Pragmatists had no desire to return to a correspondence theory but had a strong loyalty to empiricism. To them the empiricism of classical British epistemology had conceded to skepticism only because it demanded certainty. Ever since Plato, to be justified in holding that a belief was true had been cashed out in terms of "necessity," of showing that the belief could not be other than true; it had to be true. Because the correspondence theory makes showing this impossible, at least for those judgments Kant called "synthetic," classical epistemology always looses to skepticism. The pragmatic movement began with C.S.Peirce's development of a pragmatic analysis of meaning as a way to first clarify what is being claimed in any possible judgment. Peirce proposed that the meaning of a statement (actually Peirce applied it to "ideas") was to be identified with those experiences which would have to be had in order to decide the statement was true. The meaning of a claim lies in its "practical" consequences, or how the world would be (or not be) if this statement is true (or false). For his part, Peirce tended to retain a commitment to realism which led him not to identify the "truth" of a statement with the pragmatic consequences of believing it to be true. However, William James, intending to remain true to Peirce's teaching, but against Peirce's protests, did apply a pragmatic analysis of meaning to the meaing of "truth" and thereby came to identify a belief's being true with the practical consequences of holding or "accepting" that belief. If we hold a meaningful belief, it has the practical consequences of leading us to expect certain sorts of experiences; a belief with no practical consequences is "pragmatically" meaningless. But our expectations are themselves entangled with our "goals" and "purposes" as reflected in our actions in the world. If we do in fact have experiences of the sort the belief leads us to expect, then we can say that our expectations are "satisfied." Among those expectations that are the practical consequences of any belief are that it is consistent with all the other beliefs we hold, so coherence and logical consistency "constrain" (but do not alone determine) what beliefs we may pragmatically hold, from the logical or formal side, so to speak. But from the empirical side the belief must lead to expectations which are in fact satisfied in experience, and thus the sensory basis, the "empirical evidence," constrains what we may believe from the empirical side. When we find beliefs which are answerable to both constraints, then we are warranted in believing them. Indeed James seems to go further and insists that as actors we ought to hold them. "Justified true belief," the classical formula for knowledge now becomes in effect "warranted acceptability." But what we are warranted in accepting is of course relative to the evidence and system of beliefs, including our goals and purposes, which we happen to have at any given point in our inquiries into the world. As those inquiries develop, the evidence and the body of other beliefs we hold may change, thus making "warrant" relative to history and culture. Thus there can never be anything "final" about the truth, nor is acceptance of a belief a commitment to the belief's necessity. In the face of new evidence the pragmatist must remain open-minded and admit the possibility that what is held today as true may well become unwarranted in the light of future evidence. But the sturdy American pragmatist is not easily scared by the skeptical bogeyman and so returns with a profession of fallibilism: no belief is ever demonstrated as necessarily so. The classical quest for certainty has been a wild goose chase.