Antirealism and universal knowability
โ Scribed by Michael Hand
- Book ID
- 106540774
- Publisher
- Springer Netherlands
- Year
- 2009
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 189 KB
- Volume
- 173
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0039-7857
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
โฆ Synopsis
Truth's universal knowability entails its discovery. This threatens antirealism, which is thought to require it. Fortunately, antirealism is not committed to it. Avoiding it requires adoption (and extension) of Dag Prawitz's position in his longterm disagreement with Michael Dummett on the notion of provability involved in intuitionism's identification of it with truth. Antirealism (intuitionism generalized) must accommodate a notion of lost-opportunity truth (a kind of recognition-transcendent truth), and even truth consisting in the presence of unperformable verifications. Dummett's position cannot abide this, while Prawitz's can. Antirealism's epistemic notion of truth derives from general features of its meaning theory, not from a universal knowability principle.By "antirealism" I mean the position in the theory of meaning articulated and examined famously by Michael Dummett. Our interest is in the fine structure of an antirealistic meaning-theory for empirical discourse, and in the extent to which truth may contrive to be recognition-transcendent but nonetheless countenanced by antirealism. 1 The principle of universal knowability seems a sure-fire, familiar way for the antirealist to bar recognition-transcendent truths, sure-fire because if every truth is knowable 1 I follow Dummett's usage: "I use the phrase 'the theory of meaning' as coordinate with 'the theory of knowledge' to designate a branch of philosophy,...To distinguish this from what Davidson and others speak of as 'a theory of meaning', that is, a complete specification of the meanings of all words and expressions of one particular language, I shall use for the latter the expression 'a meaning-theory'." (Dummett 1991, p. 22).
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