Johanna asked:

I am a Finnish philosophy student and currently struggling with Charles Peirce. I have been asked to
do an essay on the following topic: '"Truth is that which to the community ultimately settles down,"
Charles Peirce. Analyse and evaluate this claim.'

Mr Peirce was a pragmatist, and that's almost all which I know about him. But how to "add"
pragmatism into this statement? Can truth be divided into other categories than this? I've been writing
something about subjective and objective truth — should his statement be interpreted that he meant
community to be the one who defines truth or other way round? Or both ways? What about the word
'ultimately'? Somehow I feel it adds the concept of time to be considered as well. Truth is somehow
time dependent, it changes and varies, but ultimately we can obtain it? Not? Ultimately — hard
concept to define. Can mean infinitely, can it? I would be really grateful for your help.

============

What is truth? Or, more precisely, what are we saying about a statement, when we say that it is true?
Any account of truth has got to start from the following pair of observations:

*
When you assert a statement, what you mean to convey is that your statement is true. That is the
pointof a statement, the targetthat a statement aims at.

*
The term, 'true' is the term which uniquely satisfies the following condition: Ifthe statement, 'Snow is
white' is true, then snow is white. Ifthe statement, 'Tony Blair is a Martian' is true, then Tony Blair is a
Martian. And so on for every statement, true or false, that you can make.

This might make it seem that truth is a simple and down-to-earth notion, but it isn't. These two
observations rapidly lead us into a sceptical quagmire. To assert a statement astrue is not the same
as asserting that the statement has passed every verification test we can think of, or that everyone
believes that it is true, or even that the assumption of its truth leads to joy and contentment for all
those who hold it. A statement can satisfy any or all of these conditions and still not be true.

The result is that the simple notion of truth as 'what our assertions aim at' appears to acquire deep
and imponderable metaphysical significance. When you assert a statement, when you aim your arrow
at the truth target, you can never be absolutely sure whether you have scored a hit or a miss. For
practical purposes, we assumethe truth of things that pass the required tests, while all the time
aware that realtruth is 'out there' beyond our reach, outside all human experience.

The pragmatist response to this picture is to deny that a 'truth forever beyond our reach' —
transcendent truth — is a truth that anyone could be interested in. What we are interested in is what,
in some sense, worksfor us.

A accepted 'truth' that worked for us up until now might still let us down at a future date. So Pierce
brings in the idea of convergence in judgements over time.When you assert something as true, what
you are claiming is that, over a sufficiently long period, there will be convergence of judgements
amongst members of the community — who have had ample chance to discuss and debate the
matter — towards the view that the statement in question does indeed work for those who accept it.
The possibility that events will prove us wrong, recedes further into the distance until, for all practical
purposes, it disappears altogether.

But it is not enough to make the homely observation that outside of a philosophy classroom, no-one is
interested in transcendent 'truth beyond our reach'. The simple observations I made earlier about
truth appear to commit us to accepting the existenceof transcendent truth, whether the ordinary
person is interested in it or not. And that is sufficient to cause the metaphysical worry.

That is why as a pragmatist one has to make the final step of showing that there isno transcendent
truth out there. To be a true pragmatist, in other words, you have to refute realismabout truth. And
that is no easy task.

Geoffrey Klempner