COMMENTS AND CRITICISM

REALITY AS NECESSARY FRICTION*

In “Truth as Convenient Friction,”1 Huw Price defends a certainsort of pragmatist view of truth. One theme animating Price’spaper is that the pragmatist view of truth that he is arguing for

is not the Peircean version, which he finds objectionably ontological.Price claims that there is a

tendency, still too strong in Peirce, to ask the wrong question abouttruth. If we think that the philosophical issue is “What is truth?” thennaturally we will want to find an answer—something with which we mayidentify truth. Then, given standard objections to metaphysical answers,it is understandable that Peirce’s alternative should seem attractive. Butthe attraction is that of methadone compared to heroin. Far better, surely,from a pragmatist’s point of view, to rid ourselves of the craving for analy-sis all together.2

In this paper, I argue that Price overstates the onerousness, andunderrates the utility, of the ontological commitments involved inPeirce’s view of truth. This argument comes in three parts. First, Ioffer my own explanation of Peirce’s view of truth and relate it tohis account of assertion.3 Next, I explain what I take Price’s grievanceagainst Peirce’s view to be and why that criticism misses the target.Finally, I argue that Peirce’s version of the pragmatist account oftruth has greater explanatory power than the narrowly linguistic ver-sion put forward by Price, such that even the ontology-averse shouldaccept it.

*Presentations based on earlier versions of this paper were given at Boston Collegein February 2014 and at the International Centennial Peirce Congress at UMass-Lowellin July 2014. Thanks to those audiences, as well as two anonymous referees, for astutecriticism and helpful comments. I also owe thanks to Ken Boyd, with whom I amengaged in a years-long conversation about Peirce’s view of assertion that has no doubtimproved the paper.

1 Huw Price, “Truth as Convenient Friction,” this journal, c, 4 (April 2003): 167–90.2 Ibid., p. 183.3My view here can fairly be construed as an amplification of the interpretation of

Peirce offered by Cheryl Misak, Truth and the End of Inquiry, 2nd ed. (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2004). There Misak demonstrates that there is no weight-bearing ide-alization in Peirce’s version of the pragmatist account of truth. This paper exists notbecause I believe that Misak has missed anything crucial, but because I take “Truthas Convenient Friction” to be a kind of “paper of record” for pragmatism in the twenty-first century, one that calls for a direct response.

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0022-362X/15/1209/504–514 ã 2015 The Journal of Philosophy, Inc.

i. peirce’s account of truth and assertion

Let us begin with Peirce’s account of truth. This is a part of his epis-temology that is deeply embedded in his philosophy as a whole:it flows from the pragmatic maxim and is inseparable from bothhis account of inquiry and his appeal to the indispensability of thehypothesis of reality as a regulative assumption of inquiry.

Peirce articulated the need for the pragmatic maxim in the 1878“How to Make Our Ideas Clear.”4 In that paper, his aim is to showthat logicians who rely solely on notions of clarity and distinctnessto explain what it is to grasp a concept are missing an importantdimension of meaning, the pragmatic dimension. He begins with themore familiar philosophical terms: “A clear idea is defined as onewhich is so apprehended that it will be recognized wherever it ismet with, and so that no other will be mistaken for it.”5 This corre-sponds to a first “grade of clarity,” that of “perfect familiarity.”6

Such perfect familiarity may nonetheless be inarticulate, and sowe also need of the concept “a distinct idea,” “one which containsnothing which is not clear.”7 This corresponds to a second gradeof clarity, that of analytic definition. We then face a new difficulty:we can have mastery of a concept at the level of recognition, and evendefinition, while failing to have any idea of what follows from sucha concept’s correct application. Hence, the pragmatic maxim:

Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings,we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conceptionof these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.8

The inclusion of the third, pragmatic grade of clarity connects ourownership and articulation of concepts with our use of them in prac-tice: grasping a concept means not just recognizing and preciselydefining it but understanding its use in practical terms.

