(From the discussion of truth as “what is best in the way of belief” as opposed to correspondence with reality):
How the combination of:
declarativism
blurring out all distinctions of kind of claimable
expressivism
a local expressivism about what one is doing in attributing truth—namely not describing the claimable, but endorsing it—
underwriting a global antirepresentationalism because of special properties of the vocabulary of truth
together underwrite a Jamesean understanding of truth-talk.
This role for an expressivist move in a pragmatist argument forges an important link between the first and the second halves of this course.
(From the discussion of representation):
What is really at stake in the battle between a representational model of the content of expressions and a pragmatist model is the best order of explanation (a way of thinking about conceptual priority) between representational relations and reason relations (of implication and incompatibility).
Davidson teaches us that and how taking reason relations as primary (the pragmatists says, because giving and assessing reasons, implicitly and practically appealing to justificatory reason relations, specifiable in a deontic normative vocabulary of “commitment” and “entitlement”’) holistically determines representational relations in top-down explanatory stories.
Representationalists are committed to atomistic objective usually causal relations (specifiable in an alethic modal vocabulary) determine reason relations.