The Appearance and the Wager v1.1 Sterling and Marquis on the Problem of Pragmatism
The Appearance and the Wager v1.1
Sterling and Marquis on the Problem of Pragmatism
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
In January 2021, on the International Stoic Forum, Steve Marquis and Grant C. Sterling conducted a four-message exchange under the heading “Stoic Pragmatism — a modern approach to the dilemma of what is the right thing to do.” The exchange is short, occasional, and unresolved. It is also a case study in exactly the kind of displacement that the corpus elsewhere traces at civilizational scale: the substitution of justification-procedure for correspondence as the measure of a belief’s standing. What happens between Marquis and Sterling in miniature is what Steve Fuller, writing later about Rorty, describes happening to the whole of Western philosophy. The value of the exchange is that it shows the substitution being resisted, not merely completed — and shows the resistance itself under pressure.
Marquis’s Wager
Marquis opens by recalling an old dispute with Sterling over whether the Stoic Sage requires something approaching omniscience to select the right action. His resolution is a scope restriction. Certainty of fact, he argues, is not available in ordinary deliberation and was never really required — what is required is knowledge of what is significant to the choice, not knowledge of the whole state of the cosmos. He calls this his “free body diagram”: the engineer does not model every force acting on a structure, only the ones that matter to the tolerance in question.
From this Marquis draws his self-description: “I am at heart a pragmatist and this is Stoic pragmatic rationalism.” But the claim is bounded, and the boundary matters. Marquis restricts pragmatic judgment to questions of non-value fact — the empirical circumstances a choice depends on — and explicitly excludes questions of value from the same treatment: “concerning matters of value, we can know with certainty.” He is not proposing that moral truth itself be measured by usefulness. He is proposing that under factual uncertainty, action on what “appears” most probably true, arrived at through something like cost-benefit or risk assessment, satisfies the Stoic requirement of correct judgment without requiring the Sage to be omniscient. This boundary should be held provisionally: the section on the October 2014 record below shows the same position stated without it.
In his second message Marquis extends the point to pathos: much of what makes a choice feel like a genuine dilemma, on his account, is not real balance between options but pathos obstructing what would otherwise be straightforward discrimination. Reduce the pathos, and the apparent dilemma resolves itself. This is consonant with the corpus’s own treatment of pathos as an obstruction to correct judgment rather than a source of moral information — Marquis is not introducing a foreign element here, only applying it to epistemic rather than strictly ethical judgment.
Sterling’s Declination
Sterling’s reply is explicit about where he stands relative to the label: “Although I would not describe myself as a pragmatist, my views are not far from Steve’s here.” He then offers three theories of knowledge, each consistent with an inerrant Sage, each explicitly flagged as his own construction rather than a claim about settled ancient doctrine.
Theory 1, Skeptical Dogmatism, restricts belief to what is certain and permits action without belief for everything else — one can eat the apparent sandwich at the apparent lunch hour without committing to either proposition as believed.
Theory 2, Pragmatic Dogmatism, is Sterling’s formalization of Marquis’s position: it redefines error not as having a false belief but as having an irrational one. The Sage who reasons correctly from her evidence remains inerrant even if the belief she arrives at later proves false, because inerrancy is relocated from the content of the belief to the rationality of the process that produced it.
Theory 3, Internal Content Dogmatism, is the theory Sterling identifies as his own preference. On this account the Sage forms no belief about the external state of the world absent certainty — she believes only about the appearance itself. The oar half-submerged in water appears bent; the Sage does not believe the oar is bent, and does not believe it is straight. She believes “the oar appears bent” and “oars that appear bent in water are often straight” — propositions that are, Sterling notes, certainly true, because they are about the appearing, not about the external fact.
The architectural function of Theory 3 is not incidental. It is the mechanism by which Sterling preserves correspondence (C5) under conditions of practical uncertainty. The belief still corresponds to something real — not to the external state of affairs, which remains unknown, but to the fact of the appearance itself. Nothing is asserted that outruns the evidence, and nothing is surrendered to mere justification-in-the-absence-of-truth. Sterling closes by proposing that the three theories converge on the same practice of ethical choice regardless of which is adopted — a move that settles the practical question without settling the theoretical one.