What is distinctive about pragmatist views of truth as a group is thatthey arise from exploration of this additional “grade of clarity” to theconcept of truth. Some pragmatists have made what Peirce thought acritical error at this juncture, the error of taking the pragmatic dimen-sion of truth to be the whole of it. These pragmatists have answeredPeirce’s call to move past the previously accepted pattern of giving

4 All references to Peirce are to the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed.C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss, and A. Burks, 8 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1931–58). Cited as CP plus volume and paragraph number.

5CP 5.389.6CP 7.284.7CP 5.390.8CP 5.402.

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a merely “nominal definition” of truth to disdaining definitionentirely—and along with it, the traditional associations of truth,such as reality and objectivity. This has led to pragmatist slo-gans about truth that are better known than Peirce’s more care-ful expressions9—slogans such as James’s claim that “Any ideaupon which we can ride…that will carry us prosperously fromany one part of our experience to any other part, linking thingssatisfactorily…[is] true instrumentally.”10 Rorty added fuel to this firewith even more provocative remarks, such as that truth qua assert-ability just is “what our peers will…let us get away with saying.”11

It is obvious that such views are not what Peirce intended. As Peirceemphasized in a 1910 letter to Paul Carus, written shortly after James’sdeath, “[M]y three grades of clearness are not…such that either thefirst or the second are superseded by the third….I continue to admitthat the third grade is the most important of all….But there is noreason why all three should not be symmetrically developed.”12

Although he stresses that it is merely “nominal definition,” Peircedoes allow that truth is amenable to definition.

Such definition would be uninteresting without what Cheryl Misakhas called “pragmatic elucidation,”13 but nonetheless the projectof offering a nominal definition is valuable because it forces usto think rigorously about the concept. Peirce was concerned withgiving an account of inquiry true to the phenomenology of doubtand deliberation, and an account of truth that brought it downfrom the philosophical heavens—but not so far, one is temptedto say, as the philosophical gutter. His account of truth involves notonly human practices but also that to which human practices areresponsive—indeed, that to which they must be responsive if theyare to be any good as practices: reality.

9 Of course, not all of Peirce’s expressions were careful. The pragmatic dimension oftruth is fully on display in his aphoristic and widely misunderstood claim that “truth isthe end of inquiry”—an ill-considered expression he came to regret, and that has ledsome readers to suppose that he is a messianic realist who believes that arriving atthe truth is our destiny, or an adherent to a view of truth that could only be satisfiedby ideal inquirers, or an advocate of the notion that whatever answer we get to thatsatisfies us in the moment may as well be called “true.”

10 William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, ed. FredsonBowers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975 [1907]), p. 58. If there is anydoubt what the emphasis on satisfaction might entail, James clears it up by adding that“Satisfactorily means more satisfactorily to ourselves” (ibid., p. 61).

11 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1979), p. 176.

12CP 8.218.13 Cheryl Misak, Truth and the End of Inquiry, op. cit., p. 4.

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The idea of reality is also implicated in Peirce’s naturalized account ofinquiry, which frames inquiry as roughly a cycle of doubt-deliberation-belief. What we take ourselves to be doing when we experiencegenuine doubt and engage in deliberation is aiming at the bestbelief. The best belief is a true one, one that allows us to act suc-cessfully because it is responsive to the evidence. The best belief, byour own lights, is a settled one—and to be settled in the right wayis just what it is to be true.

We must be careful: what is it to be “settled” in the “right way”? Itis here that a notion of reality in the form of “external permanency”appears to be indispensible, and where we can see why Peirce arguedthat the existence of some reality must be a regulative assumption ofinquiry.14 A regulative assumption expresses a “habit of mind whichgoverns…inference,” and serves as a “guiding principle[s].”15 Themethod of inquiry relies on the supposition that there are real thingswith which we want our beliefs to be in harmony, but Peirce does notclaim anything specific for the content or nature of that reality. It isthe idea of reality in the role of a working hypothesis upon whichPeirce relies, and upon which he thinks we must rely if we are to makesense of our practices of inquiry and assertion.

