• 1 The correspondence theory of truth has gone through many versions and refinements over its long his (...)

2Familiarly, the correspondence theory of truth holds that the truth of a statement, proposition, or belief consists in its correspondence to the way the world is. The idea is that a statement, proposition, or belief (or whatever one’s favored “truth-bearer” is) depicts or represents the world as being a certain way, and it is true if the world is in fact the way the statement depicts, e.g., if there is a fact or state of affairs in the world that corresponds to it. On this view, there are two separable things: us, our representations, or what we think or believe is true, on the one hand, and the way the world is, which is independent of us (and them), on the other, with the truth of the former consisting in it corresponding to the way the latter is.1

• 2 Rorty (1998: 22; 2000: 4) dubs this the “cautionary” sense of truth, which is the only (deflationar (...)
• 3 Many have noted the link between realist or non-epistemic accounts of truth, such as the correspond (...)
• 4 See Williams (1996: 48f.) on the notion of “radical scepticism” and its difference from “non-radica (...)

4A key epistemological problem faced by such realist or non-epistemic conceptions of truth is that they, precisely in being non-epistemic, conceptually divorce truth from justification: that a belief is very strongly, perhaps even maximally, justified, never entails that it is true. Epistemic notions like justification, evidence, reason are one kind of thing; truth is another, different, non-epistemic thing altogether.2 A consequence of conceptually disconnecting truth and justification in this way is that it opens the door to radical scepticism, since once truth and justification are thought to be a priori dissociated from one another, it is a short step to think that they have nothing to do with each other: i.e., that having good justification for holding a belief provides us with no reason for thinking that the belief so held is true, or even more likely to be true, than a belief lacking any justification at all.3 Radical scepticism expresses a deep cynicism about the notion of justification itself, and thus of the truth-conduciveness of good justification. Radical scepticism, in this way, should be distinguished from another, rather benign, non-radical form of scepticism (or fallibilism) which claims only that it is possible (sometimes) for a belief to be justified and yet be false.4 Radical scepticism, on the other hand, is the view that a belief’s justification is totally unrelated to the question of its truth, that truth and justification are in principle separate, not merely that they may sometimes in fact be separated (which is all that fallibilism says). That is, the radical sceptic countenances the possibly of a complete and permanent alienation of truth from justification, the fallibilist only that they may be partially and occasionally disconnected.

• 5 The anti-realist conception of truth, like its realist counterpart, has gone through various iterat (...)

6Traditionally, one strategy for dealing with this problem, which results from the a priori disconnection of truth and justification, is to simply a priori reconnect them by defining truth in terms of justification. One such example is the verificationist conception of truth. According to it, for a statement to be true is for it to satisfy a certain justificatory standard (such as, verification by experience), thereby re-establishing a conceptual link between truth and justification. On this account of truth, a proposition is true not if it corresponds to the way things are in the experience-independent world, but if it is verified or confirmed by our experiences (of the world).5

• 6 Ayer (1971: 116). In typical anti-realist fashion, Ayer explains how the verificationist account of (...)

7This verificationist conception of truth was held, e.g., by the positivists. Their verification principle was in the first instance a criterion of meaningfulness: a statement is meaningful iff it can be verified (or falsified) by possible experience, iff it has consequences for experiences that we could possibly have (Ayer 1971: 48f.). And, although the verification principle’s primary job is to provide a criterion of meaningfulness, it has, as a straightforward corollary, a verificationist theory of truth. Given that a statement is meaningful iff it can be verified or falsified by possible experience, a statement is true iff it is verified (rather than falsified) by possible experience, or iff its consequences for possible experience actually obtain.6

• 7 This point – that epistemic conceptions of truth, which include verificationist and coherentist one (...)
• 8 What Putnam (1981: 54) called “anything goes” relativism, and what some today (at least in part) me (...)

