Instructor: James Woodbridge
email address: jw79@nyu.edu
Office Hours: M 5pm-6pm, Th 10am-11am
Office: Main Building 503-O
Office Phone: 998-8330
Dept. Phone: 998-8320

Pick one of the following topics, and write a 4-6 page paper completing the tasks assigned.

Your paper is due in my office or mailbox no later than 3pm on Friday, June 1st.

Topics:

1. In Section III (pp. 85-88) of “Putnam’s Pragmatic Realism,” Sosa discusses a metaphysical issue regarding the existence and endurance through time (“perdurance”) of “constituted, supervenient” entities, that is, objects constituted by combinations of sorts of constituent matter and constituent forms. (As a simplified model, think of a snowball as being constituted by a type of stuff—snow—having a particular form—roundness.) The existence and perdurance of such entities is supposed to be a matter of certain criteria being satisfied. In your own words, using your own examples, explain this “broadly Aristotelian” picture of the existence and perdurance of constituted entities. Next, using further examples, discuss the problem of “explosion” that arises. Sosa claims that we are left with three options in the face of this result: Absolutism, Eliminativism, and Conceptual Relativism. Summarize (in your own words) the basic ideas behind each response to explosion, including the central problems each faces. Which response do you think is the most plausible? Give reasons for picking your choice over the other two, and discuss how you would deal with the problems your favored response faces.


2. Contemporary Anti-Realist positions are often presented in terms of an endorsement of an epistemic notion of truth and a rejection of a correspondence notion of truth. Some philosophers (e.g., Sosa and Devitt) have objected to this way of characterizing Anti-Realism, but have they done so for the right reasons? Explain how there is a sense in which the characterization of Anti-Realism described in the first sentence is problematic by considering the requirement that any account of truth must fit with the equivalence schema “(ES) It is true that p iff p” or the (T)-schema “(T) S is true iff p” (where the term that goes in for ‘S’ names the sentence that goes in for ‘p’). How does this constraint bear on the issue of truth involving correspondence to reality? What implications does this have for the possibility of an epistemic conception of truth, in particular, for the idea that the truth is epistemically constrained (i.e., that all truths are knowable)? (You might consider what Devitt and David have to say about the basic idea behind a correspondence theory of truth.) To what extent does this support Sosa’s and (especially) Devitt’s rejections of the characterization of Anti-Realism in terms of truth? Next, explain in detail how the two paradigm epistemic accounts of truth—the pragmatist and coherentist theories—claim both to make truth an epistemic notion and (as Haack and Rescher argue, respectively) to accommodate correspondence to reality. Does this give these epistemic notions of truth metaphysical consequences? What impact does this have on Sosa’s and Devitt’s claims? How independent do you think the issue of Realism vs. Anti-Realism is from the issue of the nature of truth? Give reasons for your position.