page 3 of Understanding Realism

The interpretation in question is described by Dummett in terms of a classical two-valued semantic theory specifying how the semantic values of statements are determined by the values of their parts together with their arrangement. Any theory of meaning based on such a semantics will be a truth-conditional theory which is 'objectivist' about truth, that is, which is committed to a sharp distinction between questions about the truth of a statement and questions about anyone's having grounds for taking it to be true. This means that the plausibility of the semantic theory can be tested by assessing the plausibility of the theory of meaning based upon it. Again familiarly, it is Dummett's contention, as supported by, among other arguments, the 'challenges' over acquisition and manifestation of linguistic competence, that the objectivist-truth-conditional theory of meaning will not do [6].

What is pivotal in this train of reasoning is that it identifies classical objectivist truth as the key to realism. But this, it seems to me, is a mistake. For the notion of truth in play crucially depends on a pair of prior commitments, one metaphysical and the other epistemological; it is these, and especially the latter, which really do the work in what Dummett describes as realism. And when one recognises this, one sees that Dummett has run together quite different issues as 'realisms'. His blanket definition arguably obscures rather than clarifies what is at stake in each of the different debates.

Dummett himself states that the realist conception of statements in some class turns on the idea that their truth-values are settled by knowledge-independent states of affairs. 'The very minimum that realism can be held to involve,' he says, 'is that statements in the given class relate to some reality that exists independently of our knowledge of it, in such a way that that reality renders each statement in the class determinately true or false, again independently of whether we know, or are even able to discover, its truth-value' [7]. The immediate interest in this for Dummett is that such a commitment shows - leaving aside problems of vagueness - that the statements in question are bivalent, because they are selected as determinately true or false by an independent reality which settles the matter without reference to any cognising subject. And this is why he describes realism as a semantic thesis: it is 'a semantic thesis [because it is] a doctrine about the sort of thing that makes our statements true when they are true'. But he goes on to unpack the expression 'sort of thing' in a way which shows that its being a semantic thesis comes courtesy of something else: 'the fundamental thesis of realism, so regarded, is that we really do succeed in referring to external objects, existing independently of our knowledge of them, and that the statements we make about them are rendered true or false by an objective reality the constitution of which is, again, independent of our knowledge' [8].

What this characterisation immediately shows is that the conception of truth at work cannot be understood otherwise than in terms of the logically antecedent metaphysical and epistemological theses which determine its content. The theses are simply stated. First, there is a determinately charactered reality. Secondly, truth-values are properties of statements which they possess as a result of standing in certain definite relations - the usual candidate is some sort of 'correspondence' - to that reality, the relations being external ones as required by the independence constraint; which is, thirdly, that both the reality and the truth-values of what is or could be said about it are independent of any knowledge of either. So the semantic theory (the theory of truth and reference) presupposes the existence of a determinately charactered reality (the metaphysical thesis) which is independent of our knowledge and confers, independently of our means or even our capacity for getting such knowledge, truth or falsity on whatever could be said about it (the epistemological thesis).

This epistemological thesis is in essence a negative one. It says that our conception of reality is in no way constrained by our capacities to know anything about it. More precisely, it says that the knowledge relation is external, contingent and limited; it states (a) that the objects of knowledge can and for the most part do transcend our powers of access to them, and (b) that the sense of remarks about the existence and character of these entities or realms is not governed by considerations relating to our epistemic powers. In the anti-realist view it is the incoherence of (b) which underlies the incoherence of realism, as we shall see later. Among other things it makes realists construe (a) as saying that the independence of objects of knowledge from acts of awareness of them entails the independence of objects of knowledge from knowledge tout court. There is no such entailment: which is the starting point for a story to be told elsewhere [9].

What is claimed or denied about the relevance of epistemic constraints is neutral with respect to finer-grained accounts of what those constraints are. At very least they embody a demand that whatever is required for a conception of some object of discourse, it should lie within the ability of discoursers to get it - with it being allowed that the results of epistemic co-operation, yielding resources which can be shared and distributed courtesy of language, count among discoursers' possessions. Given inherent limitations on individuals' powers of perception, reason and memory - a finitary predicament which imposes narrow boundaries even on what the community of discoursers can do co-operatively, as a whole - that demand is an austere one. It is what identifies our problem in the theory of knowledge: the problem of trying to understand belief-acquisition and justification, given our strategic need for beliefs whose content often exceeds the empirical grounds there can be for holding them.

The negative epistemic thesis has it that we can attribute possession of certain concepts to ourselves without having to provide, or even to possess, grounds for that attribution. It is natural to express this in terms of the meaning of the expressions we use in applying such concepts, not least because the most tractable - and often the only - way of specifying the content of a concept lies in inspecting what we say. But what a theory which takes this route turns on is the prior commitment to there being truth-conferring (and so: meaning-conferring) states of affairs whose existence and character is independent of our knowledge of them; which is why a realist holds that language understanding is not constrained by the terms of some epistemological story.

On Dummett's order of exposition, if one accepts a commitment to bivalence and knowledge-independence of truth-value, one is thereby committed to holding that there is a knowledge-independent reality which makes statements determinately true or false. In this way the thesis about truth and its semantic embedding appears to be the decisive factor. But the logical order of dependence among these commitments is, as the foregoing remarks suggest, the reverse of his order of exposition. The crucial commitment is to there being knowledge-independent states of affairs, for without this view already in place for the semantic thesis to presuppose it, that thesis is empty: we have no other way of characterising the concept of truth required.

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