10Traditionally, the main epistemological problem facing the verificationist conception of truth, and indeed anti-realist (or epistemic) accounts of truth more generally, is that they risk confusing truth with justification and in so doing result in relativism: i.e., identifying what is true with what we (justifiably) think is true, or take to be true, at a given time/place.7 To be sure, what is thought to be true, what is justified or verified by experience can (and often does) change over time/place, but this does not mean truth itself can or does. For example, the proposition that the earth is flat was once thought to be true, and the evidence of experience seemed to point in its favor; now we think it is (roughly) spherical, and the evidence of experience now justifies or verifies this contrary claim. In this way, what we (justifiably) think is true, what is confirmed or verified is relative to some one-or-other community of inquirers and context of inquiry. However, if truth and justification are identified, then truth would be relative to a community of inquirers as well, but this is unacceptable. For, while it is perfectly appropriate to hold that which beliefs are justified about the earth’s shape may change over time (based as they are on the experiential/theoretical data available at the time), one cannot conclude from this that the truth about its shape also may – that would be to hold that the earth at some point changed shape, that it was once flat and is now round. Thus, what is thought true, what is verified or justified, is relative to time/place/context, but what is true is not. The verificationist account of truth (and epistemic accounts of truth more generally) is unable to do justice to this point, since in identifying truth with justification, it results in relativism about truth: that what is true is whatever we happen to (justifiably) think is true at a given time, thus that any (justified) view is just as true as any other, and consequently that we can only ever talk in terms of “true-for-us” and “true-for-them.”8 In short, the objection to the epistemic construal of truth is that it is not a theory of truth at all, for the notion of truth essentially involves the idea of what is the case independently of what one is justified in thinking, and this is sacrificed once truth is defined in terms of justification, or verification.

• 9 See for example Peirce (1982: 97) and Putnam (1981: passim). As the rest of this paragraph points o (...)
• 10 Williams (1996: 236-7) points out this dilemma facing “idealizing” anti-realist theories; he also d (...)
• 11 Peirce is standardly interpreted as propounding an account of truth that features the notion of ide (...)

11One way epistemic conceptions of truth try to capture the non-epistemic character of truth is by introducing an ideal element into their account.9 On these modified accounts, truth is not straight-forwardly equated with what is justified at a particular time and place, or what is agreed to in a certain context, but with what would be agreed to by all who investigate long enough and hard enough, i.e., it is the view about which there would be consensus in ideal epistemic circumstances, or at the ideal end of inquiry. The conceptual work done by the concept of the ideal is twofold: first, it is meant to preserve the distinction between something’s being true and its being justifiably believed according to the standards of justification operative in some actual (i.e., non-ideal) context. The preservation of this distinction is essential for truth to keep its essentially objective character, its sense of being what is the case whatever we happen to think is justified at a given time/place, such that relativism can be averted. On the other hand, the notion of ideal justification is also meant to block radical scepticism by making truth something that is within our epistemic reach. This is because it rules out the possibility that all my beliefs could be ideally justified yet this provide no reason at all for them being true, since true beliefs are simply defined as beliefs that are ideally justified. The pressing question facing such idealized epistemic conceptions is: how coherent is the notion of ideal justification, how can it be both within and outside our possible epistemic grasp at the same time? For, if it is to block the relativist identification of what is true with what we justifiably believe is true at a given time it cannot be too much within our reach. However, if it is to avoid radical scepticism, the radical separation of truth from justification, the notion of ideal justification must be somehow still very much within our possible epistemic grasp. This seems an impossible needle to thread. The problem with such ideal accounts (expressed by the first horn of the dilemma) is working out what they could possibly mean since we have little to no idea of what ideal epistemic conditions are or what the ideal end of inquiry might look like, precisely because in being ideal, they are beyond anything we could ever actually achieve. Like the realist idea of correspondence to the world (in itself), which is also understood as something that is transcendent in principle to our ability to know it, idealizing epistemic accounts of truth risk positing truth as in principle beyond our epistemic reach, thus offering no real alternative to realism (and as a result promise a return to radical scepticism). On the other hand, to the degree they avoid this radical sceptical fate they make ideal justification something within the reach of our epistemic capabilities, but in so doing risk failing to sufficiently distinguish truth from justification, thus landing us in relativism.10 The challenge is to craft a conception of truth that can do justice to both intuitions at once: one that allows truth its essential independence from justification at any given time/place so that we can avoid the pitfalls of relativism while at the same time conceptually connecting truth with justification we are actually capable of so as to avoid the perils of radical scepticism. I will argue in the next section that a fallibilist-pragmatic conception of truth, reconstructed from aspects of James’s and Peirce’s views, which eschews appeal to ideal epistemic conditions, can succeed in providing such a middle position.11

