page 2 of Understanding Realism

As to the second understanding of thesis A, it seems a commonplace, and an unexceptionable one, that something must serve as the basic nodes of a scheme, to which reference can be made and by which its historico-geographic contours can be mapped; but as we see in the case of our dry goods world, such an ontology is determined by the schemers and their needs, and we live familiarly with any number of sometimes only partially commensurable such schemes, and their vocabularies, in our daily lives: for example, the perceptual scheme of medium sized dry goods, the explanatory schemes afforded by the biological and physical sciences, the folk-psychological scheme of interpersonal interpretation, and the sociological scheme of social explanation. It is a bold thesis which says that any one of these takes, or in a perfected state will take, reductions from any or all the others, or that all are smoothly saved, if we only knew how to recognise it, by a complete description of something else which is ontologically primary. The common sense belief, of course, is that the dry goods world imposes itself on us, rather than we on it, and our scheme carves it at its independently existing joints, because it has to: but we need only remind ourselves of Russell's remark, 'common sense gives rise to science, and science shows that common sense is false', to recognise that whatever A-type thesis we try to evolve from our epistemic needs, it had better not be precisely that one.

The second sense of 'independence', and the one which I argue is genuinely at issue in the 'realism-anti-realism' debate, is epistemic independence. Someone applies such a notion if he holds that that the entities in some realm exist independently of any thought, talk, knowledge or experience of them. Call this thesis B. Often B is expressed in terms of the 'mind-independence' of given entities. When those who discuss realism mistakenly contrast it with idealism, it is clear that they have mind-independence in mind as the chief characteristic of realism. This way of describing realism accords well, however, with more familiar statements of the position in terms of evidence-transcendent truth.

To make out my claim that B is what really matters in the realism debate, and at the same time to locate the issues with respect to more familiar ways of setting them out, I need to widen the scope of the discussion.

The question we are addressing is: what is the realism debate really about? According to the current orthodoxy prompted by Dummett, it is primarily about language, truth and logic, and much careful argument has gone into persuading us that if we think it is primarily about anything else we are misled. The claim is that what chiefly threatens to mislead us is failure to break free of traditional concern with questions about what exists. We should instead see the debate, the orthodoxy tells us, as an opposition between, on the one hand, the view that to understand a sentence is to grasp its truth conditions, where truth and falsity are understood as epistemically unconstrained properties of what we say or think, and on the other hand, the view that to understand a sentence is to grasp its assertion conditions. Much of the discussion about realism and anti-realism has accordingly focussed on these issues.

I agree that metaphysical issues are not primary, but neither it seems to me are semantic issues. In my view what is primary is the epistemological question of the relation between thought and language, on the one hand, and on the other hand the entities or realms of entities over which they range. To demonstrate this I shall use as a foil Dummett's thesis that realism turns on a commitment to a truth-conditional theory of meaning where truth is understood as evidence-transcendent.

Dummett began by thinking that commitment to the principle of bivalence is the hallmark of realism, and its rejection therefore as the hallmark of anti-realism. He later came to hold that bivalence is not sufficient for realism, although it is necessary; what is additionally required is acceptance of a semantic theory setting out the particular classically-based manner in which the statements in a given class are determined as true or false [1]. Rejection of bivalence remains, however, characteristic of anti-realism.

This change of emphasis results from what are now, thanks to the detailed debate, familiar points about why a rethinking of the connection between realism and bivalence is necessary, which show that commitment to recognition-transcendent truth does not entail commitment to bivalence, so that if for other reasons it proves desirable to abandon bivalence, a notion of recognition-transcendent truth nevertheless survives. One can be a realist, in short, whether or not one thinks that there are exactly the two jointly exhaustive truth-values 'true' and 'false'. Dummett's earlier equation of realism with acceptance of bivalence was motivated by the converse relationship, namely the apparent fact that bivalence entails recognition-transcendence; which, whether or not it is right, at least appears plausible. An implication of the detachability of bivalence and recognition-transcendence, however, is that one can have a view of the relation between the truth-values of sentences and the presence or absence of their asserters' capacities to determine what they are, which does not follow automatically from one's choice of semantic principle. This raises questions about the nature of the relationship as Dummett has it, for in his view choice of semantic principle determines the nature of the relationship between the truth-values of sentences and the capacities of language-users to identify them.

Dummett claimed to have noticed that what are often described as two quite different debates, the realism-nominalism and the realism-idealism controversies, in fact share a certain form [2]; and then to have noticed that they share this form with other debates also, for example those which concern the reality of the future and past, mathematical objects, and values [3]. The common feature seemed to be that a realist in any of these different subject areas is committed to bivalence. Dummett argues that to take this commitment as the mark of realism is 'preferable' to treating realism as an ontological thesis, in which the commitment is to the existence of entities of certain sorts, because some species of realism, for example those about the future or ethics, 'do not seem readily classifiable as doctrines about a realm of entities' [4]. On this ground Dummett concludes that 'in every case we may regard a realistic view as consisting in a certain interpretation of statements in some class' (my emphasis) [5].

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