The Contested Point
Marquis’s reply does not accept the settlement. He grants Theory 1 the most sympathy, reads it as vindicating his own long-standing insistence on withholding judgment absent certainty, and reads Theory 2 as simply a restatement of how the scientific method already operates. But he presses directly on Theory 3: “the statement it ‘appears’ to be the case is always true but a trivial rewording of the pragmatic approach.” His charge is that “appears” functions in Sterling’s usage as a disclaiming device — a way of avoiding commitment to any claim about the external fact while still, in practice, acting exactly as if the appearance were the fact. If that is right, Theory 3 has not escaped the pragmatic maneuver Sterling declines to name himself with; it has only relocated the same maneuver one level down, from belief-about-the-world to belief-about-the-appearance, while cashing out in the identical practice: act on what appears most probably true.
This charge is not answered in the thread. Sterling’s own closing move — that the three theories converge in practice — is available to him before Marquis’s objection arrives, and is not revisited afterward. The exchange ends with the objection standing.
The Position Seven Years Earlier
The January 2021 exchange did not introduce Marquis’s pragmatism. It restated a position he had set out at length in October 2014, in the thread on Butler’s Dissertation upon the Nature of Virtue, against the same interlocutor.
On judgment. Replying on 12 October to Sterling’s account of the great general — the post is sent as a reply to Sterling’s 10 October message, with Marquis’s own bracketed note that he was unable to quote the earlier post he meant to answer — Marquis accepts the analogy and reads it his own way. Neither the great general nor the wise person follows a set of maxims or a maximizing formula; both apply what we loosely call judgment. Part of that may be native talent — he notes from engineering practice that some people visualize structural load paths naturally and others never acquire it — but most of it is the accumulated and largely unconscious residue of past cases, which he calls engineering character. From this he draws a conclusion Sterling does not:
This is why I reject any fixed in stone objective moral rules. There will simply be cases where they don’t apply or will conflict however rare those cases may be.
Rules retain a developmental function, he grants: they are necessary in the early stages of training to form the character from which sound judgment arises — but early stages here means child-rearing, not adult practice.
On premises. The wager itself is then stated without qualification:
Since it is unlikely we will nail any complicated choice 100% right given the infinite dynamics of the real world it is not necessary to start from 100% true premises.
The scope of each choice is necessarily truncated; we begin with a rule base that may conflict and a judgment based on incomplete information; therefore, he concludes, it is unnecessary to insist on perfectly objective premises, and we do not need an infallible conscience in order to make progress.
On motive. Marquis then advances a claim about why the demand for objective premises persists. Most of us want our premises to be perfect, he writes, because the personal ego wants to believe its paradigm is right — and what drives the search for objective perfect premises is not any necessity for progress but the ego’s insecurity. He illustrates with a town hall meeting on the State of Jefferson secession movement, where inalienable rights and the self-evident truths of the Declaration were invoked to visible effect. The belief that an objectively true moral law is written in every man’s heart is deeply moving, he observes, and diluting it with the reflection that this may be internalised traditional norms is unacceptable to most people, because it is not clean and pure and the fire goes out. Pragmatically, he grants, the belief that all of this is certainly true may be necessary to motivate the average person. He adds that it is not necessary for him: he can accept the same things as pragmatically true and move forward, and he is in the minority on it. The section closes on the dark side of attachment to ideals, with the World Trade Center attacks as the case.
On foundationalism, named. On 19 October Marquis quotes Sterling’s antecedence claim back at him, identifies the position by name, and states the objection:
It must be obvious what the problem is here. If we cannot justify something we just label it ‘self-evident truth’ and carry on. This seems to me a very convenient way to avoid criticism and support one’s already accepted beliefs.
That many people accept the same self-evident truth and report similar experiences does not change its character; it remains, he holds, unjustifiable by definition. He then presses a regress of his own. If criteria are introduced to screen authentic conscience from false contenders — he offers “peaceful” as a placeholder — then the self-evident truths have been burdened with criteria that are not themselves self-evident and require independent justification, and around in circles we go. His practical conclusion is a split: intuition alone has no basis for public policy because it admits no public non-subjective verification, so in the public sphere one should confine oneself to reason and evidence; for personal ethics the standard may be lower, and certainty may not be a requirement for practice.
On convergence. The second 19 October post answers Sterling’s cross-cultural argument. Cultural norms are statistical averages and do not entail that any individual holds them; the mix in a given person is unique. And the convergence itself admits a deflationary explanation:
What is seen throughout history and over the entire planet as consistent values can be explained as simply what traditionally works. This is nothing other than social evolution. We do not need to reach so far as objective moral truth for the explanation.
Honesty is pragmatically the better policy over the long haul though not in every instance, so it is unsurprising that most cultures count it a virtue. The Himmler case is turned around: that Himmler had to counter values his officers already held means to Marquis that he was countering what traditionally worked, the Final Solution being new on the scene rather than the cultural norm.
