From Extroverted Realism to Correspondence: A Modest Proposal

Abstract

Once upon a time realists seemed to exhibit an understandable complacency. They had a metaphysics that seemed simple, highly explanatory, and obviously true. And they had a semantics that was formally appealing, was again explanatory, and was harmonious with the metaphysics. They believed that the things they encountered in their lives, including the things they encountered in the pursuit of such intellectual activities as science, existed. And they believed there were important relationships between these things and the languages used to talk about them, which in turn determined if the sentences of their language were true. Sentences were true if there was an appropriate correspondence between the words they contain and the things that exist, and false otherwise. This correspondence provided them in turn with a reason for believing in the existence of other things. If sentences, or truthbearers of any sort, were true, there would have to be things, or truthmakers, in existence to make them true. So realists came to believe in the existence of properties and relations, numbers, sets, certain other abstract entities, and even possible worlds and similar possibilia. But realists can no longer be so complacent. They face a profound threat from without. Instrumentalists, idealists, and anti-realists query the rationality of their realism, and scorn their use of the correspondence theory of truth. And even more disturbing is the fifth column activity of some supposed realists. Some try to purge realism nominalists and others, for instance, deny reality to all but concrete particulars, shunning universals, numbers, and various categories of possibilia. Others drive a wedge between realism and the correspondence theory of truth, either by rejecting the theory altogether or else by making its connection with realism far more tenuous,