Naturalism without mirrors

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Bibliographic Information

Naturalism without mirrors

Huw Price

Oxford Univeristy Press, c2011

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. 323-328) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

This volume brings together fourteen major essays on truth, naturalism, expressivism and representationalism, by one of contemporary philosophy's most challenging thinkers. Huw Price weaves together Quinean minimalism about truth, Carnapian deflationism about metaphysics, Wittgensteinian pluralism about the functions of declarative language, and Rortyian skepticism about representation to craft a powerful and sustained critique of contemporary naturalistic metaphysics. In its place, he offers us not nonnaturalistic metaphysics, or philosophical quietism, but a new positive program for philosophy, cast from a pragmatist mold. This collection will be essential reading for anyone interested naturalism, pragmatism, truth, expressivism, pluralism and representationalism, or in deep questions about the direction and foundations of contemporary philosophy. It will be especially important to practitioners of analytic metaphysics, if they wish to confront the presuppositions of their own discipline. Price recommends a modest explanatory naturalism, in the sense of Hume: naturalism about own linguistic behavior, regarded as a behavior of natural creatures in a natural environment. He shows how this viewpoint privileges use and function over truth and reference, and expression over representation, as useful theoretical categories for the core philosophical project; and thereby undermines the semantic presuppositions of contemporary analytic metaphysics. At the same time, it offers an attractive resolution of the so-called "placement problems", that so preoccupy metaphysical naturalists-a global expressivism, with affinities both to the more local expressivism of writers such as Blackburn and Gibbard, and to Brandom's global inferentialism.

Table of Contents

  • PREFACE
  • 1. Moving the Mirror Aside
  • 2. Metaphysical Pluralism
  • 3. Semantic Minimalism and the Frege Point
  • 4. Two Paths to Pragmatism
  • 5. How to Stand Up for Noncognitivists
  • 6. Naturalism and the fate of the M-Worlds
  • 7. Ramsey On Saying And Whistling: A Discordant Note
  • 8. Truth As Convenient Friction
  • 9. Naturalism Without Representationalism
  • 10. Immodesty Without Mirrors-Making Sense of Wittgenstein's Linguistic Pluralism
  • 11. . Pragmatism, Quasi-realism and the Global Challenge
  • 12. The Semantic Foundations of Metaphysics
  • 13. Metaphysics After Carnap: the Ghost Who Walks?
  • 14. One Cheer for Representationalism?
  • NOTES
  • BIBLIOGRAPHY

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