Abstract
Resources of Realism is concerned with current issues in epistemology and philosophical semantics. It defends a causal-realist approach to theories and explanations in the natural sciences and a truth-based propositional semantics for natural language derived from various sources. Among these sources — unusually in this kind of discussion — is the work of William Empson. Norris argues against various forms of anti-realist (or ontological—relativist) doctrine with regard both to the truth-claims of science and to the construal of intentions, meanings, and beliefs in the process of linguistic understanding. He also offers some incisive criticisms of the ‘hermeneutic turn’ in the philosophy of language and science, as well as of those kindred schools of thought that would relativise truth to some cultural context or background horizon of consensus beliefs.
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Notes
William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words, (2nd edn, rev., London: Chatto & Windus, 1969). All further references given by title and page number in the text.
See especially Donald Davidson, ‘A nice derangement of epitaphs’, in R. Grandy and R. Warner (eds), Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends (London: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 157–74.
See for instance the essays collected in W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.), Against Theory: Literary Theory and the New Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985 );
also S. Pradhan, ‘Minimalist semantics: Davidson and Derrida on meaning, use, and convention’, Diacritics, Vol. 16 (Spring 1986), pp. 66–77
and Samuel C. Wheeler, ‘Indeterminacy of French translation: Derrida and Davidson’, in Ernest Lepore (ed.), Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).
Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 2nd edn, rev. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961).
See for instance Noam Chomsky, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (The Hague: Mouton, 1966);
Christopher Norris, William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (London: Athlone Press, 1978).
See especially Davidson, ‘On the very idea of a conceptual scheme’, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (op. cit.), pp. 183–98; also Richard Grandy, ‘Reference, meaning and belief’, Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 70 (1973), pp. 439–52;
Colin McGinn, ‘Charity, interpretation and belief’, Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 74 (1977), pp. 521–35;
Bjorn Ramberg, Donald Davidson’s Philosophy of Language: An introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
On the subject of ‘radical translation’, see W. V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960);
also Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1966); Davidson, ‘On the very idea of a conceptual scheme’ (op. cit.);
David Lewis, ‘Radical translation’, Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1983);
W. H. Newton-Smith, The Rationality of Science (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 163.
See for instance Richard Rorty, ‘The world well lost’, in Consequences of Pragmatism (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), pp. 3–18;
‘Pragmatism, Davidson, and truth’, in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 126–50;
I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Paul Trench Trubner, 1924 );
Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947).
See the essays collected in A. J. Ayer (ed.), Logical Positivism (New York: Free Press, 1953 );
also Friedrich Waismann, ‘Verifiability’ and Isaiah Berlin, ‘Verification’, in G. H. R. Parkinson (ed.), The Theory of Meaning (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 15–34 & 35–60.
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Heath, S., MacCabe, C., Riley, D. (2004). Christopher Norris, Resources of Realism: Prospects for ‘Post-Analytic’ Philosophy (1997). In: Heath, S., MacCabe, C., Riley, D. (eds) The Language, Discourse, Society Reader. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230213340_22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230213340_22
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