page 4 of Understanding Realism

If we adhere to Dummett's formulation, in which acceptance of bivalence and knowledge-independence of truth-value commits us to the existence of a knowledge-independent reality, we have indeed thereby identified what that acceptance entails as to its theoretical underpinning. But there is no converse entailment. It may be natural, but it is not obligatory, for someone to hold the metaphysical and epistemological doctrines in question, and also to hold the view about truth which Dummett says is the mark of realism. But it is open to someone to hold those metaphysical and epistemological doctrines and to make different moves over truth: for one example, to deny that truth is a property conferred on what we assert by the reality so conceived; or, for another, to deny bivalence. And someone might do this latter even if he accepted that truth is recognition-independent and is so because it is conferred by a knowledge-independent reality.[10] At the same time, it is clear that what a philosophical doctrine of realism seeks to preserve from our ordinary beliefs about the nature of reality is precisely what is conveyed by the metaphysical and epistemological theses which give natural but not inevitable rise to the view of truth in question. Given this, it is hard to resist the view that the metaphysics and especially epistemology of the matter are fundamental.

One explanation of the apparent pressure to think otherwise comes from the idea that any adequate conception of truth has to rely on stipulative features. In particular, it might be held that a correspondence principle, for one of the two main senses of 'correspondence', functions regulatively in our account of truth, prompting commitments about the nature of the corresponding relata. At its roughest a correspondence theory of truth says that a proposition, statement or belief is true if it corresponds to 'the facts' or 'how things are', false otherwise. Three difficulties immediately present themselves: what is the correspondence relation? What are the linguistic or psychological entities which stand in the correspondence relation, whatever it is, to something else? And what is this something else, here vaguely denoted by 'the facts' or 'ways things are'? For all the superficial plausibility of the proposal that truth is correspondence between sayings (or beliefs) and facts, the debate it has generated has not yielded any satisfactory defence of it. Accordingly it has been suggested that in response to our need for a regulative conception of truth, we simply lay it down as a minimum feature of truth that it consist in a correspondence - leaving open the question of what in detail this is - between suitably characterised relata.

There might accordingly be a demand for an independence clause in a specification of truth - that is, one which asserts that 'the facts' exist, and have the character they have, independently of our investigations of them - precisely to serve our need to be able to mark off true beliefs and utterances from those which are not so. Given that it matters so much in practice whether what we say and believe is true, just that objectivist division is forced, and in the heat of the moment an utterance's failing to be true invites no closer scrutiny as to how it does: we do not stop to ask whether it fails to be true because it is false, or for some other reason (because, say, it is meaningless, or has some third truth-value, or is not a candidate for truth-value at all). The view that falsehood exhausts ways of failing to be true is doubtless a natural one to have arisen in the history of ordinary uses of language, a fact which might yield a moral for anyone inclined to believe that ordinary usage is sacrosanct.

But the need which prompts stipulations about the nature of truth is precisely an epistemic need (all practical needs are such, although the converse is not true). Viewed as a strategic commitment, a correspondence principle entails the allied but further strategic commitment to the independence of truth-conferring states-of-affairs from knowledge of them, because this objectivist attitude alone sustains what is required by the urgencies of practice - that is, exhaustive classification into 'true' and 'not-true'. Considerations of practice of course lead on to the drawing of distinctions among ways beliefs and utterances can fail to be true. But at the outset our view of the character of truth is determined by the controlling influence of our metaphysical and epistemological concerns, namely, those which constitute our commitment to there being a knowledge-independent realm of entities. The power of these concerns can be seen in the fact that they give rise to the very intuitions which are offended by counterfactual conditionals that appear not only incapable of determinate truth-value, on the grounds that there is nothing 'in virtue of which' they could be either true or false ('if God had created such-and-such beings, they would have done so-and-so' is a familiar example), but that they are not even capable of being either true or not true. Here the lack of something 'in virtue of which' an objective truth-value can be assigned suggests that there is nothing to be committed to antecedently which would sustain a notion of truth-value for the cases in question.

The tension in Dummett's account is not far to seek. His reason for characterising realism as a thesis about the truth of statements rather than as an ontological (still less an epistemological) thesis, is, as noted, that 'certain kinds of realism, for instance realism about the future or about ethics, do not seem readily classifiable as doctrines about a realm of entities' [11]. Yet he immediately goes on to define realism for any subject matter in expressly ontological and epistemological terms: 'The very minimum that realism can be held to involve is that the statements in the given class relate to some reality that exists independently of our knowledge of it' [12]. This is inconsistent, so one of these views must give way. It is not hard to say which. If the notion of truth which constitutes the Dummett hallmark of realism depends for its content on an antecedent commitment to there being an independently existing reality, and if, as already quoted, 'the fundamental thesis of realism ... is that we really do succeed in referring to external objects, existing independently of our knowledge of them', it follows that what we should say about those 'realisms' which are not readily classifiable in terms of entities is, simply, and on Dummett's own reasoning, that they are not realisms. Disputes concerning them are disputes of a different kind: and insofar as they raise questions about what concept of truth is applicable to them, that concept cannot involve considerations about the knowledge-independent existence of entities. And it is accordingly no longer clear whether the concept of truth at stake in these disputes is objectivist. When we find that a theory of meaning rests on a semantics to which that concept of truth is central, commitments of the metaphysical and epistemological kind at issue have therefore already been made.

One point, then, is that whatever else 'realism' might denote, it at least denotes a thesis about a realm of entities. This should hardly be surprising; even in traditional debates about universals and the external world this much is a common feature. But as we see it follows that if ethics and mathematics and talk of other times - especially the future - are not about realms of entities, then controversies over the concepts of truth and knowledge applicable to them are not realism-anti-realism controversies. On this conception, although we recognise that, in ethics, the debate is between cognitivists and those who disagree with them, and that in mathematics it is between espousers of different understandings of what makes for the truth of mathematical statements, we also recognise that in neither debate is it just that there is no obligation to talk about the existence of entities (the respective candidates might be 'moral properties' and 'structures'); it is, as Dummett himself suggests, positively misleading. For if, respectively, cognitivist and Platonist theses turn on claims about the existence of certain sorts of moral properties or mathematical structures, the question immediately arises as to how we can reduce the metaphorical character of such claims, given that their sense is imported from the one case (the 'external world' case) which alone has unmetaphorical content [14].

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