Pragmatism and Inquiry Selected Essays

This volume presents a series of essays which investigate the nature of intellectual inquiry: what its aims are and how it operates. Inquiry according to C. S. Peirce is a struggle to replace doubt by true belief, while John Dewey insisted that the transformation was from an indeterminate situation to a determinate or non-problematic one. So Isaac Levi's subject is changes in doxastic commitments, which may involve changes in attitudes or changes in situations inwhich attitudes are entangled. The question what justifies modification of doxastic commitments is a normative one, and so may not be understandable in purely naturalistic terms.

Isaac Levi is John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. He is the author of many journal articles and reviews, and his books include The Covenant of Reason: Rationality and the Commitments of Thought, and For the Sake of the Argument: Ramsey Test Conditionals, Inductive Inference and Nonmonotonic Reasoning.