Is pragmatism coherent? Classical and contemporary pragmatism on truth, realism, and epistemology

The dissertation falls into two sections. Part I (Chapters 2-6) deals with classical pragmatist arguments against the correspondence theory of truth; Part II (Chapters 7-10), with neo-pragmatist arguments against the possibility of a substantive theory of knowledge. The goal of Part I is to reconstruct and evaluate the main anti-correspondence arguments employed by the classical pragmatists (Peirce, James, Schiller, Dewey) and contemporary neo-pragmatists (Rorty, Putnam, Goodman, Habermas, Apel, Davidson). Here we offer detailed critical and historical discussions of two arguments in particular: (1) the comparison objection, which claims that the idea that truth is a matter of correspondence with the facts leads directly to skepticism; and (2) the constructivist or anti-realist objection, according to which the correspondence theory is tenable only if realism is defensible, and thus cannot survive the latter position's (alleged) fall from grace. After considering these objections, we address what James and Dewey had to say about the nature of the correspondence relation itself, and urge that their position has been badly misunderstood by foes and friends alike. Part II deals with the misgivings neo-pragmatists have about the very idea of a philosophical "theory of knowledge." Within analytic philosophy, the most familiar and aggressive expression of this anti-epistemology attitude is Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. However, Rorty is far from alone in declaring epistemology moribund: philosophers in both the Anglo-American and Continental traditions have been busy composing obituaries for some time now. Our primary aim in Part II is to refute two main arguments central to the neo-pragmatist anti-epistemology case: (1) the arguments against "foundations", a heterogeneous family of four objections to the idea of epistemology as 'foundational'; and (2) the anti-representationalist argument, according to which skepticism and epistemology itself are said to rest on an untenable representationalist conception of thought or language.