Saving the Differences: Essays on Themes from Truth and Objectivity

559 Pages·2003·7 MB·English

by  Crispin Wright

•
•
Tru'hand

CRISPIN WRIGHT
SAVING
THE
DIFFERENCES
~ Essays on Themes
from Truth and Objectivity
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS· Cambridge, Massachusetts· London, England
2003
FOR ANNALISA, CYRUS, DUNCAN, JESPER,
LARS Bo, LARS, PATRICE, PATRICK AND SVEN
Copyright © 2003 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wright, Crispin, 1942-
Saving the differences: essays on themes from Truth and
objectivity I Crispin Wright.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-674-01077-9 (alk. paper)
1. Realism. I. Wright, Crispin, 1942- Truth and objectivity.
n.
Title.
B835.W7472003
121-<ic21 2002191296
CONTENTS
Preface vii
I. REALISM RECONFIGURED 1
l. Precis of Truth and Objectivity 3
2. Realism, Anti-Realism, Irrealism, Quasi-Realism 11
II. REPLIES TO CRITICS 49
3. Response to Jackson 51
4. Realism, Pure and Simple? A Reply to Williamson 61
5. Responses to Commentators: Van Cleve,
Horwich, Pettit, Horgan, Sainsbury, Williamson 82
6. Comrades against Quietism 125
Contents
III. ETHICS 151
7. Moral Values, Projection
and Secondary Qualities 155
8. Truth in Ethics 183
IV. TRUTH 205
9. Truth as Coherence 211
10. Truth: A Traditional Debate Reviewed 241
11. Truth as Sort of Epistemic:
Putnam's Peregrinations 288
12. Minimalism and Deflationism 332
V. RESPONSE-DEPENDENCE AND COGNITIVE COMMAND 351
13. The Conceivability of Naturalism 357
14. What Could Anti-Realism about Ordinary
Psychology Possibly Be? 407
15. On Being in a Quandary: Relativism, Vagueness,
Logical Revisionism 443
References 511
Additional Readings 523
Credits 531
Index 533
vi
PREFACE
In his "Conversations with Wittgenstein" (Rush Rhees (1981),
p. 171), M. C. Drury reports that Wittgenstein considered taking a
line from King Lear, 'I'll teach you differences', as the motto for the
Philosophical Investigations. The 'differences' he had in mind, of
course, were not of the etiquette of rank and station which the Duke
of Kent was keen to enforce, but differences in the role and function
of superficially similar language games!-differences, in Wittgen
stein's famous view, which those very similarities encourage us to
overlook, thereby constituting a prime cause of philosophical misun
derstandings and confusions. My book Truth and Objectivity was
concerned with one (although a very general and of course con
tentious) instance of this Wittgensteinian thought: the idea that state
ment-making and susceptibility to ordinary propositional logic may
be a relatively superficial aspect of discourses, masking deep differ
ences in point of objectivity and the manner in which they relate to
the real world. That idea calls for a philosophy of truth and truth
aptitude which allows the application of those notions to tolerate
such deep differences, and an account of wherein the deep differences
themselves consist. Truth and Objectivity made proposals in both
vii
Preface
those directions. The essays collected in the present volume prefigure,
elaborate on or defend those proposals, or bring them to bear on spe
cific regions of discourse. Since Wittgenstein decided not to use it, I
have purloined the line from Lear as the motto for my book.
I have organised the essays into five groups. Part I contains, by way
of introduction, a short precis of Truth and Objectivity together with
my 1987 Gareth Evans Memorial Lecture in which I outlined earlier
versions of its central ideas. Part II consists of essays and discussion
notes written in response to the detailed reactions of reviewers of the
book. Part III contains two essays on objectivity and truth in ethics.
Four essays in Part IV enlarge on and defend the minimalist con
ception of truth proposed in Truth and Objectivity, as well as offer
ing detailed discussion of coherentism and of the epistemic concep
tion of truth defended by (and more recently renounced by) Hilary
Putnam. The latter half of Essay 12, on Robert Brandom's 'assertibil
ism', is previously unpublished. Part V, finally, groups together three
very recent essays on 'matters arising' in connection with response
dependence and Cognitive Command. All the previously published
essays appear as originally save for occasional light editing for the
sake of clarity. In addition to a bibliography of the references they
contain, I have included a supplementary list of the most useful writ
ings known to me which post-date Truth and Objectivity and criticise
or apply to themes of my book, or pursue closely related ones. No
conclusion should be drawn from what I may have omitted to include
in this supplementary bibliography. No one can read everything; it is
likely that I have overlooked a good number of relevant publications
over the last decade. I would be pleased to hear of them from readers
of the present volume.
Specific acknowledgements are separately noted, as originally, in
each essay. Collectively, of course, the essays share the ancestry and so
inherit the intellectual debts of Truth and Objectivity itself, and it is
my pleasure to re-emphasise my gratitude to the various friends, col
leagues and institutions acknowledged in the preface to that book. I
take the opportunity to repair the omission of any mention there of
the impetus to my thinking about realism which I brought away from
viii
Preface
my Princeton seminar in 1985-6. The prototype framework which
emerged in the Evans Lecture one year later was the precipitate of the
intense weekly attention to my ideas provided by, among others, Paul
Benacerraf, the late David Lewis, Mark Johnston, Gideon Rosen and
Michael Smith. A much more recent debt is owed to colleagues and
students at the Mind and Language seminar at New York University,
where, allotted a "thinker of the week" slot in three successive years
in 1999-2001, I had the opportunity to present versions of the three
essays in Part V, each of which profited immensely from the intensive
critical scrutiny that forum characteristically provides.
My thanks to Cyrus Panjvani for indispensable help with the
bibliographies, systematisation of references, and proofreading the
typescript; and once again to Anne Cameron and Janet Kirk for its
preparation. David Bemelmans once again did an immaculate job of
copyediting and Marguerite Nesling provided her usual invaluable
help to me in preparing the typescript's final form. My thanks to
Donna Bouvier for her sure guidance through the final stages of proof
correction. The book, which is dedicated to my nine very industrious
and talented St. Andrews graduate students who have attained their
Ph.D.'s during its preparation, has been put together during tenure of a
Leverhulme Research Professorship, and I once again most gratefully
acknowledge the support of the Leverhulme Trust.
ix
Come, sir, arise, away! I'll teach you differences.
Away, away! If you will measure your lubber's length again, tarry:
but away! go to. Have you wisdom? So.
-King Lear, I, iv.