"Undoing the True Fetish: The Normative Path to Pragmatism"

Pragmatists are famous for advancing several striking theses about meaning, truth, and inquiry. These include (i) that the aim of inquiry is not to uncover truth but to serve our practical interests, (ii) that truth is nothing other than that which rational inquiry converges on in the long run, (iii) that the meaning of a statement is given by its practical consequences, and (iv) that any inflationary notion of truth or representation should be rejected as philosophically idle. These are all rejected by contemporary realists, for whom truth plays a central role in a theory of meaning and inquiry. I will argue that a normative assumption widespread amongst contemporary realists in fact leads straight to these four pragmatist theses.