ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book is concerned with the negative task of showing how philosophical theoreticism runs the permanent risk of epistemic neurosis and with the positive, "therapeutic" task of trying to redescribe some traditional problems of epistemology in a way that avoids theoreticism and its accompanying psycho-philosophical disorders. Philosophers have often thought that concepts such as "knowledge" and "truth" are appropriate objects for theoretical investigation. Understanding what truth and knowledge are consists in understanding the functions that the terms truth and knowledge play in epistemic practices. It is the complexity and variety of their functions that make truth and knowledge look like theoretical objects with hidden natures. The causal theorist wants to explain how truth can be a correspondence between language and the world by reducing reference to an external, causal relation.
