Christopher Norris

This article offers a critical perspective on two lines of thought in recent epistemology and philosophy of science, namely Michael Dummett?s anti-realist approach to issues of truth, meaning, and knowledge and Bas van Fraassen?s influential programme of?constructive empiricism?. While not denying the salient differences between them it shows how they converge on a sceptical outlook concerning the realist claim that truth might always transcend the restrictions of some given state of knowledge. The author puts the case that such sceptical arguments, if followed through consistently, must involve giving up all claim to account for our knowledge of the growth of scientific knowledge. He also takes issue with Dummett?s idea of truth as nothing more than a matter of?warranted assertibility? and with van Fraassen?s likewise verificationist conception of empirical warrant as the most we can have by way of epistemic justification. Thus it is wrong to suppose that the realist is merely indulging in a display of? courage not under fire? when she assumes ontological commitments in excess of the observational data. This disavowal of realism in favour of a theory which?saves the appearances? has a less-than-distinguished prehistory in the range of compromise strategies adopted by upholders of a dominant metaphysics or world-view, starting out with the orthodox Catholic attempt to defuse the implications of the heliocentric hypothesis advanced by Copernicus and Galileo. Such theological motives are nowadays not so prominent although? it is suggested fithey do emerge at certain points in Dummett?s writing. More constructively, this article presents a case for objectivism with regard to scientific truth and also for inference to the best causal explanation on both the micro- and the macrophysical scale as the only approach with an adequate claim to make sense of the history of advancements in scientific knowledge to date

In this path-breaking study Christopher Norris proposes a transformed understanding of the much-exaggerated differences between analytic and continental philosophy. While keeping the analytic tradition squarely in view, his book focuses on the work of Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou, two of the most original and significant figures in the recent history of ideas. Norris argues that these thinkers have decisively reconfigured the terrain of contemporary philosophy and, between them, pointed a way beyond some of those seemingly intractable issues that have polarised debate on both sides of the notional rift between the analytic and continental traditions. In particular his book sets out to show - against the received analytic wisdom - that continental philosophy has its own analytic resources and is capable of bringing some much-needed fresh insight to bear on problems in philosophy of language, logic and mathematics. Norris provides not only a unique comparative account of Derrida's and Badiou's work but also a remarkably wide-ranging assessment of their joint contribution to philosophy's current - if widely resisted - potential for self-transformation.

This book brings together three main topics - deconstruction, philosophy of language, and literary theory - that have figured centrally in Christopher Norris's work over the past two decades. It offers a refreshingly clear and vigorous statement of his views as to how ‘theory' might profit from a greater awareness of current philosophical debates while philosophy might likewise gain by adopting a more open-minded attitude toward developments in literary theory. Most significant here is Norris's continuing exploration of the various points of contact between Jacques Derrida's thought and the kinds of concern - especially with issues in philosophical semantics and speech-act theory - that have preoccupied thinkers in the ‘other', mainstream-analytic line of descent. However his focus is consistently on matters that should be of interest to philosophers and literary theorists alike. Thus Norris devotes some penetrating commentary to topics such as modal or ‘possible-worlds' logic as it bears upon issues in narrative theory; the ‘two cultures' controversy; the different ways in which literary theory has alternately embraced and rejected the appeal to ‘scientific' modes of analysis; and some possible reasons for Wittgenstein's well-known aversion to Shakespeare. He also suggests a novel approach to the free-will/determinism issue by way of debates about the nature of language and the scope it affords for expressive creativity despite - or owing to - the limits imposed by various structural constraints. Altogether this important new book provides a welcome overview of the author's current thinking and an equally welcome enlargement of horizons in contrast to the narrowly specialised character of much present-day academic discourse.

This essay responds to Jeff Malpas's foregoing article, itself written in response to my various publications over the past two decades concerning Donald Davidson's ideas about truth, meaning, and interpretation. It has to do mainly with our disagreement as regards the substantive content of Davidson's truth-based semantic approach in relation to the problematic legacy of logical empiricism, including Quine's incisive but no less problematical critique of that legacy. I also raise questions with respect to Malpas's coupling of Davidson with Heidegger, intended to provide a more adequate depth-ontological grounding for the formalized (logico-semantic) conception of truth that Davidson adopts from Tarski. My essay then argues the case for an outlook of objectivist causal realism joined with a theory of inference to the best, most rational explanation that would satisfy this need in more philosophically (as well as scientifically) accountable terms.

