Peirce criticizes Descartes' method of universal doubt as 'paper doubt.' What is the core of this criticism?
ACartesian doubt is too extreme and leads to skeptical conclusions Descartes did not intend
BMethodological doubt is not genuine doubt — it lacks the functional character of real doubt, which arises from a specific disruption in inquiry, not from a philosopher's decision to pretend
CUniversal doubt is self-refuting because it must use reason to cast doubt on reason
DDescartes should have doubted more systematically before drawing his conclusions
Peirce's critique is not that Cartesian doubt is too radical. The deeper point is functional: genuine doubt arises when a habit of action is blocked, a prediction fails, or something surprises us. Descartes' doubt is artificially assumed at will — it has the grammatical form of doubt without the experiential reality. If there is no genuine doubt about whether the external world exists, there is nothing for epistemology to resolve, and the Cartesian project starts from a manufactured pseudo-problem.
Question 2 Multiple Choice
James claims that true ideas are those that 'work.' A critic argues this means any comforting or convenient belief counts as true. What is the correct response?
AThe critic is right — pragmatism is committed to the view that beliefs useful to an individual are true for that individual
BJames means beliefs that survive sustained testing against experience and cohere with other beliefs — not beliefs that are merely convenient or emotionally satisfying
CJames's pragmatism applies only to practical matters, not to theoretical or scientific claims
DThe critic identifies a genuine flaw that Dewey corrected by abandoning the 'working' criterion
The common misreading conflates 'works' with 'is convenient' or 'feels good.' A belief that you can fly 'works' in no meaningful pragmatist sense — it fails catastrophically when tested. For James, a belief earns the predicate 'true' by successfully guiding action, by integrating coherently with the rest of experience, and by surviving testing against reality. Wishful beliefs that don't survive this testing are false, not true.
Question 3 True / False
For Peirce, the claim that truth is 'what inquiry would converge on in the long run' means that what the scientific community currently believes is true.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: False
Peirce's definition explicitly idealizes to the limit of indefinitely continued inquiry — not current consensus. Fallibilism follows directly: any present belief might be revised by future inquiry. The long-run convergence is a regulative ideal that preserves objectivity without identifying truth with current opinion. Current scientific consensus is our best approximation to truth, not truth itself on this view.
Question 4 True / False
Dewey's pragmatism replaces the traditional epistemological question 'does my representation accurately correspond to the world?' with a question about whether inquiry successfully resolves a problematic situation.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: True
Dewey rejects the spectator theory of knowledge — the model of a mind passively representing an external world. Knowing is a form of doing: an organism using intelligence to transform indeterminate situations into determinate ones. This reconceives the basic questions of epistemology rather than offering new answers to the old questions. The shift is from correspondence to successful practice as the criterion of cognitive achievement.
Question 5 Short Answer
How does the pragmatist conception of truth differ from the correspondence theory, and why do pragmatists regard inquiry rather than correspondence as central to epistemology?
Think about your answer, then reveal below.
Model answer: The correspondence theory holds that a belief is true if it accurately represents a mind-independent reality — a static relation between the belief and the world. Pragmatists question whether this 'correspondence' is coherent: how do we verify correspondence except through further inquiry? Peirce grounds truth in the long-run convergence of inquiry, preserving objectivity without positing a mysterious correspondence relation. Dewey shifts attention from representation to practice: the relevant question is not whether my belief corresponds to reality but whether my inquiry successfully resolves a real problem. Inquiry is central because knowledge is an achievement of practice, not a static mind-world relation.
Pragmatism does not just offer a different answer to traditional epistemological questions — it reconceives which questions are worth asking, and in doing so challenges the entire framework within which the correspondence theory makes sense.