Abstract
Simon Blackburn would like to turn what he views as the prevailing tide of metaphysical opinion-the pragmatist, internal realist, minimalist, defiationist, or quietist tide of what he nicely describes as the denial of differences, the celebration of the seamless web of language, the soothing away of distinction.1 While a little unsure of my welcomeand doubtful, actually, how strong the current against us really is I am happy to join him in the water. Truth and Objectivity is dedicated to explaining the kinds of distinction which are rejected by the trend Blackburn deplores. The whole project of the book is the cartography of contourthe characterization of dimensions in which different areas of our thought and discourse might vary and, by so varying, give point to realist and thoughts about them. Blackburn acknowledges this (if maybe a little grudgingly). However he claims a more contoured vision of the metaphysical landscape than mine. I think the image misrepresents our main differences. For whilealthough contesting some of the detailshe broadly applauds the contrasts emphasized in my book, it is not as if there are then additional discriminations which he would have me make. His complaint is not that I draw too few distinctions, but that I draw the wrong distinctions-or mischaracterize distinctions which we agree should be drawn. For instance, he wants to prevent the territory traditionally occupied by expressivist anti-realist proposals from being swallowed up by the minimalism about truth and truth-aptitude advanced in Truth and Objectivity, to reserve space for the idea that the propositional surface of moral language, or conditionals, or talk of probabilities, for instance, may serve to mask the real nature of what is happening in discourses of those kinds. Yet while he regards expressivism, broadly construed, as giving an account of the workings of certain discourses alternative and preferable to the proposal that they are qualified by no interesting feature serving to give point to an intuitive realism about [them]-that [they deploy] minimally truth-apt
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