Saving the differences

the long version

"A friend reported that Wittgenstein considered taking a line from King Lear, "I'll teach you differences," as a motto for the Philosophical Investigations. The "differences" he had in mind, of course, were not of the etiquette of rank and station, which the Duke of Kent was keen to enforce, but differences in the role and function of superficially similar language games - differences, in Wittgenstein's famous view, that those very similarities encourage us to overlook, thereby constituting a prime cause of philosophical misunderstandings and confusions. Crispin Wright's Truth and Objectivity explored a wide range of such differences to bring about a far-reaching reorientation of the metaphysical debates concerning realism and truth. The essays in this companion volume prefigure, elaborate, or defend the proposals put forward in that work." "Among the papers are important discussions of coherence conceptions of truth, of Hilary Putnam's most recent views on truth, and of the classical debate between correspondence, coherence, pragmatist, and deflationary conceptions of the notion. Others are concerned with Kripke's famous argument against physicalist conceptions of sensation; the distinction between minimal truth-aptitude and cognitive command; a novel prospectus for a philosophy of vagueness; and a new proposal about the most resilient interpretation of relativism."--Jacket.