Abstract

It is the contention of this paper that both of these claims are mistaken. Once these misunderstandings have been cleared away, it will be apparent the many objections made to Dummett's view are misplaced. On the other hand, while the net effect of this clearing process is to expose a Dummettian philosophy which is more intrinsically plausible than the one both his friends and foes have previously credited to him, I shall, nevertheless, point out a serious residual complaint to which even the newly revealed Dummettian view is vulnerable. One of the most striking characteristics of Dummett's method is his apparent desire to equate ontological disputes and disputes about the meanings of sentences. Indeed, Dummett can be interpreted as making a four-way conflation. He sometimes seems to take the ontological doctrine of realism and the doctrine that meaning is truth conditions and Realist theories of truth and the doctrine of bivalence as all being, in effect, different names for the same doctrine. But there are also passages in which he is much more circumspect, claiming only that one or another of these doctrines in combination with other premisses would lead one to infer the others.2 But on any interpretation Dummett's arguments against truth

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