Definición del Alcance

What I hope to do in this essay is to make clear how it was that I came to see what I regard as insuperable diffi culties with antirealism. In this way, I hope to open yet another page in the dialogue that Michael Dum-mett and I have been having for forty years.

The term “realism” occurs quite often in my essays prior to 1975.⁶ In those essays, it means one thing and one thing only: the rejection of logical positivism, operationalism, and related positions. As I ex-plained in one of those essays, “A Phi los o pher Looks at Quantum Mechanics”:

All attempts to literally “translate” statements about, say, electrical charge into statements about so- called observables (meter readings) have been dismal failures, and from Berkeley on, all a priori

argu-5. Michael Dummett, “Truth: Deniers and Defenders,” in Truth and the Past, 97–116;

quotation from p. 114.

6. I am thinking in par tic u lar of the essays I collected in the fi rst two volumes of my Philosophical Papers, which were published in 1975 by Cambridge University Press. (A third volume, Realism and Reason, published in 1983, represents my subsequent “internal realist”

position— a position I now regard as a false start to dealing with the very real prob lem of the normativity of language use.)

ments designed to show that all statements about unobservables must ultimately reduce to statements about observables have con-tained gaping holes and outrageously false assumptions. It is quite true that we “verify” statements about unobservable things by making suitable observations, but I maintain that without imposing a wholly untenable theory of meaning, one cannot even begin to go from this fact to the wildly erroneous conclusion that talk about unobservable things and theoretical magnitudes means the same as talk about observations and observables.⁷

Although I pointed out in that essay that Carnap had given up the attempt to reduce statements about unobservables to “observation lan-guage,” I criticized him in “Explanation and Reference,” for an “ide-alist” tendency manifested in the fact that according to the theory of the meaning (or “partial interpretation”) of theoretical terms in science he defended in his late writings, every change in the total scientifi c theory amounted to a change in the reference of every one of those terms, so that theoretical terms were not treated as names of, say, unob-servable things and forces concerning which scientists change their minds, but as merely parts of a machine for predicting “observations,”

parts which have no meaning in themselves apart from their role in the par tic u lar theory.⁸

The term “idealism” in those essays was virtually synonymous with

“phenomenalism.” Prior to my reading Dummett’s William James Lec-tures, the only “idealism” I knew was Berkeley’s, and the only “antire-alism” I knew was antirealism about unobservables (and, in the case of phenomenalism, about “ middle sized dry goods,” which were treated as unobservables by phenomenalists). Thus it was an eye- opener that “re-alism” and “antire“re-alism” could be understood as positions about the nature of truth itself, and not simply as positions about the reducibility or nonreducibility of “theoretical terms” to “observation terms” or of

“ thing- language” to “sense- datum language.”

7. Hilary Putnam, “A Phi los o pher Looks at Quantum Mechanics,” in Mathematics, Matter and Method, vol. 1 of Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 130–158, quotation from p. 131.

8. Hilary Putnam, “Explanation and Reference,” in Mind, Language and Real ity, vol. 2 of Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 196–214.

What I then called “idealism” is better called reductionism, Dummett taught me.⁹ Reductionism, with re spect to a class of statements, is the philosophical theory that statements in that class are “made true” by facts described by statements in what is claimed to be some epistemolog-ically or metaphysepistemolog-ically more “basic” class. For example, the phenome-nalist view that statements about tables and chairs and other ordinary

“material objects” are made true by facts describable in a sense- datum language is a reductionist view of the kind I called “idealist.”

If a view is reductionist with re spect to assertions of one kind, only to insist on a “correspondence” notion of truth for statements in the re-ducing class, then that view is, according to Dummett, metaphysically realist at base. A truly nonrealist view is nonrealist all the way down.

I say that this redefi nition of realism (and antirealism) was an “eye- opener” because it seemed to open a way out of the diffi culties I had been having in thinking about the model theoretic argument against metaphysical realism—an argument that had occurred to me before Dummett’s William James Lectures, but that I could not see my way clear to either accepting or rejecting at that time, which is why I did not present it publicly until 1976.¹⁰

Not surprisingly, Dummett’s redefi nition of “realism” and “antire-alism” was contested: most vehemently, perhaps, by Michael Devitt.¹¹ According to Devitt, the realism issue is simply, “Is there a mind- independent real ity or not?” (thump) and there that question has nothing to do with semantics. This short way with the issue reminds one of Lenin’s (disastrously incompetent) polemical book against Ma-chian positivism.¹² Lenin simply claimed that positivists, since they took human sensations as the class of truth- makers for all propositions (I am using present- day terminology, not Lenin’s, of course), could not

9. The views I am referring to were those in the William James Lectures (see note 1, above). They were set out more briefl y in “What Is a Theory of Meaning? (I),” and “What Is a Theory of Meaning? (II),” respectively published in Mind and Language, ed. S. Guttenplan (Oxford: University Press, 1975), 97–138, and in Truth and Meanings: Essays in Semantics, ed.

Gareth Evans and John McDowell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 67–137.

10. See note 4 for details.

11. Michael Devitt, Realism and Truth (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984); see Drew Khlentzos, Naturalistic Realism and the Antirealist Challenge (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004) for a convincing criticism of Devitt’s response to Dummett.

12. V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio- Criticism (Moscow: Foreign Languages Pub-lishing House, 1952).

accept the statement that the solar system existed before there were human beings.¹³ This argument simply assumes— what positivists of course deny¹⁴— that the positivists cannot interpret “the solar system existed before there were human beings” in their rationally recon-structed “language of science.”

But what of the word “in de pen dent” in “the be hav ior of the stars is in de pen dent of human sensations and thoughts and beliefs”? (This is what Devitt portrayed antirealists as denying.)

Well, there are many kinds of in de pen dence. Presumably causal in-de pen in-dence is what Devitt was talking about, since logical in in-de pen in-dence is a property of statements (or, perhaps, of events under a description), and whether statements are or are not logically in de pen dent is certainly a question about their semantics, which Devitt claimed to be irrelevant to the realism issue. But then Devitt’s argument once again simply as-sumes— what antirealists of course deny— that the antirealist cannot interpret the sentence “the be hav ior of the stars is in de pen dent of human sensations and thoughts and beliefs” in a “justifi cationist” way, inter-pret it so that it is “true” (in the antirealist sense). Devitt cannot, after all, say, “But that’s not what the sentence means!” without engaging in a discussion of— guess what?— semantics.

I remain convinced that Dummett has made a truly lasting contri-bution to our appreciation of the depth of the realism/antirealism issue, just as Berkeley did at an earlier time. Devitt’s dismissive attitude is as unphilosophical as Samuel Johnson’s stone- kicking.