Austere Realism

Contextual Semantics Meets Minimal Ontology
Erscheinungsjahr 2009
ISBN: 978-0-262-51333-3
Verlag: MIT Press Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 229 Seiten, Trade Paperback, Format (B × H): 153 mm x 227 mm, Gewicht: 300 g

Reihe: Representation and Mind series

A provocative ontological-cum-semantic position asserting that the right ontology is austere in its exclusion of numerous common-sense and scientific posits and that many statements employing such posits are nonetheless true.The authors of Austere Realism describe and defend a provocative ontological-cum-semantic position, asserting that the right ontology is minimal or austere, in that it excludes numerous common-sense posits, and that statements employing such posits are nonetheless true, when truth is understood to be semantic correctness under contextually operative semantic standards. Terence Horgan and Matjaz Potrc argue that austere realism emerges naturally from consideration of the deep problems within the naive common-sense approach to truth and ontology. They offer an account of truth that confronts these deep internal problems and is independently plausible: contextual semantics, which asserts that truth is semantically correct affirmability. Under contextual semantics, much ordinary and scientific thought and discourse is true because its truth is indirect correspondence to the world. After offering further arguments for austere realism and addressing objections to it, Horgan and Potrc consider various alternative austere ontologies. They advance a specific version they call “blobjectivism”—the view that the right ontology includes only one concrete particular, the entire cosmos (“the blobject”), which, although it has enormous local spatiotemporal variability, does not have any proper parts. The arguments in Austere Realism are powerfully made and concisely and lucidly set out. The authors' contentions and their methodological approach—products of a decade-long collaboration—will generate lively debate among scholars in metaphysics, ontology, and philosophy.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Horgan, Terence E. (University of Arizona)

Horgan, Terence E.

Potrc, Matjaz (University of Ljubljana)

Potrc, Matjaž

Weitere Mitwirkende

Putnam, Hilary

Block, Ned

Über Autor(innen)

Horgan, Terence E.
Terence Horgan is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona.

Block, Ned
Ned Block is Silver Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at New York University and was Chair of the Philosophy Program at MIT from 1990 to 1995. He is a coeditor of The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates (MIT Press, 1997).

Putnam, Hilary
Hilary Putnam was Walter Beverly Pearson Professor of Mathematical Logic at Harvard University.

Potrc, Matjaž
Matjaž Potrc is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana.

Matjaž Potrc is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana.