Recasting important questions about truth and objectivity in new and helpful terms, his book will become a focus in the contemporary debates over realism, and ...

Here, Bob Hale and Crispin Wright assemble the key writings that lead to their distinctive neo-Fregean approach to 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 program and the contributions made to it by the various papers; a section explaining which issues most require further attention; and bibliographies of references and further useful sources. It will be recognized as the (...) most powerful presentation yet of a neo-Fregean program. (shrink)

This is a response to Paul Boghossian’s paper: What is inference?. The paper and the abstract originate from a symposium at the Pacific Division Meeting of the APA in San Diego in April 2011. John Broome was a co-commentator.

This paper addresses three problems: the problem of formulating a coherent relativism, the Sorites paradox and a seldom noticed difficulty in the best intuitionistic case for the revision of classical logic. A response to the latter is proposed which, generalised, contributes towards the solution of the other two. The key to this response is a generalised conception of indeterminacy as a specific kind of intellectual bafflement-Quandary. Intuitionistic revisions of classical logic are merited wherever a subject matter is conceived both as (...) liable to generate Quandary and as subject to a broad form of evidential constraint. So motivated, the distinctions enshrined in intuitionistic logic provide both for a satisfying resolution of the Sorites paradox and a coherent outlet for relativistic views about, e.g., matters of taste and morals. An important corollary of the discussion is that an epistemic conception of vagueness can be prised apart from the strong metaphysical realism with which its principal supporters have associated it, and acknowledged to harbour an independent insight. (shrink)

"Dogmatism" is a term renovated by James Pryor [2000] to stand for a certain kind of neo-Moorean response to Scepticism and an associated conception of the architecture of basic perceptual warrant. Pryor runs the response only for (some kinds of) perceptual knowledge but here I will be concerned with its general structure and potential as a possible global anti-sceptical strategy. Something like it is arguably also present in recent writings of Burge 1 and Peacocke.2 If the global strategy could succeed, (...) (...) it would pre-empt any role in the diagnosis and treatment of sceptical paradoxes for the kind of notion of entitlement (rational, non-evidential warrant) I have proposed elsewhere [Wright 2004]. But my overarching contention will be that Dogmatism is, generally and locally, too problematic a stance to be helpful in that project. (shrink)

This volume, published on the fiftieth anniversary of Wittgenstein's death, brings together thirteen of Crispin Wright's most influential essays on Wittgenstein ...

One of the most important “folk” anti-realist thoughts about certain areas of our thought and discourse—basic taste, for instance, or comedy—is that their lack of objectivity crystallises in the possibility of “faultless disagreements”: situations where one party accepts P, another rejects P, and neither is guilty of any kind of mistake of substance or shortcoming of cognitive process. On close inspection, however, it proves challenging to make coherent sense of this idea, and a majority of theorists have come to reject (...) it as incoherent. There are two significant exceptions in the contemporary literature: relativists often hold it up as something of a coup for their view that it can make straightforward sense of faultless disagreement; and the author of this paper has argued (Wright 2006) that making judicious intuitionistic revisions to classical logic can provide resources that suffice to stabilise the notion. The present paper argues that neither relativism nor intuitionism in fact provides a satisfactory account and indicates how an alethic pluralist framework enables us to do better. (shrink)

Every student of English-speaking analytical metaphysics is taught that the early twentieth century philosophical debate about truth confronted the correspondence theory, supported by Russell, Moore, the early Wittgenstein and, later, J.L. Austin, with the coherence theory advocated by the British Idealists. Sometimes the pragmatist conception of truth deriving from Dewey, William James, and C.S. Peirce is regarded as a third player. And as befits a debate at the dawn of analytical philosophy, the matter in dispute is normally taken to have (...) been the proper analysis of the concept.No doubt this conception nicely explains some of the characteristic turns taken in the debate. Analysis, as traditionally conceived, has to consist in the provision of illuminating conceptual equivalences; and illumination will depend, according to the standard rules of play, on the analysans’ utilizing only concepts which, in the best case, are in some way prior to and independent of the notion being analyzed — or, if that's too much to ask, then concepts which at least permit of some form of explication which does not in turn take one straight back to that notion. (shrink)

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, and José Zalabardo. This 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 every day 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. They examine the notion of meaning; whether it is possible to find a suitable meaning-constituting fact from our previous behaviour or mental histories; objections to, and defenses of, dispositional accounts of meaning; the plausibility of non-factualism about meaning; our attempts to develop non-reductionist accounts of meaning; and the sources of the normativity which attaches to meaning, such as the linguistic practice of the community or the dispositions of the individual. With an introductory essay and a comprehensive guide to further reading the 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. Contributors include Simon Blackburn, Paul Boghossian, Graeme Forbes, Warren Goldfarb, Paul Horwich, John McDowell, Colin McGinn, Alexander Miller, Ruth Garrett Millikan, Philip Pettit, George. M. Wilson, Crispin Wright, and José L. Zalabardo. (shrink)

This is a short, and therefore necessarily very incomplete discussion of one of the great questions of modern philosophy. I return to a station at which an interpretative train of thought of mine came to a halt in a paper written almost 20 years ago, about Wittgenstein and Chomsky,[1] hoping to advance a little bit further down the track. The rule-following passages in the Investigations and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics in fact raise a number of distinct issues about (...) rules, meaning, objectivity, and reasons, whose conflation is encouraged by the standard caption, "the Rule-following Considerations".[2] So, let me begin by explaining my focus here. (shrink)

Crispin Wright; IV*—On Putnam's Proof that We are not Brains-in-a-Vat1, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 92, Issue 1, 1 June 1992, Pages 67–94, h.