• 12 I don’t wish to get embroiled in an intramural debate about whether the view of truth expressed in (...)

12A seemingly central feature of James’s remarks on truth is that truth is not a static property of belief, but is instead a dynamic, living characteristic that an “idea” or belief can gain over time, and which it can also lose.

• 13 As just noted, the satisfaction of James’s three-fold epistemic criteria (verification by experienc (...)

16True beliefs are made through this becoming-true process, and as they continue to be verified by ongoing experience, continue to successfully predict future experience while cohering with past experience and well-established beliefs, they continue to approach the status of being true. However, since the becoming-true process is never-ending, since it is always open to the deliverances of future experience which cannot be known in advance, beliefs for James are ultimately always in the becoming-true state. Truth itself is what proves itself or is verified “in the long run,” and since the long run is never completely achieved but is always unfolding, at any given time what we take to be true (what is becoming true) could turn out false.13 As such, for James, we must be fallibilists about what we take to be true at any given time, “we have to live to-day by what truth we can get to-day and be ready to-morrow to call it falsehood” (James 1982b: 238). This is the inbuilt fallibilism of his becoming-true account: because the true belief is what is expedient to believe in the long run, yet what we take to be true, or what we think is expedient to believe, at a given time may turn out not to be in the long run, “what meets expediently all the experience in sight won’t necessarily meet all farther experiences equally satisfactorily” (ibid.), what we take to be true at any given time is always fallible (or, what is in the process of becoming true may not end up being true). For James, truth’s long run unchangeability or absoluteness is mirrored in the fallibilism of what we take to be true at any given time; or put otherwise, the inescapable fallibility of what we take to be true at any given time is the epistemic correlate of the objective “absoluteness” of truth itself.

• 14 Quine (1953: 43) expresses clearly the flavor of this fallibilism: “Revision even of the logical la (...)