One might worry that practical reliance on a working hypothesisabout the existence of reality is no adequate justification for its adop-tion, no matter how central to human life the practices supported bythat hypothesis might be. By way of response to that worry, it is worthreiterating that Peirce is not laying claim to any insight about theinner workings of reality.16 His idea of reality as “external permanency”is deliberately vague; it requires no presumptions about kinds or cate-gories.17 Nor do we have any positive reason to discard a hypothesisabout the existence of reality as a regulative assumption of the practiceof inquiry. Peirce claims that no one can really doubt that there is anexternal permanency to which our beliefs must answer. When we admitand articulate the assumption, we find that the method of inquiry andthe hypothesis that there is a reality “remain ever in harmony.”18

14CP 5.384.15CP 5.357; 5.369.16 As Paul Forster has rightly reminded me, Peirce does at other times say a great deal

about what reality is like. But such claims—for example, the assertions that Peircemakes about the reality of universals—are not requisite ingredients of reality in itsregulative role, which is what I focus on here.

17 Consider: many idealists think that there is an “external permanency” beyond theirideas, and to which their ideas ought to respond. That reality were made of ideaswould not rule out calling it “reality.” The only position that is really ruled out by adopt-ing a working hypothesis about reality is solipsism of the present moment.

18CP 5.384.

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So well-settled beliefs are those that we will not be pushed intodoubting again by experience, beliefs we have arrived at by pushingthe process of inquiry as far as it can fruitfully go, beliefs that areresponsive to reality. It is in the sense that further inquiry would neverunsettle a true belief that truth is “the end of inquiry.” Such beliefsaim to accurately hook up with the reality that accounts for the force-fulness and intractability of our experience, to serving as the basis forconfident action.19 A question is settled as true, to borrow terminologyfrom David Wiggins, when we could say of its accepted answer that“there is nothing else to think.”20

We can see a compelling reason to keep truth and reality on speak-ing terms in a fragment from 1908, where Peirce responds at length tothe question, “What is the nature of assertion?”:

We have no magnifying-glass that can enlarge its features, and renderthem more discernible; but in default of such an instrument we canselect for examination a very formal assertion, the features of whichhave purposely been rendered very prominent, in order to emphasizeits solemnity. If a man desires to assert anything very solemnly, he takessuch steps as will enable him to go before a magistrate or notary andtake a binding oath to it. Taking an oath is…not mere saying, but isdoing….it would be followed by very real effects, in case the substanceof what is asserted should be proved untrue. This ingredient, the assum-ing of responsibility, which is so prominent in solemn assertion, must bepresent in every genuine assertion. For clearly, every assertion involvesan effort to make the intended interpreter believe what is asserted, towhich end a reason for believing it must be furnished. But if a lie wouldnot endanger the esteem in which the utterer was held, nor otherwisebe apt to entail such real effects as he would avoid, the interpreter wouldhave no reason to believe the assertion. Nobody takes any positive stockin those conventional utterances, such as “I am perfectly delighted tosee you,” upon whose falsehood no punishment at all is visited. At thispoint, the reader should call to mind, or, if he does not know it, shouldmake the observations requisite to convince himself, that even in solitarymeditation every judgment is an effort to press home, upon the self ofthe immediate future and of the general future, some truth. It is a gen-uine assertion, just as the vernacular phrase represents it….Consequentlyit must be equally true that here too there is contained an element ofassuming responsibility, of “taking the consequences.”21

19 Having intractable or recalcitrant experience is a familiar phenomenon to allof us. At times we are forcefully struck by the world being as it is, no matter how wemay wish it to be.

20 David Wiggins, “Moral Cognitivism, Moral Relativism and Motivating MoralBeliefs,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, xci (1990–91): 61–85, at p. 67.

21CP 5.546.

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This rich quotation marks genuine assertion—both in private judg-ment and in engaged discourse—as taking responsibility for the truthof what is asserted, and being prepared to accept the consequencesif we prove mistaken. Without a notion of truth that places it in con-tact with reality, we cannot make sense of this practice of holding our-selves, and others, responsible for the content of our public assertionsand private judgments. Crucially, Peirce sees the “real effects” metedout for an erroneous assertion as going beyond those that can bevisited upon us by our peers, and including those that reality itselfcan impose. We “take the consequences” not only from our peers butfrom reality.

