Crispin Wright - Böcker

“Providing up-to-date, in-depth coverage of the central question, and written and edited by some of the foremost practitioners in the field, this timely new edition will no doubt be a go-to reference for anyone with a serious interest in the philosophy of language.”Kathrin Glüer-Pagin, Stockholm UniversityNow published in two volumes, the second edition of the best-selling Companion to the Philosophy of Language provides a complete survey of contemporary philosophy of language. The Companion has been greatly extended and now includes a monumental 17 new essays – with topics chosen by the editors, who curated suggestions from current contributors – and almost all of the 25 original chapters have been updated to take account of recent developments in the field.In addition to providing a synoptic view of the key issues, figures, concepts, and debates, each essay introduces new and original contributions to ongoing debates, as well as addressing a number of new areas of interest, including two-dimensional semantics, modality and epistemic modals, and semantic relationism. The extended “state-of-the-art” chapter format allows the authors, all of whom are internationally eminent scholars in the field, to incorporate original research to a far greater degree than competitor volumes. Unrivaled in scope, this volume represents the best contemporary critical thinking relating to the philosophy of language.

The classical Protagorean idea that the idea of absolute truth is an illusion — that there is only 'your truth' and 'my truth', or perhaps 'our truth' and 'their truth' — was until quite recently widely regarded as thoroughly and deservedly discredited. However there has recently been a sea change among professional philosophers in the analytical tradition, with a number of distinguished specialists arguing that, when suitably disciplined and refined, relative truth can play a central and illuminating role in the theory of the workings of a number of important regions of thought and discourse.Crispin Wright has been a leading protagonist in the resulting debates. The papers gathered here chart the development of his ideas over the last two decades on three interconnected sets of issues in which the renaissance of relative truth has intensified interest: · the general metaphysics of relativism and whether it has the resources to rebut the traditional objections to it.· the significance of the “standards-variability” phenomena that seem to afflict ascriptions of knowledge and claims featuring epistemic 'mights' and 'coulds'. · the challenge to find the best formulation of anti-realism about certain areas of our thought and discourse — taste, humour, or etiquette, perhaps, — in such a way as to make sense of the intuitive idea that disagreement about matters within these areas can be and often is “faultless”. The overall tendency of the chapters is to call into question the claimed theoretical advantages of 'New Age' relativism. As so often in Philosophy, however, it is the journey rather than the destination from which we learn.

This book is an important collection of new essays on various topics relating to realism and its rivals in metaphysics, logic, metaethics, and epistemology. The contributors include some of the leading authors in these fields and in several cases their essays constitute definitive statements of their views. In some cases authors write in response to the essays of other contributors, in other cases they proceed independently. Although not primarily historical this collection includes discussions of philosophers from the middle ages to the present day, from Aquinas to Wittgenstein.No one seriously interested in questions about realism, whether as a general philosophical outlook or as a particular position within specific debates, can afford to be without this collection.Contributors: Ian McFetridge, Mark Johnston, John Skorupski, Christopher Peacocke, Michael Williams, Edward Craig, Michael Smith, John Campbell, Peter Railton, David Wiggins, Bob Hale, Simon Blackburn, John Haldane, Crispin Wright

Self-knowledge is the focus of considerable attention from philosophers: Knowing Our Own Minds gives a much-needed overview of current work on the subject, bringing together new essays by leading figures. Knowledge of one's own sensations, desires, intentions, thoughts, beliefs, and other attitudes is characteristically different from other kinds of knowledge, such as knowledge of other people's mental attributes: it has greater immediacy, authority, and salience. The first six chapters examine philosophical questions raised by these features of self-knowledge. The next two look at the role of our knowledge of our own psychological states in our functioning as rational agents. The third group of essays examine the tension between the distinctive characteristics of self-knowledge and arguments that psychological content is externally--socially and environmentally--determined. The final pair of chapters extend the discussion to knowledge of one's own language. Together these original, stimulating, and closely interlinked essays demonstrate the special relevance of self-knowledge to a broad range of issues in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language.