17To illustrate how this works in a mundane example: suppose I’m walking down Main Street and look across the road and see a figure in a shop window. I look at the figure for a good while and notice that it doesn’t move, so I form the belief that it is a mannequin that I am observing. From past experience, I have a stock of old beliefs concerning mannequins – e.g., that mannequins are often to be found in shop windows, that they are inanimate objects, that inanimate objects don’t move under their own steam, and so on. In forming the belief that this is a mannequin, I thereby create expectations about how future runs of my experience will go concerning it that are in keeping with the “older stock of truths” I have about mannequins and inanimate objects: e.g., I expect I won’t see it moving. The truth of this belief that there is a mannequin in the shop window consists in its ability to move most expediently from old beliefs to new (future) experiences. Suppose I continue to get experiences of a motionless figure when looking at it, then the belief that it’s a mannequin is discharging this function of mediating between old and new experiences and beliefs expediently, and in this way the belief is being verified, and so is in the process of becoming true. However, if, when I continue to look, the figure moves, the belief is no longer predicting successfully future experience because, coupled with my old stock of beliefs already outlined about mannequins and inanimate objects, I expected to get future experiences of it remaining stationary. I now have an inconsistency in (a “jolt” to) my stock of beliefs: e.g., that this object is a mannequin, that mannequins are inanimate objects, that inanimate objects are not self-movers, that this object moved of its own accord. Consistency can be restored to (the jolt can be removed from) my belief corpus in a number of different ways: I could write off the experience of its moving as non-veridical (after all, say, I was looking from across the street, there were reflections of cars and people moving on the window that was interfering with what I was seeing and which may have given the impression that the mannequin was moving when it wasn’t), I could change my belief that it was a mannequin in the first place (rather it was in fact a shop steward who just happened to be remarkably still when I was first looking), more radically I could change my beliefs about mannequins being inanimate objects or about inanimate objects not being self-movers, I could even deny excluded middle and hold that something can move and be stationary at the same time and place. For James, which option I should take, and therefore which belief is (in the process of becoming) true is the one that restores consistency and enables predictive success in the most expedient way in the long run, i.e., with the minimum modification to our well-established belief corpus in the long run. Which revision will do so in the long run will depend, of course, on how future experience plays out. Unless our old stock of beliefs is badly mistaken we would expect consistency to be restored in ways other than those suggested by the final three possibilities laid out above, since they would involve altering many fundamental beliefs of biology, physics, and logic, which are extremely well-credentialled by an enormous amount of past experience and other surrounding beliefs. This is the epistemic constraint of conservativeness that James speaks of, a mark of the epistemic venerability of the “old stock” of beliefs, their justificatory entrenchment in our web of belief, as Quine would put it. It dictates that we are, and should be, loathe to revise them, unless runs of experience go pear-shaped and pragmatically demand it. So, in this particular case, the pragmatic response would be to adopt either one of the first two options, which one would depend on how experience continued to unfold. However, it must be noted that, should ongoing experience unfold in highly unexpected ways (to us, now), more radical consistency-restoring options would be pragmatically called for. In this way, the account still demands that we be fallibilists even about our currently most firmly held beliefs, however it will only be pragmatically warranted to revise those beliefs if experience were actually to unfold in radically unexpected ways.14 Importantly, fallibilism about, and, if necessary, subsequent revision of, the well-established, old stock of beliefs, needs to be motivated by real reasons for doubt, such as unexpected experiences actually occurring. The mere logical possibility of there being alternative ways of restoring consistency to one’s belief corpus is not enough.

• 15 Brandom’s default-challenge conception of justification is a contemporary version of Peirce’s idea, (...)
• 16 So characterized I think the pragmatic-fallibilist account of truth developed in this section bears (...)

19In an avowedly anti-Cartesian spirit, Peirce argues that in epistemology we cannot but begin where we are, in medias res, with all its attendant presuppositions, cultural inheritances, “prejudices,” or “older stock of truths” (James). He warns us not to “pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts,” and in so doing draws a distinction between pretend doubt and genuine doubt, between hypothetical (or Cartesian) grounds for doubt and real (or pragmatic) grounds for doubt. That is, Peirce is insisting on the difference between merely pretending to doubt that there’s a mannequin in the shop window (because of the extremely remote logical possibility that there could be an omnipotent deceiver) and really doubting that there is as a result of some anomaly in my current experience. When one has a real doubt, one has a concrete reason to doubt, and when this occurs, one is able to make an inquiry into whether the reason is a good reason for doubt or not. If it’s not, the doubt is allayed; if it is the doubt is reinforced, and further inquiry may result in actual revision of the belief. One can only assess the doubt if there is a reason, and the reason for him cannot be the bare Cartesian possibility that one could be the victim of evil demon deception. One needs, instead, a “positive,” concrete reason for doubting the mannequin’s existence – e.g., having an experience of it moving, noticing beads of sweat on its brow when I see it close up, etc. In this way, for Peirce, there are standards of legitimacy for calling a belief into doubt, and the merely logical possibility that it could be false is not enough to legitimize a genuine, rationally motivated scepticism.15 Rather, there needs to be real doubt, doubt generated from actual experience not mere metaphysical speculation, and in the absence of some specific, concrete evidence for thinking that a belief is no longer “expedient,” then the appropriate epistemological stance to take towards it is to continue to think that it is.16

• 17 As we saw from the mannequin example, these three criteria need not always pull in the same directi (...)

