Pragmatic theories of truth were first posited by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey.
In this view, truth cannot be discussed to much effect outside the context of inquiry, knowledge, and logic, all very broadly considered.
Depending on the context, this element might be called an artefact, expression, image, impression, lyric, mark, performance, picture, sentence, sign, string, symbol, text, thought, token, utterance, word, work, and so on.
Theories of truth may be described according to several dimensions of description that affect the character of the predicate "true".
The kinds of truth predicates may then be subdivided according to any number of more specific characters that various theorists recognize as important.
So Peirce's semiotic, his theory of sign relations, is key to understanding his entire philosophy of pragmatic thinking and thought.
This statement emphasizes Peirce's view that ideas of approximation, incompleteness, and partiality, what he describes elsewhere as fallibilism and "reference to the future", are essential to a proper conception of truth.
So we might as well proceed on the assumption that we have a real hope of comprehending the answer, of being able to "handle the truth" when the time comes.
Bearing that in mind, the problem of defining truth reduces to the following form: Now thought is of the nature of a sign.
The statement above tells us one more thing: Peirce, having started out in accord with Kant, is here giving notice that he is parting ways with the Kantian idea that the ultimate object of a representation is an unknowable thing-in-itself.
Reality and truth are coordinate concepts in pragmatic thinking, each being defined in relation to the other, and both together as they participate in the time evolution of inquiry.
Inquiry is not a disembodied process, nor the occupation of a singular individual, but the common life of an unbounded community.
No modification of the point of view taken, no selection of other facts for study, no natural bent of mind even, can enable a man to escape the predestinate opinion.
"[2] By this, James meant that truth is a quality the value of which is confirmed by its effectiveness when applying concepts to actual practice (thus, "pragmatic").
"[9] By using the term ‘cash-value,’ James refers to the practical consequences that come from discerning the truth behind arguments, through the pragmatic method, that should yield no desirable answer.
If, however, the argument was to yield one result which clearly holds greater consequences, then that side should be agreed upon solely for its intrinsic value.
"[7]: 77 James exhibits a knack for popular expression that Peirce seldom sought, and here his analysis of correspondence by way of a simple thought experiment cuts right to the quick of the first major question to ask about it, namely: To what extent is the notion of correspondence involved in truth covered by the ideas of analogues, copies, or iconic images of the thing represented?
The answer is that the iconic aspect of correspondence can be taken literally only in regard to sensory experiences of the more precisely eidetic sort.
When it comes to the kind of correspondence that might be said to exist between a symbol, a word like "works", and its object, the springs and catches of the clock on the wall, then the pragmatist recognizes that a more than nominal account of the matter still has a lot more explaining to do.
James believed propositions become true over the long term through proving their utility in a person's specific situation.
For Peirce the pragmatic view implies theoretical claims should be tied to verification processes (i.e. they should be subject to test).
William James, while agreeing with this definition, also characterized truthfulness as a species of the good: if something is true it is trustworthy and reliable and will remain so in every conceivable situation.
Hilary Putnam also developed his internal realism around the idea a belief is true if it is ideally justified in epistemic terms.
(Rorty 1998, p. 2)(2) Conceptual relativity With James and Schiller we make things true by verifying them—a view rejected by most pragmatists.
Schiller used the analogy of a chair to make clear what he meant by the phrase that truth is made: just as a carpenter makes a chair out of existing materials and doesn't create it out of nothing, truth is a transformation of our experience—but this doesn't imply reality is something we're free to construct or imagine as we please.
John Dewey, less broadly than William James but much more broadly than Charles Peirce, held that inquiry, whether scientific, technical, sociological, philosophical or cultural, is self-corrective over time if openly submitted for testing by a community of inquirers in order to clarify, justify, refine and/or refute proposed truths.
First, due originally to Bertrand Russell (1907) in a discussion of James's theory[citation needed], is that pragmatism mixes up the notion of truth with epistemology.
In the same way, while it might be an indicator of truth, that a proposition is part of that perfect science at the ideal limit of inquiry, that just isn't what "true" means.
Habermas distinguishes explicitly between factual consensus, i.e. the beliefs that happen to hold in a particular community, and rational consensus, i.e. consensus attained in conditions approximating an "ideal speech situation", in which inquirers or members of a community suspend or bracket prevailing beliefs and engage in rational discourse aimed at truth and governed by the force of the better argument, under conditions in which all participants in discourse have equal opportunities to engage in constative (assertions of fact), normative, and expressive speech acts, and in which discourse is not distorted by the intervention of power or the internalization of systematic blocks to communication.
Recent Peirceans, Cheryl Misak, and Robert B. Talisse have attempted to formulate Peirce's theory of truth in a way that improves on Habermas and provides an epistemological conception of deliberative democracy.