Crispin Wright

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Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy

Name	Crispin James Garth Wright
Birth	December 21, 1942 Surrey, England
School/tradition	Analytic
Main interests	Philosophy of mind Philosophy of language Philosophy of mathematics Frege · Wittgenstein Epistemology
Notable ideas	Rule-following considerations Neo-Fregeanism · Truth pluralism
Influenced by	Ludwig Wittgenstein · Gottlob Frege Michael Dummett

Crispin Wright (born 1942) is a British philosopher, who has written on neo-Fregean philosophy of mathematics, Wittgenstein's later philosophy, and on issues related to truth, realism, cognitivism, skepticism, knowledge, and objectivity. He is Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of St. Andrews, and, as of fall 2008, professor at New York University (NYU), though he will also continue to teach at the University of St. Andrews. He has also taught at the University of Michigan, Oxford University, Columbia University, and Princeton University.

Crispin Wright is founder and director of Arché (research center).

In the philosophy of mathematics, he is best-known for his book Frege's Conception of Numbers as Objects (1983), where he argues that Frege's logicist project could be revived by removing the Principle of Unrestricted Comprehension (sometimes referred to as Basic Law V) from the formal system. Arithmetic is then derivable in second-order logic from Hume's principle. He gives informal arguments that (i) Hume's principle plus second-order logic is consistent, and (ii) from it one can produce the Dedekind–Peano axioms. Both results were proven informally by Gottlob Frege (Frege's Theorem), and would later be more rigorously proven by George Boolos and Richard Heck. Wright is one of the major proponents of neo-logicism, alongside his frequent collaborator Bob Hale.

In general metaphysics, his most important work is Truth and Objectivity (Waynflete Lectures given at Oxford), Cambridge, MA, 1992. He argues in this book that there need be no single, discourse-invariant context in which truth consists, making an analogy with identity. There need only be some principles regarding which the truth predicate can be applied to a sentence, some 'platitudes' about true sentences. Wright also argues that in some contexts, probably including moral contexts, superassertibility will effectively function as a truth predicate. He defines a predicate as superassertible if it is assertible in some state of information and then remains so no matter how that state of information is enlarged upon or improved. Assertibility is warrant by whatever standards inform the discourse in question.

Many of his most important papers in philosophy of language, epistemology, philosophical logic, meta-ethics, and the interpretation of Wittgenstein have been collected in two volumes published by Harvard University Press.