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 ...

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)

A common first reaction to expressivist and quasi-realist theories is the thought that, if these theories are right, there's some objectionable sense in which we can't be wrong about morality. This worry turns out to be surprisingly difficult to make stick - an account of moral error as instability under improving changes provides the quasi-realist with the resources to explain many of our concerns about moral error. The story breaks down, though, in the case of fundamental moral error. This is (...) where the initial worry finally sticks - quasi-realism tells me that I can't be fundamentally wrong about morality, though others can. (shrink)

The question at issue is whether moral defects of artworks can be aesthetic defects. Noël Carroll claims they can be, Berys Gaut claims they are, and James Anderson and Jeffrey Dean claim they are not. I side with Anderson and Dean and produce additional arguments against Carroll and Gaut. Triumph of the Will serves as an example that all five of us agree is a morally flawed artwork. I argue and conclude that its horrible moral defects are not aesthetic ones. (...) Its triumph is the sum total of its aesthetic merits. (shrink)