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Scott Aiken and Thomas Dabay contend that a satisfactory account of truth is both infallibilist and antiskeptical. Externalist correspondence theories, they say, preserve the infallibility of the truth-relation yet invite skeptical qualms. In tying truth to experience, pragmatist theories resist skeptical challenges, but embrace a fallibilism that renders their account of truth inconsistent and even incoherent. While agreeing with Aiken and Dabay that externalist accounts are vulnerable to skepticism, I dispute each of the four arguments they offer against pragmatist fallibilism. Though partially successful against Peirce's more popular view that truth is the final belief of a community of inquirers, their arguments are wholly ineffective against Dewey's account of truth as warranted assertability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

James A. Good A Search for Unity in Diversity: The 'Permanent Hegelian Deposit' in the Philosophy of John Dewey Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006. xxx + 288 pp. Among the [...]

OMAR SWARTZ, EDITOR Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, UK: Arima Publishing, 2011. viii + 301 pp. No index. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Keynesian model of government regulation and social [...]

Dewey's view of immediate experience is one of settled meaning, a conception quite different from the 'blooming, buzzing confusion' described by William James. For Dewey, primary experience is an experience of things with meanings, based on a background of settled meaning arrived at through previous inquiry. Confusion arises only as an interruption of primary experience that initiates reflective inquiry, beginning a circular process from having experience to knowing and back to having again. Dewey does not subscribe to the metaphysical view that experience involves encounter with an independent reality. Instead, he works out a middle way between idealism and realism.