Abstract
i. Throughout the long history of the realism-idealism debate, the realist has encountered notorious difficulty in specifying clearly his notion of independence, when he claims that the world is independent of our perceptions and concepts. Michael Dummett has suggested a way that interprets realism as asemantic and epistemological, as much as a metaphysical, thesis.1 For him the realist's claim is that meaning must be defined in terms of truth conditions, and that truth here must be contrasted with verification or warranted assertibility. The realist takes his assertions to state that their truth conditions are satisfied, whether or not we are in a position to tell that they are. The independence in question is the irreducibility of truth to warrant, coupled with the analysis of meaning in terms of truth. Realism in this semantic sense must be thoroughgoing in order to have any plausibility. We cannot be realists about truth but not meaning. We cannot, as some contemporary philosophers seem to suggest,2 analyze meanings as given by justification conditions and then continue to contrast justification with truth. This leads to the absurd result that to assert that x is F is to assert that x is probably F but may not be. Since these assertions are not equivalent, if meaning is to be given by justification conditions, then truth must reduce to warranted assertibility as well. If we accept the antecedent but not the consequent, we must also renounce the equivalence in all but observational contexts between 'It is true that p' and 'p', since the latter would assert only justification conditions and the former truth. The semantic realist denies the antecedent as well as the consequent. Dummett, of course, has challenged the ultimate viability of the more thorough semantic realism. The basic problem for him is to
Published Version
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