Sven Rosenkranz	.
Objectivity and Realism
Meeting the Manifestation Challenge
(Philosophische Impulse; Band 2) 2002, XXX u. 232 Seiten, Brosch. € 34,80 ISBN 3-935025-15-7
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Objectivity and Realism is a realist's response to a philosophical challenge which arises for any conception of truth as minimally objective. The challenge is one of explaining how submission to a standard of objective truth can originate from immersion in a practice, where compliance with the rules of this practice is not an objective matter. Meeting this challenge generates certain definite obligations for a philosophical theory of understanding: if the meaning of a sentence is taken to consist in the conditions for its truth, then the theory must render intelligible how knowledge of what those conditions are, is manifested in the abilities necessary and sufficient for the competent use of that sentence. Specifying what objectivity minimally requires, Sven Rosenkranz develops a theory of understanding meeting this constraint. He goes on to provide a sustained defense of realism on that basis. This defense involves a major dialectical reorientation of the realism/anti-realism debate, in which the argumentative burdens are shifted in the realist's favour. In the course of his argument, Rosenkranz offers original critical discussions of important topics in the philosophy of logic and language and general epistemology such as logical revisionism, Fitch's paradox of knowability, minimalism, assertibilist semantics, inferentialism, Kripke's paradox of dogmatism, belief revision, hypothetical reasoning and its role in inferences to the best explanation, and the connection between causality and empirical knowledge.
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Sven Rosenkranz is Assistant Professor at the Freie Universität Berlin.
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