20From the discussion of the mannequin example in the previous section, the fallibilist-pragmatist account of truth involves three epistemic criteria: verification by experience in the long run, logical consistency with other beliefs in the long run, and “conservativeness” (“minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity” with our “older stock” of epistemically venerable beliefs) in the long run.17 The component common to each is the “long run” feature, and its significance for my purposes lies in the fact that it makes available a middle position between the broadly anti-realist and realist approaches laid out earlier, and in doing so avoids the problems of relativism and radical scepticism that they face respectively.

• 18 See notes 9 and 13 above.
• 19 Of course, in resisting relativism, fallibilism captures the realist intuition – that truth is one (...)

21The fallibilist-pragmatist account avoids relativism because it gets objectivity into the picture, and it does so without having to invoke the realist notion of correspondence to a world completely independent of us and our epistemic norms (or the anti-realist surrogate of ideal epistemic conditions impossible for us to ever actually achieve).18 A genuine objective standard is made available not by comparing our current empirically verified, consistent and “conservative” beliefs against the world per impossible, or against a set of beliefs that satisfy some ideal version of these epistemic standards (again per impossible), but rather by comparing them against other (imperfect) beliefs that we actually come up with which meet these same epistemic standards. The account does not identify true beliefs with beliefs that satisfy the threefold criteria at a given time, thereby avoiding the relativist identification of what we think is true at any given time with what is true, since true beliefs are those that satisfy these criteria in the long run, and presumably beliefs could be verified by experience at a given time, be consistent with other beliefs at a given time and satisfy the constraint of “conservativeness” at a given time, yet not do so in the long run. Hence, at any given time, what we think is true, i.e., what meets our threefold epistemic criteria, is always provisional (i.e., fallible), and possibly revisable based on comparison with future beliefs of ours that meet (an updated version of) these criteria. In this way, the assessment of whether our beliefs at any given time are true is not carried out by comparing them to the belief-independent world, nor to impossible-to-actually-achieve ideal standards, but by comparing such beliefs and their capacity to satisfy our epistemic criteria with other, future beliefs of ours and their ability to meet the same criteria, and so on (where those other, future beliefs will be open to assessment by comparison to still further-into-the-future beliefs and their ability to meet the same standards). Because what we think is true at any given time is always open to assessment by comparison with what we think is true at another time, what we think is true at any given time is always provisional and possibly revisable such that truth simpliciter is never identifiable with it. This account keeps truth epistemically in-house, since truth neither requires comparison to a world which is in principle independent of our knowledge gaining capacities, nor to ideal epistemic conditions that are impossible for us to ever actually epistemically achieve. In this way it does not divorce truth from justification tout court, thus honoring the anti-realist intuition about the relation between justification and truth and avoiding radical scepticism. At the same time, while not identifying what is true with what we find justified (i.e., what satisfies the threefold epistemic criteria) at a given time, because what is true is identified with what is justified in the long run, this account can distinguish between justifiably thinking that a belief is true at a given time and its being true, and so does justice to the realist intuition (that truth and justification are conceptually irreducible to one another) and avoids relativism. In fact, it entails fallibilism rather than relativism, where fallibilism is distinguished from relativism in the way pointed out earlier: relativism is the view that whatever we take to be true (i.e., whatever beliefs are justified according to our threefold criteria) at a given time is true; fallibilism is the (different) position that whatever we take to be true at a given time could turn out false. Relativism identifies what seems to us to be true at a given time with what is true; fallibilism precisely does not.19

• 20 While they are sometimes run together and can lead to similar challenges, academic freedom and free (...)
• 21 The reason being that it is rare to find in public discourse actual examples of radical scepticism (...)

