Veritism

Abstract: Elgin has offered us a powerful articulation of an epistemology that does not, contra veritism, have a concern for truth at its core. I contend that the case for Elgin’s alternative epistemological picture trades upon a faulty conception of what a veritistic epistemological outlook involves. In particular, I argue that the right conception of veritism—one that is fundamentally informed by the intellectual virtues—has none of the problematic consequences that Elgin claims. Relatedly, I maintain that we can account for the core role of objectual understanding in inquiry without thereby giving up on truth as the fundamental epistemic good (and even while granting that such understanding might well involve some false beliefs on the part of the subject).

Abstract: There is a familiar teleological picture of epistemic normativity on which it is grounded in the goal or good of belief, which is taken in turn to be the acquisition of truth and the avoidance of error. There is also a widespread platitude to the effect that this is at heart two distinct goals in tension with one another. The teleological picture faces numerous challenges, but one of the most interesting is an argument that rests on this platitude. This paper looks more closely at the standard way of understanding the truth goal, drawing out its explicit and implicit features. The aim will be to show that the standard way the truth goal is understood is deeply mistaken, to propose and defend an alternative model, and to show how this alternative model restores the unity of the goal and its potential to ground and explain the normative dimensions of belief.

Abstract: In Kate Chopin's first two critical essays, both written in 1894, the same year her first collection of short fiction, Bayou Folk, was published, the St. Louis-born walter--who was best known for her Louisiana fictions--demonstrates the ambivalence with which many nineteenth-century American authors approached terms like regionalism and local color. The essays are brief but incisive accounts of the strengths and weaknesses of regional writing and offer a quick glance at the literary conflicts at the end of the century. The first reports on the Western Association of Writers, a mostly Indiana group that Chopin chides for "clinging to past and conventional standards, [for] an almost Creolean sensitiveness to criticism and a singular ignorance of, or disregard for, the value of the highest art forms."(1) The group's provincialism, Chopin suggests, prevents it from realizing that "there is a very, very big world lying not wholly in northern Indiana." But to ensure that her criticism of local writing here is not itself read provincially, Chopin continues to describe the world good fiction must attempt to configure: "nor does it lie at the antipodes, either. It is human existence in its subtle, complex, true meaning, stripped of the veil with which ethical and conventional standards have draped it" (691). The second is a more measured piece, a mixed review of Crumbling Idols, Hamlin Garland's collection of essays championing the use of regional and local color elements in the service of a literary realism. By Chopin's estimation, when Garland advocates breaking free of "the hold of conventionalism," he ends up undervaluing "the importance of the past in art and exaggerates the significance of the present," especially as the present makes itself visible through the meticulous detailing of local life. Though she herself was a writer of regional fiction that was enthusiastically promoted for its artistic and faithful rendering of local life, Chopin here warns that "social problems, social environments, local color and the rest of it are not of themselves motives to insure the survival of a writer who employs them" (693). Chopin's curious aversion to the efforts of her fellow regional writers in these essays seems to come from a suspicion of any ethical motive or naturalist principle and favor a strict formalism or aestheticism. The critiques also show Chopin to be reluctant to throw in with any aesthetic ideology that blindly attacks the powers that support it or the artistic forms that enable it. Thus she characterizes the Western Association's eschewing of high art as naive and childish, and she takes Garland to task for his impolitic criticism of the East as a tyrannous literary center. "There can no good come of abusing Boston and New York," Chopin cautions: "On the contrary, as `literary centers' they have rendered incalculable service ... by bringing to light whatever ... has been produced of force and originality in the West and South since the war" (694). Such a position is coincidentally (and perhaps ironically) in step with much of the early twentieth-century literary criticism of regional fiction that kept Chopin an admired but minor figure until the rediscovery of her second novel, The Awakening. At first glance, much of Chopin's own fiction seems to discount her critique of Garland's "veritism" and of regional writing in general, but a closer inspection, particularly of the short fiction, tells a different story. Chopin delivers her criticism with authority and conviction, with the authenticity of one who speaks from within a region and tradition, suggesting not that Chopin is simply inconsistent in her criticism and practice, but rather that Chopin's understanding of regional writing includes a sophisticated and indeed implicitly ethical knowledge of the dangers inherent in claiming to offer an authentic or enduring relation of another person or community. Published six months before her review of Garland's manifesto, Chopin's Bayou Folk contains two stories that explicitly challenge the impulse of local color to provide an authentic vision of a region. …

Abstract: Epistemology needs to account for the success of science. In True Enough (2017), Catherine Elgin argues that a veritist epistemology is inadequate to this task. She advocates shifting epistemology’s focus away from true belief and toward understanding, and further, jettisoning truth from its privileged place in epistemological theorizing. Pace Elgin, I argue that epistemology’s accommodation of science does not require rejecting truth as the central epistemic value. Instead, it requires understanding veritism in an ecumenical way that acknowledges a rich array of truth-oriented values. In place of veritism, Elgin offers a holistic epistemology that takes epistemic norms to have their genesis in our collective practice of deliberation. The acceptability of epistemic norms turns on epistemic responsibility, as opposed to reliability, and truth-conduciveness is rejected as the standard of evaluation for arguments and methods of inquiry. I argue, by way of an extended discussion of a high-profile and controversial criminal case, that this leaves epistemic practices and their products inadequately grounded. I offer an alternative, veritistic account of epistemic norms that retains a modified version of truth-conduciveness as a standard of evaluation. However, my alternative account of epistemic norms is congenial to Elgin’s holistic epistemology, and, I suggest, could be incorporated within it.