Truth Matters

Realism, Anti-Realism, and Response-Dependence

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by Christopher Norris

Edinburgh University Press

Due/Published July 2002, 240 pages, cloth

ISBN 0748615997

Truth Matters offers an introduction to response-dependence, a topic that has lately become a main focus of interest for philosophers across a wide range of disciplines and subject areas. The response-dependence claim, in brief, is to provide a 'third way' between the realist (or objectivist) conception of truth as always potentially transcending the limits of human ascertainment and the anti-realist (or verificationist) case that truth cannot possibly transcend those limits since then we could never acquire or manifest a knowledge of it. Setting out the issues clearly and concisely, Norris also provides relevant background history of the current debate, including a discussion of its sources and analogues in Plato, Locke, Kant, and Wittgenstein.