Essays on Relativism 2001-2021

The classical Protagorean idea that the idea of absolute truth is an illusion — that there is only 'your truth' and 'my truth', or perhaps 'our truth' and 'their truth' — was until quite recently widely regarded as thoroughly and deservedly discredited. However there has recently been a sea change among professional philosophers in the analytical tradition, with a number of distinguished specialists arguing that, when suitably disciplined and refined, relative truth can play a central and illuminating role in the theory of the workings of a number of important regions of thought and discourse.

Crispin Wright has been a leading protagonist in the resulting debates. The papers gathered here chart the development of his ideas over the last two decades on three interconnected sets of issues in which the renaissance of relative truth has intensified interest:
· the general metaphysics of relativism and whether it has the resources to rebut the traditional objections to it.
· the significance of the “standards-variability” phenomena that seem to afflict ascriptions of knowledge and claims featuring epistemic 'mights' and 'coulds'.
· the challenge to find the best formulation of anti-realism about certain areas of our thought and discourse — taste, humour, or etiquette, perhaps, — in such a way as to make sense of the intuitive idea that disagreement about matters within these areas can be and often is “faultless”.

The overall tendency of the chapters is to call into question the claimed theoretical advantages of 'New Age' relativism. As so often in Philosophy, however, it is the journey rather than the destination from which we learn.

Crispin Wright, Global Professor of Philosophy, New York University

Crispin Wright did his Ph.D. at Cambridge before being elected Prize Fellow (1969) at All Souls College Oxford where he spent the first nine years of his career. He was appointed to the Chair of Logic and Metaphysics at St Andrews in 1978 - at that time the youngest ever appointment to an established chair in philosophy in the UK. At St Andrews, his achievements included appointment (1999) to the first Wardlaw University Professorship and the foundation (1998) and Directorship for its first decade of the research centre, Arché. He is currently Global Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at New York University and Professor of Philosophical Research at the University of Stirling. Previously, he has taught at Oxford, Columbia, Michigan, Princeton, St Andrews, and at Aberdeen from 2009-15 where he held the Regius Chair of Logic and directed the Northern Institute of Philosophy.