Self-knowledge is the focus of considerable attention from philosophers: Knowing Our Own Minds gives a much-needed overview of current work on the subject, bringing together new essays by leading figures. Knowledge of one's own sensations, desires, intentions, thoughts, beliefs, and other attitudes is characteristically different from other kinds of knowledge, such as knowledge of other people's mental attributes: it has greater immediacy, authority, and salience. The first six chapters examine philosophical questions raised by these features of self-knowledge. The next two look at the role of our knowledge of our own psychological states in our functioning as rational agents. The third group of essays examine the tension between the distinctive characteristics of self-knowledge and arguments that psychological content is externally -- socially and environmentally -- determined. The final pair of chapters extend the discussion to knowledge of one's own language. Together these original, stimulating, and closely interlinked essays demonstrate the special relevance of self-knowledge to a broad range of issues in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language.

Bob Hale and Crispin Wright draw together here the key writings in which they have worked out their distinctive neo-Fregean approach to the philosophy of mathematics. The two main components in Frege's mathematical philosophy were his platonism and his logicism -- the claims, respectively, that mathematics is a body of knowledge about independently existing objects, and that this knowledge may be acquired on the basis of general logical laws and suitable definitions. The central thesis of this collection is that Frege was -- his own eventual recantation notwithstanding -- substantially right in both claims. Where neo-Fregeanism principally differs from Frege is in taking a more optimistic view of the kind of contextual explanation (proceeding via what are now commonly called abstraction principles) of the fundamental concepts of arithmetic and analysis which Frege considered and rejected. On this basis, neo-Fregeanism promises defensible and attractive answers to some of the most important ontological and epistemological questions in the philosophy of mathematics. In addition to fourteen previously published papers, the volume features a new paper on the Julius Caesar problem; a substantial new introduction mapping out the programme and the contributions made to it by the various papers; a postscript explaining which issues most require further attention; and bibliographies both of references and of further useful sources. The Reason's Proper Study will be recognized as the most powerful presentation yet of the neo-Fregean programme; it will prove indispensable reading not just to philosophers of mathematics but to all who are interested in the fundamental metaphysical and epistemological issues on which the programme impinges.

It was well known to the Greeks that the phenomenon of vagueness in natural language gives rise to hard problems and paradoxes, yet more than two millennia passed before Philosophy began to pay any degree of concerted attention to the challenges of vagueness to match the effort expended, for example, on the Liar paradox and its kin. This situation changed dramatically in the last quarter of the twentieth century, when the Sorites paradox in particular began to provoke a dramatic intensification of research and publication. Crispin Wright has been in the international vanguard of the resulting modern debates that have attracted some of the most distinguished contemporary philosophers of logic and language. The Riddle of Vagueness collects together fourteen of Wright's highly influential publications in this field. The chapters together encompass almost half a century of evolving thought on the central problems and challenges which vagueness poses: what exactly is vagueness, what does its pervasiveness in natural language show about the nature of language mastery, is it desirable to modify classical logic and semantics in the face of the Sorites and, if so, what form should the modifications take? Richard Kimberly Heck contributes a substantial introduction to the volume, providing an invaluable summary of these fundamental issues, and an overview and evaluation in depth of the evolving course of Wright's ideas about them.

This volume provides a survey of contemporary philosophy of language. As well as providing a synoptic view of the key issues, figures, concepts and debates, each essay makes new and original contributions to ongoing debate.

This volume, published on the fiftieth anniversary of Wittgenstein's death, brings together thirteen of Crispin Wright's most influential essays on Wittgenstein's later philosophies of language and mind, many hard to obtain, including the first publication of his Whitehead Lectures given at Harvard in 1996. Organized into four groups, the essays focus on issues about following a rule and the objectivity of meaning; on Saul Kripke's contribution to the interpretation of Wittgenstein; on privacy and self-knowledge; and on aspects of Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics. Wright uses the cutting edge of Wittgenstein's thought to expose and undermine the common assumptions in platonistic views of mathematical and logical objectivity and Cartesian ideas about self-knowledge. The great question remains: How to react to the demise of these assumptions? In response, the essays develop a concerted, evolving approach to the possibilities--and limitations--of constructive philosophies of mathematics and mind. Their collection constitutes a major statement by one of Britain's most important philosophers--and will provide an indispensable tool both for students of Wittgenstein and for scholars working more generally in the metaphysics of mind and language.

