Paul Horwich

“Tell me," Wittgenstein once asked a friend, "why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?” What would it have looked like if we looked at all sciences from the viewpoint of Wittgenstein’s philosophy? Wittgenstein is undoubtedly one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His complex body of work has been analysed by numerous scholars, from mathematicians and physicists, to philosophers, linguists, and beyond. This volume brings together some of his central perspectives as applied to the modern sciences and studies the influence they may have on the thought processes underlying science and on the world view it engenders. The contributions stem from leading scholars in philosophy, mathematics, physics, economics, psychology and human sciences; all of them have written in an accessible style that demands little specialist knowledge, whilst clearly portraying and discussing the deep issues at hand.

This chapter focuses on the principle, ‘We ought to want our beliefs to be true and ought not-want them to be false’. Horwich aims (a) to confirm that this candidate for our directly instructive belief-truth norm is preferable to certain tempting alternatives; (b) to argue for its being conceptually more basic than (but equivalent to) the norm of correctness; (c) to show that it’s also prior to the desirability of knowledge; (d) to address the question of why it holds; (e) to suggest that it not be construed as a pragmatic principle; (f) to propose instead that it be given a moral interpretation; (g) to resist the idea that it helps constitute either our concept of truth or our concept of belief; (h) to examine its place in epistemology—specifically, its relationship to norms of justification; and (i) to answer the surprisingly difficult question of how a respect for it is manifested in epistemic behaviour.

This chapter defines a paradox, roughly and superficially, as an assembly of apparently reasonable considerations that engender conflicting inclinations about what to believe, and hence a form of cognitive tension. By way of illustration, it examines various philosophical paradoxes—concerning knowledge, motion, freedom, evidence, non-existence, truth, normative facts, and vagueness. In light of these examples, the relative merits of three competing theories of the nature and meta-philosophical import of paradox are discussed: one suggested by Schiffer, which blames paradoxes on “glitch” concepts; a second diagnosis, due to Wittgenstein, which stresses irrationally stubborn, scientistic over-generalization; and a third—pinned on Quine—in which the causes of paradox are conflicts amongst our fundamental habits of reasoning.

Inspired by Wittgenstein’s discussion in paragraphs 138 to 242 of the _Philosophical Investigations_, Saul Kripke devised a widely discussed line of argument that questions the reality of meaning, and this chapter offers a further examination of that account. It focuses on the philosophical plausibility of its central contentions. Objections are made to its implicit inflationism about reference and truth, to its failure to acknowledge a naturalistically respectable conception of ‘ideal law’, and to its confusions over ‘guidance’ and ‘normativity.’ But this critical appraisal—since it comes from what the text takes to be Wittgenstein’s perspective—will also reveal the substantial extent to which Kripke’s Wittgenstein diverges from Wittgenstein himself.

This essay comprises six sections. Section 1 contrasts deflationary accounts of truth with traditional theories. Section 2 evaluates two deflationary views: (i) my use-theoretic Minimalism, which holds that the meaning of ‘true’ lies in speakers’ tendency to accept the Equivalence Schema: ‘The proposition that p is true ↔ p’; and (ii) Wolfgang Künne's definition of ‘x is true’ as ‘(Ep)(x = & p)’, which quantifies into sentence position, departing from classical logic. Section 3 addresses Sten Lindström's critique of Minimalism, arguing it is inadequate. Section 4 raises a challenge to both accounts: whether they can accommodate the plausible idea that some untranslatable statements may still be true. Section 5 examines a paradox stemming from applying the Equivalence Schema to self-referential denials of truth. Finally, Section 6 responds to questions from the 2024 Vienna workshop on truth, which prompted this special issue.

