Truth from the Agent Point of View

Abstract

I defend a novel pragmatist account of truth that I call ‘truth from the agent point of view’ or ‘agential truth’, drawing on insights from Hilary Putnam. According to the agential view, as inquirers, when we take something to be truth-apt, we are taking ourselves and all other thinkers to be accountable to getting right a shared target that is independent of any individual's or community's view of that target. That we have this relationship to truth is what enables our practices of disagreement and agreement, even when subject to the glare of self-conscious reflection, and represents a crucial ingredient in our capacity for rational thought. The resulting account shares elements with Huw Price's and Cheryl Misak's views, but also has important advantages over both. It also yields a surprising conclusion—that our best pragmatist account of truth may well be a version of the correspondence theory of truth.

Does Father Christmas Have a Distinctive Facial Phenotype?

“…A recent paper has made a bold claim, that rejects Santa Claus and/or Father Christmas as tracing back to Saint Nicholas and instead proposes that he originated from a more recent man called Walter Clement Shields, who organised reindeer fairs in Alaska in the early twentieth century and delivered gifts on a reindeer sleigh [23]. We were unable to support this theory in our study following SVM classification, which predicted Mr Shield's face belongs to the Adult Man group [24]. Perhaps a more likely explanation is that rich cultural and increasingly commercial traditions in Europe, North America and across the globe (long after Saint Nicholas' birth in the third century) have iteratively promulgated ideas about, and increasingly uniform images of Father Christmas and Santa Claus.…”