Abstract

The work is organized as six semi-independent essays with an overlapping focus. Its approach is historical as much as topical, exegetical as well as critical and constructive. Its aim is to contribute to our understanding of the connection between thought/language and the reality thought of/described, through a discussion of key texts. Wittgenstein is the central figure in this enterprise. ;In Chapter 1 I isolate the issue of realism with respect to truth from the realism-nominalism and realism-idealism controversies, and argue that a metaphysically rich version of what "correspondence to reality" amounts to is both otiose and fueled by a conception of meaning to be criticized in later chapters. I advocate in its stead a deflationary, pragmatic conception of correspondence. ;In Chapters 2 and 3 I discuss Descartes' Meditations and Wittgenstein's Tractatus as representatives of the traditional, realist view of truth. Both philosophies seek to ground the descriptive space of discourse in a language-independent grid of possibilities, and both invoke shared form as the basis of articulable sense. ;Chapter 4 proposes that the primary aim of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations was to dissolve the intentional nexus previously held to be the fundament of meaning and truth. The view that emerges from my exegesis is that sentences are not representational devices, as the tradition has understood them to be and as the Correspondence Theory of Truth presupposes. In the course of arguing this point, I take issue with Kripke's reading of the Investigations. ;In Chapter 5 I distinguish the semantically relevant notion of truth conditions for sentences of a given language from the notion of structures represented in metaphysical models of the world described by such sentences, and develop the idea that realism rests on a conflation of the two. I argue for the autonomy of our linguistic practices, and try to promote a post-Wittgensteinian, pragmatic conception of metaphysical issues. ;Finally, in Chapter 6 I criticize the irrealism of Nelson Goodman's Ways of Worldmaking. I show that the three arguments offered for his multiple-actual-world thesis rely on views debunked in earlier chapters