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The paper presents a dilemma for Chang's pragmatic view on truth, suggesting implications for scientific realism.
Recently, Hasok Chang has argued that we should adopt a pragmatic account of truth on which truth is constituted by practical success. Central to his argument is the claim that truth in this sense can be pursued and that other senses of truth can’t be. In this paper, I present a dilemma for Chang’s view. Either practical success constitutes truth in a way that implies infallibility—a conclusion that I’ll argue is untenable—or the argument from pursuit fails. I end by suggesting that scientific realism alone commits us to very little with respect to truth.
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Corey Dethier (2026) studied this question.
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