Naturalism Without Mirrors

This volume brings together fourteen major essays on truth naturalism expressivism and representationalism by one of contemporary philosophy''s most challenging thinkers. Huw Price weaves together Quinean minimalism about truth Carnapian deflationism about metaphysics Wittgensteinian pluralism about the functions of declarative language and Rortyian skepticism about representation to craft a powerful and sustained critique of contemporary naturalistic metaphysics. In its place he offers us not nonnaturalistic metaphysics or philosophical quietism but a new positive program for philosophy cast from a pragmatist mold. This collection will be essential reading for anyone interested naturalism pragmatism truth expressivism pluralism and representationalism or in deep questions about the direction and foundations of contemporary philosophy. It will be especially important to practitioners of analytic metaphysics if they wish to confront the presuppositions of their own discipline.Price recommends a modest explanatory naturalism in the sense of Hume: naturalism about own linguistic behavior regarded as a behavior of natural creatures in a natural environment. He shows how this viewpoint privileges use and function over truth and reference and expression over representation as useful theoretical categories for the core philosophical project; and thereby undermines the semantic presuppositions of contemporary analytic metaphysics. At the same time it offers an attractive resolution of the so-called placement problems that so preoccupy metaphysical naturalists--a global expressivism with affinities both to the more local expressivism of writers such as Blackburn and Gibbard and to Brandom''s global inferentialism.