For sure! My use of “life-form-independent” in the present context was misleading. I meant that the Newtonian/Galilean cosmologist treats as paradigm the movements of the planets qua planets, and the movements of ideal solids on Earth qua ideal solids (e.g. as maintaining constant shape and mass, resting on frictionless slopes, etc.), and those planets and solids don’t exemplify life-forms though the cosmologists themselves bring those concepts (e.g. planet, solid, friction, gravitation) to bear on their objects in accordance with their own practical form of life, which includes their scientific practices.
Consider the case of a jury tasked with establishing the guilt of the accused beyond a reasonable doubt, as the evidence standard is commonly enacted in criminal law. This suggests that when they reach a guilty verdict, the jurors must take themselves to know that the accused is guilty, or to hold that the claim that accused is guilty is true. It doesn’t mean, of course, that they hold themselves to be infallible. The standard is reasonableness, not certainty. The jurors would not hold themselves to know that the accused is guilty if they merely thought the “guilty” judgement to be better warranted than the “non guilty” one. Conversely, they would not render a non-guilty verdict if they took themselves to know that the accused is guilty.
Now, when deciding the question, over the course of the trial and deliberation period, the questions of actus reus and mens rea are commonly distinguished. The first question concerns, in light of the evidence, whether the prohibited act was committed and the second one whether it was done intentionally, with or without premeditation, negligently, recklessly, etc. The law or statute spells out both the general conditions under which an act falls under the prohibition (actus reus) and what constitutes a culpable state of mind (mens rea) when committing this act. An orthogonal, albeit not fully independent, distinction is the quaestio facti versus quaestio iuris one. Those answer the questions “What sort of issue is this?” and “Who has authority to decide it?” respectively. The jury normally has full discretionary power to determine the “facts” (what it is that the accused did, and what was their state of mind) and the judge (and appellate courts, when required) decide the general standards governing the scope of applicability of the law.
A naïve realist view would sort out contributions of “the world” and those of “the mind” (or of our concepts) through locating actus reus and quaestio facti issues on the “objective” side of the goings-on in the world (what are the facts/data that our judgements bear on) and the quaestio iuris on the subjective and conventionalist sides of the judgement (what norms/concepts are brought to bear on the facts/data). On that view, the mens rea question might sit uneasily between both, it being presumably subjective on account of the inscrutability of the mind of the accused. A less naïve view would construe the target of the judgement—the putative criminal action that merits, or vindicates, the rendering of a guilty verdict—to be the sort of act that is constituted as such (i.e. as a criminal act) by the norms governing the administration of criminal justice. Those norms (as articulated in written statutes and the relevant jurisprudence) make up the conceptual nets within which criminals are caught and constituted as such.
The story so far seems to depict a division of labor whereby juries are tasked with wielding the net (and judging whether the accused is, or isn’t, caught in its mesh) whereas the written law (and hence the legislators), the presiding judge and the appellate courts build and maintain the net. There is however a common practice of jury nullification, which is a discretionary power accorded to juries, whereby they can acquit the accused even if they judge that they are caught in the net of justice according to the standards set by the law (and interpreted/specified/articulated by the presiding judge). Jury nullification may be construed as a modern, institutionally-tolerated instance of Aristotelian epieikeia, or equity as the correction of legal justice where it fails due to its excessive generality. Aristotle’s point in the Nicomachean Ethics is that the equitable is just but not definitionally legally just. It is rather what corrects the law when the law is defective precisely because it must be universal (and therefore leans too much towards generality, and neglects relevant specific circumstances). The lawgiver legislates in general terms but can’t anticipate every particular case, so when a situation arises that the universal rule doesn’t adequately address, equity steps in to rectify that gap. This is where juries step in, in cases of jury nullification, for the benefit of the accused wrongly caught in a net that wasn’t meant to catch them, and where appellate judges step in though creating new precedents, and hence adjusting the mesh of the net to make it more specific and thereby also more universally applicable within its thus adjusted scope of application.
I think this illusttration of the joint collective responsibility for forum participants to abide by the norms embodied in our institutions and, at the same time, to adjust those norms in the light of epieikeia, as we encounter unforeseen cases, gives us a decent model of what a pragmatist theory of truth needs, and of what I take you to be reaching for.
When you say that “we are more theirs than they (our beliefs) are ours”, I want to agree and the net metaphor is meant to explain why without paradox. We do not each spin a private mesh. We rather are inducted into the standing and historically maintained net of a practice and it is our shared practical form of life that makes our several takes the faces of one world rather than so many disconnected ones. The shared form (embodied norms and living practices) just is what the many faces need to share in order to be faces of anything at all, as I had previously suggested. And because the net is answerable, because it can catch the wrong man (or wrong object, in general) and because we have the standing responsibility to adjust it by epieikeia, the facts it discloses are both ours, as caught in our mesh, and the world’s, as what the mesh must answer to in unforeseen circumstances. “True” is the adjective we reserve for what survives in a net so maintained.