Two Notions of Realism?
Two Notions of Realism?
McGinn's narrow aim in this essay is to complicate Dummett's simplistic, logico‐linguistic formulation of the debate between realism and anti‐realism, by undermining the presumption that the law of bivalence captures the intuitive notion of realism. Drawing on a wide variety of illustrations (e.g. statements of personal identity, ethical statements, Quinean theories of radical interpretation, mathematical statements), McGinn counters that realism is better characterized as the claim of evidence independence, arguing that this claim is independent of the truth or falsity of bivalence. Thus, McGinn's wider aim is to formulate the dispute between realism and anti‐realism as a metaphysical, rather than logico‐linguistic, debate.
Keywords: anti‐realism, bivalence, Dummett, evidence, indeterminacy, law of bivalence, meaning, Quine, radical interpretation, realism, semantics, truth, vagueness
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