Crispin Wright's Truth and Objectivity brought about a far-reaching reorientation of the metaphysical debates concerning realism and truth. The essays in this companion volume prefigure, elaborate, or defend the proposals put forward in that landmark work. The collection includes the Gareth Evans memorial lecture in which the program of Truth and Objectivity was first announced, as well as all of Wright's published reactions to the extensive commentary his study provoked; it presents substantial new developments and applications of the pluralistic outlook on the realism debates proposed in Truth and Objectivity, and further pursues its distinctive minimalist conceptions of truth and of truth-aptitude. Among the papers are important discussions of coherence conceptions of truth, of Hilary Putnam's most recent views on truth, and of the classical debate between correspondence, coherence, pragmatism, and deflationary conceptions of the notion. Others are concerned with Kripke's famous argument against physicalist conceptions of sensation; the distinction between minimal truth-aptitude and cognitive command; a novel prospectus for a philosophy of vagueness; and a new proposal about the most resilient interpretation of relativism.

Crispin Wright offers an original perspective on the place of “realism” in philosophical inquiry. He proposes a radically new framework for discussing the claims of the realists and the anti-realists. This framework rejects the classical “deflationary” conception of truth yet allows both disputants to respect the intuition that judgments, whose status they contest, are at least semantically fitted for truth and may often justifiably be regarded as true. In the course of his argument, Wright offers original critical discussions of many central concerns of philosophers interested in realism, including the “deflationary” conception of truth, internal realist truth, scientific realism and the theoreticity of observation, and the role of moral states of affairs in explanations of moral beliefs.

Provides a timely and original contribution to the debate surrounding privileged self-knowledge Contemporary epistemologists and philosophers of mind continue to find puzzling the nature and source of privileged self-knowledge: the ordinary and effortless ‘first-person’ knowledge we have of our own sensations, moods, emotions, beliefs, desires, and hopes. In Expression and Self-Knowledge, Dorit Bar-On and Crispin Wright articulate their joint dissatisfaction with extant accounts of self-knowledge and engage in a sustained and substantial critical debate over the merits of an expressivist approach to the topic. The authors incorporate cutting-edge research while defending their own alternatives to existing approaches to so-called ‘first-person privilege’. Bar-On defends her neo-expressivist account, addressing the objection that neo-expressivism fails to provide an adequate epistemology of ordinary self-knowledge, and addresses new objections levelled by Wright. Wright then presents an alternative pluralist approach, and Bar-On argues in response that pluralism faces difficulties neo-expressivism avoids. Providing invaluable insights on a hotly debated topic in epistemology and philosophy of mind, Expression and Self-Knowledge: Presents an in-depth debate between two leading philosophers over the expressivist approach Offers novel developments and penetrating criticisms of the authors' respective views Features two different perspectives on the influential remarks on expression and self-knowledge found in Wittgenstein’s later writings Includes four jointly written chapters that offer a critical overview of prominent existing accounts, which provide a useful advanced introduction to the subject.Expression and Self-Knowledge is essential reading for epistemologists, philosophers of mind and language, psychologists with an interest in self-knowledge, and researchers and graduate students working in expression, expressivism, and self-knowledge.

The rule-following debate, in its concern with the metaphysics and epistemology of linguistic meaning and mental content, goes to the heart of the most fundamental questions of contemporary philosophy of mind and language. This volume gathers together the most important contributions to the topic, including papers by Simon Blackburn, Paul Boghossian, Graeme Forbes, Warren Goldfarb, Paul Horwich, John McDowell, Colin McGinn, Ruth Millikan, Philip Pettit, George Wilson, Crispin Wright, and Jose Zalabardo. The debate has centred on Saul Kripke's reading of the rule-following sections in Wittgenstein and his consequent posing of a sceptical paradox that threatens our everyday notions of linguistic meaning and mental content. These essays are attempts to respond to this challenge and represent some of the most important work in contemporary theory of meaning. With an introductory essay and a comprehensive guide to further reading this book is an excellent resource for courses in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, Wittgenstein, and metaphysics, as well as for all philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists with interests in these areas.