ABSTRACT
True-for-me relativism doesn’t work. It is too crude. But the ideas which seemed to nudge us towards it have not gone away: it is just that true-for-me relativism was the wrong conclusion to draw from them. Nothing said so far threatens, for example, the insight that we cannot judge reality except from within some theory or system of beliefs. What we need is ways to reconcile that insight with the possibility of being objectively right or wrong. We need more sophisticated approaches to the question of how our thoughts relate to reality. Two twentieth-century thinkers have made highly influential contributions to this project: Wittgenstein and Quine. In this chapter I will examine some of Wittgenstein’s main ideas.