Where he lands. Marquis closes by setting out four options. Moral relativism or a sceptical nihilism, which he calls abandonment of moral responsibility entirely. Genuine objective moral conscience, qualified as Richard had proposed — understanding what intuition is telling us requires Stoic progress, so a conservative approach to intuition is warranted meanwhile. Weak foundationalism, quoted from the same encyclopedia article: fallible basic beliefs with inductive reasoning between them. And dynamic intuition — static intuition yielding language-borne moral rules cannot capture Reality, what the mystic obtains is an ineffable glimpse of the entire causal nexus, Stoic hard determinism may be somewhat extreme, and certain truth is for the moment only, with intuition plus reason plus sensation together yielding the cognitive impression.
He rejects the first entirely, as both repugnant and irrational. He settles on a combination of the third and the fourth, marked as provisional. And he records that if forced to choose between relativism and an objective moral conscience as mutually exclusive opposites, he would take the objective moral conscience without hesitation — while denying that the dilemma is exclusive.
Corpus Note — Dave Kelly
Three things follow for the reading of the 2021 exchange.
First, and most consequential: the boundary described in 2021 is not present in 2014. The account above records Marquis restricting pragmatic judgment to questions of non-value fact and explicitly exempting value — concerning matters of value, we can know with certainty. In October 2014 no such restriction operates. He rejects fixed objective moral rules; he explains moral convergence by social evolution as an alternative to objective moral truth; he reports accepting the moral claims of the Declaration as pragmatically true rather than certainly true; and he applies the sufficiency of imperfect premises directly to the question of conscience. The pragmatic treatment falls on value itself.
The corpus does not adjudicate what to make of this. Three readings are available and the record does not settle among them: that Marquis narrowed his position over seven years; that the 2021 restriction was local to the argument he was making there and not a general commitment; or that the two statements are inconsistent. What the record does establish is that the 2021 exemption of value cannot be treated as a stable feature of the position without qualification, and the account of the wager should not rest on it as though it were.
Second, the objection was stated in 2014 and answered in advance. The charge that foundationalism labels what it cannot justify and carries on is the sharpest formulation of the case against the commitment anywhere in the archive. It is also, in its main line, already met by Sterling’s inversion of 10 October: the objection assumes that a proposition without supporting evidence is the weakest link, and the inversion denies exactly that. The two men are not talking past each other. Marquis’s regress-of-criteria point, however, is not met — Sterling’s cross-cultural verification is indirect evidence, and Marquis’s question of what licenses the screening criteria is a real one that receives no reply in the thread. The exchange ends there.
Third, the disagreement is narrower than it appears. Marquis rejects relativism as repugnant and irrational and would take objective moral conscience over it without hesitation. What he is defending is a middle position — fallible foundations plus inductive support — not the abandonment of moral truth. This matters for the corpus’s use of him. The displacement traced elsewhere at civilizational scale operates here not as a denial of moral reality but as a weakening of the epistemic claim about our access to it, held by a man who explicitly wants the moral reality retained. That is the more instructive case, and the harder one.
Corpus Significance
The interest of this exchange for the corpus is not biographical. It is structural. “When Philosophy Changed the Subject” traces how Pragmatism, at civilizational scale, substitutes the question “what works” for the question “what is true,” and how that substitution — once made — quietly converts every field it touches from a discipline of recognition into a discipline of construction or justification. Marquis’s Theory 2, endorsed by Sterling as a formalization of Marquis’s own view, performs exactly this substitution at the level of individual epistemic practice: error is redefined from “false belief” to “irrational belief,” and the Sage’s standing is secured by the rationality of her procedure rather than by the truth of her conclusion. That the substitution appears inside an ISF exchange between two convinced Stoics, one of them the corpus’s own theoretical source, indicates that the displacement pressure Fuller describes at the level of academic philosophy operates at the level of individual reasoning as well. It is not confined to professional philosophers changing departments’ assumptions. It recurs wherever an agent under uncertainty must decide what counts as a justified belief.
Marquis’s objection to Theory 3 is best read in this light. He is not simply scoring a rhetorical point. He is asking whether Sterling’s preferred theory actually holds the line against the substitution, or whether “appears” is doing the work that “justified” does in Theory 2 — securing inerrancy by redefining its target rather than by preserving correspondence to the external fact. The corpus does not treat this question as settled by Sterling’s own preference. Whether Internal Content Dogmatism in fact preserves C5 in the relevant sense, or merely relocates the pragmatic substitution one level inward, is left here as an open point in the record rather than resolved by appeal to what Sterling personally favored. The exchange demonstrates the disagreement; it does not adjudicate it.
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
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