Crispin Wright

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Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy
Name:	Crispin James Garth Wright
Birth:	December 21, 1942 (Surrey, U.K.)
School/tradition:	Analytic philosophy
Main interests:	philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, Frege, Wittgenstein
Notable ideas:	Rule following considerations, Neo-fregeanism, truth pluralism,
Influences:	Michael Dummett, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gottlob Frege

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 regular visiting professor at New York University (NYU). He has also taught at the University of Michigan, Oxford University, Columbia University, and Princeton University.

One of his best-known works is 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 later to be proven more rigorously by George Boolos and Richard Heck. Wright is one of the major proponents of neo-logicism.

Another important book of Crispin Wright's 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 thing 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.