AbstractThe chapter focuses on so-called disputes of inclination, such as a dispute over whether something is delicious or attractive or funny or exciting. The ‘ordinary view’ of such disputes is that they involve the following three key elements: that the parties can have genuinely incompatible attitudes, that no one need be mistaken, and that both sides can rationally maintain their position in the face of the disagreement. It is argued that the naturalness of the ordinary view for a wide range of subject matters is what provides the root attraction of relativism. Moreover, disputes of this sort, and the ordinary view of them, arise in more philosophically interesting cases, as well: over what is right or wrong, or what is justified or not, for example. Therefore, understanding whether the ordinary view of these disputes is indeed coherent, and what sort of theory of truth it entails, stands to help us understand similar disputes in ethics or epistemology. After pointing out that the three elements of the ordinary view are in manifest tension with one another, the chapter canvasses and rejects several ways of resolving this tension. It then suggests a novel solution to the problem; one arising out of the position that truth can itself come in different forms. If this is so, then one is free to understand truth in some domains—such as the domains that give rise to disputes of inclination—as superassertibility or sustained justification without defeaters. Suitably understood and applied, superassertibility can be invoked to explain a defensible, albeit local, relativism about truth.

It is only in fairly recent philosophy that psychological self-knowledge has come to be seen as problematical; once upon a time the hardest philosophical difficulties all seemed to attend our knowledge of others. But as philosophers have canvassed various models of the mental that would make knowledge of other minds less intractable, so it has become unobvious how to accommodate what once seemed evident and straightforward – the wide and seemingly immediate cognitive dominion of minds over themselves.

Philosophy and Phenomenological ResearchVolume 92, Issue 1 p. 189-196 Book Symposium Assessment-Sensitivity: The Manifestation Challenge Crispin Wright, Crispin Wright New York University and University of StirlingSearch for more papers by this author Crispin Wright, Crispin Wright New York University and University of StirlingSearch for more papers by this author First published: 11 January 2016 https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12262Citations: 3Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume92, Issue1January 2016Pages 189-196 RelatedInformation

Introduction by Crispin Wright Translators' Introduction Frege: Basic Laws of Arithmetic, volumes I and II. Translators' Notes Bibliography Appendix by Roy T. Cook Index

Abstract We can be pretty brisk with the basics. Paul Benacerraf famously wondered how any satisfactory account of mathematical knowledge could combine a face-value semantic construal of classical mathematical theories, such as arithmetic, analysis and set-theory — one which takes seriously the apparent singular terms and quantifiers in the standard formulations — with a sensibly naturalistic conception of our knowledge-acquisitive capacities as essentially operative within the domain of causal law. The problem, very simply, is that the entities apparently called for by the face-value construal — finite cardinals, reals and sets — do not, seemingly, participate in the causal swim. A refinement of the problem, due to Field, challenges us to explain what reason there is to suppose that our basic beliefs about such entities, encoded in standard axioms, could possibly be formed reliably by means solely of what are presumably naturalistic belief-forming mechanisms. These problems have cast a long shadow over recent thought about the epistemology of mathematics.

AbstractThis article focuses on issues which neo-Fregeanism must address, even if the scope of its leading claims is restricted to elementary arithmetic. Many of these concern the capacity of abstraction principles—centrally, but not only, Hume's Principle itself—to discharge the implicitly definitional role in which the neo-Fregean casts them, and thereby to subserve a satisfactory apriorist epistemology for (at least part of) mathematics. Others concern the other main assumption that undergirds the specifically logicist aspect of the neo-Fregean project (and equally, of course, Frege's original project): that the logic to which abstraction principles are to be adjoined may legitimately be taken to include higher-order—at the very least, second-order—logic without compromise of the epistemological purposes of the project.

The paper explores, in the light of recent discussions by Sider, Eklund, Hawley, Cameron and others, what if any ‘metaontology’ is helpful to, or demanded by, the epistemological and ontological role of abstraction principles when they are applied to the foundational purposes of 'neo-Fregeanism' in the philosophy of mathematics.

In ‘What is wrong with abstraction’, Michael Potter and Peter Sullivan explain a further objection to the abstractionist programme in the foundations of mathematics which they first presented in their ‘Hale on Caesar’ and which they believe our discussion in The Reason's Proper Study misunderstood. The aims of the present note are: To get the character of this objection into sharper focus; To expl...

The central contentions of this paper are two:first, that contextualism about knowledge cannot fulfil the eirenic promise which, for those who are drawn to it, constitutes, I believe, its main attraction; secondly, that the basic diagnosis of epistemological scepticism as somehow entrapping us, by diverting attention from a surreptitious shift to a special rarefied intellectual context , rests on inattention to the details of the principal sceptical paradoxes. These contentions are consistent with knowledge-contextualism, of some stripe or other, being true. What follows will not bear directly on that.

Abstract Anyone must agree that vagueness pervades the lexicon of natural languages: almost everything we say is expressed in vague vocabulary. It is a little more controversial, but presumably true, that this is unavoidable: that a language stripped of vague expressions would suffer not merely in point of usefulness— often a vague judgement is exactly what we need—but in its very expressive power. (We need concepts, for instance, of rough impressions, of casual appearances, and of circumstances in which a precise predicationsay, “is more than six feet tall”—may justifiably be made on the basis of rough—and— ready observation; and we need to be able to express these concepts.) 'This makes vagueness a topic of central philosophical significance in at least two ways. Both the philosophy of languagein so for as it is concerned with what it is, at the most general level, to have mastery of a natural language—and the metaphysics of the relationship between natural languages and the world they serve to represent must demand an understanding of the nature of vagueness.

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 recognizing that Modus Ponens 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.

Preface I. Realism Reconfigured 1. Precis of Truth and Objectivity 2. Realism, Anti-Realism, Irrealism, Quasi-Realism II. Replies to Critics 3. Response to Jackson 4. Realism, Pure and Simple? A Reply to Williamson 5. Responses to Commentators: Van Cleve, Horwich, Pettit, Horgan, Sainsbury, Williamson 6. Comrades against Quietism III. Ethics 7. Moral Values, Projection and Secondary Qualities 8. Truth in Ethics IV. Truth 9. Truth as Coherence 10. Truth: A Traditional Debate Reviewed 11. Truth as Sort of Epistemic: Putnam's Peregrinations 12. Minimalism and Deflationism V. Response-Dependence and Cognitive Command 13. The Conceivability of Naturalism 14. What Could Anti-Realism about Ordinary Psychology Possibly Be? 15. On Being in a Quandary: Relativism, Vagueness, Logical Revisionism References Additional Readings Credits Index