7. Truth and Conviction Formation

At this point we can return briefly to the problem with which we began.

Different frameworks make different claims about what is true.

They may also disagree about how truth should be understood, which evidence matters, or what procedures deserve authority.

Conviction Formation Theory does not set out to settle these disputes.

But it still matters which questions about truth bear on the present investigation.

Several different issues have sometimes been grouped together under the word truth. Separating them helps show which of those issues matter here.

First, there is an ordinary, pretheoretic use of truth in which things can be a certain way independently of what someone happens to believe, and what we say can get them right or wrong.

If I am convinced that my keys are on the table and they are actually in my coat, my conviction does not relocate the keys.

Second, there are philosophical theories of truth.

Correspondence theories, deflationary theories, pragmatic theories, pluralist theories, and others attempt to explain what truth consists in or what truth-talk does.

Third, there is a stronger epistemic hope sometimes attached to truth: that appeal to truth might itself provide finite agents with a final, non-circular procedure telling them what to believe, or a foundation from which inquiry can be conclusively settled.

Whether such a foundation is available is a different problem. Nothing here requires us to assume that it is. Nothing shows that it is not.

The methodological claim is:

Many questions concerning conviction formation can be investigated without first settling a theory of truth or obtaining a final epistemic foundation.

This applies to Conviction Formation Theory itself. A reader cannot simply decide to become convinced by it. The distinctions and arguments offered here must acquire enough force to be taken up, examined, and used. They need not first be established as the final truth about conviction formation before that can happen. A framework can become useful in inquiry while remaining open to criticism, revision, or rejection.

Being convincing does not thereby make CFT true. Its substantive claims can still turn out to be untenable. But their truth need not be settled in advance for the investigation to begin.

We can keep two questions apart:

How does this become convincing?

and

Is it true?

The present investigation addresses the first, but not the second.

But the idea that our convictions can sometimes become better constrained because they answer to how things are may itself be a very convincing explanation of some of our abilities to form and correct convictions.

We do not need to possess a detailed theory of correspondence that convinces us in every respect for that explanation to have force.

Conviction can outrun theory here too.