Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truth which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as (...) we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science. Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Chapter 4 of Being Known outlines an integrated metaphysics and epistemology for the metaphysical—absolute—notions of necessity and possibility. The leading idea is to view the modal status of a proposition as the deliverance of a set of fundamental Principles of Possibility, and our ability to recognise modal status as issuing from an implicit knowledge of these principles. Peacocke aims at a middle way between the extremes of Lewis-style realism about modality and the various—conventionalist, expressivist, Wittgensteinian—forms of non-cognitivism that were prominent (...) in the last century. An attraction of his account is its unified treatment both of a priori logical—more generally, conceptual—necessity and possibility and of a posteriori necessities of essence, identity, origin and constitution, etc. The treatment is ambitious and rich in invention and original detail, but Peacocke professes himself more wedded to the general approach than to the particular development. I shall correspondingly confine my remarks, more or less, to the general approach. (shrink)

The principle of modal ubiquity - that every truth is necessary or contingent - and the validity of possibility introduction, are principles that any modal theory suffers for failing to accommodate. Advanced modal claims are modal claims about entities other than spatiotemporally unified individuals (perhaps, then, spatiotemporally disunified individuals, sets, numbers, properties, propositions and events). I show that genuine modal realism, as it has thus far been explicitly developed, and in so far as it deals with advanced modal claims, cannot (...) accommodate the principles in question. On behalf of the genuine modal realist I motivate and propose a redundancy interpretation of advanced possibility claims and extend that interpretation to the cognate cases of necessity, impossibility and contingency. I then show that the problematic principles as they apply to advanced modal claims can be derived from these interpretations. I show further how the proposed interpretation enables the genuine modal realist to deal with a number of objections that centre on the alleged inadequacy of the genuine modal realist's expressive resources. I conclude that genuine modal realism emerges the stronger for having been shown capable of dealing with advanced modal claims on the basis of no conceptual and ontological resources beyond those it requires to deal with ordinary modal claims. (shrink)

According to the Genuine Modal Realist, there is a plurality of possible worlds, each world nothing more than a maximally inter-related spatiotemporal sum. One advantage claimed for this position is that it offers us the resources to analyse, in a noncircular manner, the modal operators. In this paper, we argue that the prospects for such an analysis are poor. For the analysis of necessity as truth in all worlds to succeed it is not enough that no modal concepts be used (...) in the realist's account of a possible world (a fact we grant); rather, such an analysis will succeed only if the set of worlds that is postulated is complete. By appealing to plausible truths about the number of possible alien natural properties, we show that there are serious difficulties in guaranteeing that such a set exists without taking some modal concept as primitive. Accordingly, at least in its current form, Genuine Modal Realism must curtail its analytic ambitions. (shrink)