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Highlights

"He proposed that truth—including moral truth—is that which would be agreed upon by a community of inquirers if inquiry were to continue indefinitely."
Node 40
"A bat’s "truth" about a room—defined by sonar—is different from a human’s "truth" defined by visible light."
"To seek a set of fixed, eternal rules for logic or morality is to ignore the fact that we are biological organisms situated within a specific point in time, a specific culture, and a specific physical body."
Node 38
"Does this specific moral path actually solve the problem of human co-existence? If the answer is no, the path is rejected—not because it broke a divine rule, but because it failed the test of reality."
Node 37
"This is the core of the moral relativism objection: the fear that without an external, fixed "Moral Law," we lose the ground to stand on when facing atrocity."
Node 37
"Critics argue this leads to moral relativism—if there are no fixed rules, can we justify anything? Pragmatists respond with objective pluralism."
"Addams shifted the focus from individual purity to collective flourishing"
"It is not about filling "empty vessels" with facts; it is the process of training individuals in the art of inquiry so they can participate in the continuous reconstruction of experience."
"This rabbit hole introduces Scientific Instrumentalism, particularly Bas van Fraassenplato.stanford.edu’s view that we don't need to believe that unobservable entities (like quarks or dark matter) actually exist. We only need to believe that our theories accurately predict what we can actually see."
Node 28
"It introduces a moral dimension to the realist/pragmatist divide: is the search for objective truth a sacred duty or a stifling dogma?"
Node 28
"For Peirce, a concept's meaning was found in its "intellectual purport"—its relevance to scientific prediction and collective inquiry."
Node 23
"If a belief in free will makes a person more energetic and moral than a belief in determinism, then free will is "true" in the sense that it possesses a positive "cash-value" for the individual."
Node 7
"Peirce found this reckless. He viewed James’s application as a "suicidal" expansion of his maxim, fearing it would turn philosophy into a justification for subjective whims."
"For Peirce, truth is not a flexible adaptation to our needs, but a fixed point toward which all scientific investigation eventually gravitates."
Node 17
"In the context of Scientific Progressplato.stanford.edu, revision is not a sign of failure but a mechanism of refinement."
Node 5
"This middle ground, championed by John Worrall, argues that while the "entities" of a theory (like "ether") may be discarded, the mathematical structure and relationships often persist."
"However, the requirement that truths remain "open to revision" introduces the Pessimistic Meta-Induction."
Node 5
"Realists often rely on the "no-miracles argument," famously articulated by Hilary Putnam, who suggested that the empirical success of science would be a miracle if our theories were not tracking objective reality."
"Since our environment and needs change, our "truths" must remain open to revision."

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