Truth Matters: Realism, Anti-Realism and Response-Dependence

Truth Matters: Realism, Anti-Realism and Response-Dependence Christopher Norris Truth Matters is the first full-length introduction to response-dependence, a topic that has 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 possibily transcend those limits since then we could never acquire or manifest a knowledge of it. While setting out the issues clearly and concisely, Norris also provides some relevant background history to this current debate, including discussion of its sources and analogues in Plato, Locke, Kant and Wittgenstein. His book offers invaluable guidance for student readers in search of a reliable introductory survey of the field. Among those with a more specialist interest it may sometimes provoke disagreement, as when Norris argues that the response-dependence approach often goes along with a disguised anti-realist bias and hence fails to make good on its ‘third-way’ promise. However, its combination of wide-ranging coverage with clarity of focus and depth of philosophical treatment will be welcomed.