of “a truth-oriented political process” regarded by all reasonable citizens as epistemically powerful (if not infallible). Both of these arguments seem to me to echo those made by the neopragmatists Misak and Talisse.4
As Cohen says, Rawls banished all conceptions of truth from the public reasoning of political liberalism on the grounds that they introduced an unduly divisive concept in a polity marked by “doctrinal pluralism.” Cohen thinks Rawls went too far: “Truth is so closely connected with intuitive notions of thinking, asserting, believing, judging, and reasoning that it is difficult to understand what leaving it behind amounts to.” Public reason cannot do without some conception of truth, and not all conceptions of truth would have to have the unhappy consequences Rawls feared. Hence Cohen aims to “present a view of truth that suffices for public reasoning and could reasonably be endorsed by the adherents of conflicting doctrines, which may themselves employ richer conceptions of truth.” He calls his putatively inoffensive, “less committal” conception a “political conception” because it is tailored to “the purposes of political reflection and argument in a pluralistic democracy, characterized by doctrinal disagreements.”
A similar “less committal” conception of truth is precisely what some neopragmatists have on offer. (Misak terms it a “low-profile” conception.) They share Cohen’s criticism of Rawls’s flight from truth. They share his rejection not only of Rawls’s “no concept” of truth in public reason, but also of the “no truth bearers,” “no substantive judgments of truth,” and “no big deal about truth” alternatives. They share Cohen’s argument that disquotationalism is too minimalist a conception of truth. The “best kind of pragmatism,” Misak says, will argue that “there is a conception of truth to be had which captures what is important about truth, is non-metaphysical, and goes beyond the triviality expressed by the disquotational schema.”5
Misak and Talisse are neo-Peircean neopragmatists. For them, as for Peirce, a true belief is one that meets the test of (communitarian) inquiry, which is the human way of subjecting belief to the challenge of reasons, argument, and evidence. A belief that fully meets this challenge is true: “A true belief is such that, no matter how much further we were to investigate and debate, that belief would not be overturned by recalcitrant experience and argument.”6 But since no inquiry can be exhaustive, we can never know for certain that any of our beliefs are true, however indubitable they may seem at present. Truth is thus a “regulative ideal,” an ideal that is unrealizable and yet serves a valuable function, in this case keeping the road of inquiry open. Truth is the aim of inquiry, but the best that can be secured at any moment in its course is well-justified belief, which is not necessarily true. It is rational nonetheless to adopt well-justified beliefs, even if these beliefs later prove to be false.
As far as I can see, the principal objection that Cohen might raise to identifying his “political conception of truth” with that of the neopragmatists is he sees theirs as a particular, controversial conception of truth that would not be accepted by those with other conceptions of truth and hence unavailable for public reason under conditions of doctrinal pluralism.7 But neopragmatists do not claim dogmatically that theirs is the only possible conception of truth. (To do so would be to eschew the fallibilism that is at the heart of pragmatism.) They claim only and more modestly that truth is, at least, what they claim it to be. Talisse has anticipated objections such as Cohen’s. The epistemic commitments of his neopragmatism, he says, “do not constitute a comprehensive epistemology in their own right, but rather state a set of principles that are consistent with any well-developed epistemology. That is, internalists, externalists, foundationalists, coherentists, and so on all agree that beliefs aim at truth, that when we believe, we take ourselves to be responding to reasons, argument, and evidence, and that reasons, argument, and evidence are at the very least reliable indicators of truth.” Peircean commitments “attempt to capture the norms we countenance in virtue of the very fact that we are believers. Hence, if they succeed in capturing those norms, the Peircean commitments are not optional”—even those who would contest them must presuppose them since they are essential to contestation.8
Here Talisse is, in effect, offering a self-conscious version of the argument Estlund attributes to Cohen: “We use, as it were, a fragment of the concept of truth, the fragment that all reasonable views accept.” Pragmatists do, of course, suspect that this fragment is all there is to truth, but they see no need to press the claim since it is not one that they can convincingly justify, and inquiry can proceed quite nicely without it. Misak and Talisse are neo-Peirceans because they strip pragmatism of notions of a progressive, empirical convergence to truth at the “end of inquiry” with which Peirce burdened his conception of truth and which, as Cohen says, does make a pragmatist conception of truth unduly controversial for purposes of a pluralist politics. As Misak says, “The pragmatist should not connect truth to inquiry with an indicative conditional, but rather with a subjunctive conditional. It is not that a true belief is one which will fit the evidence and which will measure up to the standards of inquiry as we now know them. Rather a true belief is one which would fit with the evidence and which would measure up to the standards of inquiry were inquiry to be pursued so far that no recalcitrant experience and no revisions in the standards of inquiry would be called for.” Insisting on the subjunctive allows pragmatists to avoid “the doomed task of saying just what is meant by the hypothetical end of inquiry, cognitively ideal conditions, or perfect evidence, whatever these might be. Any attempt at articulating such notions will have to face the objection that it is a mere glorification of what we presently take to be good.”9 But the subjunctive formulation also absolves pragmatists of the charge that they confuse truth and current warranted belief.
