Crispin Wright: Truth and Objectivity

Abstract

Wright says that any predicate which certain platitude-sustaining features, F, deserves to count as a truth predicate, and this position thus at least in principle open to the possibility of a pluralist view of truth: there may be a variety of notions ... which pass the test (25). What impact should this view have on Wright's account of the English predicate true? One possibility is that it opens the door to treating it as ambiguous: perhaps someone who, operating within Wright's framework, is an anti-realist for one discourse and a realist for another should believe that the sense of true as it occurs in the one is the least that does justice to F, whereas the sense of true as it occurs in the other is meatier. I believe that Wright's text sometimes' suggests that this is his view. However, I shall show that no damage would be done to his central theses by rejecting this position, that there is no need for him to adopt it, and that he does better not to. This is intended as a minor friendly emendation (or perhaps clarification). It is one thing for a tree to exist, another for a sensation to exist, and yet another for a number to exist (or so I shall suppose). Would any of these supposedly constitutive differences show that is ambiguous, perhaps meaning, respectively, has spatial and temporal location, has temporal location and has platoplasmic location? Of course not: we get a better explanation of why different kinds of filling in the schema what is it for a ... to exist? deserve different kinds of answer by attending to the differences in the filling. We have no need to appeal to a shift of sense of exist. If we did make the needless appeal, we would still have to invoke the (putative) fundamental differences between trees, sensations and numbers in order to explain how it is that English-speakers cannot hear such assertions as A tree exists which weighs more than a ton as trivially false: in this context, they

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