This year Erraticus experienced an increased number of blog posts responding to essay contributions, a testament to readers’ eagerness to engage with one another in meaningful dialogue. 

In “Why We’ll Never Arrive at Truth,” Ian Cran wrote a reply to our 2022 Editors’ Choice Award-winning essay, in which he defends pragmatist philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce and William James against the claims that their versions of meliorism are “juvenile,” “tender-minded,” and “naive.” Believing knowledge claims improve over time, nearing closer and closer to how things actually are, Cran argues we’ll never quite reach the asymptote of truth. 

Playing around in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Rick Joines’ essay “On the Something There Is” holds that poets, like pragmatists, possess a unique ability to sit with uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts. Their adeptness in extending and multiplying metaphors enables them to weave new relations and realities with words and imagery. This literary approach to truth is vital for fresh perspectives and furthering human inquiry. For poets and pragmatists, neither walls nor metaphors are ever complete.

Inspired by Joines’ essay, “On the Something There Is,” Nick Gall penned a blog post titled, “An Ironist Must Learn to Listen Poetically.” He employs pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty’s concept of ironism to advocate for the importance of listening, if one is to be a committed ironist: “While poets are those who write or speak poetically; ironists are those who read or listen poetically.”

In the second essay in his three–part series, “Your Job and Cancer Are Nothing,” 2020 Erraticus Award winner Donovan Irven details his efforts to use Zen Buddhist meditation as a way to cope with several co-occurring life crises. This includes his wife’s cancer diagnosis, being laid off from academia, and the travails of becoming a middle school teacher, among others. While experiencing a modicum of relief and increased fortitude, total resolution evades him.

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Readers’ Choice Award Runner-Up

“Why We’ll Never Arrive at Truth” by Ian Cran

Readers’ Choice Award Winner

“On the Something There Is” by Rick Joines

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Editors’ Choice Award Runner-Up

“An Ironist Must Learn to Listen Poetically” by Nick Gall

Editors’ Choice Award Winner

“Your Job and Cancer Are Nothing: Part II” by Donovan Irven

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