Thomas Kuhn is viewed as one of the most influential (and controversial) philosophers of science, and this re-release of a classic examination of one of his seminal works reflects his continuing importance. In _World Changes,_ the contributors examine the work of Kuhn from a broad philosophical perspective, comparing earlier logical empiricism and logical positivism with the new philosophy of science inspired by Kuhn in the early 1960s. The nine chapters offer interpretations of his major work _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ and subsequent writings. The introduction outlines the significant concepts of Kuhn's work that are examined and is followed by a brief appraisal of Kuhn by Carl Hempel. The chapters discuss topics that include: a systematic comparison of Kuhn and Carnap viewing similarities and differences; the disputation of absolute truth; rational theory evaluation and comparison; applying theory to observation and the relation of models in a new conceptualization of theory content; and interpreting Kuhn's plurality-of-worlds thesis. The volume also presents four historical papers that speak to Kuhn's views on lexical structures and concept-formation and their antecedents. The afterward, by Kuhn himself, reviews his own philosophical development, his thoughts on the dynamics of scientific growth, and his response to issues raised by the contributors and other interpreters of his work.

Time is generally thought to be one of the more mysterious ingredients of the universe. In this intriguing book, Paul Horwich makes precise and explicit the interrelationships between time and a large number of philosophically important notions.Ideas of temporal order and priority interact in subtle and convoluted ways with the deepest elements in our network of basic concepts. Confronting this conceptual jigsaw puzzle, Horwich notes that there are glaring differences in how we regard the past and future directions of time. For example, we can influence the future but not the past, and can easily gain knowledge of the past but not of the future. Moreover we see a profusion of decay processes but little spontaneous generation of order; time appears to "flow" in one privileged direction, not the other; and we tend to explain phenomena in terms of antecedent circumstances, rather than subsequent ones. Horwich explains such time asymmetries and examines their bearing on the nature of time itself.Asymmetries in Time covers many notoriously difficult problems in the philosophy of science: causation, knowledge, entropy, explanation, time travel, rational choice (including Newcomb's problem), laws of nature, and counterfactual implication -- and gives a unified treatment of these matters. The book covers an unusually broad range of topics in a lucid and nontechnical way and includes alternative points of view in the philosophical literature.

The aim of this work is to demystify linguistic meaning—to characterize the underlying nature of this phenomenon in such a way that its familiar attributes become intelligible. To that end, one must consider whether a word's meaning derives from what it refers to, from the way it was defined, from some associated mental image, from its evolutionary function, from a prototype structure, from an inferential role, or from something else. The basic strategy adopted here for answering this question is to scrutinize a range of general features of meaning that have often been thought to provide clues to its origin—facts concerning the relationships between meaning and understanding, truth, a priori knowledge, complex expressions, what ought to be said, and actual word usage. It is a striking result, however, that only the last of these characteristics proves to be capable of guiding us towards a theory of how meaning arises: namely, that all our particular applications of a given word result, in part, from what we mean by it. This characteristic is explained—and can only be explained—by the theory presented here, whereby meaning properties are reduced to law‐like regularities of word use. More specifically, the theory is that each word means what it does in virtue of the fact that a certain ‘acceptance property’ of the word is explanatorily fundamental vis‐à‐vis its overall deployment (where an ’acceptance property’ specifies conditions in which designated sentences containing the word are held true). This proposal is forced to confront a formidable barrage of objections; but in each case an adequate reply is shown to be available.

Paul Horwich gives the definitive exposition of a prominent philosophical theory about truth, `minimalism'. His theory has attracted much attention since the first edition of Truth in 1990; he has now developed, refined, and updated his treatment of the subject, while preserving the distinctive format of the book. This revised edition appears simultaneously with a new companion volume, Meaning; the two books demystify central philosophical issues, and will be essential reading for all who work on the philosophy of language.

Pragmatists have traditionally been enemies of representationalism but friends of naturalism, when naturalism is understood to pertain to human subjects, in the sense of Hume and Nietzsche. In this volume Huw Price presents his distinctive version of this traditional combination, as delivered in his René Descartes Lectures at Tilburg University in 2008. Price contrasts his view with other contemporary forms of philosophical naturalism, comparing it with other pragmatist and neo-pragmatist views such as those of Robert Brandom and Simon Blackburn. Linking their different 'expressivist' programmes, Price argues for a radical global expressivism that combines key elements from both. With Paul Horwich and Michael Williams, Brandom and Blackburn respond to Price in new essays. Price replies in the closing essay, emphasising links between his views and those of Wilfrid Sellars. The volume will be of great interest to advanced students of philosophy of language and metaphysics.