25Familiarly for pragmatists, the measure of the usefulness of a view is the difference it makes in practice. In this final section, I aim to put the fallibilist-pragmatist position developed here to the pragmatic test by considering how it fares on a currently highly charged issue in public discourse: academic freedom on college campuses in the US.20 I contend that it compares favorably to relativism and radical scepticism (though I will focus more on the way it contrasts with the former).21 I will argue that efforts to restrict academic freedom by both the political right and the political left currently are informed by a relativistic outlook, shown by the fact that such efforts tend to express ideological parochialism or partisanship. This has the consequence that they aim at, or result in, the suppression of different viewpoints, i.e., a culture of cancellation, whereas positions informed by a fallibilist perspective typically would not. Furthermore, I will argue that where a fallibilist-informed position would recommend deplatforming a given viewpoint, it would do so on more principled, i.e., non-ideologically driven, truth-pursuing grounds, and in doing so offer a more consistently liberal basis for limiting academic freedom than relativist-backed ones.

• 22 Recent examples include: the disinviting of Professor Dorian Abbot, a University of Chicago geophys (...)

26A problematic implication of relativism is that it leads to the kind of “post-truth” ideology that underwrites cancel culture, instead of providing the conditions for genuine, rational discussion and assessment of opposing viewpoints, where views are accepted or rejected on the basis of their epistemic merits or lack thereof. The route from relativism – the position that denies the possibility of a singular, objective truth on any subject matter, substituting in its stead talk of a plurality of “my truths” and “your truths” – to cancel culture is as follows: if whatever we happen to think is true at a given time is identified with the truth, then once there are different “we’s” with very different ideas about what is true, then there are different truths, and no way for rationally evaluating them. The mere assertion that it’s “my truth” or “our truth” is all the warrant a view needs and can have; no further justification is required or possible (given that there is no objective truth of the matter to be had). Examples of this kind of relativism resulting in the cancellation of opposing viewpoints abound from both ends of the political spectrum although they manifest in different ways. Relativistic, i.e., ideology-driven, assaults on academic freedom from conservatives have come from outside the academy and have taken the form of government intervention in the hiring of faculty or the framing of curricula. A paradigmatic example is Governor De Santis’s overhaul of New College Florida which involved: the appointment of six new conservative trustees to the board, the firing of the former, progressive president and the installing of a conservative political ally as the new one, the dismantling the college’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) office, the denial of tenure to five faculty members with progressive research agendas and teaching profiles, and the enforcement of curricula restrictions so as to eliminate courses, with certain race and gender content, from being taught. De Santis deemed such measures “justified” by “his (and more generally conservatives’) truth” that prevailing educational approaches in progressive institutions of higher education like New College constitute indoctrination in “woke” Ideology rather than genuine education. Assaults on academic freedom from progressives have typically come from inside the academy, led by professors or students (or both) who justify the suppression of conservative viewpoints on the grounds of “their truth,” namely that such views are oppressive to marginalized or vulnerable groups.22 In such a relativistic, post-truth (or truth-denying) intellectual vacuum where there are just different groups each with their own dug-in ideas about what they think is true, rational scrutiny and assessment of opposing viewpoints in the search for genuine truth is replaced by ideological decisionism in which one or another view is just simply adopted and deemed true (depending on who is in power) and the other suppressed (or bullied into suppression).

• 23 Berube & Ruth 2022 make this charge.