Christopher Norris raises some basic questions about the way that academic philosophy has been conducted over the past quarter-century and, in doing so, offers a strong counter-statement to the overly specialised character of much recent work in the analytic mainstream.Topics addressed include speculative realism, the 'extended mind' hypothesis, experimental philospophy, the ontology of political song, Shakespearean language as a challenge to the norms of linguistic philosophy, and anti-realism as a antitode to epistemological scepticism. In many cases Norris shows how the acceptance of prevailing academic codes of discourse has resulted in a narrowing of sights to the point where other, more expansive or philosophically productive approaches are blocked from view.As well as mounting this critique of local practice Norris also puts the positive case that continental philosophy, or certain developments under that broad rubric, may be seen to hold the most promising resources for a creative renewal of analytic thought

Response‐dispositional (RD) properties are standardly defined as those that involve an object's appearing thus or thus to some perceptually well‐equipped observer under specified epistemic conditions. The paradigm instance is that of colour or other such Lockean “secondary qualities”, as distinct from those—like shape and size—that pertain to the object itself, quite apart from anyone's perception. This idea has lately been thought to offer a promising alternative to the deadlocked dispute between hard‐line ‘metaphysical’ realists and subjectivists, projectivists, social constructivists, or hard‐line anti‐realists. A chief source text is Plato's Euthyphro, where the issue is posed in ethical terms: do the gods infallibly approve virtuous acts on account of their divine moral omniscience or are virtuous acts just those the gods approve? Among the areas proposed as amenable to an RD approach are epistemology, ethics, political theory, and philosophy of mathematics. It is claimed that by making due allowance for the involvement of normalised or optimised human responses one can steer a course between the twin poles of an objectivist realism that places truth beyond our cognitive grasp and an epistemic conception that confines truth within the limits of humanly attainable proof, knowledge, or verification. Here I argue—on the contrary—that RD approaches can be shown to offer nothing more than a variant of the same old realist versus anti‐realist dilemma. That is, they work out either as a trivial (tautologous) claim that ‘truth’ simply equates with ‘best judgement’ in the ideal (quasi‐objective) limit or as the claim—advanced by anti‐realists like Michael Dummett—that we cannot form any adequate conception of objective (recognition‐transcendent) truths. After looking at this issue in various contexts of debate, I conclude that one useful (if pyrrhic) outcome is to demonstrate the non‐availability of any middle‐ground stance. We are left with the strictly unavoidable choice between a realist or objectivist approach and one that assimilates truth to the consensus of accredited best opinion. This latter amounts to a roundabout, elaborately qualified version of the anti‐realist case.

This article offers a critical review of various ontological-relativist arguments, mostly deriving from the work of W. V. Quine and Thomas K hn. I maintain that these arguments are (1) internally contradictory, (2) incapable of accounting for our knowledge of the growth of scientific knowledge, and (3) shown up as fallacious from the standpoint of a causal-realist approach to issues of truth, meaning, and interpretation. Moreover, they have often been viewed as lending support to such programmes as the 'strong' sociology of knowledge and the turn towards wholesale cultural-relativist doctrines, whether of the Wittgensteinian ('language-games') or Heideggerian (depth-hermeneutic) varieties. Thus Richard Rorty recommends that we should henceforth drop all that old-fashioned talk of 'truth', 'knowledge', or 'reality', since whatever warrants those descriptions from time to time is just the product of some currently favoured language-game or range of elective metaphors. Such ideas have little in common with Quine's general outlook of robust physicalism, nor again - though the case is less clear - with Kuhn's reconsidered approach to these issues as set forth in his 1969 Postscript to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . However, both thinkers have left themselves open to misconstrual by adopting a sceptical-relativist fallback position in response to the well-known problems with logical empiricism. This essay therefore reviews those problems with reference to alternative, more adequate accounts of what is involved in the process of scientific discovery and theory-change.

In this book Christopher Norris develops the case for scientific realism by tackling various adversary arguments from a range of anti-realist positions. Through a close critical reading he shows how they fail to make adequate sense on any rational, consistent and scientifically informed survey of the evidence. Along the way he incorporates a number of detailed case-studies from the history and philosophy of science. Norris devotes much of his discussion to some of the most prominent and widely influential source-texts of anti-realism. Also included are the sophisticated versions of verificationism developed by thinkers such as Michael Dummett and Bas van Fraassen. Central to Norris's argument is a prolonged engagement with the once highly influential but nowadays neglected work of Norwood Russell Hanson. This book will be welcomed especially by readers who possess some knowledge of the background debate and who wish to deepen and extend their understanding of these issues beyond an introductory level.

_Deconstruction: Theory and Practice_ has been acclaimed as by far the most readable, concise and authoritative guide to this topic. Without oversimplifying or glossing over the challenges, Norris makes deconstruction more accessible to the reader. The volume focuses on the works of Jacques Derrida which caused this seismic shift in critical thought, as well as the work of North American critics Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller and Harold Bloom. In this third, revised edition, Norris builds on his 1991 Afterword with an entirely new Postscript, reflecting upon recent critical debate. The Postscript includes an extensive list of recommended reading, complementing what was already one of the most useful bibliographies available.

