Abstract

Peirce is often credited with having formulated a pragmatic theory of truth. This can be misleading, if it is assumed that Peirce was chiefly interested in providing a metaphysical analysis of the immediate conditions under which a belief or proposition is true, or the conditions under which a proposition or belief is said to be madetrue. Cheryl Misak has exposed the subtleties in Peirce's discussion of truth, especially showing the difficulties faced by any ascription to him of an analytic definition of truth. In this paper I follow Misak in urging that Peirce's contribution to the philosophical discussion about the nature of truth was not of that kind. What makes his pragmatic approach distinctive is that rather than attempting to state the nature of truth per se, it attempts to uncover the beliefs and expectations we commit ourselves to when we make specific claims that such and such is true or is the case.