One might protest that it is an equivocation on the idea of “takingresponsibility” to suggest that reality can hold us responsible.22 Tospeak of reality holding us responsible is to fall into an ambiguity:we hold ourselves responsible with regard to reality, but the responsi-bility is really to our future selves, or to future members of our com-munity.23 Responsibility, the reasoning would go, is to individuals—thosewith whom we are engaged in the giving and taking of reasons, thosewith whom we jointly constrain conversation through the acknowledg-ment, implicit or otherwise, of norms.

This line of objection is plausible, but I think that it is also mistaken.Judgment, whether public or private, operates under a truth-norm.That private judgment is constrained in this way is not parasitic onthe social mode of assertion employed in public discourse; rather,both private judgment and public discourse are places where we makeassertions, where we take a stand. In both cases, we hold ourselvesresponsible for the truth. Neither mode of assertion is “basic” in away that would signal that one has a priority over the other. In orderto make sense of the cognitive aspirations present in private judgmentas well as in public assertion, we need the idea of something to whichone person, engaged in a solitary process of reasoning or inquiry, canunderstand the sense of responsibility that flows from acceptance ofa truth-norm. We need an idea of reality.

22Micah Lott helped me to see the importance of engaging with this line of reasoning.23 Price’s footnotes (4, 25) reveal a position of this kind—insofar as we abide by con-

versational norms privately, he suggests, such behavior may be based on internalizationof our socialization in truth-norm-governed shared practices. What I am suggestinghere is that the story is not so simple. As Peirce suggests in “Fixation of Belief,” onewants truth for one’s own sake, once we see how beliefs that are not true can let usdown. We take a truth-norm seriously individually and collectively, but there is noreason to suppose that one way of being committed to such a constraint is for the sakeof the other.

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ii. price’s concern

Price locates himself somewhere between pragmatists who woulddiscard truth altogether, on the one hand, and Peirce on the other.The broad argument about assertoric practice in “Truth as Conven-tion Friction” is that truth (and not merely sincerity or justification)is a normative constraint on assertion. Price describes sincerity as“subjective assertibility,” assertibility that is appropriate by one’s ownlights because it is an authentic expression of a belief one actuallydoes have. For the stronger norm of justification, Price works througha range of standards of assertibility, from what he calls “personal war-ranted assertibility,” through “communal warranted assertibility,” tothe norm that he takes to be driving Peirce’s view of truth, “ideal war-ranted assertibility.”24 The argument that the normative notion that wereally need is truth is made in characteristically pragmatist fashion, bypointing out that “in order to account for a core part of ordinary con-versational practice, we must allow that speakers take themselves andtheir fellows to be governed by a norm stronger than justification.”25

Price goes on to argue that we not only view ourselves as bound bythe truth-norm when we make judgments in the form of assertions,but that “this behavioural pattern” is “central to what we presentlyregard as a worthwhile human life.”26 The notion of truth that under-pins our practice of holding ourselves and others up to that normof assertion provides “the grit that makes our individual opinionsengage with one another.”27 Having a commitment to truth in asser-tion makes genuine engagement possible.

Though Peirce and Price agree that we all do accept that ourassertoric practices are governed by the norm of truth, where theirviews come apart is on the point of whether or not there is moreto say about truth than we can say about its functional role in the

24 Oddly, despite the sustained discussion of assertibility in the context of assessingpragmatist views of truth, Price never explicitly considers the originator of the notion ofwarranted assertibility, John Dewey. I am not confident that it is possible to make senseof “warranted assertibility,” ideal or otherwise, without tracing the genealogy of the ideaback to Dewey. But I think that it is worth noting that Dewey follows Peirce in arguingfor the role of regulative assumptions in inquiry, as in his Logic: The Theory of Inquiry(New York: H. Holt and Company, 1938). In that work, Dewey points out that thereare propositions that function as “primary logical principles” for us—but they are pro-duced in the process of inquiry, not decided antecedently. Dewey’s elucidation of hisown primary logical principles explicitly invokes Peirce: “Neither the existence northe indispensability of primary logical principles is…denied. The question concernstheir origin and use. In what is said upon this matter, I follow in the main the accountgiven by Peirce of ‘guiding’ or ‘leading’ principles.” (Ibid., p. 19.)

