Critical studies: differences with Wright

"Saving the Differences: Essays on Themes from ‘Truth and Objectivity’ ". By Crispin Wright, Harvard UP, 2003, 9780674010772. This volume collects together Crispin Wright’s papers on realism and its oppositions, from his 1987 Gareth Evans Memorial Lecture, in which the programme of his 1992 book Truth and Objectivity (Harvard UP) was first adumbrated, to papers on aspects of the programme published as recently as 2002. Readers familiar with Truth and Objectivity, and Wright’s earlier collection Realism, Meaning and Truth (Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd edn 1993), will not be surprised to hear that the body of work collected together in Saving the Differences is of the very highest calibre. Wright has been at the forefront of the realism debate for a good quarter-century, and here again we see analytic philosophy at its very best, with traditional philosophical issues tackled in a way that shows how the virtues of the analytic approach – clarity, logical rigour, precision – can be pursued at no expense to profundity or depth. In this study, I shall briefly survey Wright’s programme and the contents of the volume, before raising a few queries that occurred to me in reading through the articles in the book.