Wright’s summary of his book provides us with three things: a helpful way of looking at (i) the difference between realism and a couple forms of anti-realism, (ii) an account of what it might mean to speak of truth as a substantive property, and (iii) a sample of the sort of “pluralism” that will be our topic for the rest of the week. All of these are tied in one way or another to Wright’s “minimalism,” his list of basic features (listed on p. 864) that he takes to be enough to make a predicate count as a truth-predicate.
• Wright frames the dispute between realism and anti-realism in terms of an idea, “superassertibility” (see p. 865) which is analogous to the sort of idealization of warranted assertibility that you have seen in Peirce and in Putanm’s “Realism and Reason” (i.e., Putnam’s ideal theory and Peirce’s idea of what is fated to be agreed in the end). Wright describes two key ways in which a realist might deny that truth and superassertibility are the same.* (Think how close the second sort of realism might be to what Putnam calls “commonsense realism.”)
• Wright sketches two ways in which truth might be made a substantive property on pp. 866f; notice how both concern ways of understanding the idea that truth corresponds to the facts.
• Wright’s pluralism appears on the top of p. 865, but you’ll find a couple of examples of regions or areas of discourse further down the page (in the case of comedy, Wright has in mind assertions like “That’s funny”).
*Wright’s term ‘Euthyphro Contrast’ alludes to the question, considered in Plato’s Euthyphro, whether a given act is loved by the gods because it is pious or pious because it is loved by the gods. The presence of the term ‘because’ shows that this is a question about the order of explanation, and it can be asked even if the pious acts form the same class of acts as do the acts loved by the gods.