Abstract

A dominant concern of contemporary philosophy has been the debate between the realist and his critic, a debate that has been conducted both on a broad front in the philosophy of language, and in such local theatres as the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of science, and moral theory. The dissertation is mainly concerned to evaluate the influential general argument put forward by Michael Dummett against a particular conception of realism, the argument which prompted the modern version of the debate and laid down the lines along which it has proceeded. Dummett argues that the kind of appeal to the notion of truth conditions made by the realist in devising his theory of meaning must be at odds with the thesis associated with the later writings of Wittgenstein that meaning is exhaustively determined by--hence cannot transcend--use. ;Having clarified the conception of realism as a theory of meaning on which the dissertation will focus, I turn in the second chapter to the theory which Dummett thinks should replace it. I argue that this theory, according to which the meaning of a statement is to be explained in terms of its justificatory conditions, is itself committed to making the kind of appeal to truth conditions which it deplores in the theory it is intended to supersede. On the basis of my discussion, I offer a response on behalf of the realist to Dummett's argument. In the course of elaborating and defending the response, I am able to give expression to a fuller and more defensible account of realism which takes its inspiration from John McDowell's work on the subject. ;The third chapter comprises an extended investigation of the possible role of the Wittgensteinian notion of criteria in the development of an anti-realist theory of meaning. The last two chapters are devoted to an examination of anti-realism with respect to statements about other times, other places, and other minds. I end by criticizing a sophisticated version of anti-realism proposed by Dummett's most prominent follower, Crispin Wright. I argue that it is only by incorporating the distinctive tenets of realism that Wright's account is able to forestall the kind of objection to anti-realism I raised against Dummett's version