The essay addresses the well‐known idea that there has to be a place for intuition, thought of as a kind of non‐inferential rational insight, in the epistemology of basic logic if our knowledge of its principles is non‐empirical and is to allow of any finite, non‐circular reconstruction. It is argued that the error in this idea consists in its overlooking the possibility that there is, properly speaking, no knowledge of the validity of principles of basic logic. When certain important distinctions (...) are observed, for instance that between recognising that Modus Ponenes is sound and recognising that it is proof against the competent discovery of basic counterexamples, the case for thinking that there is indeed no space for genuine recognition of the validity of Modus Ponens becomes increasingly impressive. It is argued however that, the impossibility of knowledge notwithstanding, we are, in an important sense, entitled to take it that Modus Ponens is sound and that this notion of entitlement can help break the trichotomy ‐ intuition, inference, experience ‐ which imprisons our ordinary thinking about logical knowledge. (shrink)

[Crispin Wright] Two kinds of epistemological sceptical paradox are reviewed and a shared assumption, that warrant to accept a proposition has to be the same thing as having evidence for its truth, is noted. 'Entitlement', as used here, denotes a kind of rational warrant that counter-exemplifies that identification. The paper pursues the thought that there are various kinds of entitlement and explores the possibility that the sceptical paradoxes might receive a uniform solution if entitlement can be made to reach sufficiently (...) far. Three kinds of entitlement are characterised and given prima facie support, and a fourth is canvassed. Certain foreseeable limitations of the suggested anti-sceptical strategy are noted. The discussion is grounded, overall, in a conception of the sceptical paradoxes not as directly challenging our having any warrant for large classes of our beliefs but as crises of intellectual conscience for one who wants to claim that we do. /// [ Martin Davies] Wright's account of sceptical arguments and his use of the idea of epistemic entitlement are reviewed. His notion of non-transmission of epistemic warrant is explained and a concern about his notion of entitlement is developed. An epistemological framework different from Wright's is described and several notions of entitlement are introduced. One of these, negative entitlement, is selected for more detailed comparison with Wright's notion. Thereafter, the paper shows how the two notions of entitlement have contrasting consequences for non-transmission of warrant and how they go naturally with two conceptions of the presuppositions of epistemic projects. Problems for negative entitlement are explained and solutions are proposed. (shrink)

The essays in this companion volume prefigure, elaborate, or defend the proposals put forward in that landmark work.

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 paper is a reply to George Boolos's three papers (Boolos (1987a, 1987b, 1990a)) concerned with the status of Hume's Principle. Five independent worries of Boolos concerning the status of Hume's Principle as an analytic truth are identified and discussed. Firstly, the ontogical concern about the commitments of Hume's Principle. Secondly, whether Hume's Principle is in fact consistent and whether the commitment to the universal number by adopting Hume's Principle might be problematic. Also the so-called `surplus content' worry is discussed, (...) which points out that the conceptual resources to grasp Hume's Principle vastly outstrip the conceptual resources employed in arithmetical reasoning. And lastly whether Hume's Principle is in bad company with other unsuccessful implicit definitions. In the last section, an account towards our entitlement to Hume&'s Principle is sketched. (shrink)

§1 To many in or on the edges of the Academy, ”Relativism” is a word with overtones of sinister iconoclasm, representing a kind of intellectual and ethical free-for-all in which the traditional investigative virtues of clarity, rigour, objectivity, consistency and the unbiased pursuit of truth are dismissed as illusory and the great scientific constructions of the last two hundred years, together with our deepest moral convictions, rated merely as ‘our way of seeing’ the world, more elaborate and organised but otherwise (...) on all fours with the cosmology and customs of primitive tribes. In his short book, Paul Boghossian aims to address, and to expose as bankrupt, the idea that there is even a coherent, let alone defensible philosophical stance about truth and knowledge that can underwrite these ‘pluralist’, or ‘postmodernist’ tendencies. But since it is crucial to his project that his style of discussion make it available to non-specialists, much of the recent more technical, less emotional debate within analytical philosophy about relativism’s renaissance as a particular form of semantic theory is passed over unmentioned. Part of my aim in what follows is to illustrate how Boghossian's discussion connects quite straightforwardly with relativism in its contemporary analytical philosophical livery—what I have elsewhere called New Age relativism1— and how some of his critical arguments may be presented in that setting. My main contentions will be, first, that when relativism about epistemic justification, and about morals, are couched in the currently canonical sort of form, they still remain in range of artillery that Boghossian positions in chapter 6 of his book; second, that there is evasive action that they can.. (shrink)