Peirce’s pragmatist theory of truth holds that truth will be the outcome of an indefinitely adequate amount of scientific research. According to the minima trivialia objection, Peirce’s theory of truth is refuted by such common sense truths as that about what I ate for breakfast, which is hardly the outcome of a prolonged collective scientific endeavour. The argument does not work, however, if we endorse Sellars’s distinction between the manifest image and the scientific image of mankind in the world and the connected scientific realism: in this Sellarsian context, minima trivialia can be seen as false views from the perspective of the manifest image, like the existence and persistence of material objects, and not as proper truths, which are appreciated as such only from the point of view of the scientific image. Therefore, the endorsement of this distinction, which is quite compatible with Peirce’s framework, bypasses the minima trivialia objection.
Minima Trivialia Bypassed
Salis, Pietro
2024-01-01
Abstract
Peirce’s pragmatist theory of truth holds that truth will be the outcome of an indefinitely adequate amount of scientific research. According to the minima trivialia objection, Peirce’s theory of truth is refuted by such common sense truths as that about what I ate for breakfast, which is hardly the outcome of a prolonged collective scientific endeavour. The argument does not work, however, if we endorse Sellars’s distinction between the manifest image and the scientific image of mankind in the world and the connected scientific realism: in this Sellarsian context, minima trivialia can be seen as false views from the perspective of the manifest image, like the existence and persistence of material objects, and not as proper truths, which are appreciated as such only from the point of view of the scientific image. Therefore, the endorsement of this distinction, which is quite compatible with Peirce’s framework, bypasses the minima trivialia objection.File | Dimensione | Formato | |
---|---|---|---|
s11406-025-00815-y (1).pdf
accesso aperto
Tipologia:
versione editoriale (VoR)
Dimensione
780.67 kB
Formato
Adobe PDF
|
780.67 kB | Adobe PDF | Visualizza/Apri |
I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.