Wright Introduction
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What is it?
Crispin Wright’s sketch of the realism battlefield. It’s of particular relevance as he has directly responded to Dummett.
Where can it be found?
Wright, C. Realism, Meaning & Truth, 2nd ed.
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Summary
- Realism: — able to form the right concepts re: features of the world — can come to know true statements about the world (involving the above concepts)
- Scepticism: doesn’t dispute existence, rather ability to grasp truths.
- Idealism: realist misunderstands nature of truth, it is all of our own making.
- Dummett as still concerned with misunderstandings re: truth but not in all cases.
- at issue: can truth transcend evidence?
- how does this connect to traditional realist debates? — i.e. how does it lead to a questioning of the fit of our beliefs with the world? — seems we can have this fit without transcendence
- Dummett: key point is that realist believes in unrestricted bivalence. — how then is the realist to account for vagueness? — doesn’t seem they can, so perhaps a more reasonable characterisation of the realist is via their belief in evidence-transcendence (ET) with bivalence coming in when vagueness is not an issue? — [[crimson [I don’t know this book but] surely that last point must be right: nobody believes in totally unrestricted bivalence. Nobody believes that “(blibble) v ( ~ blibble)”. Jason ]]
- but not at all clear that scientific realist is stuck with ET — [[crimson But since “scientific realist” means something different from “realist”, that MIGHT not help. Or it might help, if you mean a particularly strong kind of scientific realist who is like a traditional realist. Or if scientific realism is what you’re concerned with. (Not sure whether “you” is Wilcox or Wright. Either way.) Jason ]]
- 3 kinds of objectivity: — truth: may have intelligibility without having cognitive capacity to determine truth-value — meaning: meaning of a statement as a real constraint — note: obj truth => obj meaning but maybe not <= — judgement: statements that are attempting to deal with independent features of the world (i.e. outcome of judgements not entirely determined by the judge) — again obj truth => obj judgement
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What do I think?
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