Reply to Crispin Wright and Richard Zach

I am very grateful to Crispin Wright and Richard Zach for their thoughtful and penetrating comments on my book, The Boundary Stones of Thought (henceforth BST; unadorned page numbers below refer to this volume). The author of any reasonably long philosophical work will feel more confident in some of his claims than in others, and in studying Wright’s and Zach’s essays I have been struck by how often they home in on elements which gave me most trouble when writing the book and of which I was least certain having finished it. While that makes the job of defending my position harder, it is in one important respect comforting, for it suggests that the book was sufficiently clearly written to have enabled this meeting of minds. In a symposium of this kind, there can be few things more depressing than for the author to have to write: ‘X attributes to me such-and-such an argument, but what I really meant was instead this’. Thankfully, very little of that will be needed here. While Wright and Zach focus on different parts of BST (Zach on Chapters 6–8, Wright on Chapters 9 and 10), there are many thematic connections between their commentaries. Rather than give separate replies, then, I shall address the relevant topics in the order in which they appear in my book, dealing (as I hope) with all their main points as I go