25 Price, “Truth as Convenient Friction,” op. cit., p. 168.26 Ibid.27 Ibid., p. 169.

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setting of dialogue.28 Price argues that the ontological habit is onewe need to kick—we need to focus on explanation, not reduction.Peirce thought that inquiry is impossible without a functional com-mitment to the real.

Where I believe that Price is mistaken is in the claim that Peirce’sview of truth, beneath its pragmatic surface, still has it that “truth”is reducible to “ideal warranted assertability.”29 Peirce does rely on anotion of reality to explain how the notion of truth can have norma-tive force for individuals as well as for communities engaged in con-versation. But it is not at all clear that this implies that reduction wasever his aim. Rather, belief should “conform” in a way that is con-sonant with the naturalized model of inquiry he offers—with whatremains immovable as a product of stages of doubt and belief expe-rienced by people who have engaged in inquiry.30 For Peirce, allthree grades of clarity remain important to understanding the con-cept of truth; reductive definition does not supplant pragmatic elu-cidation. Although Price gets Rorty’s view just right, it also seemsthat he is misled by Rorty, whose interpretation overstates the roleof idealization in the Peircean picture.

Since Peirce was not interested in the project of reduction, Price’sclaim that Peirce’s view of truth is too metaphysical—a kind ofunstable halfway house between representationalist realism and“proper” pragmatism—is mistaken. The analogy between robustrealism about truth versus Peircean pragmatism about truth on theone hand, and heroin addicts versus methadone users on the other,is off target. Peirce’s view of truth relies on reality only in a regulativesense, in a minimal sense that is required to make the practices ofinquiry, assertion, and judgment coherent.

Many contemporary philosophers, and many philosophers whoconsider themselves pragmatists, really do want to avoid talking aboutreality at all costs. But even if this is what we want, it is not what weneed. Nor is having some hint of what lies beyond practice included inour elucidations of truth really so bad. As George Santayana remarked

28 Price is candid in admitting that he has placed a serious burden on the centralityof dialogue to human life, and on its being a consequence of maintaining the truth-norm (Ibid., p. 183).

29 Ibid., p. 184. My main aim at this juncture is to rebut the claim that Peirce’s viewcrucially relies on idealization or reduction, but the idea that what is at issue for Peirceis warranted assertibility may also involve a misattribution to Peirce of Dewey’s notion.For Dewey’s sense of “warranted assertibility,” see a classic paper published by Dewey:“Propositions, Warranted Assertibility, and Truth,” this journal, xxxviii, 7 (Mar. 27,1941): 169–86.

30CP 5.569.

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about matter, “whatever matter may be, I call it matter boldly, as I callmy acquaintances Smith and Jones without knowing their secrets.”31

Mutatis mutandis for reality: we can call what accounts for the forceful-ness of experience “reality” without engaging in the speculative brandof metaphysics that Peirce himself thought “scrofulous.”32 We can saythat reality is that which impinges, whether the impingement takesthe form of a mild surprise or of a major shock.

I wish to replace Price’s analogy with another: representationalistrealism about truth is analogous to the camper who thinks that oneneeds gasoline to get a fire going, while Peircean pragmatism abouttruth is like the camper who recognizes that one needs oxygen to geta fire going. It would certainly be more convenient for us if oxygenwere not required to start a fire, just as it would certainly be moreconvenient to avoid the disciplinary baggage that some have cometo associate with metaphysics. But as I have argued here, Peirce’suse of reality as a regulative assumption is not really so odious. Inadopting it we commit to little, and make sense of much.

iii. a little reality goes a long way

Additionally, it seems that Price’s linguistic-practice-oriented account,though it comes at a lower ontological “cost”—or perhaps no suchcost at all, if one can get out of the ontology market altogether33—actually cannot do all of the same work as the Peircean view.

