Pragmatism and Inquiry Selected Essays

This volume presents a series of essays which investigate the nature of intellectual inquiry: what its aims are and how it operates. The starting-point is the work of the American Pragmatists C. S. Peirce and John Dewey. Inquiry according to Peirce is a struggle to replace doubt by true belief. Dewey insisted that the transformation was from an indeterminate situation to a determinate or non-problematic one. So Isaac Levi's subject is changes in doxastic commitments, which may involve changes in attitudes or changes in situations in which attitudes are entangled. The question what justifies modification of doxastic commitments is a normative one, and so may not be understandable in purely naturalistic terms.

1 - Corrigibilism without Solidarity
2 - Inquiry, Deliberation, and Method
3 - Pragmatism and Change of View
4 - Beware of Syllogism: Statistical Reasoning and Conjecturing According to Peirce
5 - Dewey's Logic of Inquiry
6 - Wayward Naturalism: Saving Dewey from Himself
7 - Seeking Truth
8 - The Logic of Consistency and the Logic of Truth
9 - Belief, Doubt, and Evidentialism
10 - Induction, Abduction, and Oracles
11 - Knowledge as True Full Belief

Isaac Levi is John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. He is the author of many journal articles and reviews, and his books include The Covenant of Reason: Rationality and the Commitments of Thought, and For the Sake of the Argument: Ramsey Test Conditionals, Inductive Inference and Nonmonotonic Reasoning.