If Cohen were to marry his political liberalism to this neopragmatist conception of truth, he would not have to call his conception “political truth,” a phrase redolent with unsavory connotations and a bloody history from which I would think he would want to distance himself. Misak and Talisse have made available to him a conception of truth that he could simply call “truth” since it manifests the consensual truths about truth that, as a political liberal, he is looking for.
“Epistemic liberal democracy” is a good term for the political consequences that Misak and Talisse derive from their neopragmatism. Hence I think that they would find much to agree upon with Estlund, as well as Cohen. The four basic Peircean epistemological commitments are to the contentions that to hold a belief is to hold it to be true; that to hold a belief to be true is to hold that it would forever meet the challenges of reason, argument, and evidence; that to hold that a belief would meet such challenges is to commit oneself to justifying that belief; and that to acknowledge that the project of justifying a belief is a social project that entails participating in a community of inquiry. As Talisse says, an argument for liberal democracy “follows intuitively from these principles.” That is, neopragmatist inquiry is the sort of “truth-oriented political process” that liberal democracy calls for:
If being a believer commits one to the project of justification, and if the project of justification commits one to the social enterprise of examining, exchanging, testing, and challenging reasons, then one can satisfy one’s commitments qua believer only within a political context in which it is possible to be an inquirer. Inquiry requires that characteristically democratic norms obtain; in order to inquire, there must be norms of equality, free speech, a freedom of information, open debate, protected dissent, access to decision-making institutions, and so on. Moreover, since the project of justification involves testing one’s beliefs against the broadest possible pool of reasons, experiences, and considerations, inquiry requires norms of the sort often associated with “radical democracy” views, such as participation, inclusion, and recognition.10
One significant advantage that neopragmatism’s proceduralism has over those derived from Rawls is that it begins with such a minimalist set of requirements for participation in public reasoning—shared agreement on what it means simply to hold a belief—that it need not resort to the sort of preemptive dismissal (or repression) of “unreasonable” or “unqualified” participants about which so many critics of Rawlsian political liberalism have complained.11 Unlike Rawls and so many Rawlsians, neopragmatists do not have to protect liberal politics by smuggling liberal convictions into their supposedly unprejudiced criteria of political “reasonableness.” They can even allow the Nazis who haunt these debates to enter into public life, confident that they will immediately find themselves ensnared in a host of performative contradictions.12
Rawlsians, Rawls himself said, aim to be “realistically utopian.”13 My suggestion here is that by embedding a neopragmatist conception of truth in public reason, Rawlsians would lend more realism to their utopia, make it more plausible. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, one might argue that pragmatism or something very much like it is well on its way to becoming the default mode of argument in pluralist, liberal democracies such as that of the United States.14
Of course, whatever conception of truth we embed in our politics, it can provide no guarantee that political discourse will be without lies, even the sort of American whoppers that Harold Pinter lists in his Nobel lecture. All that neopragmatism and other forms of “epistemic liberal democracy” promise is a greater likelihood than would obtain in other truth regimes that such lies will eventually wither under the scrutiny of the sort of free inquiry in which Pinter engages.
Brief though these remarks are, I hope I have said enough to help foster a conversation between neopragmatist philosophers and neo-Rawlsian political theorists. No doubt, they will have much to argue about, though I think they have enough common ground to generate a fruitful engagement for all concerned. If so, I will happily leave it in their expert hands, though someday I might perhaps venture to try to explain why they were having it when they were.