Should the truth-value of statements be thought of as epistemically constrained or as determined by objective factors that stand quite apart from our best knowledge, evidence, or powers of conceptual grasp? The anti-realist/realist debate turns ultimately on this disagreement. My article takes its lead from a famous pronouncement by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield to the effect that there are ‘known knowns’, i.e. ‘things that we know we know’; ‘known unknowns’, or ‘things we know we do not know’; and lastly, ‘unknown unknowns’, ‘things we don’t know we don’t know’. Whether Rumsfeld was talking gobbledegook, making some acute logical points, or just pulling the wool with regard to Iraq’s disputed weapons capability is matter for debate. Still, his remarks may be useful for clarifying certain fundamental issues about knowledge and truth, especially in the context of assertions - by anti-realist philosophers such as Michael Dummett - that truth cannot possibly transcend our best powers of proof or ascertainment. On the other hand such scruples may have just the opposite (obfuscating) effect when we are faced with a complex and case-specific question, such as whether or not Iraq truly possessed weapons of mass destruction. My article contends that a wide range of reliably knowledge-conducive procedures, while indeed they fall short of absolute, indubitable truth, nonetheless offer grounds for arriving at a reasoned assessment of the evidence and for not consigning statements of the Dummettian ‘disputed class’ to a limbo of ultimate undecidability.

This book was written with a view to sorting our some of the muddles and misreadings - especially misreadings of Kant - that have charaterized recent postmodernist and post-structuralist thought. For these issues have a relevance, as Norris argues, far beyond the academic enclaves of philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism. Thus he makes large claims for the importance of getting Kant right on the relation between epistemology, ethics and aesthetics; for pursuing the Kantian question 'What is Enlightenment?' as raised in Foucault's late essays; or again, for recalling William Empson's spirited attempt to reassert the values of reason and truth against the orthodox 'lit crit' wisdom of his time. These are specialized concerns. But for better or worse it has been largely in the context of 'theory'- that capacious though ill-defined genre- that such issues have received their most scrutiny over the past two decades. As its title suggests, The Truth About Postmodernism disputes a good deal of what currently passes for advance theoretical wisdom. Above all it mounts a challenge to those fashionable doctrines - variants of the 'end-of-ideology' theme - that assimilate truth to some existing range of language-games, discourses, or in-place consensus beliefs. Norris's book will be welcomed for its clarity of style, its depth of philosophical engagement, and its refusal to endorse the more facile varieties of present-day textualist thought. It will also serve as a timely reminder that the 'politics of theory' cannot be practised in safe isolation from the politics of activist social concern

This book is concerned chiefly with issues in epistemology, philosophical semantics and philosophy of science. 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 them unusually in this context the work of William Empson. It argues against various forms of anti-realist doctrine with regard to both the truth-claims of science and the construal of intentions, meanings and beliefs in the process of linguistic understanding. His book will be welcomed for its vigorous arguments and notable clarity of style. It will be of particular interest to teachers and students in philosophy, critical theory, science studies and the history of ideas.

This Routledge Revival , first published in 1985, gives detailed attention to the bearing of literary theory on questions of truth, meaning and reference. On the one hand, deconstruction brings a vigilant awareness of the figural and narrative tropes that make up the discourse of philosophic reason. On the other it insists that argumentative rigour cannot be divorced from the kind of close reading that has come to characterize literary theory in its more advanced or speculative forms. This present-day ‘contest of faculties’ has large implications for philosophers and critics, many of whom will welcome the reissue of such a clear-headed statement of the impact of deconstruction

In this essay, I offer a critical evaluation of Hilary Putnam's writings on epistemology and philosophy of science, in particular his engagement with interpretative problems in quantum mechanics. I trace the development of his thinking from the late 1960s when he adopted a strong causal-realist position on issues of meaning, reference, and truth, via the "internal realist" approach of his middle-period writings, to the various forms of pragmatist, naturalized, or "commonsense" epistemology proposed in his latest books. My contention is that Putnam's retreat from a full-fledged realist outlook has been prompted in large part by his belief that it cannot possibly be reconciled with the implications of quantum mechanics for our understanding of processes and events in the subatomic domain. However, I suggest, this response should be seen as premature given the range of as-yet unresolved problems with quantum mechanics on the orthodox (Copenhagen) interpretation and also the existence of an alternative account - David Bohm's hidden-variables theory - which perfectly matches the established predictive-observational results while providing a credible realist ontology. I also examine Putnam's case for adopting a nonstandard (three-valued) "quantum logic" in relation to the thinking of other philosophers - Michael Dummett among them - who have espoused a more global or doctrinaire version of anti-realism. I conclude that Putnam's early (causal-realist) position is by no means untenable in light of the various arguments that he now takes as counting decisively against it.

Norris presents a series of closely linked chapters on recent developments in epistemology, philosophy of language, cognitive science, literary theory, musicology and other related fields. While to this extent adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Norris also very forcefully challenges the view that the academic "disciplines" as we know them are so many artificial constructs of recent date and with no further role than to prop up existing divisions of intellectual labour. He makes his case through some exceptionally acute revisionist readings of diverse thinkers such as Derrida, Paul de Man, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, Michael Dummett and John McDowell. In each instance Norris stresses the value of bringing various trans-disciplinary perspectives to bear while none-the-less maintaining adequate standards of area-specific relevance and method. Most importantly he asserts the central role of recent developments in cognitive science as pointing a way beyond certain otherwise intractable problems in philosophy of mind and language.