Abstract

The central goal of cognition is truth. This thesis is defended against the new wave relativist-pragmatists, notably Stephen Stich. First, the relativist-pragma-tist stance and its central line of argumentation is briefly presented, pivoting around the plurality of TRUTH-predicates. Against this, the following theses are argued for: various TRUTH-predicates are not in semantic, epistemic, and instrumental competition, and they will stand for the same higher-level epistemic goal — believing and saying "p" only if p; the choice among TRUTH-predicates for natural languages is epistemically and instrumentally insignificant; whereas the choice among TRUTH-predicates for the language of thought is not available to thinkers, since they do not choose in what interpreted language they think and therefore are not to be blamed for not exercising a choice where there is none.