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)

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 ...

Presented here in a lucid, simple style is an extended defense of a behavioral and direct-realist theory of sense perception. Originally published in 1971. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the (...) rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Presented here in a lucid, simple style is an extended defense of a behavioral and direct-realist theory of sense perception. Originally published in 1971. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich (...) scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

The paper distinguishes between epistemic and ontic divisions of qualities into primary and secondary. It identifies two functions which ontic division has been called upon to fulfill - setting the limits on what a realist philosophy of science must achieve, And providing a means of judging between rival realist philosophies of science. It argues for an interaction pattern criterion of primacy, And concludes that while this enables the first function to be achieved, No primary/secondary distinction can fulfill the second.

One of Hume's most well-known works and a masterpiece of philosophy, A Treatise of Human Nature is indubitably worth taking the time to read.

Edward Wilson Averill By the phrase 'anthropocentric account of color' I mean an account of color that makes an assumption of the following form: two ...

"This admirable volume of readings is the first of a pair: the editors are to be applauded for placing the philosophy of color exactly where it should go, in ...

The thoughts of three philosophers on three topics: meaning, causality, and objectivity, are the focus of this study.

When we open our eyes, the world seems full of colored opaque objects, light sources, and transparent volumes. One historically popular view, _eliminativism_, is that the world is not in this respect as it appears to be: nothing has any color. Color _realism_, the denial of eliminativism, comes in three mutually exclusive varieties, which may be taken to exhaust the space of plausible realist theories. Acccording to _dispositionalism_, colors are _psychological_ dispositions: dispositions to produce certain kinds of visual experiences. According (...) to both _primitivism_ and _physicalism_, colors are not psychological dispositions; they differ in that primitivism says that no reductive analysis of the colors is possible, whereas physicalism says that they are physical properties. This paper is a defense of physicalism about color. (shrink)

Weder historisch noch philosophisch kann man zu nur einer einzigen Unterscheidung zwischen primären und sekundären Qualitäten gelangen. Es gibt vielmehr eine große Zahl von Unterscheidungen, die miteinander vermengt und wie eine einzige behandelt werden, und zwar einfach deshalb, weil man bei der Diskussion des Problems wahllos einige Beispiele herausgreift. In diesem Aufsatz werden zweiundzwanzig solcher Unterscheidungen angeführt, wobei Bezug genommen wird auf Philosophen, die diese Unterscheidungen vertreten haben. Im Anschluß daran wird die Vermutung geäußert, daß der Grund für diesen verworrenen (...) Zustand zum Teil im Fehlen einer plausiblen Theorie der Qualitäten zu suchen sei. Da eine solche Theorie fehlt, ist es nicht verwunderlich, daß die Einteilung von Qualitäten und vermeintlichen Qualitäten in primäre und sekundäre Schwierigkeiten bereitet. (shrink)