Consider two benefits of having some notion of reality at workalongside our conception of truth. The first is that the idea of realityemployed as a Peircean regulative assumption licenses our standardsof corrigibility. Notions of truth that float free of reality run the riskof founding philosophies that devolve, as David Bakhurst has putthe point, into “narcissistic anthropocentrism.”34 Without somethingto supply the “grit” that Price himself wants, any truth-norm focusedpurely on conversation practice is liable to become anthropocentricin an unsavory way. Such a notion might be connected with our con-versational practices, but not with all of our assertoric practices, and

31 George Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith: Introduction to a System of Philosophy(New York: Dover, 1955 [1923]), p. viii. Given his critique of nominalism, Peirce isclearly not a materialist in the sense in which Santayana declares himself a materialist(in holding that everything that is experienced arises from a matrix of matter). In thatsense of being a materialist, Santayana thought himself “apparently the only one living”circa Scepticism and Animal Faith (ibid., p. vii). (See also note 18.)

32CP 6.6.33 Cathy Legg and Mark Migotti have both suggested to me that we should under-

stand Price as trying to avoid the ontology market altogether.34 David Bakhurst, “Pragmatism and Ethical Particularism,” in C. Misak, ed., New Prag-

matists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 122–41, at p. 139.

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not with that for which we require practices in the first place: theworld in which we find ourselves, and with which we must cope.The very practice of revising one’s beliefs in light of new evidenceassumes that there is a reality to which we are responding.

Price thinks that the “crucial point” that “assertoric dialogue requiresan intolerance of disagreement” as a “pragmatic presupposition ofjudgment itself” is enough to save his position from this objection.35

I am not convinced that this is so. While Price’s account of asser-tion has a good deal of resonance with Peirce’s on the points of first-personal aspiration to truth and phenomenological feel, it does notseem capable of making sense of the fact that our responsibilities arenot merely to our conversational partners but also to the way the worldis (which can hold us “responsible” in forceful and dramatic ways).When the Peircean pragmatist says of some judgment that “there isnothing else to think,” she means not just that she is satisfied withher belief, but that anyone, anywhere, should be satisfied with the samebelief. No sense can be made of this without a commitment to a realityto which we, individually and collectively, respond.

This leads to the second benefit of having a notion of realityconnected with a pragmatist conception of truth, which is that itpreserves a parallel between vocal, public assertion and silent, innerjudgment. In both cases, we place ourselves under the norm oftruth. However, if there were nothing outside of ourselves capableof holding us “responsible,” there would be no reason for silent,inner judgment to be constrained in the same way that vocal, publicassertion is. The latter activity would be one where we could be“caught out,” while the former could not. But, as we know, we canbe “caught out” by reality—which is much harder to dupe than anyconversational partner.36

We must see the value of taking both assertion and private judg-ment seriously in a “worthwhile human life.” As Misak has put thepoint, “the pragmatist does not think that our aim in…deliberation isagreement for agreement’s sake or for impartiality’s sake.”37 Agreement

35 Price “Truth as Convenient Friction,” op. cit., p. 186.36 This is the insight captured in Peirce’s category of Secondness. While Firstness

is the “pure” quality of experience, Secondness is the way in which we find ourselves“bumping up” against it (CP 1.303; 1.324). To cite one of Peirce’s most excellentexamples underscoring the importance of recognizing this category, though the ide-alist may well be a convincing interlocutor in dialogue, he will be “caught out” bythe reality of physical objects when he is punched in the face whilst lounging downRegent Street (CP 5.539).

37 Cheryl Misak, Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation (New York: Routledge,2000), p. 145.

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is important for what it enables: shared, stable practices of holding our-selves and one another responsible, institutions for justice and educa-tion, standards of corrigibility. But with respect to such topics, we notonly want to agree, we want to agree on the truth of the matter. We wantto be right, not just settled-for-right-now. As in any inquiry, we cannotrest satisfied with beliefs that are undermined when we consider themethods by which they were attained, and we cannot rest satisfied witha conception of truth that focuses too narrowly on human conversa-tion when a sense of the broad, and sometimes brute, context of thatconversation is also called for.

diana b. heneyFordham University

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