Author Description

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 STET, and deservedly discredited. However there has been a sea-change among professional philosophers in the analytical tradition, with distinguished specialists arguing that, when suitably disciplined and refined, relative truth can play a central, illuminating role in the theory of the workings 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: (1) the general metaphysics of relativism and whether it can rebut the traditional objections to it; (2) the significance of the "standards-variability" phenomena seeming to afflict ascriptions of knowledge and claims featuring epistemic 'mights'/'coulds'; and (3) the challenge to find the best formulation of anti-realism about certain areas of our thought and discourse - taste, humour, or etiquette, perhaps - so as to make sense of the intuitive idea that disagreement about matters within these areas can be and often is "faultless." Overall, the chapters tend to call into question the claimed theoretical advantages of 'New Age' relativism and to sketch an alternative 'minimalist' account of the function of truth within those discourses where the case for relativism seems most powerful.