The foregoing account of truth made use of the counterfactual condi-tional as well as of the notion of epistemically ideal (or “close to ideal”) conditions. S is true, according to this view, just in case the following counterfactual is true:
S would be justifi ed if epistemic conditions were good enough.21
But how is this counterfactual to be understood? As I put the diffi -culty in my Dewey Lectures,22 explaining my reasons for giving up the whole approach:
19. Putnam, Reason, Truth and History, 55.
20. Putnam, Reason, Truth and History, 55–56.
21. I employed a similar counterfactual in Repre sen ta tion and Real ity (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press 1988), 115.
22. “The Dewey Lectures 1994: Sense, Nonsense, and the Senses: An Inquiry into the Powers of the Human Mind” (special issue of Journal of Philosophy 91, no. 9, 1994); these are collected as part I of The Threefold Cord (pp. 3–70).
Unlike Dummett’s “global antirealist,” I did not suppose that em-pirical propositions could be unalterably verifi ed or falsifi ed.23 And I was bothered from the start by the excessively “idealist” thrust of Dummett’s position, as represented, for example, by Dummett’s fl irtation with strong antirealism with re spect to the past, and I avoided that strong antirealism by identifying a speaker’s grasp of the meaning of a statement not with an ability to tell if the state-ment is true now, or to tell whether it is true under circumstances the speaker can actually bring about . . . but with the speaker’s pos-session of abilities which would enable [any] suffi ciently rational speaker to decide if the statement is true in suffi ciently good epi-stemic circumstances.
To the objection that this is still an “idealist” position, I re-plied that it certainly is not, on the ground that while the degree of confi rmation speakers actually assign to a sentence may simply be a function of their sensory experiences . . . the notion of suffi -ciently good epistemic circumstances [was] a “world involving” no-tion. That is why the totality of actual human sense experiences does not, on this position, determine the totality of truths, even in the long run.
On my alternative picture (as opposed to Dummett’s), the world was allowed to determine whether I actually am in a suffi ciently good epistemic situation or whether I only seem to myself to be in one— thus retaining an impor tant idea from commonsense realism—[but] the conception of an epistemic situation was, at bottom, just the traditional epistemological one. My picture still retained the basic premise of an interface between the knower and every thing “outside.” But while the need for a “third way” besides early modern realism and Dummettian idealism is something I feel as strongly as ever, such a third way must . . . undercut the idea that
23. Although Dummett is not unaware that the verifi cation of an empirical statement is typically corrigible, as a rule, he tends to prescind from this fact. This tendency may spring from his expressed desire to carry Brouwer’s intuitionist logic, a logic designed by Brouwer in connection with an antirealist philosophy of mathematics, over to empirical language.
The simplest pos si ble way to make such a carryover is to extend the notion of “proof,”
which is the basic notion in the intuitionist semantics for mathematical language, to a bivalent predicate ‘verifi ed’ ” applicable to mathematical and non- mathematical language alike, and this is what Dummett does. In this quotation, only the fi rst italic (“unalterably”) was in the original text.
there is an “antinomy,” and not simply paste together elements of early modern realism and elements of the idealist picture.24
As mentioned earlier, the “idealization theory of truth” was presented in chapter 3 of Reason, Truth and History. In chapter 5, the prob lem of the understanding of counterfactuals like “S would be justifi ed if epi-stemic conditions were good enough” was addressed, however, by adopting a verifi cationist account of how we understand counterfac-tuals. I said simply that a “nonrealist” or “internal realist” regards con-ditional statements as statements that we understand (like all other statements) in large part by grasping their justifi cation conditions. This does not mean that the “internal” realist abandons the distinction be-tween truth and justifi cation, but that truth (idealized justifi cation) is something we grasp as we grasp any other concept, via a (largely) im-plicit understanding of the factors that make it rationally acceptable to say that something is true” (122–123). The dilemma I faced (but was not aware that I faced at that time) was this: let us suppose, as seems reasonable, that what ever makes it rational to believe that S makes it rational to believe that S would be justifi ed were conditions good enough. If my understanding of the counterfactual “S would be justi-fi ed if conditions were good enough” is exhausted by my capacity to tell to what degree it is justifi ed to assert it, and that is always the same as the degree to which it is justifi ed to assert S itself, why did I bother to mention the counterfactual at all? Why did I not just say that my understanding of S is just my capacity to tell what confi rms S to what degree, full stop? It seems that the whole appeal to “idealized” verifi ca-tion, to counterfactual verifi caca-tion, was an unnecessary shuffl e. But then the jaws of the Scylla of solipsism close on me! On the other hand, if I repudiate the justifi cationist account of our understanding of counter-factuals, the Charybdis of the metaphysical realism I was trying to avoid sweeps me into its whirl pool. It was the impossibility, as I now think it to be, of steering an antirealist course between the Scylla of solipsism and the Charybdis of metaphysical realism that led me to develop and defend what I believe to be an unmetaphysical version of realism in The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body and World. It is time now for us to see if
24. Putnam, “The Dewey Lectures,” 14–15.
Michael Dummett has a found a way where I failed, to steer between Scylla and Charybdis.