Meaning and understanding are not dependent on notions of reference and truth. The ability to successfully involve oneself in the world is not limited by the fact that there is nothing in common between closure and openness.

Closure is a wide ranging account of what it is to be human and our relationship to the world. It begins by expanding ideas that were presented in Lawson’s 1985 book Reflexivity. Lawson sets out a radical new story that responds to the modern crisis of truth, where the possibility of a single true account of the world has been abandoned. Instead of feeling lost in a frenzy of incompatible theories, Lawson argues that the key to making sense of our circumstances and navigating life is to regard the world as open and it is we who through our senses and language close openness and in the process create what we take to be reality.

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Routledge
July 2001
ISBN-10: 0415136504
ISBN-13: 978-0415136501

Hilary Lawson shows himself to be a latter day ‘metaphysician’ on the grand scale…a quite astonishing achievement.
Alan Montefiore
University of Oxford



Its range of reference is exhilarating, and its clarity and argumentative vigour refreshing.
Times Literary Supplement



The closure paradigm could prove remarkably versatile and useful…It will surely become a valuable intellectual resource.
John Ziman
former editor of Nature



Really refreshing…direct, interesting, unpedantic.
Jonathan Ree
Middlesex University



Perhaps the first non-realist metaphysics, it brings out the play between our desire to build a thoroughly organised and regulated world, and our contrary longing for openness and freedom.
Don Cupitt
University of Cambridge