27The question is: does fallibilism leave us any better off than relativism in this regard? The worry is that it does not. For, if any given view is (in principle) possibly false, as fallibilism holds, then we should avoid ideological tunnel vision and allow as many different viewpoints as possible to be heard and pursued if we are to have a chance of arriving at the truth. In this way, fallibilism is naturally aligned with academic freedom – so far so good – but the concern is that this leads to a similar epistemic egalitarianism as relativism: the equal worth of all viewpoints, progressive and conservative, with nothing to choose between them. In such an environment, progressives accuse fallibilist-backed defenses of academic freedom of allowing academic freedom (or “viewpoint diversity”) to be weaponized by conservatives:23 they compel everyone (in the name of academic freedom) to platform and respond to views that are obsolete, even pernicious, as well as to defend (unnecessarily) positions that are already well-justified. They argue that fallibilism will mire us in debates we rightly left behind long ago: requiring us to engage with, and respond to, opponents of DEI or those who deny the reality of systemic anti-Black racism (say), simply because, in the spirit of fallibilism, there is a possibility that our opposing positions on these issues could be false. However, such progressives argue, we should not have to, just as we shouldn’t have to respond to flat earthers or Holocaust deniers. I think, though, that the two key features of the fallibilist-pragmatist position I have been highlighting – the “long run” orientation of its three-fold epistemic standards and its insistence that “real” doubt is required to legitimately motivate a fallibilistic attitude about a well-established belief – insulate fallibilism from this objection. Furthermore, both features work in lockstep with the ideal of academic freedom, and thus provide an avenue of response to the charge of “illiberalism” often made, in counter objection, by conservatives against progressives.

• 24 For examples, see the cases of Professors Abbot and Hooven mentioned in an earlier note.
• 25 The “illiberalism of the left” is often dismissed by those on the left as a conservative fiction, h (...)
• 26 Cancel culture can cut both ways and is just as easily deployed by conservatives against progressiv (...)
• 27 Of course, who determines whether there is “concrete reason” will be contested and probably settled (...)

30Furthermore, the pragmatic-fallibilistic position may provide progressives with an effective response to the charge of illiberalism often levied at them by conservative opponents. As I pointed out earlier, a common way liberal campuses have been responding to conservative speakers and viewpoints is to simply “deplatform” them: i.e., ban them from speaking or conduct campaigns to have them cancelled.24 Predictably, this has invited the charge from conservatives of hypocritical “illiberalism,” of progressives only honoring the ideal of academic freedom for views with which they are in political agreement.25 In response, some progressives have doubled down and argued that the ideal of academic freedom is a Trojan horse for regressive views to get an undeserved re-airing. For them, calls for “viewpoint diversity” are nothing of the sort, but rather a dog whistle allowing reactionary political positions to get re-broadcast. (This is a version of the progressive objection to academic freedom, mentioned earlier, viz. that it risks being disingenuously used by the right to advance their conservative political agenda). While the ideal of academic freedom may be (mis)used in this way politically, it strikes me that getting rid of it is both dangerous26 and unnecessary. For, as we have just seen, the fallibilist-pragmatist position has a mechanism for legitimately limiting the freedom to voice any view at all in the name of academic freedom: namely, any re-airing of a previously discredited viewpoint needs to be in the service of pursuing the truth, and so some concrete epistemic motivation needs to be provided for such a view to get a rehearing, e.g., a different argument supporting it (from the one considered to have convincingly discredited in the past), or an objection to the argument thought to have undermined it in the past, etc. In the absence of such motivation or challenge, the “conservativeness criterion” extends default entitlement to the accepted view. In this way, it seems to me that progressives can deal with this threat in the same way as contextualists deal with sceptical challenges in epistemology. Just as we do not need to rule out the possibility that we are looking at a barn façade when we see a barn in the distance unless we have some positive evidence for thinking we are in barn-façade county, so we are not epistemologically required to seriously consider a “regressive” conservative viewpoint in the name of academic freedom on the fallibilist-pragmatist position I’m defending here unless there is good reason for thinking it has something to it. Thus, although fallibilism does not permit us to cancel such viewpoints out of hand, likewise it does not require that we have to platform them in the name of academic freedom unless there is a concrete reason to do so.27 In this way, the deplatforming of certain retrograde viewpoints under such conditions does not sacrifice the ideal of academic freedom.