Abstract
In the sixth lecture, Benoit Gaultier (Collège de France) returned to the question of "Epistemic purism and doxastic puritanism: pragmatism, Clifford's principle and the question of the value of truth". He recalled that, according to Russell, the conceptual core of pragmatism consists of a combination of essentially epistemological theses about the nature of belief,evidence, epistemic normativity, truth and the doxastic role of practical reasons. It is in William James's critique of W. Clifford's principle that "it is wrong, everywhere and always, to believe anything on the basis of insufficient evidence" that pragmatism most clearly reveals its nature. But even contemporary discussion of Clifford's principle is based on confusion between epistemic purism and doxastic puritanism. The position defended by Isaac Levi, for whom "even if one can establish a strong opposition between practical and theoretical goals, there is no difference between practical and theoretical rationality", must be rejected, as must that upheld by Peirce in his seminal article on the fixation of belief (1878), which is at the root of Levi's position. The third part of the paper was devoted to setting out Gaultier's position on the nature of belief, and showing how it can, according to him, resolve a number of central epistemological questions. The discussion brought out some counter-intuitive aspects of this position, notably the thesis that believing that p consists constitutively in believing that p given an evidence.
